matching tracksuits

From our walk yesterday.

The weather has finally improved after at least ten days of clouds and rain. K and I made the most of it.

My latest project — the dresser.

My new favorite site:Language Log. “Weblog run by University of Pennsylvania phonetician Mark Liberman, with multiple guest linguists.”

This entry on Dan Brown from a couple of years ago left me wiping the tears from my eyes. In another entry about Brown books, we read, “In short, to call this novel formulaic is an insult to the beauty and diversity of formulae.” (Source)

Really worth a look.

The growth of the middle vine in twenty-four hours:

“Incredible” does not do it justice. (Click on the image for a Flickr enlargement.)

The back-porch vine — a potato-something — has been growing at Jack-and-the-Bean-Stalk-ian proportions.

It literally grows a measurable length every every day.

It’s difficult to tell, but the middle vine has already, within a week, reached the bottom of our neighbor’s deck — our “roof,” I suppose — and will soon be snaking its way across, eventually to drop down to the banistar and begin weaving in and out of its rails. At least that’s how we’ve run the guide wire.

Looking at Google News, for a moment, I thought I’d stepped back in time.

“Maybe the South is going to rise again,” I pondered…

Camus was wrong: Sisyphus had it easy.

There’s little heroism in doing something when you know there’s no hope of success. Later critics called Camus’ creation “existentialism.” It’s really either stubbornness or stupidity. Or boredom. Whatever it was that kept Sisyphus rolling that boulder back up the hill, he suffered no delusions that this time would be different than any other time he’d done it. He pushed the stone up without any hope of success. Not even Camus’ modern re-creation of Sisyphus, Dr. Bernard Rieux, had any hope of curing any of his patients in The Plague.

Sisyphus and Rieux have the luxury of hopelessness.