Department of Duh

Microsoft warns of critical IE flaws. As the MSBlast worm continues exploiting a Windows vulnerability to spread across the Net, Microsoft issues an alert on three critical security flaws in Internet Explorer. [CNET News.com]

WIRED: PowerPoint Is Evil. Edward Tufte. At a minimum, a presentation format should do no harm. Yet the PowerPoint style routinely disrupts, dominates, and trivializes content. Thus PowerPoint presentations too often resemble a school play -very loud, very slow, and very simple. [Tomalak's Realm]
9:59:50 PM    

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Forgiveness IV

The poem Father Bo's put up goes nicely with yesterday's post.

If this weren't a spiritual discipline, I would not write today. I've spent a large part of the day asleep, worn about by the embarrassingly tiny exercise program I've started. But I promised, so here I am, if abbreviated and possibly not coherent, though that's always a possibility.

Thanks to those who've been recommending books and scriptures. I will be reading them. It's my experience that when I open myself to lessons, material comes flooding in like a South Louisiana hurricane. Like the sermon I remembered yesterday. And the forwarded woowoo newsletter somebody sent me that announced that people everywhere were finding themselves called to deeper forgiveness, to go over old hurts they thought they'd released. This I've heard from several other sources all through this year. It's as though while the nation was being called to war, others were being called to peace.

Last night I went for the first time to a book discussion group because they were talking about one of my favorites: The Eyre Affair by Jasper Fforde. (I recommend it highly to all fans of screwball British humor and refugees from the Lit Dept. It makes Monty Python look sedate and Terry Pratchett as fast-paced as Fordyce's Sermons.) I wondered what this group of science fiction fans would make of it. I mean, I've had people in a writing group refuse to critique a light humor piece of mine because it was obvious that I didn't take science fiction seriously. Mr. Fforde takes nothing seriously. About half the folks really liked it; half found it tedious--"too much going on, and no plot."

So when it was my turn, I explained the plots I found: the mystery in the foreground, the angst of the ex-soldier who'd lost her brother and been betrayed by her lover in the background, and all the other threads snaking through that wound up into a satisfactory ball at the end--except for the few lines cast forward into Sequel Land. (Lost in a Good Book. Coming soon: Thursday Next and the Well of Lost Plots. You have to able to stand names like Thursday Next, Braxton Hicks, Paige Turner, and temporary sidekicks Cannon and Phodder, Walken and Dedmun, etc.) And as I spoke, a parallel popped into my head: The mystery of the book is bound up in Jane Eyre, a story of forgiveness leading to great love. Our Heroine goes through the same story, has to decide whether to forgive and love.

And so do I. Everyday.

9:52:40 PM    

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