Trash 2 Treasure
This should be a national holiday.
Last Saturday past a tradition in Nelson (and possibly elsewhere, I've only seen it here) - "Trash 2 Treasure" - wherein people pile their unused, unwanted merchandise out on the curb for others to rummage through and help themselves.
I'm beside myself with delight, it's like going garage saling, only everything is free. Free, free, free, that's the price for me. Especially now, with a budget that enforces sobriety and very limited smoking...
Every couple of blocks a curb filled with the cast-offs, there are "dealers" - people quickly driving from one to the next and grabbing what they think they can sell, but most of it is in the "kind of neighborly way".
A few hours, a few things, camera lens, other irrelevant treasures, but I'm wary of collecting, I already have too much stuff as it is. Those people not participating in Trash and Treasure often have problems with people coming into their yards and appropriating things that clearly weren't meant to be "donated" or taken, but all in all it's a community success...
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United Airlines Kills Bunnies
I couldn't make this up:
If beating and threatening passengers couldn't effect corporate change, maybe their bunny-killing ways will. Because if there's one thing a corporation shouldn't do, it's kill bunnies. Unless it's to test make-up and cosmetics...
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- Category: WTF
Dante - The Inferno - Robert Pinsky
Finally finished, not through any fault of the author or translator, but like a lot of good books it demands pause to process...
The rhyming - occasional, good, although I stumbled to find the rhythm, to satisfy the false rhymes, reading, on the left page, the original, and my Italian is near nonexistent but I know all the rhymes there are true. But that's not what it's about. It's about the images, the aspects and degrees of hell that he conjures up, the punishments he inflicts upon his enemies or those he considers worthyn- eternal and cruel in the extreme, not what you would imagine from someone so apparently enlightened. And the people - the population of hell, I miss most of them, the references often to people Dante knew himself, and so perhaps the work was as much a political satire, but this is speculation.
There's an essay there, in how our view of the world (and God) has changed, I'd always taken it for granted that like minded people with modest education thought pretty much the same, but this is not true, and we are as much a product of our times and culture as we are of ourselves.
Great book. And the translators notes are at the end, bonus, to try and puzzle what I didn't first understand.
Read a portion of it online here: http://www.purgatorio.com/divine_comedy/inferno1.html
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