Rick's Rants » All About Me

It does seem to like this everywhere

lryer — Wed, 12 Sep 2007 05:06:42 +0000

Sometimes it gets so hard to care…

An explanation

lryer — Fri, 19 Jan 2007 05:39:04 +0000

I am more afraid of falling in love than any other of the addictions that I wish to avoid. [Addiction is a form of repetitive behavior. Many kinds of compulsive repetitive behavior are useful and/or necessary.]

Employment strikes

lryer — Mon, 20 Feb 2006 21:42:39 +0000

I am again a bookseller! Thank you Half Price Books, on the left side of Madison!

Books for Industry

lryer — Tue, 01 Mar 2005 18:44:42 +0000

This BoingBoing article set off an odd mixture of feelings:
Boing Boing: Furniture made from books

Second Editions is a Berkeley-based business run by Jim Rosenau, a software developer and carpenter. He builds furniture out of books — mostly books (“I remove some of the paper and replace it with a sturdy armature of salvaged lumber.”).

The idea is to produce an urban version of the rural crafter’s twig-furniture (“I envied rural craftspeople who could spend time in the woods, gathering elegant natural materials for their work. I was relegated to what I could find on the sidewalk and in Dumpsters, my head swiveling as I passed each pile of discards.”). The furniture itself is gorgeous, witty and bloody useful, and produced with an eye to archiving ethics (“I research all apparently valuable books and try to place them with dealers but rarely succeed.”). I want all of this. Link

I love the idea of urban salvage/scavaging for building materials. I even like the idea that books serve books. I have seen dumpsters full of books that are discarded as part of the basic distribution process. I think the shelves look really cool.
Yet there is a clutching feeling in my heart when I see a book physically gutted and repurposed by stripping out its information content (its soul). I think I see a book as a meme that propagates itself by copying, and each copy which is destroyed reduces the meme’s chance of survival.

The world notices The World

lryer — Tue, 01 Mar 2005 15:30:15 +0000

As part of my decompression from the election, I am trying to read blogs dealing with more than politics. Having SlashDot as my home page helps. Another endless source of fascination is BoingBoing, a site that collects curious and stimulating items from a techno-scifi perspective. This week Cory Doctorow picked up on an article from the UUWorld:
UU World Bookshelf: Speculation and revelation by Will Shetterly

I lost my faith in God when I was young because conservative Christians did not offer stories that seemed literally and morally true. Their insistence that I believe made it impossible for me to believe. But my love of fantasy and science fiction helped me see that ants do not need to talk for Aesop’s fables to be true, and Jesus’ message of sharing and peace does not require him to rise from the dead. My love of these genres took me further: Jesus rising from the dead is no longer an obstacle to my belief in his teaching. That rising is not a supernatural being’s show of power; it’s a writer’s call for me to trust that, when all hope appears to be lost, hope remains.

Conservative Christians would say that fantasy and science fiction led me astray. I say those stories led me home. They made it possible to read the Bible as if it were a new text, without two thousand years of accreted interpretation by people who wanted me to see what they saw or wanted me to see. Those stories made me a Unitarian who believes that God is in everything. They made me a Universalist who believes that love is available for every living creature. They made me a Christian who believes that heaven is in us all, if we only know how to look. Many writers and readers of science fiction and fantasy will tell you there’s nothing religious or spiritual in these books. As a Unitarian Universalist, I respect their interpretation. But I still take revelation where I find it.

Live from Massachusetts

lryer — Fri, 25 Feb 2005 01:49:21 +0000

Blogging from the Essex Conference Center in Essex, MA, just because I can. I’m up here for what seems to be currently called the Convocation on Ministery With Youth. The plan is to begin the process of evaluating and potentially making big changes in the way the UUA does youth ministry. What are our unserved constituencies? Can we reach them and still preserve what it is that we love about YRUU?

This is a lovely place in the woods north of Boston. Simple but very well appointed. Should be a good place to think. I hope we can find a way to give a useful purpose to this weekend. I fear that the concept of this weekend is not clear enough to focus the activity. I have an open mind and good will, however, so we will see.

Greetings from Boston

lryer — Sun, 10 Oct 2004 13:43:21 +0000

I had to post once from Pickett and Elliot House here at the UUA in Boston. I’m at my first YRUU Steering Committee meeting, and have now officially survived it. We managed to chew off a big chunk of the “Common Ground 3″ problem/opportunity in a manner that honors the difficulty we have with the proposal. I have had only limited views of the city: run/walk around Boston Commons Friday morning, shopping downtown (for a belt) yesterday, and a walk by John Kerry’s house on the way to a wonderful Thai restaurant, “The King & I”, last night. It has been a very good experience working with this steering committee, and I look forward to the year.

The sound of marching feet, boy…

lryer — Sat, 11 Sep 2004 15:27:30 +0000

I’ve been doing canvassing work for the Democratic National Committee (DNC) for the last month, through Grassroots Campaigns. It’s a little odd for me to work this directly with the party, but I’m happy to do nearly anything to press regime change in this country. I’m enjoying the work on several levels. I love talking to people and reinforcing the feeling that everyone can be involved in the campaign. I also love being on my feet all day and have been dropping poundage! One of my least favorite things about my paranerd job was sitting on my butt all day.

I would prefer working to build a progressive organization that will last beyond the election, however, and I don’t feel that the DNC is that. I’m glad, therefore, that we have finished with our DNC contract and will start next week doing work for MoveOn and The Environmental Action PAC.

This is still a little off the track of my “UU monk for the revolution” career plan, but the pay is suitably meager…

What April?

site admin — Mon, 03 May 2004 16:37:52 +0000

So what happened to April. Well it was a pretty frantic month! The first clue is that I’m moving to Madison, WI this week. I don’t know if I’ll be able to post until I get set up there. My email will stay the same.