Monday, August 21, 2006

One Web Day



(World's Collide: J.Fitz talking on cellphone next to a totem pole)


One Web Day is a grand thing to celebrate, I think....from their site:

Share Your Story
Post your thoughts here or on your own blog:

* about the top 10 amazing ways the web has changed the world.
* about the ways the web has changed your world
* about the ways you'd like to see the web change the world

What you can do to celebrate
On OneWebDay, take one web-related action that helps someone else. Suggestions:

* teach someone to use an application (blog, wiki, Flickr) that is new to them
* start a group blog about an issue you care about
* help a grandparent get in touch with a grandchild online
* help a young student find a new educational resource online
* start a story online that other people add to
* go to a local senior center and volunteer to help people get online
* go to a local school and volunteer to help get better equipment in place
* talk to your town about getting free wireless access in place
* post a tribute to a friend online - interview him/her about his/her life
* have a contest with a friend to collect and display the five most amazing things you can find online
* go to a public wireless place and strike up a conversation about the web with someone near you
* send a recipe to a friend and then make dinner together

OneWebDay Events
In NYC, we plan to have a lunchtime event in Bryant Park, a wireless hotspot, where kiosks will be available that people can use to post pictures and text to the web that have to do with how the web has changed their lives. These images can then be projected on large screens, together with a backchat channel. We're inviting "online celebrities" to speak about how the web has changed and will change lives: Jeff Bezos, Craig Newmark. Plus local politicians - Eliot Spitzer and Michael Bloomberg.

Similar plans are underway in Austin, Chicago, San Francisco, Boston, Portland (ME), Vienna, Naples, Italy, and London. In Canada, CIRA (the .ca registry) has committed significant financial support to promote the OneWebDay celebration in cities across the country.

Monday, August 14, 2006

AguaSonic Acoustics



Sometimes you just need a little reminder that the world is bigger. Bigger than your immediate concerns. As the summer winds down, I'm stuck in the mire of self and family and the beginning of school. And of course - the world....and all the places in the world where we are doing such damage to one another and this beautiful planet we inhabit.

Nice to remember that somewhere whales are singing and someone has the foresight to document it.

AguaSonic Humpback 2

I loved the whale sounds - but my sis said they were creeping her out - so I have removed them. You can find them through the web-link in the other post!

Saturday, August 05, 2006

Unedited On The Road to be published





It's literary legend, how Jack Kerouac wrote his breakthrough novel ``On the Road" in a three-week frenzy of creativity in spring 1951, typing the story without paragraphs or page breaks onto a 119-foot scroll of nearly translucent paper.

In fact, the Lowell native revised the book many times before it was published six years later, and while the scroll came to symbolize the spontaneity of the Beat Generation, the early, unedited version of the novel never reached the public.

Now, in time to coincide with the 50th anniversary of the novel's publication, the version of ``On the Road" that Kerouac wrote on the scroll will be published next year in book form for the first time, said John Sampas of Lowell, the executor of the writer's literary estate and the brother of his third wife, Stella. It will include some sections that had been cut from the novel because of references to sex or drugs.

The agreement between the Kerouac estate and the New York publisher Viking Penguin is an important development for literary scholars and Kerouac fanatics who have never had access to the original draft.

The scroll contains numerous passages that were edited out of the book and uses the original names of characters who were closely modeled on friends of Kerouac, including fellow writers William S. Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg.

``It is a big deal, and it will be of great interest to Kerouac scholars," said Hilary Holladay, director of the Kerouac Center for American Studies at the University of Massachusetts at Lowell. ``He had worked on and off before on that particular draft, but this was like a complete birth of the story."

The original scroll, long part of Kerouac's estate, was sold to Indianapolis Colts owner James Irsay in 2001 for a record-setting $2.43 million. It is currently drawing crowds on a national tour, recently extended through 2008, and it will be exhibited in Lowell next summer at the Boott Cotton Mills Museum.

The iconic manuscript will return to its author's home city at a time of growing local interest in Kerouac, after decades in which the writer was largely ignored, in part because of his appetites for drugs and alcohol. In the past five years, local leaders have pressed the state for highway signs to advertise the city as Kerouac's birthplace and advocated for the state to declare a Jack Kerouac Day.

Outside Lowell, the writer has also gained popularity. Sampas, the executor of Kerouac's estate, said he was inspired to publish the scroll version of the novel after seeing the interest of young scholars at an academic conference at UMass-Lowell last fall. After inviting Kerouac specialists to dinner, he brought them to his Lowell home and shared some of the writer's private papers with them.

``They were enthralled, and it was a wonderful experience, feeling their awe," he recalled. ``It permeated the room."

He asked the four students, who are pursuing advanced literary degrees at universities in Denver, New York, London, and Melbourne, to serve as editors of the new version, and they agreed.

It remains to be seen exactly how they will present the original Kerouac story, which was typed as one freewheeling, single-spaced paragraph. Eager to write freely and continuously, without pausing to pull finished pages from his typewriter and insert new ones, Kerouac typed instead on 12-foot rolls of paper that he later Scotch-taped together, Sampas said.

Living in New York in 1951 and writing about his recent cross-country adventures, Kerouac worked from his own notes, journals, and letters, and frequently added notes and corrections over the typewritten text.

He had previously worked on the book in scattered bursts, but finally laid it all out on paper in a single three-week sprint, Holladay said.

Some specialists say they prefer the unedited version, which features a different first sentence than the published novel, as well as a more abrupt ending.

A cocker spaniel owned by one of Kerouac's friends apparently ate the last section, according to WJim Canary, the head of special collections conservation at Indiana University's Lilly Library.
By Jenna Russell, Boston Globe Staff | July 27, 2006


While traveling out west last month we visited the interprative center - part of the Northern Cascade National Park - and saw a beautifil little exhibit about the time Kerouac spent on Desolation Peak.

Many folks don't know that Jack Kerouac spent 63 days during the summer of 1956 as a fire lookout on Desolation Peak. He wrote about his experiences in the books "The Dharma Bums" and "Desolation Angels". The lookout is a 14' x 14' structure built in 1933 and remains active under the National Park Service.

>>>Click here for more information about the trail.<<<


The following passages are from "The Dharma Bums" and "Desolation Angels".

"There she is!" yelled Happy and in the swirled-across top-of-the-world fog I saw a funny little peaked almost Chinese cabin among the little pointy firs and boulders standing on a bald rock top surrounded by snowbanks and patches of wet grass with tiny flowers.

I gulped. It was too dark and dismal to like it. "This will be my home and restingplace all summer?"



I was thinking about this place again when I heard that my nephew Liam - who lives in Seattle - just got back from hiking up to the fire tower. Well done, Liam! Here's a picture of Liam from the trail ride we went on in British Columbia last month. (That was fun too.)