Up this morning at six with a decent night's sleep, home now from breakfast, the day overcast. They're saying overcast for the rest of the day, but such is life. I was thinking about the web addiction I was describing last night when I wrote the above and realized, if I substituted surfing the news sites on my home computer with surfing the various news sites, Facebook, other journals and such (there aren't very many “other” journals anymore) on a smart phone - an iPhone, say, or a DROID - and added in text messaging and interminable phone calls, I'd understand something more about the younger generations and how their reality is different from mine back in the stone ages of the fifties and sixties.

No, I'm not quite ready for a smart phone. Not yet. It will come. Someone will invent an application I can't live without. The one that tracks buses through GPS, for example, allowing you to see where it is, when it's arriving, if you've already missed it, comes pretty close, but we're not there yet.

I have a feeling in another twenty years these times will seem as quaint as, again, the sixties and seventies seem today. All this turmoil in our political environment, much of it a product of people seeing what seems to them rapid, radical and unsettling change in power structures, education, the color and ethnicity of their next door neighbors. We talk about the clash of traditional Muslim societies facing modernity; well, we see the same clash here in the United States. And not just in the red states, in all states, in every state including my own state. Of mind.

Cool headed thou? You got all of this out of smart phones and buses on GPS?

Cool headed thou is sitting here wondering about all the time he spends in front of this computer.

Later. Lunch downtown with six of my old fellow workers at a favorite Vietnamese restaurant and then an hour's walk through the downtown area after lunch with Mrs. S to shoot some photographs as she's acquired a new camera and asked for some technical advice. Which, I might add, was a lot of fun. Back now in time to listen to the PBS News Hour in the background and futz with the one or two of the photographs I took during the session. A good day, the overcast breaking and the sun coming out just after eleven. Glad to find the weather forecasters were wrong.

Oh, and some photographs I didn't post on the Carnaval section of artandlife. You can see why. Art Is Life - Life Is Art. My, my.