This quirky little applet, which allows you to pick a city and display the blast and incineration zones which would be caused by a nuclear detonation, reminded me of a long-ago night when I and about 40 dear friends hit the streets of Boston with buckets of paint and posters to illustrate the same thing in meatspace.
It was back in 1982, and it was one of the first non-violent direct actions I organised in Boston. Continue reading
OK, I promised myself to not rant about the jingoism, the patriotic balderdash, the ignorance of the rest of the world that can lead a speaker to say “Only in America” and ignore Mandela and the struggle in South Africa. I promised to set aside my knowledge that politics is compromise, and that he will undoubtedly break our hearts.
I raised a glass with my neighbors. I tried to tell the kids, fairly, what was happening and why it was important. I put on the ceremonial Bush T-shirt to remove and the celebratory Obama T-shirt to put on.
And I loved the man, and the moment, and the fact that we have someone in the white house who mentions non-violent struggle in his inaugural speech, who knows how badly we need change, and who is without doubt, of all the broken choices, the best hope for America.
Filed under Personal
The Birkenstock tan lines are fading from my feet. I’ve cleared the 839 emails that came to roost, like so many bats in an abandoned house, in my inbox. The kids are back at school, the globe is still warming, the whales are still dying, and it’s time to admit: vacation is over.
I´ve been on a Finger Lakes vacation for more than a month (thanks for noticing, all of you dear readers who left comments in my absence about how to elong my schlong and win big at bingo) and that has largely meant water. Kayaking, sailing, swimming in the morning at 7am as the kids bounded out of bed to jump in the lake, Dylan the youngest just learning how to swim.
We stayed, mon famille et moi, in lake-side cottages and clan headquarters. None was equipped with wifi, broadband, or even decent GPRS cover. The kids were dismayed that both televisions in the cottages, within minutes of our arrival, were “broken” — thanks to a handy trick dad knows involving wall plugs. (One of these days they´re gonna work this one out, and I’ll have to move up to fuses.)
Now here, gentle reader is a sad fact. Amid all the bucolic beauty, the campfires and stars and slate gorges, I can’t say I missed el mundo internet much. Sure I missed Google — my brain is a wholly owned subsidiary, and it was tough not being able to look up film trivia and wine vintages and watermelon salsa recipes on the spot. No, what I really really missed was…
Facebook. Dammit. Continue reading
Originally uploaded by Brianfit
Ahhhh. Still rested and refreshed from a week away in the Highlands of Scotland. Nature, wilderness, wildlife — I miss these things here in my urban flatland home.
I’m rather pleased with this photo. It captures a charged moment, one of the indescribable experiences of being eye to eye with wild nature and the cautious slow motion that such encounters demand.
I once looked a humpback calf in the eye on a whale-watching trip back in Cape Cod, from an even closer distance than I saw this stag, and the intelligence and curiosity I sensed was a profound and life-changing experience.
There was a day I spent a lot of time on mountains, in forests, on the water. If there’s one thing I miss about the States (and this may be the only thing)… it’s that I always lived within easy striking distance of nature. I used to hitch-hike out of Boston to get into the Vermont or New Hampshire woods, spent a winter living in a cabin in New Hampshire. Even Washington DC was close enough to the hills of Virginia to be in a tent by nightfall using metro, bus and your thumb to get out.
But Scoltland reminded me most of the Nevada desert. Not the climate or the fauna, of course – though if you swapped the yellow gorse of Scotland with the springtime sagebrush of Nevada you’d be close — but the sheer magnificent desolation of some of the highlands. It was as if we had landed on another planet, with not a human being in conscious range, the wind wild over the deep moss, not a tree or any form of shelter taller than a boulder for as far as the eye could see.
The stag was, therefore, all the more powerful a surprise — to discover this large, powerful creature that any second was going to bolt away in a splendid bounding disappearing act, and know I had only a moment to appreciate the experience.
“Mono no aware” I’m informed this is called in Japanese… the wistful bittersweet appreciation of beauty that is transient and about to vanish from your life.
Filed under Personal
I was raised Catholic, until the day, at 14, I told my dad I wouldn’t be going to church any more because I felt like a hypocrite. His response was interesting: “You’re too young to know what a hypocrite is,” which to this day I don’t know if he meant literally or with a wider meaning.
I cherry-picked what I liked about Catholicism, from the Sermon on the Mount to the stained-glass-colored mysteries of the high mass in Latin to the Bible as a layered literary work by a wide set of authors — some of whom were genuine poets, others carny barkers.
Today, I’m grateful for some of the values that I got out of the church, but believe it’s truly bizarre and cruel to raise a child with the mythologies of heaven and hell. It was especially warped to deliver that mythology by the latter’s earthly minions: nuns brandishing rulers with which to slap your wrists. I remember struggling so hard with the concept of purgatory, and all those unbaptized children of other religions failing to get through the cloud-shrouded gates, no matter how true to the code of Christianity they lived, simply because they had failed to get the memo about the application process. I mean really.
Photo: De Telegraaf
I blow my nose this morning, and out comes muck. This is after two showers, a hosing off by the fire department, and a swim in (relatively) clean water. My legs feel like iron. My knees are rusted. The smell of my clothes as I put them in the washing machine this morning nearly made me barf.
Yesterday, I ran the Land over Zand competition in Broek in Waterland.
When colleague Tom asked if some of us wanted to compete in a half-hour fun run that involved getting muddy, a local tradition in farmer entertainment, I thought it would be easy. Tom, Eoin, Andrew and Tom’s friend Nico and I signed up in an impromptu Team Greenpeace, with Zeina on documentation duty. (See her great photos below and as a slideshow here.)
Andrew, Nico, Tom, Eoin, and myself after the race: Creative Commons Photo by Zeina
I no longer run daily, but I’ll still take an occasional slow jog. The last time I took a turn around the park was a few weeks back, and a half hour wasn’t taxing. The part of me that stills see myself as a runner and refuses to believe I’ve aged wanted to thumb my nose at my 49th birthday in some way. This seemed easy.
Easy it was not. And my body’s 49 years thumbed their noses right back at me. This was a run in which you had to swim, lunge, wade, climb, and scramble a 4 km circle around the town of Broek in Waterland, carrying a significant extra weight of Dutch farmland around plastered to your skin, hair and clothing.
Filed under Personal
30+ years geek-tweaking Greenpeace, which has allowed me to combine my love of technology, globally people-powered trouble-making, hippy do-goodery, and boats.
