Pinter poems

I got these off a Google newsfeed that appears unstable, so I'll mirror them here:





God Bless America
by Harold Pinter, January 2003

Here they go again,
The Yanks in their armoured parade
Chanting their ballads of joy
As they gallop across the big world
Praising America's God.

The gutters are clogged with the dead
The ones who couldn't join in
The others refusing to sing
The ones who are losing their voice
The ones who've forgotten the tune.

The riders have whips which cut.
Your head rolls onto the sand
Your head is a pool in the dirt
Your head is a stain in the dust
Your eyes have gone out and your nose
Sniffs only the pong of the dead
And all the dead air is alive
With the smell of America's God.





Democracy
by Harold Pinter, Februrary 2003

There's no escape.
The big pricks are out.
They'll fuck everything in sight.
Watch your back.




American Football
(A Reflection upon the Gulf War)
by Harold Pinter, August 1991

Hallelullah!
It works.
We blew the shit out of them.

We blew the shit right back up their own ass
And out their fucking ears.

It works.
We blew the shit out of them.
They suffocated in their own shit!

Hallelullah.
Praise the Lord for all good things.

We blew them into fucking shit.
They are eating it.

Praise the Lord for all good things.

We blew their balls into shards of dust,
Into shards of fucking dust.

We did it.

Now I want you to come over here and kiss me on the mouth.

I'm-an-Idiot day (CSS)

i proposed below in passing
that the 13th of each month
should be "i'm an idiot day"

and bloggers on that day
should try to think of a question
they've hesitated to ask
for fear of looking stupid

and ask it publicly
in hopes that someone will answer
or that the act of asking will make it clearer
or will inspire the required research effort

so my idiot-question, a day early, is:

back when everyone on comp.infosystems.www.authoring.html
was promoting CSS stylesheets
their promise was that if i didn't like an author's page-design
i'd be able to substitute a different stylesheet

now i've got the latest version of firefox
but i don't see that function anywhere

(there's a page-style submenu under 'view'
but it doesn't offer any subtitutes)

so were we sold a bill of goods [yes]
or is this function still on its way
or what? [workaround]

(don't say greasemonkey-- that's javascript)

(sage does allow it,
globally for all rss-feeds)

Elmore Leonard's Bulwer-Lytton contender

"The last red reflection of the sun showed in the sky behind them as the wagons rolled down the slope toward the camp-- toward the silent, cold-looking, deserted-looking adobes that were already enveloped in the dull shadow of this slope the wagons were descending." Escape from Five Shadows 1956

Semantics of person-person relationships

the dream of a semantic web
(and equally, the dream of a vingean singularity)

will require a formalised understanding of human relationships

which is what this vocabulary strives to be



because it's sorted alphabetically
we can't begin to critique it
without re-sorting it into (six) clusters:



1. kinship:
ancestorOf/descendantOf
grandchildOf/grandparentOf
parentOf/childOf
siblingOf

any two living things are in a kinship relation
it's just a question of distance, and direction
so this is really a vector
say +1 for parent, +2 for grandparent, -1 for child, etc
leaving 0 for no direct lineal relationship
and adding more parameters to capture
sibling cousin aunt uncle niece nephew etc etc etc

2. cohousing:
livesWith
neighborOf

again this is a measure of distance
between where any two animals sleep

same bed, same room, same floor, same house
same street, same neighborhood, same town, same county
same state, same country, same continent

3. degree of acquaintance:
knowsOf
knowsByReputation
hasMet
knowsInPassing
acquaintanceOf
lostContactWith

this one is almost more trouble than it's worth

you might try numerical values for:
howOftenSeen
howOftenSpokenWith
howOftenEmailed
howOftenChatted
howOftenDoneStuffTogether
howOftenDoneSexTogether

but these are really graphs over time

and you'd also really need:
knowsName
knowsEmail
knowsPhoneNumber
knowsAddress
knowsMaritalStatus...?

4. professional:
colleagueOf
collaboratesWith
employerOf/employedBy
mentorOf/apprenticeTo
worksWith

how many dimensions does 'professional distance' need?

you can do similar jobs for dissimilar companies

you can work with people outside of any company

you can aspire to a profession
apply to a company, but be rejected or fired or quit...

5. relationship valence:
ambivalentOf
wouldLikeToKnow
friendOf
closeFriendOf
antagonistOf
enemyOf

if we make this independent of degree of acquaintance
then 'wouldLikeToKnow' can have the same value as 'likes'
but with the acquantance-level still zero

but you also need longterm vs shortterm valences:
i love you dearly
but
i can't be around you until i get some things worked out

6. sex/marriage:
engagedTo
lifePartnerOf
spouseOf

this one is next-most-important
after kinship

and (in humans) involves a stereotypical melodrama of romance
detailed in my Solace

additional numeric relationship needed:
considersPotentialLifePartner

additional unary (non-relationship) parameter:
desiresLifePartnership

(zero desire, or even negative desire, is possible)

Nanoheat

This animated nanotech gallery
is the first I've seen
that even attempts to show the effects
of ordinary thermal vibrations
on the nano scale

but I think it lies, still
because each atom's vibration is shown
as if it's locked in crystalline diamond

but the only thing locking it
is its bonds to its neighbors

and since these are springy
the system as a whole will be
wavy as a slinky

ring-shapes will bounce back and forth
between wider and narrower diameter

waves will propagate around their rim
so that tight fits to neighboring 'gears'
will be impossible

if one atom in a ring is hit wrong, so it twists
that twist will propagate around the ring as well

and this is the dynamic world we'll soon see, inside cells

balled threads of amino acids
springing not wildly but in naturally engineered directions

with atp-molecules latching into specific sites
and blasting off their phosphate tip, when triggered,
the blast propagating across the springy ball
and doing useful work somewhere nearby

(to practice getting the picture right
think of a tiny clump of water molecules
falling weightless, spinning slightly
near freezing, molecules clinging not-quite-tight

and realise the vibrations echo
from end to end, and around the flattening rim
until they achieve symmetry
and that geometry demands
the symmetry be sixfold

and that new molecules joining the cluster
add random new vibes
that also settle into sixfold symmetry
jostling every other point on the surface
until all are mirror-matched

voila
a snowflake)