'Acostumbrese A Ver Fantasmas'
Take a look at the picture that goes with this El Mundo story. It's on a cloak presented at a recent expo in San Francisco that projects an image from behind the wearer onto the front of the wearer -- a first step toward a cloak of invisibility.

Next, Hotels On Mars?
I can't wait!

An Amazing Father's Day
We spent the weekend down in Massachusetts for nephew Nick's birthday. I can't believe he's 15; the years since I met Kristen and made my first journey out to Sterling to meet her family have roared by. It was wonderful to see David playing with Shelby and Cole, Zack and all of the grownups, too, especially uncle Jerry. All of these kids are so good, and so well loved. Sofia smiled so many times for MM that I have to agree -- it was not gas. She was in heaven, passed among so many adoring arms beneath so many adoring eyes. Jerry's long, slow-cooked ribs were unbelievable. I could not have had a better Father's Day weekend. When we got home, Kristen capped it off by giving me a copy of "The Once and Future King" and sending me out fly fishing.

Re-joined
Well, I couldn't stand it anymore and rejoined Audible.com. The membership price is really quite small when you consider the length of my daily commute and the amazing selection of books they have.... This time I took as the free sign-up gift not the extra book but the mp3 player, and it was worth it. It holds up to 32 hours of audio and means I don't have burn cd's all the time. The transfer is much, much faster, the device is tiny, and it holds all sorts of things besides books: music, photos, files ... it's like a cigarette lighter-size hard drive that plugs into a USB port.

Reasonant Passage From The Readings At Today's Mass
"If anyone wishes to come after me, he must deny himself and take up his cross daily and follow me. For whoever wishes to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake will save it." (Lk 9:18-24) This is the hardest of sayings. It is about humility and more, surrender. This is not a culture that breeds either, but then I'm not sure any culture does or did. It's in our nature to turn selfward; self preservation seems more natural than sacrifice. It is the supernatural part of us then that allows us to contemplate, and sometimes accomplish, the latter.

The Pyramid of Amirah
Hugo Award-winning New Hampshire science fiction writer and chairman of the state council on the arts, James Patrick Kelly, reading a tale on mindmined.com about "meaning" in a disconcerting future society. The story originally appeared in The Magazine of Science Fiction and Fantasy in 2002. You can also read the story on Kelly's Web site.

Another Reason To Learn A Second Language
Being bilingual can protect against age-related cognitive problems, according to a new study published in this month's journal of Psychology and Aging. And while the bilinguals in the study "used their two languages everyday since they were 10 years of age," I can't help but imagine this has implications for us, the language hobbyists as well ... especially when other studies imply that chess, crossword puzzles, and learning new things (like tasting exotic fruit while blindfolded and memorizing what it tastes like) can all help prevent or slow the onset of degenerative mental aging diseases.

A Resonant Passage From Today's Mass Readings
On June 13th, the church celebrates The Solemnity of the Most Holy Body and Blood of Christ, and so all of the readings regard feeding body and soul. Commemorating the establishment of the Eucharist, Paul recalls (1 Cor 11:23-26): "...the Lord Jesus, on the night he was handed over, took bread, and, after he had given thanks, broke it and said, 'This is my body that is for you. Do this in remembrance of me.' In the same way also the cup, after supper, saying, 'This cup is the new covenant in my blood. Do this, as often as you drink it, in remembrance of me.'" We also get Gn 14:18-20 and Lk 9:11b-17 this week, which includes the miracle of the feeding of the five thousand. It's interesting to consider the fact that when presented with a hungry crowd, Jesus doesn't simply miraculously make them not hungry anymore, which seems like it would be the simpler solution. He feeds them by multiplying loaves an fishes, which reinforces that marvelous fusion of body and soul in which both are good and both are important. Our physicality plays a huge role in our spiritual progress, and not in some negative, Manichean way. Our bodies and what they tell us are part of the plan, just as His was so much the plan.

David's First Canoe Trip!
After several weekends of poor weather, obligations and other obstacles, I finally got David out on the water for his first canoe trip. We picked up George on the way and headed down to Stumpfield Marsh, where we put in near the bridge on Route 9 and paddled all the way down to the state park. The sun was bright, the air was cool and humming with glinmmering winged dragonflies. David was a natural. He not only tolerated two hours on the boat, he reveled in it: gazing into the water at the roots of strange plants, watching the bugs, trailing his hands in the water, tossing my paddle into the water when I had the temerity to try and take a few casts with the fly rod... He behaved every bit the outdoorsman; he looked it too, in his new life jacket, floppy hat and the little aqua socks Kristen bought him last week.

It is amazing to do so many "first" things with someone; the excitement, pride and sense of great obligation this brings shakes me at the core every time I think about it, whether it's a big thing like this (and to me a first trip on the water is a very big thing) or just teaching a new word (not that words are small things, but it seems like he learns ten a day, every day, these days ... today's fun ones were pineapple and lobster, which he learned while grocery shopping).

Flamenco Guitar Transcriptions
FlamencoWorld.com, besides offering some free downloads of new artists, has a section of transcriptions of guitar parts in tab. Nice ... now I've only to find a spare half a minute to play through some of it!

The Blog-Only News Diet
Steve Outing at Poynter reports on blogger Steve Rubel, who spent a week getting his news solely from blogs. At the end, Outing quizzed him. I think Rubel did pretty well, though he didn't get every answer. Not sure, actually, who would have except someone for whom news was business...

Some Nice DHTML Tutorials And Examples

So, Now Should We Get Paranoid?
NH.com technology writer Dave Brooks recently got an issue of a magazine he subscribes to with an aerial photo of his house on the cover. Each subscriber, in fact, got one with his own home featured.

A Comment On Beauty
Summa Contra Mundum posted a talk given to a choir on the nature of beauty that's worth reading. I liked this understanding, that "good is the metaphysical condition of beauty," but it left me needing a bit more... It is comfortable to say "goodness and beauty are related, intimately" but less so to speculate on the relationship of physical appearance to evil. Especially considering the fact that evil is often exceptionally beautiful, glamorous. And we can observe that physical beauty has little relation to how good a person is... So here the analogy between, say, an apple, whose beauty indicates its goodness (sweetness, ripeness, etc.) and a person, whose physical appearance may be unrelated to his goodness (moral qualities, not physical), seems hard to follow.

Handsome Frank Is Back
Last night I helped George unload about two tons (seriously) of copies of the new Plaidswede Press book, Franklin Pierce, New Hampshire's Favorite Son. As of a half hour ago, it's available on NHBooksellers.com. It's the first biography of the only president from New Hampshire to be printed in nearly seventy-five years.

Top 10 Free and Cheap CMS
Barry Parr writes on Media Savvy: "I spend too much time thinking about cheap content management. Between new sites and new licenses for software I'm already using, I've got a couple of reasons. But I think I may just be compulsively fascinated with the idea that my ideal CMS is just around the corner...and that it's free."

Do you speak Elf?
A group of students at a school in England has volunteered to slog through vocab and verb tables to learn the Elvish of J.R.R. Tolkiens Lord of the Rings. Wrote a piece on this for Encore a few years back: learning Tolkien's invented languages is a quite popular pastime.

Defending Alternative English He Is
Thanks to Mirabilis for noting this: Linguistics expert David Crystal is championing alternative English as legitimate English, saying the history of English is non-standard. As a way of drawing attention to his cause, he cites Yoda, the Star Wars Jedi master, as an example of a character in modern fiction who speaks non-standard English. In fact, Crystal says, Yoda speaks with an inverted word order akin to old Anglo Saxon. This he says, should be good for getting the kids on board...

Typically in fantasy fiction, Crystal complains, everybody speaks standard English, from the devil to faeries to aliens on different planets. I'm not sure he reads enough fantasy -- seems writers are always making up variations on the language for this purpose, some to better effect than others. I'm also not sure if you're setting a story in someplace entirely other it doesn't make sense to use standard English as you and your readers speak it to represent whatever the primary language of that other place is, then use variations to represent other dialects and tongues. Better this than losing the reader trying to decipher difficult usage.

Flashback To 12 Years Old...
This isn't exactly how I remember Dungeons & Dragons, and yet it is...

Resonant Passages From Today's Mass

... we even boast of our afflictions, knowing that affliction produces endurance, and endurance, proven character, and proven character, hope, and hope does not disappoint, because the love of God has been poured out into our hearts through the Holy Spirit that has been given to us. (Rom 5:1-5)

...I found delight in the human race. (Prv 8:22-31)

The Last Samurai
Kristen and I got David and Sofia asleep early enough to watch a movie; I walked down to Cinema 93 and rented The Last Samurai with Tom Cruise as American Captain Nathan Algern who fought in the Civil War and against the American Indians with General Custer. He's suffering nightmares and waking dreams about the massacre of Native American women and children ordered by his commanding officer, and despite being a war hero he has ended up an alcoholic sideshow performer touting Winchester rifles. Then he's hired by his former commanding officer to go to Japan to train the emperor's army against a last holdout band of samurai who are convinced the modernization of Japan is bad for the emperor and the people.

The pacing of the film is brisk, the acting sharp and the characters, while not overly deep, are compelling. The spiritually wounded protagonist is a great vehicle, and I can't help but compare this movie to Master and Commander, another top-notch period war piece. In that, however, the Russel Crow character, Captain Jack Aubrey, is so much in command of himself, so morally confident, that his internal struggles are subtler and his character harder to empathize with.

I liked the treatment of language in the film, and Algern's interest in learning first Native American Indian languages and then Japanese made him more sympathetic (at least for me). The British linguist, scholar character was fun, too.

The main theme in the film is the clash between modern and traditional worlds and values. The film might superficially seem a polemic against progress and the West, but this isn't right. The core of the story is not Western versus Eastern culture, but about the need to, while progressing in either culture, retain a sense of traditional values, a moral core that includes honor, courage and sacrifice. The samurai leader, Katsumoto, who has befriended Cruise's character, recognizes this and makes his sacrifice not to end progress, which he knows can't be done, but to infuse progress with a traditional value: to make the emperor hear his his voice.

Great pictures, lovely costumes, stunning fight sequences.

We see so few movies now with a toddler, a newborn and a busy schedule, that each one really has to count. This one did.

Information Overload
Good story on Talk of the Nation today regarding information overload in a digital age. Guests included computer scientist David Levy, former director of the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center John Seely Brown and Sreenath Sreenivasan a professor of new media in the Columbia School of Journalism and columnist for the journalism Web site, Poynter.org. Interesting hearing some varied takes on the glut of data we get doused with daily - and that some folks, yours truly among them, assist in the dousing with. I've read Sreenivasan on Poynter for a while now ... interesting to hear him speak.