These pieces were not written by the late British poet, Ken Smith (1938-2003), nor the other Ken Smiths who make bass guitars, study marine biology, sell cars, teach card counting, paint war scenes in oils, guide bear hunters in Idaho, teach forest management, study immunology, do war reporting, sell real estate, photograph nature, teach cryptology, provide legal counsel to the gay and lesbian community, realign the spines of athletes, listen for seismic faults in the Sierra Nevadas, operate a 4-axis milling machine, work for sustainable development in Alberta, play blackjack, or criticize Junk English. Nor were the pieces written by the Ken Smith who is “the Elvis Costello of Landscape Architecture” nor the one who serves in the Pennsylvania House of Representatives nor the one who hit a home run for the Atlanta Braves in 1983. I only wish.
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Art show in town
A dazzling collection of regional art is going up in the Indiana University South Bend gallery. Here is a detail from a big, smashing painting by Harry Ahn, for example.
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In-browser notepad
Digging the a5.gg in-browser notepad that uses the browser’s memory, loads in a snap, and is happy to live in the toolbar below the address box if you drag it there just once. Nicely done, Jason Cooper (@jasecoop).
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Two widows
Conversation in the check-out aisle, two white-haired women each with a cart and a modest number of items. Chatting about nothing, then about Downton Abbey, then about the beloved old movies on the cable. “My husband taped those,” one said. “My husband taped them too,” the other said. “How long were you married?” “Fifty-six years.…
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An ingrained right to ask a public question
Having no voice, or no voice that extends very far beyond the hedges at the boundaries of our private lives. That is the topic. But the question is whether we start there or end up there–whether through the shaping forces of the society or our own choices or a combination of the two. In a…
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Letter from Congress
I wrote a note to our IN-2nd district House representative to the US Congress, Jackie Walorski (@RepWalorski), a couple of days ago, and an email reply came today. No doubt it’s a form letter. I asked about a recent press release on her official government website, where among other things she said that a 2.3%…
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October 2013 Fargo Archive Pages
October 7 Testing, testing Just wondering. October 6 Remembering Eileen and Harvey Bender Remarks at a dedication ceremony on the IU South Bend campus, October 5, 2013. Planting a tree in autumn takes me back to Westover Greenhouses in St. Louis, where I worked when I was in college. Our customers knew that there were…
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What I wrote my representative today
Living in South Bend as I do, I follow our IN-2nd Congressional district representative Jackie Walorski on Twitter — @RepWalorski — and I check out the press releases on her official Walorski.house.gov site from time to time. I know that she signed the August letter (top of page 3) urging House leaders to play hardball on…
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Magic wand moment in American health care
One day he was in the middle of the eleventh year of nagging anxiety over not just a serious health issue but the fact of being “uninsurable” as far as his homeland was concerned. (I know a couple that moved to Central America two or three years ago to deal with a similar crisis.) The…
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The most powerful sentence I read today
“When the noise gets louder than I can stand, I explain – as gently as I can – that my wife would likely still be alive if ACA had gone into effect even three months sooner.”
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September 2013 Fargo Archive Pages
September 30 Civic literacy blog It’s nice to see that the Center for Civic Literacy at our cousin campus in Indy, the alarmingly named Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis or IUPUI, has a blog underway on civic literacy, a topic they phrase as a worthy question in an early posting: What exactly do American citizens need…