Rule your own country!

So I signed up for a new online "game" that's been popping up all over, Nation States. It's a website created by the writer of the book Jennifer Government.

My nation is The Most Serene Republic of Paz y Guerra. Visit it at your convenience... If you create your own nation, you may petition me to join my loose confederacy. After you pledge your fealty, of course. :)

Coming soon, to a computer screen near you.... and other stuff.

Most regular patrons of this journal know that I am, at heart, a person with an unabiding love and passion for history. I can't get enough of the stuff. I do computers too but that's just because it's a gig that I can do to pay the bills. What I want to do for a living is history stuff.

I went up last weekend to MSU with Sandy and her daughter Rin (recently returned -- damaged -- from Navy basic training) to go to the Michigan Stallion Expo. This is apparently one of the big horsie shows in the midwest. Sandy was going because she is on the Livingston County Sheriff's Mounted Patrol and had to log some time. Rin went because she was bored. I went so I could go to the MSU campus. I had stuff to do that wasn't horseplay.

I went to the American Cultural Studies department to talk to the chairman and get some information but found out I'd missed him by ten minutes. That kinda sucked. But I did end up talking to the department secretary, Kathleen, who was very nice and probably helped me as much as the chairman would have, albeit in different ways. The cutoff date for applications is December 31 for the following school year so I've missed out on admission for this coming September. I did find out that I can take classes through the lifelong learning program and have them count to the degree, as long as I coordinate with the department what classes I'm taking. That's one of the great things about this program: Since there are so many facets of it, there are a zillion different classes that can be applied. I'm going to apply to the college and get a catalog and see what I can find.

On another note, Vicki (of Lint From My Pocket fame) and I have decided to start a website to allow "at-large" historians such as ourselves (in other words, history geeks who don't have a history job) to post papers they've written which are scholarly but may not have the depth or sponsorship for inclusion in a journal. Vicki and I are going to start out by putting up papers we wrote in college and go from there. Maybe a little discussion forum down the road. Anyway, that's coming up Real Soon Now. There won't be much to start with but we hope to advance confidently in the direction of our dream.

Quotes of the day

"He's got the physique of a comedian and the personality of a bodybuilder."
- Jeff -March 22, 2004; in my office.

"The problem with defending the purity of the English language is that English is about as pure as a cribhouse whore. We don't just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary."
- James Nicoll -May 15, 1990; usenet group rec.arts.sf-lovers

To be fair, Dave Barry saw it first.

I was catching up on my Dave Barry columns today while installing (for a second time) OS X on a G3. This is the column I was reading that prompts this entry. Before you click on the column to read the genius that is The Dave, click to this site: artcritical.com.

Did you look at "chair"? That's the title, you know. chair. They want an amazing amount of money for chair. So much that one could go out and by a decent used car with it. This is an example of "found art" which is to say, "trash". One person's trash is another person's treasure, they say. Or art.

Don't get me wrong; I love art. A lot. I really do. I love the works of Michelangelo, Da Vinci, Breugel, Van Gogh, Mark Rothko, Rockwell, Kandinsky, Warhol, Rodin, O'Keefe, Picasso, J.M. Whistler, and a host of others. I don't really "get" some of the stuff by Kandinsky or Picasso but I appreciate it. I think that the reason I appreciate their work, as well as the works of hundreds of others, is that they have created. They've made something out of nothing and put effort into it. Kandinsky's abstractions are a little out there but they have motion and contrast. On the other side of the coin are the works of Mark Rothko, who's paintings are, at first glance, nearly monchromatic. When you look more deeply into them though, you see subtle variations of shade which make for a complex image. I really do appreciate that.

But when a person finds a old busted up chair somewhere and sticks it in a corner and calls it "art", that's where my understanding and appreciation fails me. I have friends who are artists. Heather, for example. Heather is a very talented artist. I have a beautiful drawing of a goldfish she did which hangs proudly on my wall. I look at it frequently, and appreciate it. Heather also is a chandler -- a maker of candles -- who is dedicated to her craft. She takes great pains at making sure her candles; indeed, everything she does, are made well and with care. I don't think it would ever occur to her to find an old busted-up chair on someone's trash heap and put it in a corner and call it art.

I support the arts. I understand that not every piece of art is called 'art' by all. But the vast majority of people who create art do just that: They create. They make something out of nothing. They don't make nothing out of nothing. I'll close by sharing an idea I had a long time ago for a work of pseudo "performance art". A large wire trash can, the kind you see made of wire mesh but on a much larger scale, would be placed in the middle of a dark room. The can itself would be illuminated from above with a narrow-focus white spot. As people came into the room they would be invited to grab at random from one of several boxes around the room a piece of colored paper. They wouldn't be able to determine the color before they took it. Then they would be invited to crumple the paper up or fold it or do whatever with it and toss it into the basket. There would be a distance involved between the perimeter of the exhibit and the viewing/tossing area, so not every item would go into the basket. Some would fall around the outside of it. Many would go into it. From there, the basket would fill with brightly colored paper, always changing as it filled. Every so often, when it was overflowing, an image would be taken by a panoramic camera of the basket and the debris field around it. Then the basket would be emptied and the floor swept and the process would start again. Sure, it's wacky and odd but it is created art. In fact, it's created by hundreds of people. That's truly inspiring.

I need to sit down after this. Anyone got chair?

Funny guy...

I got this link from a friend and thought I'd share. This guy is amazing with what he can do. It isn't dirty or anything and still manages to be entertaining!! What's the world coming to??

http://old.hugi.is/fyndnar/maestro_1.wmv

It's about 4 minutes long.

Oh, the lazy happy days of childhood...

I was talking to a friend yesterday about the travails of life -- insurance, relationships, work, kids and family, money, etc. We talked about how nice it would be to go back in time to be a kid again. Arbitrarily, I decided that 11 years old would be a nearly perfect time to go back. Two days as an eleven year old boy in late June of 1977; the year that I was eleven. That's the other part of the requirement, to go back in time as well. To be able to identify with being an eleven year old better. For my friend Vicki, it would have been 1984. Neither of us would have a clue how to live today if we suddenly became eleven, so it would be best to be in our own times.

So, there we were: Vicki as an 11 year old girl in 1984 and Bob as an 11 year old boy in 1977. Late June. School's out and there's nothing to do but enjoy life as it was meant to be enjoyed. No worries about money or families or the state of the world. At eleven years old you get upset that the news is on, since that means the cartoons aren't. You live for The Wonderful World of Disney on Sunday nights and you bug your parents to go see Star Wars over and over. Life, in hindsight, was truly good, at least for me. I know that there are a lot of eleven year old kids -- both in 2004 and 1977 -- for whom life is, and was, not truly good. They live in poverty and pain and I feel sadness and pity for them. But this is my life and my 11 year old self doesn't really know about them in any great depth.

From there, I continued to refine this desire to retreat. I asked Vicki which she would prefer to do: Go back in time to her 11 year old self to live those two days with no knowledge of her 30 year old life but with full recall of the days' events. In this way the experience would be pure and genuine. She would be able to truly be a kid again and when she returned from her experience, those memories would be fresh in her mind and she would be able to keep them and treasure them for what they were. Or, I asked, would she like to go back and be a 30 year old in the body of an 11 year old? Where she would be able to look at her situation critically and do the things she really wanted to do? If she wanted to play with little Susie Smith down the street, who was her bestest friend from kindergarten but who moved to California when they were 12 and she hasn't heard from her since then, she can do that. There's no need to "take chances". She can appreciate the events of the days first hand and mold her experience as she wanted to. In order to simplify things I added the caveat that she wouldn't be able to change anything in her future, like telling her parents to "buy Microsoft". She would live the days as she pleased and when she came back she would have those memories intact.

Vicki chose the first option. She chose to look at the world through the genuine eyes of an 11 year old and take those experiences back with her. That's totally valid and a good choice. For me, it wasn't really that easy of a choice. There certainly is the desire to have the pure and unadulterated memory fresh in my mind of eleven year old Bobby but there was an overwhelming desire to be able to go back and spend nearly every second of that time being my parents' son and my brother's brother again. To bask in that feeling of warmth and happiness and security. I suppose that it was a double edged sword, this idle exercise of "what if?". Because it made me realize that I miss my family quite a lot, even now. My brother Jim has been gone for 17 years now. For dad it's been eight years and mom, six. That's a long time to go and the memories, though still plentiful, begin to fade slowly, like a daguerreotype from the ninteenth century. The contrasts have begun to even out and the shadows are lighter. Would it be valuable to go back and be able to really burn those images in my mind?

Or am I unable to separate the 38 year old me far enough away that I could perform this exercise for what it is? The conversation started out as a desire to escape from the issues of adulthood, yet I focus on them in my very desire to choose the most effective method of escaping it for a time. It was an odd and almost funny realization when it happened. But also sad in a way, that I have grown so far from the child that I once was and have always tried to stay close to on some level. So, because I want to never retreat too far from eleven year old Bobby, I too will choose to leave the 38 year old me here in the present and go out and play for a couple of days.