~~~~~~~~~

RETURNED FROM 13 DAYS IN ETHEREAL LIMBO (THINGS SURE HAPPEN FAST IN THE HI-TECH WORLD!!)

[These entries that follow in a cluster are lifted from Pure Land Mountain pro tem, my alter-blog when Blogger's cranky hardware acts up... RB]


[ Wed Jul 09, 08:29:56 PM | Robert Brady]
~~~~~~~~~~~


KIND OF BLUE RIFF

This evening I take advantage of the suppression afforded by the very low-hanging mountain clouds to realize a special resonance, within which the notes of Kind of Blue enjoy a special temper, the timbre resonating from the plum leaves as from the sky, the bamboo grove serving as a sturdy green harmonic to Miles' evocation of the essence of the blue days of childhood walking along a country road in sunshine and tranquility, moments of life that are the root and sky of culture, as it seeks always to be...

[ Wed Jul 09, 10:06:18 AM | Robert Brady]
~~~~~~~


SKIES, ETHERS

Raining again today, to no one's surprise, though yesterday afternoon (of the paler darkness we call the daytime) I saw amidst the clouds a small patch of the blue sky I recall from childhood. Through that small patch, for a brief moment, beamed a kind of feeble light, that felt warm upon my arm. This was the sun, as we know from the ancient texts. Well, it's day 12 of no postings on Pure Land Mountain, things sure do happen fast in the tech world too. My unpaid blogs, like this one, are working fine. Seems the folks at Blogger may have to sort of reverse their priorities, if they care to stay in business. Though now that they're all salaried Googlers, maybe who cares about profit? They have an ad up there on the Blogger home page calling for client relations employees to come on in and take part in the wonderful client relations they've established thus far. What they need are client relations instructors.
[ Tue Jul 08, 04:08:55 PM | Robert Brady]
~~~~~~~~~~


MOSSY MANSE IMAGE MISLEADING, SAYS BRADY

Just found out that because all the trees (cedar, snowbell, chestnut) overhang much of the roof, keeping it from fully drying out after rain (as though we have dry weather), moss is growing apace (too bad; I otherwise love moss) on the lower north side roof, and tree debris has been accumulating under the shingles here and there, or abrading them and enabling water penetration and freezing in winter, slowly chipping the shingles away in a vicious, ever-worsening roofy death spiral right down into the bottom of the old bankbook. So as soon as the rain ends later this century we're going to have to reshingle. By 'we' I of course mean paid professionals. No way will I entrust the task to the very same self that, when planning the house, didn't know a thing about shingles, other than that they went on the roof. Turns out that composite shingles, although much less expensive, are much more expensive. How little we knew, we well-intentioned and frugal innocents, with now wide-open wallets....
[ Tue Jul 08, 11:06:41 AM | Robert Brady]
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~


MOVING AT THE SPEED OF LEAD

Finally, after 11 days, a little itsy-bitsy notice, way back there hidden away where you really have to hunt for it, an admission from blogger that blogspot blogs can't be published because of a hardware error and that they will fix it. At the same speed, I wonder?
[ Tue Jul 08, 11:02:13 AM | Robert Brady]
~~~~~~~~~~~~


TIGER TORNADO CONTINUES

The incredible Hanshin Tigers now have a 14 game lock on first place in the Central League, and an average of .716, with no other team in either league above .600!! (Even the dynamo Atlanta Braves only have .640!) The excellent Daiei Hawks, who hold first place in the Pacific league, are only a game and a half in first, with a .595 average. The perennial first-place (big-money) Tokyo Giants, now way back in second place behind the Tigers, have an average of but .526! Great to see Osaka putting it to Tokyo, but good.
[ Tue Jul 08, 10:53:54 AM | Robert Brady]
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~



LAND OF THE RISING SUN MY FOOT

Woke up this morning and it was--of all things--raining, right down from the sky to the ground, making this 4829 straight days of rain if my calculations are correct, over a hundred times worse than the measly 40 days Noah had to endure, and that was enough to get him into a holy book. I wonder what sacred text our deluge will get us into. Anyway, we've left the lucky Noah way back in our dust, as it were. That's just a figure of speech, left over from the old days of course; there is no dust anymore, it's all wet, and is mud now. But one remembers from the ancient records that the sun did at one time shine on these regions, and local folk could enjoy the dust, certainly at some point during the Edo period. Regarding the liquescent present, the weatherfolks on tv don't have much to say that we don't already know from the squish in our shoes; listlessly the weathermenschen monotonize: "Today our satellite picture shows us that there will be you-know-what all day and night, and tomorrow there will be more you-know-what, in fact the entire week will be--oh, forget it, let's go to the weather map," and there we behold a very small and soggy Japan surrounded by huge red blobs that are low pressure centers getting in line, waiting their turn to empty themselves all over the coming week. Down in the south of the Pacific map, just as a sort of cosmic taunt, is a round yellow spiky thing that my history books tell me is the symbol for the sun, as it was called. In fact the sun is used as the symbol on the Japanese national flag, albeit with an oriental sense of deep irony. To drive that irony even deeper, the emperor of Japan, a direct descendant of the sun god, appears to have no pull whatever with his bright ancestor. And as if the irony weren't already deep enough, Japan even calls itself the Land of the Rising Sun, though everyone nowadays seems to have forgotten why; they look at each other in puzzlement at my mention of this fact. The scientists insist, however, that the sun does actually rise each day above the permanent clouds that comprise our sky; they say it is the sun that imparts to certain segments of the 24 hour rainy cycle that paler bleakness, in which we all go off to work with our umbrellas and raincoats, shouldering our way through the curtains of you-know-what, there to earn the livelihood that will eventually enable us to have our day in the you-know-what...

[ Mon Jul 07, 09:51:57 AM | Robert Brady]
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~


THE WIZARDS OF BLOG, or FEEDING THE HAND THAT BITES ME


I'm compiling this lengthening essay as I wait to post to my old site on the 'new' Blogger; and wait, and wait, and wait...

As visitors hereto may have observed for the past few weeks, the advancing technology and radical software upgradings and innovations, whizbangs, whistles and bells being crowbarred into place at Blogger.com to enhance the blogging experience, elevate it to new heights, make blogging a simple pleasure, have in fact pretty effectively challenged Dante with a new level of hell, while erasing the several qualities that characterize blogs: spontaneity, regularity, responsiveness, immediacy, ad blogeam.

After a tantalizing interlude of blogability, I went to open Pure Land Mountain a couple of nights ago and for the second major chunk of time in a month found I had no template: "error 001" it said implacably, "template not found." Nowhere in all the database was an error 001. This is 'new'? For days I posted records about my plight on the Blogger/villein interface, and my queries just sat there, gathering pixeldust. I could have rowed across the Pacific, bicycled up the coast to the Blogger/Google Imperium and knocked on the gate faster than they responded online to my queries, conveniently marked Day 1, Day 2 etc. Then one day they responded: RESOLVED, across the board. I went to my control panel, at last! And: Voila!! Even more no template. What word do they use when something actually is resolved?

Now we're approaching Day 10 for the second time, heading for a new record (7 days, set 2 weeks ago). Nice folks still come and visit Pure Land Mountain, but it's getting to be more like a museum that I can visit too, though I can't touch my own artifacts, a privilege for which I must pay cash.

Since communication is the name of the game for the avid blogger, one would think the same was true for Blogger.com as an early pioneer provider of the service, but apparently the Wizards of Blog are more into tinkering and tweaking merrily in their new and luxurious cyberpalace than in keeping we merely paying customers informed as to why we cannot use their PAID service to blog today, or yesterday, or the day before, or tomorrow or who knows?

And even when they say they've fix it, it's not fixed. Through their assiduous efforts the Wizards of Blog have made at least my blog more closely resemble a cemetery of cogitation. This may augur something, I'm not sure what, maybe happier servers or somesuch, but the merely living human user certainly is not happier. Can it be considered an improvement to be pretty much erased for a week or more at a time (10 days so far) without a warning, without a word, without a sign, without a clue, even though there is a control board, where such postings are ignored daily, a status board that details a problem resolved last month? There's also email, and telephones, even telegrams, what the hell. More like Hades 9b. Sitting Bull got his info faster than I've heard anything from the Wizzes. I've been checking out MT et al., but are they any more communicative if you disappear? Right now I think I'll just go spend some time in the poppy field...