Saturday, April 16, 2005

Look out

Bunch of new shots up at Flickr. Including photos from the air of London, Los Angeles, Santa Monica Mountains , and La Conchita. Also a ground level shot of Red Rock Country in Nevada, right after a snow.

Went back to look at the flowers on Figueroa Mountain again today. More of those soon.

Roll on

The metaphor of blogging as rolling ideas, like snowballs, down hills, is catching on a bit. Here's To Blog is to Snowball, by Byron, at the Blog Business Summit. He riffs of a definition at Rhizome.org. Having fought (never successfully... can't be done) the pernicious rhizome known as Johnson Grass in North Carolina, I know enough about them to dig that analogy, too. A definition:

In botany, a rhizome is a horizontal, usually underground stem of a plant that often sends out roots and shoots from its nodes.

Blogging or what? Reminds us how native this kind of writing is to the Web. Also dig this, from Carl Jung, at the same definition link, above:

Life has always seemed to me like a plant that lives on its rhizome. Its true life is invisible, hidden in the rhizome. The part that appears above the ground lasts only a single summer. Then it withers away—an ephemeral apparition. When we think of the unending growth and decay of life and civilizations, we cannot escape the impression of absolute nullity. Yet I have never lost the sense of something that lives and endures beneath the eternal flux. What we see is blossom, which passes. The rhizome remains. (Prologue from "Memories, Dreams, Reflections")

There's a poignancy to that, as there will be to all of us whose words in this world outlive our bodies in the physical world. And the meaning of which outlives whatever transient urges led us to post them.

Bonus linkage:

Posts and corrections about the early history of Matt Jones' warchalking, one of the greatest ideas that ever sort-of caught on. It was kind of a snowball that rolled fast, splatted all over everything and eventually melted (mostly, though not entirely) away, leaving a few logos here and there and otherwise generally improving the world.

Here's a presentation that shows what went down in London that weekend, in pictures.