one small voice

stpeter's blog on jabber, technology, history, philosophy, et alia

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2001-09-22

Thanks to links I found by way of Dave Winer and Doc Searls, here are some words and pictures to take to heart....

Bryan Appleyard on anti-Americanism.

Michael Wolff on the dawn of war.

Heartrending pictures of memorials the world over.

Dan Heller has a page of gorgeous photos of the New York skyline, including some of the WTC.

Posted on 2001-09-22 at 21:50. File under society.

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2001-09-18

I've been thinking a lot lately about my days in New York City. My favorite buildings there, other than the Flatiron (once the tallest building in the city), were the twin towers. I remember growing up on the North Shore of Long Island and seeing the towers go up in the distance. When I was in school at Columbia I would sometimes go way downtown to the financial district. I never went to the top of the towers, though -- I always just looked up at them from the plaza. No one who has never been to NYC can understand how enormous the towers were. Much as I always loved them, I always felt intimidated standing under them. Unlike most skyscrapers, which have strong horizontal elements, the outer steel beams of the World Trade Center emphasized the vertical like no other buildings I have seen. To me they will always be the essence of reaching for the sky.

I once flew into Newark Airport on a cloudy day, one of those days when the sky is filled with an unbroken mass of something between fog and cloud that produce a form of precipitation which is neither rain nor mist but a little bit of both. As we approached Newark we descended closer and closer to the tops of the clouds, and I looked East out the window to take in the last rays of the sun before plunging into the clouds. Off to my left I suddenly noticed that not all of New York City was veiled in mist -- the highest ten or fifteen stories of the World Trade Center jutted out above the cloud-tops, for all the world like two solid white islands in a sea of rolling grey vapor. I'll never forget that sight, and as I was waking up this morning I wrote a haiku about it (which I immediately added to my Urban Haiku):

A sea of silver
Clouds below -- except the tips
Of two white towers.

Posted on 2001-09-18 at 20:12. File under personal.

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2001-09-14

Yesterday I mentioned the old Gordon Sinclair editorial alleging that other nations never lend assistance to the U.S.A. -- thankfully, that turns out to be no longer the case. For instance, the BBC is reporting that "The rescue operation is also getting the backing of foreign governments, some eager to repay America for the help it sent them in time of crisis", including assistance from Belgium, Japan, and Turkey.

Posted on 2001-09-14 at 13:35. File under society.

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2001-09-13

The events of the last few days have reminded me of something I'd long forgotten: there does exist pure evil in the world. My old teacher David Kelley states it well in this article.

For inspiration in these dark times, a lot of folks have been sending around the abridged text of a radio editorial by Canadian journalist Gordon Sinclair. There's a fascinating story behind this editorial: although the abridged version going around may sound as if it was written just yesterday, in fact it was first broadcast on June 5, 1973! Nevertheless the original text still provides a good read.

Posted on 2001-09-13 at 19:53. File under society.

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Well I think I'm going to resurrect this site as a way to test out Dizzy's Jabber-to-Blog component. We're mainly posting nowadays to JabNews as well as to Jogger over on jabber.org, but I figure since a search for 'stpeter' yields this site as the second hit, I might as well use it. :)

Posted on 2001-09-13 at 12:30. File under personal.

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