Speaker for the Diodes

5:24AM - QotD

"When government fails or refuses to protect its own people, whether from nuclear attack or from toxic waste spewing into our life-giving waters, the government has failed." -- Russel D. Moore, "Ecological Catastrophe and the Uneasy Evangelical Conscience", 2010-06-01

5:24AM - QotD

From "My Time of Day", from Guys and Dolls (music & lyrics by Frank Loesser:

</blockquote>

My time of day is the dark time
A couple of deals before dawn
When the street belongs to the cop
And the janitor with the mop
And the grocery clerks are all gone.

When the smell of the rainwashed pavement
Comes up clean, and fresh, and cold
And the streetlamp light
Fills the gutter with gold

That's my time of day

5:36AM - Easter in Cyprus

From Cyprus Trip

Easter in Cyprus is loud. Between the loudspeakers blaring the chanting and the rest of the service to all the people who couldn't fit inside the church, the fireworks being set of in various parts of the neighbourhood, the church bells ringing chaotically when the big moment is announced (then gradually coming together as they continue ringing), and later on the enthusiastic screaming of children at play after a huge family meal in the wee hours right after church ... it's joyous and it's loudly joyous.

As we were walking up the street to my cousin's house (where we're staying, and where today's big family gathering is) from my other cousin's house (where this morning's huge dinner was), my cousin was startled to notice how alive and awake I was while eveybody else had that "way past my bedtime" feeling -- after a few weeks of seeing how tired I've been most of the time. I've been trying to tell them I'm a night-person... I really did feel more alive then -- I'd been not just awake but interacting with people, and it had been at my time of day; I wasn't merely awake and trying desparately to get to sleep.

I took only a film camera loaded with high-speed black and white film to the church itself, so no digital photos of that to post now.

5:24AM - QotD

[To Christians celebrating on the Orthodox calendar, Happy Easter -- Χριστος Ανεστη!]

"The great gift of Easter is hope - Christian hope which makes us have that confidence in God, in his ultimate triumph, and in his goodness and love, which nothing can shake." -- Basil Hume

"My mom used to say that Greek Easter was later because then you get stuff cheaper." -- Amy Sedaris< [This works when it's a week later. When it's a month later, like this year, not so much.]

12:13PM - Photos in a More LJ/DW-Friendly Place (I Hope)

Cyprus. Good: I did get around to copying all of the Facebook ones to Picasa, which I think will be easier for the non-FB-users (do let me know whether that's correct). I'll try to do another post-of-thumbnails here soon -- where we're staying now, WiFi reception in my bedroom is iffy and moving the charger and plug-adapter back and forth betwen there and the dining room is a bit of a pain). In the meantime, here's one recent image I wanted to comment on, and a link to the Picasa album.</p>

From Cyprus Trip

I find it interesting that some authors' names get transliterated on translated editions (also note 'TZ' -- that's tau zeta -- for 'J', and the P-shapes are uppercase rhos) and others appear in their original alphabet. Also, I'm amused that Dan Brown's book's title appears half in one alphabet and half in the other (I'm guessing that's because the half of the title not translated or transliterated is the name of a famous historical figure usually sppelled in the Roman alphabet). I didn't expect to see as much alphabet-mixing as I've been seeing here.

(I mentioned this elsewhere but I can't remember whether I've said it here: I'm learning to hate words -- especially business names -- that lack internal clues as to which alphabet they're written in. Although reading an alpha as an ay is no biggie, and prounouncing a beta as if it were a bee is close enough to be recognizeable, substituting aitch for eta (uppercase), vee for nu (lowercase), or pee for rho (either case) makes a much bigger difference.)

---

This afternoon/evening: rest. Tonight: church for midnight (I think) Easter service. (Dunno about anybody else, but it works better for me than a sunrise service, so I'm not questioning the plan.) Tomorrow: huge family gathering and meal for Easter day -- when I asked whether comparing it to American Thanksgiving was apt, I was told that was about right (but the weather will be much warmer). Haven't been to Kyrenia yet -- that might be on the agenda for Monday, I'm not sure. Tuesday maybe some last minute shopping, then figuring out again how everything fits into the suitcases. Wednesday: awake and on the road to the airport too darned early and a long, long flight home.

SATURDAY: a Homespun Ceilidh Band gig -- we're playing at the Green Man Festival in Greenbelt, Maryland. I'd really hoped a bandmate with a more stable Internet connection would create a FB Event for that -- dealing with the photo-posting interface on a slow computer with sporadic signal loss is bad enough! -- but I don't think that's been done yet. Or if it has, they forgot to invite me on FB.

5:24AM - QotD

From the Quotation of the day mailing list, 2013-04-29:

"Yes, I have a dream, and it's not some MLK dream for equality. I want to own a decommissioned lighthouse. And I want to live at the top. And nobody knows I live there. And there's a button that I can press, and launch that lighthouse into space." -- Stanley Hudson, a character in the U.S. television series "The Office", in the WUPHF episode written by Aaron Shure.

(submitted to the mailing list by Susie Bright)

5:24AM - QotD

"Suppose, for a moment, that I were deaf, and had been so from birth. Had heard no sound, ever, was not even capable of decoding vibrations through my body. And suppose someone came to me with the story of a man called Beethoven. I would have to accept the existence of Beethoven (unless I were of the extreme cast of mind that refuses to accept as truth anything I had not personally tested myself) and I could read of his life, see pictures of him and of his home, and the strange artifacts with which he surrounded himself. But what he did, the work to which he gave his life, would be completely physically unprovable to me. I could see reams of paper covered with incomprehensible symbols. I could see films of people waving their arms about, blowing into things, scraping strings fastened to wooden boxes with sticks, just as people see other people making signs across their bodies, standing up and sitting down and singing and kneeling in silence, but it would make no sense to me. Being me (assuming I still was me, which hardly seems likely given such a catastrophic lack) I would, I think, be inclined to take the existence of 'music' on faith; but I could certainly understand such a person deciding that there was no such thing, that it was all a vast game of 'let's pretend' whose rationale completely escaped me. Especially if there were many people like me who could not experience the thing directly. And this is how I think of God." -- smallship1, 2010-12-23

5:24AM - QotD

"[W]ho can argue against civil rights and sleep at night?" -- Byrgen Finkelman, 2013-03-15

5:24AM - QotD

"Labor was the first price, the original purchase-money that was paid for all things. It was not by gold or by silver, but by labor, that all wealth of the world was originally purchased."</a> -- Adam Smith

"When people ask me, 'Why can't labor organize the way it did in the thirties?' the answer is simple: everything we did then is now illegal." -- Thomas Geoghegan

5:24AM - QotD

"[...] It's an accumulation of a lot of things that have been pursued either with good intentions or with arrogance, but nevertheless are coming to an end. And I mean the long sweep of history from World War II, mostly triumphant for America and very successful, in which we stood up to run the world. And I say that not cynically or critically, even.

"But that led us into a lot of stuff, both at home and abroad, which has been, I think, wrong, but also debilitating. And I'm talking about the end of that era. Number one is over. Not going to be any headlines announcing that, but in many different ways, it will be good for the world and good for this country, for America, if we can back off of that history and reconsider ourselves as a country, I mean, as a society ...]"

-- William Greider, on the PBS television program, Charlie Rose, 2009-05-11 (video and transcript):

5:24AM - QotD

"Terrorists want media attention, so we give it to them. Unsafe industries don't want media attention - so we give that to them." -- @Kenwardjr, 2013-04-19 ( thanks to theweaselking)

5:24AM - QotD

From the Quotation of the day mailing list, 2013-04-17:

"You must write as if your parents are dead." -- Philip Roth offering advice to fellow writer Ian McEwan.

(submitted to the mailing list by Mike Krawchuk)

[Sorry about not coming up with a quotation to fit Lag BaOmer ...]

5:24AM - QotD

From The Fishbowl (via a link from theweaselking), quoting an unnamed source:

Last time [we] sent out a warning email along the lines of:

We never ask for your username and password. If you get an email that looks like:

"There is an issue with your account. Please reply with your username and password and we will rectify it"

You should never reply to these messages with your details.

50 people replied with their usernames and passwords.

5:24AM - QotD

"I'm glad I was born when I was. My time was the golden age of variety. If I were starting out again now, maybe things would happen for me, but it certainly would not be on a variety show with 28 musicians, 12 dancers, two major guest stars, 50 costumes a week by Bob Mackie. The networks just wouldn't spend the money today." -- Carol Burnett (b. 1933-04-26)

5:24AM - QotD

"A lot of singers think all they have to do is exercise their tonsils to get ahead. They refuse to look for new ideas and new outlets, so they fall by the wayside... I'm going to try to find out the new ideas before the others do." -- Ella Fitzgerald (b. 1917-04-25, d. 1996-06-15)

5:24AM - QotD

"A Celtic banjo player flat picks everything. A Bluegrass banjo player puts jewelry on his fingertips to play. An Old Time banjo player puts super glue on his fingernails to strengthen them. Never shake hands with an Old Time banjo player while he's fussing with his nails." -- from "The Difference between Bluegrass, Old Time and Celtic bands, now finally explained!" (via a link shared on Facebook)

"Old Time and Celtic songs are about whiskey, food and struggle. Bluegrass songs are about God, mother and the girl who did me wrong. If the girl isn't dead by the third verse, it ain't Bluegrass. If everyone dies, it's Celtic." -- ibid.

5:49PM - Finally Got To Swim

In reach of WiFi tonight; on the move again tomorrow. (Came back to Nicosia this afternoon, heading toward Paphos in the morning ... unsure of how much Mom will want to stick to the schedule in her head, so dunno whether we're going straight there or stopping at various sights she says she wants to show me for long enough that I can actually look at them. Just before she went to bed the answer was that I could take all the time I like, but let's see if she remembers she said that in the morning.) Trying to catch up on a few comments and post photos, but I need to try to get to sleep early (wish me luck!) so might not get to everything I mean to.

Paralimni was nice (I uess we saw more of Protaras than Paralimni) and I finally got to swim in the Mediterranean Sea ... which was even more different from the Atlantic Ocean than I'd been told to expect. (For one thing, I didn't realize "more bouyant here" meant I cannot swim down more than a meter and a half below the surface because I'm not strong enough to push against that much bouyancy or that I have to re-learn how to kick when doing the breast stroke because my legs keep winding up too high in the water so my kick splashes more than it pushes. Eep!) I have to get a waterproof housing for one of my cameras if I ever get to come here again.

Before we came, we spent dozens of dollars to download a map of most-of-Cyprus into Mom's GPS (a TomTom unit). The map is incomplete (possibly just out of date; not sure. It does have a lot of "unnamed road" streets on it, so it at least knows there's a street there ...). It doesn't cope well with drive-on-the-left countries, which Cyprus allegedly^[1] is -- half the time it tells me to go the wrong direction on roundabouts, it wants me to turn right across a median with a guardrail, some of the time it shows a left turn but speaks an instruction to turn right (and roundabouts are a real crapshoot in that regard -- all sorts of combinations become possible) ... and most frustrating of all, no matter where I tell it to go, it wants to take me to Agia Napa^[2]. Getting to Agia Napa on purpose was fine. Trying to get out of Agia Napa, a half hour trip took two hours and much turning around.

I did finally start to get some semblance of a sense of direction in Paralimni -- unreliable but at least I had Some Idea. I haven't tested whether it works in Nicosia ... I guess tomorrow I'll find out whether it works in the direction of Paphos. (It probably helped that in Paralimni the closest -- and often visible -- water was to th East of me, like at home.)

Okay, photos, then sleep. Posting to FB (because it's convenient), then Twitter if I'm up long enough; I probably won't get them anyplace more generaly convenient for DW users tonight but that's certainly on my to-do list. (Maybe I'll have WiFi in Paphos, if I'm lucky.)

PS: I'm coming to detest words that contain only letter-shapes common to both alphabets -- ABEHIKMNOPTXYZkoptuv and in some fonts a and e (but at least C only shows up on churches and F went away before Homer's time) -- especially in names of businesses, where just recognizing or not-recognizing an English word might not be enough of a clue.A

[1] I'm finally starting to internalize what my cousins tried to explain to me: Cyprus is not so much a "drive on the left" country as it is a "drive in the middle because both sides are full of parked cars and the streets are narrow" country. But it does still mean you go left when entering a roundabout (that is to say, traffic circlesgo clockwise) and to take an off-ramp from a controlled-access highway.

[2] Not sure of the correct transliteration there. I think I've seen "Ayia Napa" as well.

5:24AM - QotD

"The formula for success is simple: practice and concentration then more practice and more concentration." -- Mildred Ella ("Babe") Didrikson Zaharias (b. 1911-06-26, d. 1956-09-27), American athlete (basketball, track & field, golf) and musician (vocals, harmonica) (via Jone Johnson Lewis' collection of quotations on about.com)

5:24AM - QotD

"I just don't trust any of it. Every time I read something about how there's been another ridiculous climb of the Dow Jones, there's a part of me that goes, 'This can't be good.' None of this is real money. You know what I mean? It's not like there's actually more of anything. It's just ideas. When people are getting richer and richer but they're not actually producing anything, it can't end well." -- Louis C.K., 2009

5:24AM - QotD

From the Quotation of the day mailing list, 2013-04-15:

"Every great film should seem new every time you see it." -- Roger Ebert, film critic. Ebert died on April 3, 2013.

(submitted to the mailin list by Steve Hekel)