Sunday, June 22, 2008

Seeing The Bright Side Of Four-Dollar Gas

In his autobiography, Surprised By Joy, C.S. Lewis writes:

I number it among my blessings that my father had no car, while yet most of my friends had, and sometimes took me for a drive. This meant that all these distant objects could be visited just enough to clothe them with memories and not impossible desires, while yet they remained ordinarily as inaccessible as the Moon. The deadly power of rushing about wherever I pleased had not been given me. I measured distance by the standard of man, man walking on his two feet, not by the standard of the internal combustion engine. I had not been allowed to deflower the very idea of distance; in return I possessed "infinite riches" in what would have been to motorists "a little room." The truest and most horrible claim made for modern transport is that it "annihilates space." It does. It annihilates one of the most glorious gifts we have been given. It is a vile inflation which lowers the value of distance, so that a modern boy travels a hundred miles with less sense of liberation and pilgrimage and adventure than his grandfather got from traveling ten. Of course if a man hates space and wants it to be annihilated, that is another matter. Why not creep into his coffin at once? There is little enough space there.

Published in 1955, and from a northern latitude.

Thursday, February 28, 2008

Winter Daydream

Living in the Dallas-Ft. Worth area, where the temperature reached 90 degrees a couple of days ago (before a cold front -- thankfully -- blew through later in the day), I'm in no hurry to say goodbye to the cooler weather of winter.

But when I come across
a story like this in The New York Times, I can't deny there's a part of me ready to fast forward to the outdoor swimming season. And, as a lover of natural pools, like Barton Springs in Austin, I'm not surprised that surfing pics of the saltwater rock pools of Sidney, Australia, has been my choice of time-waste in the last 48 hours.

My favs? How about:
The Ross Jones Memorial Pool. The Newcastle Bogey Hole. And... the Whale Beach Rock Pool. (Make sure to click on the pics for larger versions...!)