You may have read this ancient letter.
According to most sources, it would be exactly 500 years old today - written on Christmas, 1513.
According to possibly the most authoritative source, its age - or indeed its author - have been impossible to prove.
Even so - and even if you have read it - perhaps it is time to reread and reread it.
The time is always right for words that carry the beauty and solace of truth.
A Letter to the Most Illustrious the Contessina Allagia Dela Aldobrandeschi,
Written on Christmas Eve Anno Domini 1513
I salute you. I am your friend, and my love for you goes deep.
There is nothing I can give you which you have not. But there is much,
very much, that, while I cannot give it, you can take.
No heaven can
come to us unless our hearts find rest in it today. Take heaven! No
peace lies in the future which is not hidden in this present little
instant. Take peace!
The gloom of the world is but a shadow. Behind it, yet within
our reach, is joy. There is radiance and glory in darkness, could we but see.
And to see, we have only to look. I beseech you to look!
Life is so generous a giver. But we, judging its gifts by their covering,
cast them away as ugly or heavy or hard. Remove the covering, and you
will find beneath it a living splendor, woven of love by wisdom, with power.
Welcome it, grasp it, and you touch the angel's hand that brings it to you.
Everything we call a trial, a sorrow or a duty, believe me, that
angel's hand is there. The gift is there and the wonder of an
overshadowing presence. Your joys, too,
be not content with them as joys. They, too, conceal diviner gifts.
Life is so full of meaning and purpose, so full of beauty beneath
its covering,
that you will find earth but cloaks your heaven. Courage then to claim
it; that is all! But courage you have, and the knowledge that we are
pilgrims together, wending through unknown country home.
Merry Christmas - or whatever Light, whatever Good, you honour - and the best of the best in the new year.
IF YOU LIKED THIS, YOU MIGHT LIKE:
Greeting to the Unknown Human (and non-human, too)
The title and the exclamation mark notwithstanding, this is not going to a parody, a satire, or even a particularly funny post. It is actually a post about what caused a constantly blinking Wi-Fi button on my DSL modem (it went on for days), when clearly my laptop settings and the ISP were not at fault.
It was malware. Specifically, MySearchResults, which I had downloaded, unwittingly, bundled with some other program - possibly (just possibly) with my beloved PhotoScape.
(And let me tell you, I never EVER download programs from dubious places - usually I use CNET - or install them without scanning them first. So, I am somewhat disappointed in my Avast! for not having picked it up. Still, I am keeping it for the time being.)
I had noticed it in Internet Explorer (which I rarely use), where it presented itself as a default search tab. Naturally, I went to the trouble of removing it, even from the registry - manually, entry by entry.
I thought I was free of MySearch. But then I noticed something else: Internet Explorer didn't respond after removal - and there were odd problems with the internet connection. The machine was telling me I was connected, it couldn't find any trouble with the connection - yet I still couldn't access any webpages.
Furthermore, the system appeared to be more cumbersome, slower than usual (and the laptop is only two months old).
I used to love Spybot Search & Destroy, and used it for more than nine years in a row; but in the past few years I found its quality had deteriorated (maybe I am wrong, but that's my impression).
So I went and downloaded the free edition of MalwareBytes and performed a quick scan.
It came up with more than thirty suspicious entries, including one or two memory processes - and all but one seemed to be related to the defunct (or so I thought) MySearchResults. The remaining one was OpenCandy, which I know came with Photoscape. (Seriously, Photoscape!)
You see, this malware - MySearch - hides itself under generic names in the registry, so it's easy to miss it unless you know exactly what names and places to look for. Which is why I had only partially removed it, but left many entries in the registry that allowed the malware to update itself again and again.
Well, in one clean sweep they were gone. The internet connection works fine. The odd memory problems are gone.
And my Wi-Fi button blinks no more.
An extensive collection of high-quality recordings of the sounds of nature.
Highly recommended.
From the Internet Archive.
If you've come here, you have most likely experienced annoyances with Firefox. (In fact, you've most likely experienced them even if you haven't come here.)
Like, it being so mastodontically slow that it took more than a minute just to load, and then it had to think and ponder for a few moments - actually, more than a few - before executing every single command you gave.
Well, I have. I've been using Firefox - along with four other browsers - for ten years now, but in the past three or four years it has become impossibly slow, practically unusable.
So I tried to find a solution. There is an add-on called Memory Restart that gives you the chance to restart Firefox with no hassle every time its memory usage bloats out of proportion (and that happens very fast with Firefox... in fact, that's the ONLY thing that happens very fast with Firefox). Unfortunately or not, it was made by Mozilla and it only helped me very marginally. Very, very, very marginally.
So I searched on.
I found a thread that suggested deleting all "sessionstore.JS" files and its duplicates, if any. You can find them in your profile.
(Click on HELP, then TROUBLESHOOTING INFORMATION - or just follow the instructions on this page.) Or you can do what I did - because it's the fastest way - and simply search your computer for sessionstore.js. To find them, you'll have to have the "search hidden files" option enabled, of course.)
Again, it helped. And again, only very marginally.
Then - to make a long story much shorter - I decided it was probably one of the add-ons that was causing the slow-down-to-crawl.
So I opened my add-ons folder and disabled the most obvious suspect: ADBLOCK.
It worked like a charm.
Sometimes the most obvious suspects really are those whodunnit.
So, think - as I failed to for much too long - what benefits, if any, does AdBlock bring you, and are you willing to sacrifice normal-speed browsing for the pleasure of not having to see a few ads.
I am not.
ADDENDUM (June 2, 2013):
Well, for some reason the "charm" only worked for a day.
Today Firefox is back to its old form: bad, slow and very tiresome to know.
I mean, it still is better than before - especially after I deleted the storesession.js again - but it's nowhere up to yesterday's speed - not that it was lightning-fast or anything (we're talking about Firefox) but it was much faster than today.
Don't worry, I'll keep you updated.
There are few things quite as alluring as a candle-lit dinner... especially if you happen to be out of gas and/or electricity, so you used the candles to actually cook said dinner.
Don't ask me why - I'd rather not know - but many people seem to be inordinately interested in improvised cooking and other domestic appliances these days. But whatever the reason, yes, it's fun and it's always useful to know that there IS something you could do if you happened to find yourself in an emergency.
YouTube is full of videos about "cooking with candles". I have only seen one or two, but while the ingenuity of those men is by all means commendable, I had to wonder:
a) why don't they cover the pot while it's heating and/or while the food is cooking (rather obviously, you save a LOT of heat and speed up the process);
and
b) why don't they use a simple kitchen stove grate to cover the candles?
The candles used are typically tea candles, placed in convenient little metal containers. But because the authors of the videos improvised a contraption that serves as a "grate" of sorts, they can only use a few candles at a time, thereby reducing the cooking power. If they used a ready-made kitchen stove grate, they could place many more candles underneath it, replicating the power and effect of a functional stove.
Heck, if you're near a kitchen stove that for some reason is not functional, you could simply place the tea candles on the stove itself, underneath the grates.
I've tried it; it worked well.
IF YOU LIKED THIS, YOU MIGHT LIKE:
The Man Who IS an Island
Going Green: Growing Your Own Furniture
Much of the media, even "serious" mainstream media, seem to be abuzz with a report - and a picture - of a bolt of lightning that allegedly hit the dome of St Peter's basilica in Rome yesterday - on the very day of Pope Benedict XVI's announcement of his forthcoming resignation on February 28th of this year.
(The announcement itself certainly is comparable to a bolt from the skies. No pope has resigned in many centuries.)
Lightning is far from extraordinary in the present weather conditions; and a tall dome, such as Michelangelo's masterpiece, is a natural lightning rod.
Still, I am surprised that so few, if any, seem to remember that the advent of the current Pope was met by very similar, only much odder, weather manifestations.
Who could forget the wind "fingering" through the pages of the heavy book placed on John Paul II's coffin, during the ceremony outside St Peter's, before closing it in a shockingly abrupt manner?
(The window shutters on the late John Paul II's bedroom - which had been closed, as tradition dictates - were also flung wide open, but few seem to have noticed it.)
Yet many seem to have forgotten the far more shocking scene immediately after the habemus papam, when the newly announced Pope Benedict XVI was led onto the balcony overlooking St Peter's Square - and a gust of fierce wind and rain slammed the door of the balcony in his face.
I couldn't believe what I was seeing.
And now, I cannot believe so many have forgotten about it.
Where am I going with this?
Nowhere. I am simply completing the picture that others have chosen to focus on. I like completeness.
I do believe sometimes nature can express - or seem to express - itself symbolically in terms of a wider human reality, perhaps as a condensation of the human collective subconscious, if there is such a thing.
(Make sure you click on that link if you're interested in this topic.)
But what would it be saying in this case?
I don't know. Nobody knows.
And, typically, those who know the least are the most vocal about it, expressing unabashedly the extent of their intellectual and cognitive shortcomings.
We just don't know.
Benedict XVI - Josef Ratzinger - is a human, like all of us, yet he has been subjected to inhuman (perhaps understandable) scrutiny and often to hatred that has little to do with him. (But then hatred is hardly a rational feeling.) People in the limelight are often perceived as cartoon characters, with no humanity of their own, which serves no-one, least of all those who are guilty of such perception.
But that's how it is.
Yet he, like all of us, only has one life to live.
Perhaps that is the reason - one of the reasons - why he wants to shed the weight of leadership of an institution so heavy with tradition and all sorts of implications, and face - live through - whatever he has and wishes to face. It is his life: his one and only life.
Whatever his reasons for stepping down, I wish him peace and light.
And I wish much more of the same on his - or anyone's - mindless detractors.
Buckingham Palace and its subsidiaries, Kensington Palace, Balmoral...
I think they could qualify as a wonderland of sorts. There is a queen; and certainly there are many, many curious characters inhabiting it.
(Silver stick-in-waiting... If that's not a Carrollian kind of name, I don't know what is.)
Heck, even Mustique, with its insidiously scratching-inducing name, is far removed from hell on Earth.
But this is not about Kate's lifestyle. If anything, it is, if you will, more about her "lifestyle" - the images inhabiting her world - as it would or could have been, had she decided to pursue her academic interests. Or as it might be is she does decide to pursue them.
OK, let's not strain this metaphor any further.
You will have noticed that we have mentioned Catherine Middleton (apparently that still is her legal name), or the Duchess of Cambridge, as she is now known, exactly once before in this blog.
There's no special reason for it, as there simply is no special reason for mentioning her.
But today a friend, an art historian (and a damned good one, too), wondered what was her fellow art historian Kate's diploma thesis or dissertation, as they are called in some places.
That is an interesting question, so I tried to find out.
Thanks, mostly, to this site, it didn't take me long.
Catherine Middleton graduated with a dissertation on Lewis Carroll and his photographic interpretation of childhood.
The full title of her thesis, as it is listed on the Honours dissertations page of the University of St Andrew's website, is 'Angels from Heaven': Lewis Carroll's Photographic Interpretation of Childhood.
I'd love to read it, as photography - treacherous as it is - can be contentious anyway, and Lewis Carrol's photographs of children even more so (especially in these ridiculously politically correct times).
I would also love to hear what it was that attracted her to this particular topic.
If you know more about Kate's penchant for Lewis Carroll's photography, do let us know.
