Tuesday, September 13, 2005

Baby Steps to Sirius

OK. Teresa's done with her massive, do-or-die project for work that took weeks and weeks, and I have regained control of the main data banks. Problem is, I have nothing to say...

I learned from my computer-diet (I have a PC at work but I'm too paranoid to blog from it) that to accomplish anything worthwhile I need a high-speed Internet connection and 4-7 browser/application windows open at a given time. There--I just opened another browser window. The Perseus Digital Library. Don't ask.

Preferably there is music playing, and preferably I am in the La-Z-Boy recliner I am in now. That is the optimal writing state. Now I'm reading, on amazon.com, the first few pages of
The Greeks by H.D.F. Kitto, a book I love and have lost my copy of.

Out of practice at this blogging thing, I cast about for inspiration: Kitto; a Google image search for "hdf kitto" (he looks like a laugh a minute); a swing by the Genographic Project (YES!!! They FINALLY isolated my DNA! Ya know, it's weird--lots of people are into tracking down fourth cousins, researching genealogies, etc. and that all bores me to tears. Someone told me the name of the boat we came over from Germany on in the 1890s and I promptly forgot. My mom asked me to go to a family reunion this summer, and I was thinking, "Liked it better when it was called
Cops: Appalachia." But--take it back a few dozen millennia, and I'm all over it.)

I read in the New York
Times that recent evidence indicates that the human brain is still evolving, and that this has occasioned surprise in the scientific community, as indeed it should if the scientists are in the habit of reading the New York Times. If we take a long view, though, we can't help but evolve and we, like every other form of life that's ever existed, are but transitional forms. As my great-great grandguru Henry David Thoreau put it, "Only that day dawns to which we are awake. There is more day to dawn. The sun is but a morning star."

2 comments:

  1. Anonymous12:02 PM

    You shouldn't think of your family reunion as 'Cops: Appalachia'; it's demeaning. Instead, think of it as 'Deliverance II: the Revenuers Strike Back'.

    There, isn't that better?

    ReplyDelete
  2. By George, I think you're onto something. After all, the first and only one I went to featured senior citizens doing jello shots...and of course the infamous ceramic humping-frogs sculpture (a door prize...but there weren't doors...).

    I guess you can start to see why some people would want to raise the definition of "kin" far beyond mere blood relations.

    ReplyDelete