"Sage advice" from Food Network's Alton Brown (my favorite TV "chef" since David Rosengarten seems to have disappeared from the airwaves - "There are only two kinds of food: good and bad. Also, all of life's big problems include the words "indictment" or "inoperable." Everything else is small stuff."

Maybe there's hope for some vision in Lower Manhattan -- From CNN.com - Six teams chosen to create new designs for WTC site "Vowing an adherence to "quality and a keen sense of mission," the agency overseeing rebuilding at the World Trade Center site has hired six new design teams to create land use plans for the 16-acre site . . . The teams will have until November to submit their final designs. The goal is to settle on a single land use scheme by the spring of 2003. A separate competition for a memorial to those killed in the September 11 terrorist attacks will be held later . . . Among the better known American architects chosen are Richard Meier, who built the Getty Museum in Los Angeles, and Charles Gwathmey, who built the Guggenheim Museum addition and Morgan Stanley's headquarters in New York. They are collaborating on one team."

Meier and Gwathmey were among the architects involved with the NY Times Magazine project I linked to on September 25.

Cool.

NAQOYQATSI - Na-qoy-qatsi: (nah koy? kahtsee) N. From the Hopi Language. 1. A life of killing each other. 2. War as a way of life. 3. (Interpreted) Civilized violence.

This is the upcoming conclusion of a trilogy of films by Godfrey Reggio and Philp Glass. This one, to be released in mid-October purports to be about how technology is altering everything: media, art, entertainment, sports, politics, medicine, warfare, ethics, nature, culture and the very face of the human future. It's predecessors, 1983's Koyaanisqatsi (Life out of Balance) and 1988's Powaqqatsi (Life in Transformation) were powerful, non-verbal explorations of today's world. Admittedly, Glass' music can be an acquired taste (one I acquired through a 5-hour, no-intermission production of Einstein on the Beach, but which my wife, who has forbidden me to play his stuff when she's within earshot, has not.), but there is no denying the impact of his collaboration with Reggio on these films. Their influence is seen everywhere from commercials to Madonna videos.

hmmmm . . . Maybe that's not such a wide range of examples after all. ;-)

Thinking Big - A Plan for Ground Zero and Beyond -- Wow!!! After the rightfully aborted anemic official first pass at plans for rebuilding Ground Zero, a project involving world-class architects and artists, encouraged by the NY Times Architecture critic Herbert Muschamp, have come up with a real visionary approach. I saw this project featured on the Charlie Rose TV show a couple weeks ago, but the web site describing it, in both visuals and audio interviews is superb. A lot to explore and marvel at. This vision will probably never see the light of day in the physical world, but hopefully it'll influence the eventual effort.

A follow-up... Moose wins! Even though Takanohana made an impressive comeback, it was the Hawaiian Yokozuna Musashimaru who finally took the cup.

In my house, there are only two sports share interest in. Actually, other than for the Olympics, they're also probably the only sports either of us look for on TV -- ice skating and sumo. The Nihon Sumo Kyokai Official Grand Sumo Home Page is the web's focal point for the governing body of Japan's national sport.

The current basho (bi-monthly tournament) in Tokyo ends tonight with the two current Yokazunas (highest rank rikishi, or wrestlers) fighting it out for the September Emperor's Cup. The current big guy, Musashimaru, is American born, but like all sumo wrestlers, is now a citizen of Japan. His opponent tonight, Takanohana (my wife thinks he's cute, and I must admit, when he is relaxing in pre-bout concentration, his face does take on a serene Buddha-like quality), is of particular interest since this tournament is his first in about (or over?) a year. All eyes have been on him as he has come back from a leg injury.

Since I have to watch sumo tournaments on my cable system's Japanese channel, without English translation (summaries sometimes show up months later on ESPN), I've had to do my own thinking about the sport, aided by a couple books on the subject. These guys may look fat to the western eye used to a specific expectation of an athletic body, but very few of them jiggle. Yes, they're big (Moose is listed as about 520 pounds), but they are really quite solid and surprisingly quick and agile.

The sport is really about the most perfect, purest one going, with the simplest of rules. Other than logical prohibitions like those against hair-pulling, choking, and groin attacks, the rules pretty much come down to staying on your feet and in the ring while your opponent tries to either get you down or out. The size and shape of the rikishi are really part of the defensive strategy of low center of gravity for stability and mass to absorb an attack. There's such a range of holds, attacks, pushes, pulls, and throws that no two matches are really the same, despite typically lasting much less than a minute of action. It's also governed by centuries of tradition, courtesy, ritual, and respect. Uncommonly civilized compared to what goes on in baseball or soccer today, but something that should be expected in the world's oldest continually documented sport.

David Lyttle offers three scenarios for receiving a "wrong number" phone call. Since reading his blog two days ago, I've had two such calls, and responded with David's implied advice to ask what number the caller is trying to reach -- uncommon sense and uncommon courtesy that helps the caller AND avoids the possibility of a repeated interruption. Doing this consciously, I noticed that instead of getting "sorry's" from the callers, I got "thank you's." I also discovered that I liked the latter more than the former. To help yourself, help others.

Finally -- Hewlett Packard has finally got it's act together with a officejet g series software/driver: Mac OS X 10.1 to 10.2. Now I can finally consider moving up to Jaguar.

sheez -- if this is something worth posting in a personal blog, I've really got to get a life! But as a Mac user since the original 128k machine in 1984, I guess I can understand.

Needing the Unnecessary -- The democratization of luxury is compelling. Amongst the discussion of Pashmina, Martha Stewart, and Michael Graves' partnership with Target stores, one paragraph really got my attention -- "In the older culture, my dad’s culture, the limited production capacity of the economy sharply reduced aspirations to material comfort. In the modern world, my culture, much greater material satisfactions lie within the reach of even those of modest means. Thus a producer culture becomes a consumer culture, a hoarding culture becomes a surplus culture, a work culture becomes a therapeutic culture. Because what you buy becomes more important than what you make, luxury is not a goal; for many it is a necessity." I guess the question is whether more is less or less is more.

Twitchell ends with - "Instead of wanting less luxury, we might find that just the opposite -- the paradoxical luxury for all -- is a suitable goal of communal aspiration. After all, luxury before all else is a social construction, and understanding its social ramifications may pave the way for a new appreciation of what has become a characteristic contradiction of our time, the necessary consumption of the unnecessary."

Since my work is focused on helping organization increase markets, capacities, and capabilities, I guess it's a good thing for me that most people believe the dictionary and think that more is more. The trick is to remember that on the production side of the equation, very often less IS more.

BIBLIOTHECA ALEXANDRINA - The revival of the Library of Alexandria - "The ancient city of Alexandria, one of the glories of antiquity, was at the beginning of the third century B.C. the birthplace of the great plan to build a library: the BIBLIOTHECA ALEXANDRINA. But the library, this vast storehouse of learning, was destroyed by a fire which ravaged Alexandria. The Egyptian Government, in close co-operation with UNESCO, has decided to build a new library in Alexandria to endow this part of the world with an important focal point for culture, education and science."

I heard about this project on NPR this morning, and thought it cool that someone considered the edge of the mideast as a survivable location for this library of historical significance. If one thinks that copyright and ownership of information is interesting in these days, back then, the library had the right/oblligation to confiscate every book and scoll from every ship entering its busy harbor, make a copy for the original owner and KEEP THE ORIGINAL!

"matutinal???" - - Whazat???

It was the word of the day on the home page of The Bartleby Library, a great source for public domain texts named after one of my workplace heroes; the scrivener who "would prefer not to."

Oh yeah, matutinal...

It means "Of, relating to, or occurring in the morning; early." according to Bartleby's American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language: Fourth Edition.  2000.

Baring my soul (?) -- According to the TotL Belief Assistant, I'm a neo-non-Marxist atheist. hmmmm... I prefer to think about this subject via the righteous riffin' of Lord Buckley.

OK, so instead of trying to start with deep thoughts, we'll dive into the funny papers first. In addition to the ubiquitous Dilbert, my daily matutinal web forays include a visit to Randolph Itch 2 a.m. - "He is a dreamer in the most interesting sense of the word. For Randolph, every night brings an offbeat thought or vision. He takes a whimsical look at the world in the wee hours of the morning as his fertile mind takes off into uncharted territory." I've always found Toles' editorial cartoons to my liking, and relatively consistent with my politics as well. The connections Randolph makes in the arms of Morpheus are one inspiration for this blog.

There I go, raising those expectations again.

Nine days later -- This is embarassing. I've found the exercise of blogging in the subject of work and management so much fun that I decided to launch this more personal effort. But apparently, writing about life is a whole 'nother kettle of fish. What does one call writer's block in the blogging universe? Bloggage? What's the line in the Pink Floyd song?

Every year is getting shorter
Never seem to find the time
Plans that either come to nought
Or half a page of scribbled lines
Hanging on in quiet desperation is the English way
The time is gone
The song is over
Thought I'd something more to say

What a way to start a blog?!? At least I might have managed to lower expectations to some manageable level.

This is a test. It's only a test.