Posts
2005-11-21
My Grandfather died yesterday morning at 10:30, surrounded by his family. My father, my two aunts, and my mother. It would have made him happy to know that mom and dad were there - no matter how he acted it was always fairly obvious to me that dad was his favorite. And mom? He loved her like a daughter. My sisters and I were in the XTerra driving up to the hospital when the calls came in from mom - the first call was that he was fading fast, and the second was that he was gone. There was a moment of brief silence, but then everyone came back to form and started joking and talking again. And if the talking was interrupted by a few tears, and if the jokes seemed a bit forced no one seemed to notice.
2005-11-18
My grandfather is dying. His carotid arteries are blocked - 100% on one side and 90% on the other. He’s been experiencing TIA’s (micro-strokes) over the course of the last few months. He has had a stroke and is having problems moving the right side of his body. He has an inflammation of his bowel. There is really nothing that can be done - when you’re 90 years old you don’t have many options.
HP Lovecraft and the Great Pumpkin
2005-10-28
You know, there’s something to be said for someone who can take Charlie Brown and H.P. Lovecraft and weave them together. Take a look at John Aegard’s The Great Old Pumpkin over on Strange Horizons Fiction. I came across this earlier this morning when it popped up in my RSS aggregator over at bloglines in my BoingBoing feed. The tone, the use of adjectives, the descriptions (and yes, the very low amount of dialog) all make this work very….er, Lovecraftian, as the snippet below will show:
2005-09-07
Over the holiday weekend just passed, Beth and I were able to take Alex up to see the USS Cod. This is something I’ve been wanting to do since I first read a book about the submarine service back in 1982 when I was ten years old, so I was pretty excited about the whole visit. The first thing they tell you when you buy the tickets is “be careful”. The Cod is the only submarine currently on display that has not been modified from her wartime configuration. That means you walk through the same doors, up and down the same ladders, and through the same tight corridors that the sailors did when she went to war against Japan 60 years ago. Climbing down into the forward torpedo room you are struck by how tight everything seems - there is not all that much room to move around in, which can be a bit disconcerting because the forward torpedo room is one of the largest compartments on the sub.
2005-08-16
The quote below is from CS Lewis, author of the classic children’s series Chronicles of Narnia as well as such theological books as Mere Christianity and Screwtape Letters, and was delivered in 1939. The calamity referred to is the Nazi aggression that was then sweeping over Europe in general and the invasion of Poland in particular. “I think it important to try to see the present calamity in a true perspective. The war creates no absolutely new situation: it simply aggravates the permanent human situation so that we can no longer ignore it. Human life has always been lived on the edge of a precipice. Human culture has always had to exist under the shadow of something infinitely more important than itself. If men had postponed the search for knowledge and beauty until they were secure, the search would never have begun. We are mistaken when we compare war with “normal life”. Life has never been normal. Even those periods which we think most tranquil, like the nineteenth century, turn out, on closer inspection, to be full of crises, alarms, difficulties, emergencies. Plausible reasons have never been lacking for putting off all merely cultural activities until some imminent danger has been averted or some crying injustice put right. But humanity long ago chose to neglect those plausible reasons. They wanted knowledge and beauty now, and would not wait for the suitable moment that never comes. Periclean Athens leaves us not only the Parthenon but, significantly, the Funeral Oration. The insects have chosen a different line: they have sought first the material welfare and security of the hive, and presumably they have their reward. Men are different. They propound mathematical theorems in beleaguered cities, conduct metaphysical arguments in condemned cells, make jokes on scaffolds, discuss the latest new poem while advancing to the walls of Quebec, and comb their hair at Thermopylae. This is not panache: it is our nature.”