No pictures please

November 28, 2007

Since I use this blog as a bit of a per­son­al jour­nal, to remem­ber dates and hap­pen­ings, I should duti­ful­ly note that last night was the time four year old Theo pushed two year old Fran­cis off the foot­stool while brush­ing teeth, caus­ing said Fran­cis to fall pre­cip­i­tous­ly against the bath­tub and open a nasty gash in his chin. Three hours and a Martin/Francis emer­gency room vis­it lat­er there were four stitch­es in the poor guy’s chin. I’ll spare you all a descrip­tion of the ini­tial mess or the dif­fi­cul­ty of hold­ing down a scream­ing child while the doc­tor tries to put the stitch­es in. Every­thing is fine now. And no, no pho­tos or Youtube videos of the pro­ceed­ings. Maybe I’ll snap a pic­ture of the stitch­es so Fran­cis can see just where that scar came from!

Words and reason fail when faced with such horror

April 17, 2007

It’s hard to know what to say about yes­ter­day’s hor­rif­ic mas­sacre at Vir­ginia Tech, where a gun­man killed 32 peo­ple (at lat­est count) in two sep­a­rate inci­dents. Is this an indict­ment of an Amer­i­can cul­ture of vio­lence? Vir­ginia Tech has a strong mil­i­tary tra­di­tion, so is our war men­tal­i­ty to blame? Guns?, can we blame guns? Or how about the alien­ation of so many young peo­ple in our society?
Any answer seems glib and besides the point. This isn’t the time to be a pun­dit. Peo­ple snap for all sorts of rea­sons and usu­al­ly for mul­ti­ple rea­sons that can nev­er real­ly be untangled.
Like all humans, I’m shocked and sad­dened. I’ve spent time on the cam­pus and the stu­dents and fac­ul­ty I met were always warm and hos­pitable, gra­cious and open. What must they be going through? Think of the fear of the trapped stu­dents, the fear of par­ents turn­ing on the news, the fear of sur­vivors who will have to live with the mem­o­ries of this night­mare for the rest of their lives. I add my hum­ble words to the mil­lions of prayers that have been mur­mured these last twenty-four hours. May God com­fort the vic­tims alive and dead, includ­ing the shoot­er, who must cer­tain­ly be a vic­tim of some­thing himself.
How do we stop the vio­lence? How do we show our youth that vio­lence is not the way? And how do we get these damned guns out of their hands?

Making the list

January 11, 2007

Well, here’s some­thing: Quak­erQuak­er made the “SPA 100” list, Snap.com’s top 100 sites using their pre­view ser­vice (this is the hov­er­ing pre­view you see when you pass over a link). They say their list rep­re­sents “some of the more inter­est­ing, notable and funky sites” using Snap Pre­view. Hmmm, now if only they told us whether they think fell under “inter­est­ing,” “notable” or “funky.” For those keep­ing track, Quak­erQuak­er now mash­es togeth­er over a dozen Web 2.0 ser­vices to bring you the Quak­er conversation.