I’ve been reading a book on mind-mapping, “The Mind Map Book” by Tony and Barry Buzan. I’m not sure what to think of it. I haven’t tried doing a mind map yet, so I can’t say whether it works. The book makes some astounding claims about how it can improve memory retention, organization, and creativity, all things important to me. The positivity of the whole thing reminds me, although there is no other reason why it should, of other systems that ended up evolving in to sects and cults (Transcendental Meditation, other new-age stuff), so I retain a measure of suspicion about the whole thing. Have any of you experience with mind-mapping?

Using this method, I’m going to try to map the novel I wrote, in the hopes that it will kick-start the rewriting process, which is currently giving me big problems.

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And don’t even bring up Patriotism. It’s a dead word. It’s an economic term. Put the word “Act” on the end of it and it’s cameras in your brain, microphones in your butt, and FBI superpowers that only a Stalin could appreciate. Trust your masters, love the State, take three tabs of Paxil, feed your kids something from the Super Value Menu, ingest nine cups of sugar, eight cups of salt, think about celebrities while you’re having sex, bemoan your ailing portfolio and cheer on that aircraft carrier as it takes poor American kids half way around the world to shoot at and be shot by poorer kids.

[Via Words Mean Things]

I wonder how those Iraqi kids like their affirmative access to depleted uranium and sewage-infested drinking water?

Today you can feel yourself small and weak. In such case it is better to close in an own hole and to limit contacts with the people. The risky actions today will not be justified.

The Martin Luther King you don’t see on TV.

Gamma returned from ballet class.
“What did you do in class today?” her mother asked her.
Hair still up in a bun and still in her outfit, Gamma showed her.
“We jumped thirty five times each, like this,” and she jumped thirty five times, gracefully, farting with each jump.
“But I didn’t fart in ballet class.”

My cello teacher showed me a new tune yesterday, Mozart’s “Canon Inversus”. It is an interesting little piece – some site I just googled mentioned something about Mozart discovering Bach in connection with it, so I guess it’s something clever Bach would also have done. It is a piece for two cellos (or two violins or two violas, depending on how it’s arranged). But instead of the two parts being written on parallel lines one above the other and played from two separate sheets, this is all on one piece of paper. The musicians sit down facing each other, the paper in the middle, and one plays from top to bottom, the other plays it backwards, from bottom to top.

It sounds k3wL too and has a neat Apocalyptica-type sounding bit in the middle.