I wrote about my Uncle Bill’s recent death here. Unfortunately, I have no picture of Uncle Bill to grace this post with. Here’s my sister Nancy’s remembrance, which she kindly consented to let me post here.
Why is everything Google makes so UGLY?
Take your pick. Google Maps. Google Reader. iGoogle. GMail. Every single page is relentlessly, fixately UGLY.
I love Mitt Romney. His hair is real cool, and he’s personally made about $400M from deals like Staples, where I buy paper for my printer. My parents were very fond of his dad George. Now Mitt’s running for President. The press is awash in speculation about whether his particular brand of Mormon magic is going to make it impossible for him to win the nomination or the election. Mitt’s eager to assert that Mormonism is just another regular old type of Christianity. Hey, Jesus is his personal savior.
Mitt just needs to answer a few basic questions for the media and the public:
Amidst the ongoing shrieking of atheist banshees, it’s a relief to see Sam Harris address the question of the human search for happiness in a recent lecture:
…such a person may begin to practice various disciplines of attention—often called “meditation” or “contemplation”—as a means of examining his moment to moment experience closely enough to see if a deeper basis of well-being is there to be found.
Last weekend we visited the Los Encinos Historic Park with Claire’s husband Robert. This park is all that remains of the grand Rancho Encino, owned starting in 1889 by Domingo Amestoy (picture), father of John B. Amestoy, the first owner of our new house.
I just found out that Ted Nelson is continuing his decades-long, quixotic quest to reinvent the world’s basic document model, in the form of XanaduSpace 1.0, a recently released 3D document viewer that lets you see pan and zoom around a document universe with the transclusive relationships between documents represented as colored beams. You can download it here. This version is very close to demoware: there’s just one set of sample documents to be viewed.
Time magazine has published a cover story entitled The Secret Life of Mother Teresa, revealing that according to her own letters she spent the vast majority of the years between establishing her hospice in Calcutta and her death in a state of deep spiritual desolation. In 1979 she wrote:
…the silence and emptiness is so great, that I look and do not see—listen and do not hear—the tongue moves but does not speak…I want you to pray for me—that I let Him have free hand.
My Uncle Bill died in his sleep last week at the nursing home in Lewiston, ID where he was spending his final days. He’s been cremated and his ashes will be scattered on the Alaskan ocean where he fished for salmon in his second career, alongside those of his late first wife.
Kokekokko is the best yakitori place in Los Angeles, and I’ve been to most. Here it’s all about the food. The first thing out were quail eggs, plump, slightly larger than usual, lightly charred. The “meatballs” (tsukune) were juicy and grilled to perfection. The moist tebasaki (wing) meat fell off the bones. “Toku-hatsu”, a fattier variety of hatsu (chicken heart), was a real revelation.
David Myers (no relation), chef at Sona, the restaurant near Bob’s old place in West Hollywood, has high praise for Kokekokko: “Old-school yakitori. They also serve chicken sashimi, from the breast and from the leg. It’s very soft, kind of like toro. It’s so smooth.”
Kokekokko is in Little Tokyo downtown. You’ll often find yourself waiting for a table, or waiting for your food once you’ve ordered. That’s OK. Wash down your sticks with some sake from their reasonably good list.
Feng-hsiung Hsu, one of the key contributors to Deep Blue (