Category Archives: Posts

GPS: yet another delegation of power

My wife and I were in Boston recently, driving to a French restaurant where we were looking forward to having lunch. The city is complicated territory to us country mice, but the GPS lady –nice, if a bit of a know-it-all—seemed to have it under control. Do this, do that, turn here, turn there, turn […]

July 31, 2015 – 12:13 pm | By Brent | Posted in Posts | Tagged , | Comments (0)

GPS: Another delegation of power

My wife and I were in Boston recently, driving to a French restaurant where we were looking forward to having lunch. The city is complicated territory to us country mice, but the GPS lady –nice, if a bit of a know-it-all—seemed to have it under control. Do this, do that, turn here, turn there, turn […]

July 28, 2015 – 2:55 pm | By Brent | Posted in Posts | Tagged , , | Comments (0)

Death: we can’t get there from here.

Death’s bad reputation (see 5 June blog) as an obscene, scandalous social disease is one form of denial. Death is made into such a dreadful specter it is unacceptable, not as manner of speaking, but actually: as in “I won’t accept it.” (This works better when you are at an age where one’s own death […]

July 18, 2015 – 12:45 pm | By Brent | Posted in Posts | Tagged , | Comments (0)

Creativity isn’t (necessarily) good

In an early radio report of the recent upstate New York prison break, the reporter made a point of emphasizing that Governor Cuomo “seemed truly impressed” with the sheer accomplishment of the escape. Vicious murderers they may be, the governor seemed to think, but you have to admire the creativity. There was a touch of […]

July 4, 2015 – 2:45 pm | By Brent | Posted in Posts | Tagged , | Comments (0)

The creativity of everyday life

We tend to use the word and concept “creative” very restrictively. Mostly for artists, maybe inventors. Most jobs are not considered creative. Or most lives. There are creative people and there are the rest of us. We tend to put creative people on a pedestal. But if you back off from this common creative/uncreative dichotomy […]

July 1, 2015 – 8:23 am | By Brent | Posted in Posts | Tagged , , | Comments (0)

Computers and the CWQ

Has the computer improved writing? It certainly has increased the number of books published as well as the number of authors (both numbering these days in hundreds of thousands to over a million a year, depending on the estimate and exactly what is being estimated). Computers have made publishing so easy and inexpensive as to […]

June 18, 2015 – 3:21 pm | By Brent | Posted in Posts | Tagged , | Comments (0)

Death’s bad reputation.

Death has a very bad reputation in our culture. That sounds like a black humor joke since its badness seems not a matter of reputation at all but inherent in the phenomenon. But to a significant extent, death, or our experience of it, is indeed a social disease: how it is characterized is a large […]

June 5, 2015 – 1:35 pm | By Brent | Posted in Posts | Tagged , , | Comments (0)

Scapegate.

Deflategate has turned into Scapegate, the scapegoating of the league’s most successful QB. The NFL’s investigator concludes that Brady “more probably than not” knew that the ball handler guys did what they did. “More probably than not”–so what’s that, 55-45? 65-35? That’s not a standard of proof that would hold up in any other arena, […]

May 13, 2015 – 11:52 am | By Brent | Posted in Posts | Tagged , , | Comments (0)

Doing something about the weather

Even now that even the mountains of plowed-up snow have finally (I think), melted, pretty much all the conversation here on the Outer Cape consists of complaining about the miseries of this winter, the endless shovelling and hacking at ice, the days stuck in the house, the concussions from falls, the backs thrown out from […]

April 23, 2015 – 2:26 pm | By Brent | Posted in Posts | Tagged , | Comments (0)

Are solar panels ugly?

A recent letter to a local paper, evidently in response to the new Solarize Provincetown initiative, expressed the opinion that solar panels make houses ugly and that the town is unwise to make that sacrifice for energy efficiency. As a cautionary example he points to the cape-style house on Briar Lane in Wellfleet (across from […]

April 13, 2015 – 2:41 pm | By Brent | Posted in Posts | Tagged , , | Comments (0)