your one wild and precious life

Posted on July 10, 2022 by Brian D. Butler 

Who made the world?
Who made the swan, and the black bear?
Who made the grasshopper?
This grasshopper, I mean—
the one who has flung herself out of the grass,
the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,
who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down—
who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.
Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.
Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.
I don't know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn't everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?

—Mary Oliver

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Compounding Your Pejoratives

Posted on July 9, 2022 by Brian D. Butler

I have recently found myself reaching for both colorful and acceptable pejoratives when commenting on social media sites. This is partly due to the necessity of avoiding Twitter jail, but also to liven the mood. The terrific chart above was created by Colin Morris who noted that a certain form of compound pejoratives—two words such as “buttface”, “shitlord”, “douchebag”—are found in diverse yet formulaic proliferation. According to Morris:

I collected lists of around 70 prefixes and 70 suffixes (collectively, “affixes”) that can be flexibly combined to form insulting compounds, based on a scan of Wiktionary’s English derogatory terms category. The terms covered a wide range of domains, including:

scatology (fart-, poop-)
political epithets (lib-, Trump-)
food (-waffle, -burger)
body parts (butt-, -face, -head, -brains)
gendered epithets (bitch-, -boy)
animals (dog-, -monkey)

So have at it. Treat your favorite social media trolls to some inventive insults.

 

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The Grim Reader

Posted on July 8, 2022 by Brian D. Butler

 

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Librarians on Horseback

Posted on July 7, 2022 by Brian D. Butler

The Pack Horse Library Project was a  wonderful Works Progress Administration (WPA) project that delivered books to remote regions in the Appalachian Mountains between 1935 and 1943. The program created thirty libraries and served more than 100,000 people in rural communities.

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How Does Venice Work

Posted on July 6, 2022 by Brian D. Butler

Venice is a romantic and intriguing destination, but its unique situation and history make for a myriad of challenges. The canals, the sewers, the buildings, the bridges and the rest of the Venice’s infrastructure has all been engineered to deal with a singularly difficult environment: not-particularly-solid ground constantly battered by salt water. In the short film below, the many mysteries of how the city works and what steps have been taken over the centuries to ensure the smooth function of the city are revealed.

 

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Emily Dickenson Gamified

Posted on July 5, 2022 by Brian D. Butler

I have never been much of a gamer, but I had to check out this bizarre video game based on the poetry of Emily Dickenson. Emily Blaster: is a little shooting game in which you attempt to piece together selected poems by Emily Dickinson by shooting words out of the sky. This is seemed to be a clever way of introducing kids to Dickenson’s verse, however it turned out to be the promotion for a recently released book.

To celebrate the release of Gabrielle Zevin’s Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, Knopf built a real-life version of one of the games featured in the book. According to the author: “The game was inspired by the poetry of Emily Dickinson and by edutainment games of the 1980s, like Math Blaster! I liked the slight subversiveness of making a game where the object was to shoot poetry, and I thought that Emily Dickinson’s compact verse style and memorable phrasings would make for perfect targets. Emily Dickinson’s poem “That Love Is All There Is” is featured in EmilyBlaster, and it also provides the epigraph for the novel. I’ve been obsessed with this poem for roughly half my life: Dickinson begins with a riddle about love and answers it with a machine-based metaphor. I joked to my editor that this poem is basically Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, but in four lines.”

Play the game here.

 

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Paris to Zermatt in only 20 hours

Posted on July 4, 2022 by Brian D. Butler

Regular visitors to Travel Between The Pages are well aware that I am a sucker for travel posters. I especially love historic tourism and railway advertising artwork. Recently, I fell down a rabbithole exploring the brilliant poster art by the Romanian-born Frédéric Hugo d’Alési who was one of the earliest artists to design posters for the French railway companies. These extraordinary works of art were printed using a process akin to chromolithography, called simile-aquarelle (“faux watercolour”), that required up to 20 different colours to render the final image, making them much more richly printed, detailed and painterly than the travel posters from subsequent decades.  D’Alési created hundreds of posters for the railway companies in France, Switzerland, and Ireland.

 

 

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When Life Imitates Art

Posted on July 3, 2022 by Brian D. Butler

Margaret Atwood :  “I’m waiting for the first lawsuit. I’m waiting, you know, for the lawsuit in which the family of the dead woman sues the state… And I’m also waiting for a lawsuit that says if you force me to have children I cannot afford, you should pay for the whole process. They should pay for my prenatal care. They should pay for my, otherwise, very expensive delivery. You should pay for my health insurance. You should pay for the upkeep of this child after it is born. That’s where the concern seems to cut off with these people. Once you take your first breath, it’s out the window with you. And, it is really a form of slavery to force women to have children that they cannot afford and then to say that they have to raise them… People have to decide what kind of world they want to live in. Are we in favor of forced childbirth? Because that’s the world that we are going to get if we shut down reproductive rights. Right to life is one way of putting it. Forced childbirth is another way.”

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Travel can be shattering

Posted on July 2, 2022 by Brian D. Butler

At one time or another even the most veteran travelers can feel a little fragmented by the experience. Sculptor Bruno Catalano masterfully captures those feeling of disruption many of us feel during our travels.

Catalano was born in Morocco to a Sicilian family. At ten, he and his family moved to France. At twenty, he became a sailor. He says that all his travels made him feel that part of him was gone and will never return.

 

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Parallel Reality Travel Is Here

Posted on July 1, 2022 by Brian D. Butler

This week Delta launched a personalized flight monitor, its latest tool to make airport experiences smoother. The first deployment is at Detroit’s DTW airport in the McNamara Terminal. Most air travelers frequently consult the flight information display screens; many of us multiple times. With crowding around screens and an often overwhelming amount of information,  frustration can set in—as such, Delta teamed up with Misapplied Sciences for a novel system for tracking your personal flight information: Parallel Reality.

Parallel Reality uses a kiosk, billboard and facial recognition, or a scan of a printed or digital boarding pass to display an individual’s personal flight information. What’s kind of mindblowing is that the person standing beside you will only sees their own—yours is not visible to them. In fact, no one else can see your information. The special screens can show up to 100 passengers’ personalized information at a time.

Each LED pixel can simultaneously display millions of different light rays. Once you’ve signed in, a sensor tracks you and sends your unique light rays your way. The only way anyone else can see your personized data is if they place their face against yours.

Greg Forbes (Managing Director of Airport Experience at Delta) says the new displays solve an old design problem, “The challenge of the flight information display, which has been around for absolutely decades, is a problem—for example, if you think about multi-languages. We tried to find ways where if you scan your boarding pass, it’ll highlight your information for a moment, things like that. But I think we hit the design limits of that form and now this is the next stage…I think everyone has that moment of dread. Those times where one thinks, “Maybe I got it wrong or I didn’t catch a gate change or something like that. You look 100 times to check, right? If we can give that moment of reinsurance, all the better.”

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