merry christmas

to all my friends and readers who celebrate it, I wish a very Merry Christmas. To those who celebrate other festivals of the season, please accept my best wishes to you.

To some very special friends in the virtual world, I especially send my hugs and wishes for a wonderful new year:

Parker, a friend with whom I've shared both my frustrations and my counsel, and most of all my love.

Esteban, one of my very first and very best friends in SL, and a wonderful guy.

Danni, whose life I have added spice too (Cajun, specifically).

Chandlr, a guy who has an incredible talent with sculpties.

Effie, somebody I have shared both fun and frustration with.

KayCee, a very creative woman who has given me lots of helpful advice.

Darcy, a fellow bookworm.

Julianna, my favourite mermaid.

NightMorrisey, a recently made friend, who shared her frustrations, and listened to mine, and who has a beautiful place.

Chestnut, another new friend who appreciates and shares beauty.

And most of all, Pauline. I've known you for three of the four months you've been in SL, and have cherished all of the time with you. You are something special, my peapod sister.

so many more that I can't list you all.

To all of you, may the new year be a good one, full of joy, blessings, and friendship.

XO

bibliophilia

Yes! I confess! I'm a bookworm, with uncontrollable bibliophiliac tendencies. A bookstore is a place where I face great temptation.

The list below has apparently been floating about the blogosphere for a while, though I'm just now picking up on it. I've put those I've read in bold, those I'm currently reading in italics, while most of those remaining I intend to eventually read.

If you disagree with some of the entries here, please know that this list was made by others, and, as with all such lists, the choices are arguable. There is, for instance, a time effect that makes some of these more popular than they likely deserve. Indeed, some, such as the Da Vinci Code, I fully expect would not be on a list made a decade from now.

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen

2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien

3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte

4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling

5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee

6 The Bible

7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte

8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell

9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman

10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens

11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott

12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy

13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller

14 Complete Works of Shakespeare

15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier

16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien

17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks

18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger

19 The Time Traveler’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger

20 Middlemarch - George Eliot

21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell

22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald

23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens

24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy

25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams

26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh

27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky

28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck

29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll

30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame

31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy

32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens

33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis

34 Emma - Jane Austen

35 Persuasion - Jane Austen

36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis

37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini

38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres

39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden

40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne

41 Animal Farm - George Orwell

42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown

43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez

44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving

45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins

46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery

47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy

48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood

49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding

50 Atonement - Ian McEwan

51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel

52 Dune - Frank Herbert

53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons

54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen

55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth

56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon

57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens

58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley

59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon

60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez

62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov

63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt

64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold

65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas

66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac

67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy

68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding

69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie

70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville

71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens

72 Dracula - Bram Stoker

73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett

74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson

75 Ulysses - James Joyce

76 The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath

77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome

78 Germinal - Emile Zola

79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray

80 Possession - AS Byatt

81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens

82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell

83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker

84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro

85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert

86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry

87 Charlotte’s Web - EB White

88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom

89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton

91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad

92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery

93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks

94 Watership Down - Richard Adams

95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole

96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute

97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas

98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare

99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl

100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

identity in virtual worlds, preliminary thoughts

I intend to eventually get to a post on identity and reality in virtual worlds. Meanwhile, take a look at CeNedra Rivera's thoughts, and the attached comments. I don't really know CeN, but I find I have a lot in common with her view on sharing RL photos.

CeN's Two Cents: Results of Poll #17 - RL Pictures

this I believe

Chestnut Rau, in her blog entry from the 28th of July, This I Believe, had some very good thoughts that sparked some things I've been noodling with. So, in my usually belated fashion, here are my own thoughts, over a month later.

I am a real person in both physical life and the metaverse. I am the same person, the same self, but embodied in different ways in the different worlds. My avatars in the various worlds are me just as much as my physical body is me. And, yet, there are differences because of the differences between the worlds.

I do not choose to share everything about my physical life in the metaverse, and the reverse is also true. This does not make me any less real or honest in either place. I have no obligation to share "real world" information about myself with you, and I ask that you respect that. I accept that others make different choices, and I respect those choices. If you share things with me in confidence, I will keep that confidence, and I expect you to do the same for me.

If you cannot agree with what I have said, that's fine, but in that case, we will remain only passing acquaintances. I am far from perfect, I know, but it is not your role to "fix" me.

Finally, I believe in the Golden Rule, treat others as well as you wish to be treated. I don't always follow it perfectly, but I do try.

gulag

With Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's death yesterday, I'm reminded of his book, The Gulag Archipelago, which I read a long time ago. It seems to be one of those books that people used to like to pretend to have read, but recently seems to have become a book that people have forgotten. And that's a shame, as it is very relevant to current times. I have been musing on it, and, while I certainly don't have anything formally supportable in debate, here are some preliminary thoughts.

Certainly, at the time I read Gulag, in my twenties, it had a very striking effect on me. For one thing, I was very glad to know that the US did not take such an approach for dealing with "undesirables." Certainly, there had been past mistakes, and would likely be future ones, but everyone who had had civics in junior high (and who hadn't?) knew that our system of government was morally above that of the Soviets.

naïvité—(noun) the quality or state of being deficient in worldly wisdom or informed judgment. (see http://www.merriam-webster.com)

Some will say that comparing the operations of the US government in Guantánamo to the Soviet Gulag is overstating the case, and possibly it is. I do not claim to have done any serious research on this; nevertheless, there are some interesting points of comparison on the face of it.

The most cogent ones have to do with sham detention and trial systems perpetrated on prisoners in both systems. In both cases, forms are used in violation of the respective constitutions of the nation-states involved. In both cases, the system is justified as a means of dealing with the those who are of greatest danger to the society in question, without the recognition that the prison system itself—and the government supporting it—is a greater danger.

If you find this disturbing as I do, well, then, where do go with this? I don't know.

seulement toi et moi

I've been looking for this hauntingly romantic song for almost 25 years, since I heard it on a radio station way back when. And here it is:


JUST THE TWO OF US

Take the train to Neuchatel;
I'll be waiting there for you.
There's a place we can go in the mountains,
Far away where we can't be found

Just the two of us;
Just the two of us;
Just the two of us;
Just the two of us.

J'ai un ami, qui m'a offert sa maison;
Elle se trouve dans une belle forêt.
Nous deux seul, au fond des montagnes;
Nous aurons notre rêve parfait.

Seulement toi et moi;
Seulement toi et moi;
Seulement toi et moi;
Seulement toi et moi.

---

Now, who wrote it, and who performed it? Several artists have performed songs titled "Just the Two of Us", but not this song. The page where I found the lyrics, http://www.angelfire.com/tn/countrymusicfans/mypage153.html, doesn't give credit, but the calling page appears to credit Hall and Oates. I'm not so certain that's correct. The search continues…

BTW, the English translation of the French portion would be something like:

I have a friend who offered me his house,
Which is found in a pretty forest.
We two alone, at the foot of the mountains;
We will have our perfect dream.

Just you and me…

ugly words

Can we please, please, just quit using the word "webinar"? Isn't it an ugly word? I despise that word, and shudder to even write it. Something about it just puts my teeth on edge. And most of the time it's used, it's not even really a seminar, web-based or otherwise; it's simply a one-to-many presentation, or, at best, an interviewer-interviewee format. Can't we use something like "web presentation"?

Please everybody just do as Thoria says …

death on the day of love: requiem in pace redux

The Saint Valentine's Day Massacre. It's inevitable that that's what it will be called. Death on the day of love. Or Virginia Tech revisited. As of now, it's six dead, including the shooter.

How did we get to a place that mass-murder is a solution for one's personal demons? Will expressions of outrage and the outpouring of grief prevent the next such event, or simply encourage it? I cringe at the thought of the facile platitudes that will be spewed forth over the next few days from politicians and pundits who are seeking personal gain from tragedy.

What role is played by a political and commercial leadership that is so utterly sold-out to money that it cares not for human life if a profit can be made in war? By politicians and "intelligence" officials who justify torture as a means for gathering information?

Why does this strike so deeply, while genocide in places like Darfur seem so remote and irrelevant?

How dark is the human heart? How thin is our veneer of civilization?

I don't know what else to write. "Out of the depths I cry to you, O LORD" (Psalm 130:1)