Frimonday Conversation and other things

VPN trouble

I have been having the hardest time trying to upload WTUs 518 and 519 to YouTube.  This morning, I got one third of WTU 518 before the link timed out.  What to do? 

 

Hui Shan Tesco to open today!

This will make life more interesting for the K family.  There will also be a KFC opening too!

Jenny will check out the store this afternoon, maybe (not a Chinese maybe).

Taking the bus just now, I saw the parking lot was packed with bicycles.

 

I wish I could have had a picture taken

I was reading Chesterton in bed last night, as Tony was flipping through a picture book.  A nice moment, I could never have imagined happening.  There we were, reading in bed together.

 

Tony, all of a sudden, said "boat!".  I looked at his book, and I'll be damned, but I saw a picture of a boat.

 

Conversation with ?

Have you thought of a name for me?

 

I am sorry I haven't.  You will have to be patient.  I got Tony and I got work and I got Jenny who also uses the computer a lot. 

 

Don't worry.  You will get a name.  Would you like to be called the Latin for Devil's advocate?

 

I don't want to be thought of as a devil.  But I do like the idea of a Latin moniker.

 

Remember, I don't need you to have vanity.  That is my job.  Your job is to always question it.

 

Right.  Do you think you are crazy talking to yourself in your blog?

 

Yes and No.  The question has crossed my mind.  But because the question has crossed my mind, it shows I have doubts about my sanity which is ultimate proof I still have my sanity.  Unless, I have some kind of uber-insanity where I am too sure of my doubt of my sanity.  But I don't think I am a boiled egg....

 

What podcasts did you listen to last night?

 

Thank you for asking, even though the question didn't have anything to do with what I was just talking about.  That is, it didn't seem a logical or natural transition.

 

I listened to a Rabbi talk about his photography.  He said that as an art, photography is seen as a poor cousin of painting, and that furthermore, colour photography is seen as a poor cousin of black and work photography.  The reason this is, according to the Rabbi, is that the best art comes from the process having limits placed on it.  This is so the case in poetry, where poetry has gone to pot since free verse became popular.  The most profound expressions of man come when we put limits on ourselves, continued the Rabbi.  He used this thought to justify his orthodox lifestyle (though, I hate to call it a lifestyle choice -- I think it is more than that).  I can gleam much from this wisdom about limits.  I so often try to do too many things at once and so do none of these things very well.  I have to stick to a few simple goals in my life.  One of them is to be a good father.  Number two: I should be a good teacher.  And then I have a goal which transcends them all but I can't really find the words to describe it.

 

I also listened to this podcast about the Southern writer Flannery O'Connor, who died the year I was born.  There is something inspirational about a writer, from what many so-called sophisticates call Hicksville - the American South, making it bigger than the literary smart set.  Her stories are so ultra-modern and yet filled with so much basic common-sense.  This podcast, like the podcast with the Rabbi, also touched on the idea of limits.  O'Connor, whose literature is filled with the freaks and the grotesque, was said to have been able to write so well about these subjects because she had lived in a society where she could still know what freaks were.  As well, she lived in a society where manners were still practiced, unlike the more casual and freer behavior of today.  Freaks can only be freaks in a society that places the limits of manners on itself.  The modern world doesn't know who or what is freakish or  grotesque.

 

It is all well and good to talk about limits.  But how do you define them?  And do you support say the limits that the environmentalists seek to impose on us?  And knowing that you don't, how can you support limits and yet oppose those ones?

 

Good questions if I don't say so my self.  And I would further add that it raises the problem of freedom and limits.  How can we want freedom and limits at the same time?  It seems paradoxical.  And yet life is paradoxical, and if we don't accept the paradoxes we can't get through life.  

The truth sets one free.  The truth also limits one to believing only what is true.

Environmentalists and dictators who seek to put limits on us, are limiting the wrong things in the wrong way for the wrong reasons.  They seek to chain a man to a spot rather than to give him a place with fences that he can call his own.   That is the best way I can put it without going into specifics for which I have no time at the moment.

Are you at work or is family calling?

I am at work.  

Okay.  Later.

Later.