More people with strong opinions that inspire me: “[When] I say HTML mail still sucks, I don’t mean it sucks because support for design in e-mail today is like support for standards in web browsers in 1998. I mean it sucks because nobody needs it. It impedes rather than aids communication.”
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I didn’t appreciate Philip K. Dick’s writing when he was alive, but I certainly appreciate where he was coming from. I especially liked this passage from a commentary in the Times this morning: “The science fiction writer’s job is to survey the future and report back to the rest of us. Dick took this role seriously. He spent his life writing in ardent defense of the human and warning against the perils that would flow from an uncritical embrace of technology.”
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I thought this passage from a New York Times opinion piece nicely summed up my reasons for gardening:
Some people… take a special pleasure in eating what is wild, but for me the pleasure is in eating what I’ve cultivated myself. It’s a habit I learned from my parents, who grew up on farms where the kitchen garden was as important as the crops in the fields.
Those gardens were simply a matter of common sense, a way of providing for oneself. Like nearly every choice that humans make, they had an implicit political content. But the political content of our garden, and of our pigs and chickens, is overt: to step aside even a little from the vices of industrial agriculture. Our purpose is summed up in the words of an old victory garden poster that was meant to encourage Americans to grow their own food during World War II. It says simply: “Grow Your Own. Be sure!”
Verlyn Klinkenborg, ‘Victory Garden’, The New York Times Opinion, The Rural Life (August 7, 2004) <http://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/07/opinion/07sat3.html> [accessed Saturday, January 27, 2007] (para. 2–3 of 5)
Ohio Historical Society, ‘Grow Your Own, Be Sure!’, War History Commission World War II Poster Collection <http://www.ohiohistorycentral.org/image.php?rec=1582&img=976> [accessed Fridayday, June 1, 2007]
Labels: food
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