Driving and Tweeting
I confess that once in a rare while, I do tweet while driving. I know it is not the right thing to do, but I try to insert some method in the madness when I break the no-tweeting rule:
- The road has to be straight; no curves. One thing I have observed is that if the road is curved, no matter how good a driver you are, the vehicle invariably wanders off to the adjacent lane. When the road is straight, things are more manageable.
- The traffic has to be light. This is self-explanatory.
- The vehicle should be running on cruise control. This probably is the most important rule since one can cruise only in light traffic, and mostly safe driving conditions.
- The typing has to be intermittent. In my case, I type a very few letters, or at most a word, and then take my eyes of the phone, and then goes back after a while. So each tweet takes much more time than usual.
Even with all these rules, I don’t tweet all the time. I tweet on the road mostly when I am waiting for a red light, or stuck in a traffic jam. Another reason for not tweeting while driving is that my left arm (the one controlling the steering wheel) starts to hurt after a short while of one-handed driving :( A mechanism for self-protection, maybe.
6:04 pm • 23 April 2013
pilatesandgin:
Zappos, I usually love you but you’ve won today’s “Shipping Dept Must have Been Drunk” award… A 14x9x5 box for a bottle of nail polish? Really?
5:49 pm • 23 April 2013 • 2 notes
“Because sometimes stories end, but old stories go on, and you gotta dance if you want to stay ahead.”
— Terry Pratchett, from The Amazing Maurice and his Educated Rodents (via the-final-sentence)
4:35 pm • 23 April 2013 • 413 notes
“The Boston Police Department appeared to be the lead agency on the ground, but the officers were unfamiliar with the suburbs; because they’d been told to power off their cell phones (in case they inadvertently detonated a bomb), they weren’t able to use Google Maps to navigate the neighborhood’s warren of sharply angled streets.”
— Seth Mnookin, in the New Yorker, describing the scene in Watertown. (via dbreunig)
4:31 pm • 23 April 2013 • 6 notes
“Refusing to be frightened, as Bruce Schneier suggests we do, is easy when all that means to you is writing “Pray for Boston” on your Facebook wall or putting up a plaque in honor of the victims. It becomes a lot harder when you see it as asking you to continue walking your kid through public squares crowded with trash cans and other people’s backpacks, teaching them to see a world in which there’s not another 9/11 around every corner.”
— http://gawker.com/5994826/we-are-all-cowards-now
8:50 am • 18 April 2013
Public Shaming: The news out of Steubenville today is a *small step* in the right...
publicshaming:
The news out of Steubenville today is a *small step* in the right direction for a town that seems to be plagued with cover-ups in an attempt to save their beloved football team. Two young men were sentenced to juvenile detention in the Steubenville rape case today. I suggest you look up what they…
5:21 pm • 18 March 2013 • 1,514 notes
From the snow hike yesterday at the Bearfort Mountain, NJ. It was a cold day, and the trail was snow-covered all the way. It was crunchy, powdery snow, so no slipping, which was good. The first stop was Bearfort Fire Tower. It is an observation tower to spot wild fires. Some of us managed to climb it, and it was cold and the wind was howling at the top, but it was, for me, the highlight of the hike.Then we hiked around Hanks Pond, which was just a frozen sheet of ice. It was a pretty exhausting, since snow kills the thigh muscles, slowly but surely. But in the end, it was another day spent in nature, and away from Twitter. So, there was that.
6:14 pm • 18 February 2013 • 1 note
“
INTERVIEWER
You are one of the most widely translated poets—into about thirty languages. Into what languages are you best translated?
NERUDA
I would say into Italian, because of the similarity between the two languages. English and French, which are the two languages I know outside of Italian, are languages which do not correspond to Spanish—neither in vocalization, or in the placement, or the color, or the weight of the words. It is not a question of interpretative equivalence; no, the sense can be right, but this correctness of translation, of meaning, can be the destruction of a poem. In many of the translations into French—I don’t say in all of them—my poetry escapes, nothing remains; one cannot protest because it says the same thing that one has written. But it is obvious that if I had been a French poet, I would not have said what I did in that poem, because the value of the words is so different. I would have written something else.
INTERVIEWER
And in English?
NERUDA
I find the English language so different from Spanish—so much more direct—that many times it expresses the meaning of my poetry, but does not convey the atmosphere of my poetry. It may be that the same thing happens when an English poet is translated into Spanish.
”
— An excerpt from Pablo Neruda interviewed by Rita Guibert in The Art of Poetry No.14 by The Paris Review. (via rimeswriting)
(via rimeswriting)
5:37 pm • 18 February 2013 • 43 notes
