Archive for March, 2009

Kee-hap’s Meditation on the Key of C Featured on Justcatssleeping

Published
by
s000z
 on March 11, 2009
. 1 Comment

My friend, Stefan announced he was collecting pictures of sleeping felines for his brother Eric’s new blog, Justcatsleeping and of course I though of my cat, Kee-hap.  With orange tiger stripes, meowmix disposition and (usually) amber eyes, she’s just meant for this kinda thing.

Kee-hap is really asleep in this one

Problem was, Kee-hap loves to be photographed.  Way too much.  So much so, that sound of the case of a newly recharged digital camera battery snapping out of its case will rouse her from the deepest slumber.  So, by the time I’m through adjusting the focus, her whiskers are twitching and she’s sniffing the lens

That night, I was watching Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette on DVD.   And I don’t care that it got booed at Cannes and panned by the critics, it told history in a way that’s never been done before and brought an often inaccessible era right into the here and the now in this extraordinary way and Kirstin Durst characterized Antoinette in a complicated and compelling way.  The highly criticized soundtrack made it all the more sublime.  But back to Kee-hap, okay.

521px-Marie-Antoinette;_koningin_der_Fransen

So I’d finished the movie, and Kee-hap, sensing the shift of attention, was now positing herself on the sofa’s edge, like an absolute Monarch.  I threw a neon orange ball across the room and as Kee-hap was chasing after it I sent Stefan an email to assure him and his bro that there was, indeed, interest in the project,  “but right now (she’s) in the key of C and mad clean thru, as Henry Miller would say, she  “has magenta eyes, like old- fashioned vest buttons.”

Now, as you read this, Kee-hap is sleeping in pixelated perpetuity on Eric’s justcatsleeping blog.  And this is because, the very next afternoon, I managed to successfully snap Kee-hap in various stages of pre and post meditative slumber.  It helped that I loaded the recharged batteries beforehand.

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Daylight Savings 2009 makes me miss my atomic clock

Published
by
s000z
 on March 8, 2009
. 9 Comments

A Brief History of Daylight Saving Time -  Not a history geek?  No worries.  You can read my computer geek Daylight Saving Time post, instead.

Daylight Saving Time -or-  Macro vs. Micro:

It’s weird what a big deal I’m making over daylight saving this time round by putting a time twist on the macro perspective is not by choice so much as it is due to the fact that it’s impossible not to obsess over the history which is very much the story of individuals struggling to bring a micro concept to the macro arena where it belongs.

140px-Franklin-Benjamin-LOC

According to the Franklin Institute:

Benjamin Franklin was the inventor of Daylight Savings Time.  No one had conceptualized the idea prior to Franklin’s 1784 satirical essay on the topic.  It wasn’t until 1907, however that the English builder, William Willett propsed a Daylight Savings Time bill. Neither Franklin’s satirical nor Willett’s sincere efforts to brings this idea came to fruition came about during their lifetimes.

Contentious DST Component Established & Nixed

Daylight Saving Time was established as law in the U.S. by the Act of March 19, 1918 (sometimes called the Standard Time Act).  The primary purpose of the law was to officiate the time zones that the railroads had unofficially been using since 1883.  Although the contentious DST component of that bill was appealed in 1919, the standard time zones remained.

DST Finally Re-established

During World War I, Germany nationally established a DST and other European countries soon followed, including England –where Willet’s idea had been previously ridiculed.  Early into World War II, DST was finally nationally re-established in the United States.

Waste-of-Daylight-19-cover

Love and Loss

My beloved analog atomic clock will take a few days to catch up.  In the meantime, I will feel that significance of time passing and continue to organize and structure my precious writing hours as its large, clunky hands catches up with the change.  The fact that time gets lost during this atomic hickup –which, btw, has something to do with the dialogue it has with its NIST sponsored mothership, causing a few days of confused uncertainty before it sets itself straight, again— appeals to me.

Maximization through ubiquity

I admire the passion and dedication Franklin and Willett had for honoring and maximizing the precious hours of the day at a time when no one took their ideas seriously.  Then the concept, like my atomic clock, finally connected to the mothership and became the new, ubiquitously acknowledged measuring standard.

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