…shared between me, Horace and Sweet Junipers Dad…

Horace wrote, “Romae rus optas; absentem rusticus urbem tollis ad astra levis.” Roughly: in Rome you long for the countryside; in the country you sing to the stars of the distant city. I have always romanticized a country life…

Homestead

As a (very) amateur web publisher, I’m constantly struggling with time and my ability to provide both infrastructure (hosting, sites, templates…) & content, so it was a relief of sorts to read that I’m not the only one…

Content is an order of magnitude harder than technology with an order less upside; …. The main and perhaps only reason to do content should be the love of creating it.

http://venturebeat.com/2009/04/29/10-lessons-from-a-failed-startup/

That need to love the content that you write is an important one to me and chimes with the age old writers mantra of write about what you know about.

Dad and Tom (9 months) in the supermarket on a Friday night beer run, a stranger (middle aged man with his wife) comments in passing to Dad (with Tom starring from his perch in the shopping trolley):

I wish I had a mate like that.

One of the nicest things anyone has ever said to Dad.

Two peasants discuss the need to rebuild a boundary wall that lies between their properties:

“…my luck is such that no sooner would we complete the task than the sun would go black, with all the toil for naught.”

The first flourished his arms in derisive reject of the argument.

“This is a risk we must assume. Notice: I drink wine, though I may not live to become drunk. Does this deter me? No! I reject the future; I drink now, I become drunk as circumstances dictate.”

from The Eyes Of The Overworld – Jack Vance page 187.

…don’t let fear of the future hold you back…drink to it…

I enjoy a certain degree of irreverence to my superiors, keeps us all on our toes. I like this view of the class system from a character from the most recent work of one of my favourite authors…

Roundly insulting one’s superiors behind their backs was one of the perks of being an inferior…

Choubris, Matter, Iain M. Banks

To paraphrase Sly, who infamously never said ‘Don’t push me‘ in First Blood (he said ‘Don’t push it‘ in various ways)…

Don’t count me!

As a person in a generation that has so many numbers surrounding and defining us (NHS number, National Insurance number, bank account number, annual income amount, number of shares this and that bank …) I fear that those numbers begin to become me.

I feel I need to heed the warnings of those who came before…(here comes Tamkin again…)

The money. They make a killing by fantasy. Now, counting any number is always a sadistic activity. Like Hitting. In the bible, the Jews wouldn’t allow you to count them. They knew it was sadistic.

Dr Tamkin in ‘Seize the Day (Penguin Modern Classics)‘ by Saul Bellow.

“You are Number Six.”
“I am not a number — I am a free man!”

The Prisoner

Sounds like medieval Wales was a great place to be a visitor …

Those who arrive in the morning are entertained till evening with
the conversation of young women, and the music of the harp; for
each house has its young women and harps allotted to this purpose.

…young women … allotted to this purpose… Wow…

…now where is that time machine?

Just heard the following quote on the Antiques Roadshow and have to say it strikes a chord…

Not What I Have But What I Do Is My Kingdom

The words were engraved on a box made by an old ladies’ mother in the early 1900′s with some connection to the suffragette movement. Wonderful…

I think that the concept of automation taking over routine tasks to the degree envisioned by Papanek in this piece is still a utopian dream (those children stitching footballs in Asia are still a long way from becoming designers) but the description of design as meaningful and crucial is one I wholly agree with.

I’ve hopefully tidied up some of Papanek’s tangled wording at the start of this quotation.

In a world in which [...] work [will] increasingly [...] be done through automation and in which most routine supervision, quality control, and computation are performed by word and data processors, the work of the design team (research, social planning, creative innovation) is one of the few meaningful and crucial activities left to man. Inescapably, designers will be needed to help set goals for all of society.

Design for the Real World: Human Ecology and Social Change, Victor Papanek

I can’ help thinking that Geraldus Cambrensis was after something when he wrote about the Welsh in such glowing terms:

These people being of a sharp and acute intellect, and gifted with
a rich and powerful understanding, excel in whatever studies they
pursue, and are more quick and cunning than the other inhabitants
of a western clime.

The Description Of Wales by Geraldus Cambrensis or download from Project Gutenberg