The other night I posted some new content to the Monadnock Review -- this time a series of fifteen sonnets by Tom Radcliffe entitled My Daughter's Face.
My friend Vivian asked me today why I haven't yet written anything about the recent terrorist attacks. Well, for the first two weeks I was in shock. Now I'm just coming to grips with the enormity of the events. Someday soon I'll post some reflections - perhaps even tonight (I'm a bit tired of Jabber work this evening and need to work on something else).
I'm reading this fascinating book entitled "Guns, Germs and Steel" by Jared Diamond -- browsing in the Tattered Cover I found myself intrigued by the book's subtitle: "The Fates of Human Societies". That's a topic I'd been thinking about recently (I'm also in the middle of re-reading Bronowski's book "The Ascent of Man"). The terrorist attacks spurred me to wonder about some big questions -- e.g., how is it that some areas of the world are so primitive in so many ways (technologically, intellectually, ethically) while others are so advanced? Diamond's book is providing quite a few insights for me, so I hope to write about that soon as well.
And here's something else I'm wondering about: why is Mozilla dead in the latest builds of Debian unstable? I must say that my computing life is happier than ever now that I'm running Debian. It's a big improvement even over other versions of Linux.
The attacks certainly dragged me back into the world. For the past few years I've pretty much ignored the news and been much happier because of it. But you can't ignore events this huge. I've been getting most of my news lately from weblogs such as those of Dave Winer as well as more focused news sources like Jane's and Stratfor. The major media are missing a great deal of the story here, but then again the herd mentality has always been strong in journalism.