Peppermint 3 has arrived!

Finally, Peppermint 3 OS has arrived... it's what I'm using right now and so far, so good. It's built upon Lubuntu and Mint and looks and feels great (I'm not a fan of the new Ubuntu desktop at all). I've installed it on an old 256 RAM machine, but everything is working at the moment and I particularly like the fact that this Peppermint is not overloaded with programs I won't use. Since the early days of the Mac I've really enjoyed customising what I'm using and Peppermint 3 gives me that option from the get-go.

After 3 days, Peppermint 3 is still working really well. I had the usual odd window behaviour as with Peppermints 1, 2 and Ice, but that was easily fixed.

the bottom line

the bottom line

She'd washed her panties,
hung them out to dry;
he was looking at them.
'Male & female energies
need each other,' he said.
'Yes,' she agreed, following his gaze,
'that's the bottom line.'

© Kenneth Rowley 2012

The Death of Rootedness

The Death of Rootedness

The death of Donna Summer reveals the problems we're facing: the loss of rootedness and context. You see, without Donna Summer, there'd be no house music, no club dance scene, no Channel O, but most people who listen extensively (many exclusively) to these musics and inhabit these contexts have never heard of her. We have as a species shifted (a seismic shift, equivalent to the Industrial Revolution) from nationalism towards a global village, one unified worldwide culture, that contains a bit of everything, a genuine mash-up, but in so doing we have disconnected our ties to the particular histories that allowed this social world to come into being.

And, of course, it's not just the dance scene. During the late seventies (think Eagles' Hotel California, think Fleetwood Mac's Rumours), rock music was also changed forever because of Donna Summer. When Brian Eno arrived in Berlin to join David Bowie for his Low and Heroes albums, he had a copy of Summer's I Feel Love and was telling everyone, "This is the future". He was correct, and Bowie (who was a new convert to the electronica of Neu!, Can, and Kraftwerk) agreed. That nascent sound is all over Bowie's Berlin albums and the changes that followed were tidal.

Music is central to the new global village and our lives; it will continue to be, but without rootedness we can justifiably be apprehensive. I recently saw some youtube comments on a piece of classical music: "Oh, this music is just for the old people, and they'll be dying out soon." Our sense of history is dying, and with it goes our sense of proportion and rightness. Everything is now up for grabs.

Mudberry!

Swaziland is making huge strides to compete with giants like Apple, Google, Samsung and Microsoft by going local. Welcome Mudberry (TM). As you can see from our picture, it's already a big hit on the local African market.

Proud Mudberry User

Hey you!

Hey you! Are you having fun, or is the fun having you? You're tired of the old, are you fond of the new? When it's late at night and you turn out the light, is it still alright, do you still remember what to do? Oh I miss those times, I really do. Hey, you! Do you still long for a fu-wong, yearn for a mouth full of taste? Delight is too precious to waste. Call me. I want to eat some more tofu with you. I really really do.

posted from Bloggeroid

catching the plague

catching the plague

What is love? You meet someone, you dream someone, you sleep someone and then your heart is in your mouth, full of the burgeoning dawn. Your doom is already muscle-thighed and moving: she loves me, she loves me not, will she or won’t she? You can no longer sleep at night, your pulse is racing with the rush of the new. You get a kick out of her; does she get a kick out of you?

  Being in love is a recognised human condition, a measure of the state we’re in. It involves a lot of hugging and wave after wave of adrenaline. It rages like a fever. When Olivia, in Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, realises that she is falling in love, she exclaims, ‘How now! Even so, can one so quickly catch the plague?’ And when Dr Faustus, in Marlowe’s play of the same name, kisses Helen of Troy, he immediately realises that he is lost: ‘Ah, her lips suck forth my soul: see where it flies!’

  There is no surviving an outbreak of love. Once infected, you’re gone.

  But where is love? The poet Roger McGough wrote that ‘the act of love lies somewhere between the belly and the mind’. Most would probably place it in the heart, but I think it’s more a sparkle in the eyes, or the surprise of a smile, or the warm, moist, open-mouthed invitation of a kiss. Faces spark the whole thing off. At least they do for me. Some men are butt-men or leg-men or breast-men. Some others drink so much that they settle for whoever they can get. But me, I check faces, peer through the trapdoors of the soul.

  I dream dreams; I see visions. But there’s a difference between dreaming a dream and dating one. Being in love is living on the edge, balancing on the very brink of chaos: does she love me? Of course she does.

  Whoosh! There’s a flow and a flux, an energy rush. Love is coming: get on the runaway train; board the bus; fly the plane. Romance is always just around the corner. There’s always a heart looking for you. Life is a dating agency.

  When I was just a young boy, I didn’t understand this love thing. If I saw a couple kissing it was more a 'Look mummy, they’re eating each other.’ But when I became a man I put away my childish things, sighed moodily and gave myself up to passion.

  In our modern age, phone numbers are the digits of love. You’ve got it bad girl—that’s the fifth call you’ve made today...

  But that’s the whole point of love: communication. No man is an island. We’re people people. We need each other. Loneliness burns down the wires and drives people into Internet chat rooms or onto porn sites. Loneliness opens the dark dungeons of the human psyche.

  There is no antidote for love, and only the dangerously depressed will ever look for a vaccine to prevent it. No, love’s a hot-wiring of the spirit, an intoxicating home run, a favourite shirt in the wardrobe of our days.

© Kenneth Rowley, 2003-2012

   

She's my (prose poem for Valentine 2012)

She's my familiar pleasure, my discovered treasure, my depth-plumbed measure of what it means to be a man. Long-limbed, lithe and lively, she is lovely to let me stir the cream with the cocoa. We share what we know, grow to be sure of what we can, plan and cook and hatch fast and slow in the slack lane of love. Ambassador me, envoy she, we meet in the shadow-lanes behind the cafes of passion. The steam erupts from our thousand cups. And we never order lonely plates of chips.

posted from Bloggeroid