Category: Misc

From AyJay’s “Homebound Symphony”

Robin Sloan:

I want to under score it here: where the internet is concerned, we are in a crisis of discovery. Anyone with interesting new work to share — their own or someone else’s — rummages in the tool shed, looking for a seed spreader or a slingshot, and emerges with an egg beater and a single unmatched glove. Is this all we’ve got??

Every now and then I realize that there’s something going on, somewhere on a random corner of the internet, that I have unaccountable and lamentably missed. Doesn’t happen often, but often enough to keep the flame of hope flickering. And curiously enough, the only site associated with the Big Tech firms where this happens is YouTube. (Make of that what you will; I’m not sure what to make of it.)  

Robin continues: “The strategy is the same as it always was: cultivate small, sturdy networks of affinity and interest. Connect them to each other. Keep them lit.” When I find something, I make a point of sharing it, usually on my newsletter — but I bet I could do a better job of that. And at the end of Robin’s post, this vital word, which I’ve been preaching for a long long time:

I would add: there is power and leverage in not being inter­ested in the stuff everybody else is inter­ested in — the stuff other people insist is urgent.

Map the regions of your own affinity and interest, across all relevant dimensions: intellectual, aesthetic, moral. The rest, you can ignore freely. Ignore strenuously! 

I want to add that to my small hoard of encouraging declarations: Practice Hypomone! Read at whim! Festina Lente! (That’s one of Robin’s faves also.) Ignore strenuously!

Always wanted to own a cursed Venetian palace where ghosts are said to wander? Now is your chance: the infamous Ca’ Dario is for sale for 18 million Euros. It’s right on the Grand Canal, next to the Peggy Guggenheim Gallery, and it is about 10,000 square feet on five floors (although the main floor of most palazzos in Venice are used to store boats, because they flood with water all the time). It has six bedrooms and eight bathrooms and a bunch of fireplaces, and among other things, it has been the subject of a famous painting by Claude Monet. And according to Venetian gossip, it has been haunted for centuries.

The palazzo was built for Giovanni Dario, a wealthy merchant in the 1400s, and took about ten years. After it was finally completed in 1489, Dario lived in it for only a few years before he died in 1494. The palace was inherited by his daughter and her husband, Vincenzo Barbaro, who soon suffered a complete financial collapse. He was then stabbed to death, and soon afterwards, his wife Marietta killed herself. Their son Giacomo died in an ambush in the city of Candia in Crete, and another son, Gasparo, died at 18 soon after. The Barbaro family eventually sold the palace to Arbit Abdoll, an Armenian businessman.

Abdoll went bankrupt soon after and had to sell the palazzo to Rawdon Brown, the English historian, for just 480 pounds. Brown and his companion later died in what appeared to be a murder-suicide. The great Italian Tenor, Mario del Monaco planned to buy it in 1964, but while going to Venice to complete the transaction, he had a very serious car accident that brought his career to a standstill. It was bought by the Count Filippo Giordano delle Lanze, who was killed by a young friend and possibly lover.

Continue reading “A cursed 15th century Venetian palazzo could be yours for only $20 million”

Springtime is often one of the best times for a kayak trip down a nice river — the water is usually nice and high, and when you get a warm day it’s lovely with all the spring green and the earth coming alive after a long winter. So this week I decided to take a day and paddle down the Otonabee river, which runs through Young’s Point, about 15 minutes from our house. So I strapped the kayak on the car and had my wife Becky drop me off in town next to the river. I hauled the kayak on my head down a hill and under the bridge (highway 28) where there were a couple of guys fishing, and then I threw it in the water and jumped in off some rocks and off I went.

The Otonabee is quite wide where it flows out of Youngs Point — plenty of room for a yacht like the one in the picture and me. But he was kicking up quite a big wake, so I let him pass and waited for the waves to die down a bit. One of the first things I came across was a little island, which according to Google Maps is called Polly Cow Island (I didn’t take a picture unfortunately).

I found a forum where someone said they did some research and found out that it was named after young indigenous woman who passed away in the early 1800’s. She loved to canoe around the area, this person said, but she caught a fever when she was 16 and the tribe’s medicine men could not save her. So her father placed her body in a birch bark coffin and he and a few others (including one of the Young brothers who settled Young’s Point) towed Polly to the island and dug a grave there under a balsam tree, and every year he would paddle to the island and sit under the tree by her grave.

Continue reading “In which I paddle down the Otonabee River”

From C.S. Lewis