From Ploughshares to sword

The title of an e-mail that I received from another person in InterLibrary Loan. Do I immediately assume that it's a book about the evolution of tools and weapons in the distant past. No. I am an idiot. I immediately assumed, due to my MFA, that the person was talking about a literary journal Ploushares, and I began trying to figure out why I had never heard of the journal Sword. Life fail.

Some e-mails related to my wife's apparent belief that I spend a good portion of the day napping at work and a related argument we've been having about getting g-mail and leaving behind good old Hotmail. Hotmail, whose virtues I have extolled to the nth degree in order to try and sway the idiot masses back to their proper home at hotmail. I think when all is said and done a paltry company like Google is not going to stand the test of time.

abertain@hotmail.com: Napping.

sbertain@hotmail.com: Does this mean you were napping at work, or just wishing you were napping?

sbertain@hotmail.com:
Also, I created a Google Calendar for us. I will send it to you.

abertain@hotmail.com: Dammit Stephanie! Hotmail has the function. Do not go quietly into the night.

I prefer to present rather dramatic e-mails to Stephanie during the course of the day to try and dissuade her from rash action. Generally this involves Mel Gibson like (too soon) death threats if she suggests purchasing something from the vending machine.

sbertain@hotmail.com: I'm hungry.

abertain@hotmail.com: So are children in Africa, but you don't see them taking up my valuable time with e-mailing.

sbertain@hotmail.com: Are you sure?

abertain@hotmail.com: No. Actually people from Africa e-mail me all the time promising large sums of money.

Later:

Sbertain@hotmail.com: I didn't sleep well last night.

abertain@hotmail.com: Don't blame me. I didn't do anything.

sbertain@hotmail.com: I wasn't blaming you. I was just pointing out that I was tired.

abertain@hotmail.com: Carry on then.




For my wife, who excels at logistics.

From the book Remainder by Tom McCarthy:

It struck me as I waited that all the great enterprises are about logistics. Not genius or inspiration or flights of imagination, skill or cunning, but logistics. Building pyramids or landing spacecraft on Jupiter or invading whole continents or painting divine scenes over the roofs of chapels: logistics. I decided that in the caste scale of things, people who dealt with logistics were higher even than the ones who made connections.


From the wonderful book, The Whale by Philip Hoare written about the history whale and the development of the whaling industry. I'm reading it concurrently with Moby Dick.

After years living in London, the city had begun to press down on me. I sometimes felt as if all the sky were sea, and we citizens mere bottom-feeders, held down by its great pressure as we moved around the caverns and boulders of the streets.

On the young men who went whaling in the 19th century:

And down at the quayside late at night, where the fishing fleet lies tethered to rusty piles, hulls bumping gently and engines purring, I wonder how it must have been for these young men to ship out from this port, to leave these homely waters for uncertain seas. A sense of utter abandonment to fate, disconnecting from America, seeking escape wandering the oceans in search of a new home among a family of men, yet enslaved to the movements of the whale, man and animal forever linked.


This link is very funny. It has to do with the 1950's, which are also funny.