Santorini - Day 3-4

For pics that go along with Day 3-4, click here.

Woke to the usual tricks: juice, coffee, and carbs by the pool. Dodge and Sophia had a meeting and left most of us to our own designs today. Since we have precious little direction, we were all thankful with John, resident expert, whips out his bad brain and convinces us that we need to pile in the car and go see us some old stuff.

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Santorini - Day 2

For pics that go along with Day 2, click here.

Mr. Nikos runs the villas where we’re staying and appears to do all the heavy lifting. When I say heavy lifting, I mean this guy’s a pack mule. He runs up and down the stairs of this place without breaking a sweat, carrying heavy luggage, groceries, laundry, whatever, all hoisted up on his back. We’re embarrassed to be around him. he makes us feel small. This is, of course, not to dismiss his (what I have to assume is his) daughter Georgia, a cute little hyper-tensive that keeps the books and shows us to our rooms. She also brings us Frappes by the pool. She’s a dear.

So, our first morning, day 2, starts with breakfast by the pool. The kind Mr. Nikos delivers a basket of bread, a selection of butter and jams, two cups American coffee and OJ, and sets it all out for us with tablecloth on the small table in front of our door. He’s a real gentleman, this Mr. Nikos, obviously trained at the Empress.

Then, it’s time for a walk with the groom.

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Santorini - Day 1

For pics that go along with Day 1, click here.

It’s Dodge’s wedding. As the sole representative of “the old crowd” hoofing it across the pond to the island of Thira in Greece (AKA Santorini), it’s my solemn duty to chronicle the adventure here. I’m tired and not making a lot of sense yet, but I’m here and ready to go.

Technically, day 1 never happened. I left Portland at 7:30 in the morning on Tuesday, 9/20, and arrived in Greece at 4:30 in the afternoon on Wednesday 9/21 local time. Highlights of the actual travel? Most importantly, I managed to make all the connections around the world to get here, from Chicago to Zurich to Athens with little difficulty. I met up with the rest of the Nashville crew in Athens, sleeping in the airport. Besides Dodge and Sophia, I knew none of them. While sleeping they appeared to be reasonably normal people.

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Is Apple pushing out Audible.com?

Does anyone else find it interesting that with all the hubbub around iTunes 5 and the updates to the iTunes music store today, that Apple appears to have snubbed Audible.com by going straight-to-source for the Harry Potter series?

I was under the impression that all the audiobook content was released through iTMS in partnership with Audible. Yet another sign of Apple co-opting partnerships?

Huh. Maybe it’s nothing. My spidey sense is up on a count of the release of Pirates of Silicon Valley.

180 MPH. Motorcycle. Car. Crash Pics

Well, this is a tough one. Guy on a Honda racing along, minding his own business, slams into a VW at 250 KM/HR.

Cut to: these pictures… of the bike found IN the car. Note: these aren’t gorey, just graphic. If you so choose, you can go ahead and imagine what this collision did to the three people involved. I tried not to.

From BBC.com tonight

Massive airlift rescues thousands: ”Survivors of Hurricane Katrina are taken to safety in what is being called the largest airlift on US soil.”

Many survivors have witnessed scenes of violence, including rapes and murders at the shelters, mainly carried out by criminal gangs.

“There is rapes going on here,” Africa Brumfield, 32, who was staying at the convention centre, told Reuters news agency.

“Women cannot go to the bathroom without men. They are raping them and slitting their throats,” she said.

A National Guard soldier described a similar incident. “We found a young girl raped and killed in the bathroom [at the arena],” he said.

“Then the crowd got the man and they beat him to death.”

Well. Isn’t that… depressing. Sort of?

Read this.

And make sure you’ve clicked on the T.S. Elliot link at the end, so that you firmly set the mood.

We are in the middle of the same argument daily at work. Where’s the sense of awe? Of change? Where’s the chutzpah that spawned new classes and growth out of the back of a truck or the depths of someone’s parents’ garage? Now, we’re in the “Age of the Incremental”: Change standing on the shoulders of change balanced on a whittled stool. No more can evolution stand on it’s own two legs, it stands on a dot-release or a beta candidate.

One of my students wrote an interesting comment in class the other day: “Pretty soon, you’ll go to McDonald’s and see written around the lip of the coffee cups, ‘This End Up.’”

The “paradigm shift” is about as handy to me as thinking “out of the box”. I’m sure it’s as good a label as any that encompasses the idea, and since I’m not here to put that much more thought into it myself, it’ll stand. But it’s still a label. Another restriction. Another piece of thought legislation that says “I’m tired of thinking this way, so I’ll ever-so-liberally think this new way instead.” Before long, you’re back in the box.

There’s a run on gas throughout the midwest, and heading this way. I woke up earlier this week to the disappearance of several of our nation’s cities and towns. Things are pretty bad out there. Does it really matter that we have a direction, as long as we’re moving somewhere?