***SPOILER ALERT: If you, my mom, Donna Murphy, are reading this, and it’s not yet Mother’s Day, stop reading this now. Please. I mean it.***
So, yeah, this year I made another “card” for my mom, Donna. I lifted the inspiration (and parts of the oh-so-complicated CSS) from www.barackobamaisyournewbicycle.com . I wrote the script.
And now, I give it to you. All you need is your mom’s name, some inspiration, and a place on the web to upload a couple files (that place must support php). It’s a last minute online mother’s-day card. For you. I call it MomBike.
First, before we go all-tetris here: Tonight the Colorado Avalanche got swept, which marks the third pro sport team in Denver to exit with a sweep in a row (Rockies got swept out of the World Series in October, Nuggets swept in the first round of the playoffs this week, and Avs in the second round today).
1. This is an adorable interview (three questions) with Alexey Pajitnov, who invented Tetris … I’ve been putting together a “Philosophy of Tetris” article, and Alexey talks some Tetris philosophy here. Order out of chaos. Yeah.
2. Last night I won second place in the Tetris tournament … again. Third time I’ve finished second. This time I came in from the winner’s bracket, which means Vinnie had to beat me twice to take the championship. Twice. I put up a fight — this is the championship game:
3. This is the fifth in my Faces of Tetris series of interviews with people who play Tetris. I interview Vinnie, April’s champ, who talks Tetris, Colorado Springs, Steve Nash, and puts together a darn good metaphor about Tetris at the end:
By Roger Scruton, Philosopher
Pleasures go stale, but happiness is always fresh and fulfilling. Even if you are only interested in yourself, therefore, you should ask how happiness is obtained and how, once obtained, it can be kept. The most important ingredient in happiness is self-esteem: the knowledge that it is good to be what you are. This knowledge requires the distinction between good and bad. And this is not learned from judging, yourself, but from judging others and being judged by them. To be happy, therefore, you must see yourself as others might, and find no obstacle to approbation. What you admire in others, you should string to imitate in yourself.
This is a fruitful thought experiment. Take all the things that you want to do, and ask yourself, Would it endear another to me, to know that he did them? Consider infidelity. Why is it that, in all the great literature of love, the reader finds himself instinctively on the side of the faithful, and unable to take the betrayer to heart? If you are moved to sympathy for the adulterer, say, it is almost invariably because the writer or artist has portrayed him or her as pursuing an extramarital but faithful love against the background of a marriage imposed by force, convention, or habit. This is what Tolstoy does in Anna Karenina, or Wagner in Tristan and Isolde. The problematic cases are problematic for this very reason. Does our heart, in the end, really go out to Emma Bovary in Flaubert’s novel, or to Don Giovanni in Mozart’s opera?
Consider all your character traits in this light and you will soon learn which ones should be amended; violent temper, injustice, cowardice, and gross self-indulgence all place an insuperable obstacle before our affections. So let them place an obstacle before the affection that you naturally feel for yourself.
Once you begin to think in this moralized way about your life, you will recognize an important distinction not only between the good and the bad, but between the good and the nice. Nice people may be good, but in many cases niceness is a mask behind which self-interest negotiates an easy passage to its target. Nice people may charm us, do their best to get us on their side, encumber us with easily offered and cost-free expressions of affection. But it does not follow that we can trust them to help us in the real emergency, or to make sacrifices on our behalf or on behalf of anyone. For this something deeper is required — the thing that we know as virtue.
Aristotle argues that true friendship requires virtue in those who are joined by it. He meant that friendship is not just a good and a part of happiness; it is also laden with duties and obligations and cannot be sustained without cost. The cost is worthwhile, but it may not be pleasant. Virtue is the disposition to meet that cost from your own resources: to take risks on your friend’s behalf, to stand up for him in difficulties, to expose yourself to obloquy when justice requires. Without courage, wisdom, and justice, therefore, friendship is only a ghost.
To retain happiness is not so hard, if our faithful companions are beside us. They are our comfort in adversity and the partners of our joys. All promiscuous affection tends to sever these lasting relationships of love and trust, and although this may bring regards in terms of instant pleasure, it erodes the foundations of esteem. But lasting loves and friendships imply that grief will one day afflict us. And grief is a mourning, not only for the other, but for the self. We die with those whom we love, and this rehearsal for our final exit is one that many find hard to bear.
Here is another thought experiment. Imagine your own death, in a world where no one loves you or regrets your passing, but in which you have had your fair share of instant pleasures. Now imagine your death in a world where you are mourned and regretted, and where images of your character and deeds are treasured by those whom you leave behind. Soon you will come to prefer this second world, not only in the future when you have left it, but in the present, when death is only approaching at its accustomed pace. And you will come to see that there are worse things than death, and that, in the end, death is not the most grievous of your losses. Far worse is to live too long, clinging to a life that has lost its enchantment. (Janacek’s opera the Makropulos Case, based on a play by Karel Capek, makes this point beautifully.) This is part of what Nietzsche meant in recommending “timely death.” And beware of the health fanatics and the cult of youth, which tell you to keep the pristine shell of a human being while the inner soul goes rotten. Grow mature with confidence and old with dignity, and accept your death as the price. It is well worth it.
My friend JJ got me a book a couple months age — it’s the 33 1/3 “How-This-Record-Came-Into-Existence” series’ book on Born in the USA. Bruce Springsteen and I go back — I was eight years old, with my mom and my sister in a K-Mart, and we were in the music section. My mom gave me and my sister a choice: We could buy Michael Jackson’s Thriller, or we could buy Bruce Springsteen’s Born in the USA. We chose Thriller.
I didn’t pick up Springsteen again until 2004, when I put Nebraska on repeat for two or three months. Last Christmas my sister gave me Born in the USA on vinyl. JJ got me the BitheUSA book. It’s been a Bruce kind of year. And, this week, the keyboarder for the E Street Band, Danny Federici died. I never knew the guy. But — and this is what I came here to tell you about — I do want to share a little about what I learned about Federici and the Born in the USA song.
Springsteen had written a bunch of songs as demos — lots of those songs went on (in the “demo” version) to be an album (Nebraska). Born in the USA was one of those songs, but it didn’t make the cut. The demo version sounded different, a lot more desolate. When Springsteen still thought the demos he recorded were just demos, and when he got his band together to turn them into something more, he pulled out the Born in the USA song. The band played it through once, they played it through twice, and the second take of that song is the version you hear on the album.
I know it’s slightly tacky, but I’m putting ads next to the photos. Joe, Write has been operating in the red the past six quarters, and the stockholders are getting nervous. They’re using big words like “monetizing,” “YOY Growth,” and “Or Else.”
Okay, so I’m still a noob with all the snowboard lingo, but this I know: I stuck / bombed / went down my first black diamond run last week. It was the Last Hoot run at Keystone, and I carved the heck outta all but one really steep part of it. Awesome, right? Sure.
My friends Holiday and Mia were in town for Mia’s 30th birthday, and I got three days on the slopes with them and their crew.
I also stuck some sweet shots with my camera on the slopes — here are a couple of them:
There was a crew of carebears on the mountain that day that I ran into at a few different points.
Blue bear at the top of the slope:
I was with blue bear as he had trouble going down the slope, and shot this photo right as he met up with the bears that had waited behind for him:
Yup. Twice in a row. Yesterday morning and this morning. Yeah, spring.
Yesterday morning I also played the “Every 5 steps take a photo with your digitical camera, Joe” game. This morning I played the 10-step variant. When I find / build some software that’s good at taking a bunch of jpg’s and turning them into one single animated gif, I’ll post them here.
