And the World Cup winner is…
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Wired UK printed this spiffy diagram of an algorithm predicting who will win the World Cup. I hope it’s true!
Category: Waiting
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Sow Watch: May 28, 2010
By pigwhisperer, May 28, 2010
We’re on high alert tonight. Our lovely (and very pregnant) sow Mona will probably give birth in the next 12 hours. I’ve whispered in her ear to please try to push those piglets out sooner (how about 7 PM?) rather than later. But Mother Nature doesn’t care about my bedtime, and the piglets will arrive whenever they please.
How do we know that it’s Mona’s time? First, she lost her appetite. Next, she started breathing heavily. Milk began to leak from her teats today and (read no further if you’re squeamish–this is a farm blog, folks!) her vulva is really swollen and red. (The picture above says it all, really.) We’ll check her periodically to see if her water has broken. If it has, that means piglets are on the way. Births can last anywhere from 1-5 hours. Sometimes there’s a long wait between piglets, and sometimes they slide out one after the other. I’ll let you know how Mona’s birth goes. Hopefully we’ll have 8-12 new additions by morning.
Poem for the 29th
By pigwhisperer, April 29, 2010
Ithaca
As you set out on the way to Ithaca
hope that the road is a long one,
filled with adventures, filled with understanding.
The Laestrygonians and the Cyclopes,
Poseidon in his anger: do not fear them,
you’ll never come across them on your way
as long as your mind stays aloft, and a choice
emotion touches your spirit and your body.
The Laestrygonians and the Cyclopes,
savage Poseidon; you’ll not encounter them
unless you carry them within your soul,
unless your soul sets them up before you.
Hope that the road is a long one.
Many may the summer mornings be
when—with what pleasure, with what joy—
you first put in to harbors new to your eyes;
may you stop at Phoenician trading posts
and there acquire fine goods:
mother-of-pearl and coral, amber and ebony,
and heady perfumes of every kind:
as many heady perfumes as you can.
To many Egyptian cities may you go
so you may learn, and go on learning, from their sages.
Always keep Ithaca in your mind;
to reach her is your destiny.
But do not rush your journey in the least.
Better that it last for many years;
that you drop anchor at the island an old man,
rich with all you’ve gotten on the way,
not expecting Ithaca to make you rich.
Ithaca gave to you the beautiful journey;
without her you’d not have set upon the road.
But she has nothing left to give you any more.
And if you find her poor, Ithaca did not deceive you.
As wise as you’ll have become, with so much experience,
you’ll have understood, by then, what these Ithacas mean.
By CP Cavafy, born April 29, 1863
Translated by Daniel Mendelsohn
Thursday’s Poem
By pigwhisperer, April 8, 2010
Long ago, there had been a fire,
And they’d all gone into it,
My brother and sister,
a few
friends, too, and my parents
piecemeal.
And the fire
flooded up at first
like
brilliance from the wood
like
both a burning fount
called up
by great thirst
and the thirst it quenched.
It raged and then it didn’t.
Then there was only
A lull of embers,
vague flares
like wakened absences
of fire dying down
to ash,
and then ash-blunted
scrape of bronze
on stone,
a weight
of ash to lift,
and then the ash haze
left there in the shovel’s wake.
How long have I been here
Keeping the dark
in sight
my mind the place in which
the dark’s grown
conscious of itself in the dark?
Come to me now, love.
I need you.
Come here.
How cold it’s gotten.
Let my name in your voice be
the fresh disturbance,
the rippling
of char-scented air;
your touch the tinder.
–”Hearthkeeper” by Alan Shapiro
Happy Valentine’s Day / Feliz Dia dos Namorados
By pigwhisperer, February 14, 2010
For Valentine’s Day, some excerpts of letters between Franz Kafka and his fiancé, Felice Bauer. They had a five-year relationship carried out mostly through letters, and were engaged twice.
Hoje é Dia dos Namorados nos EUA. Para comemorar, trechos da correspondência de Franz Kafka com Felice Bauer. Eles eram noivos para 5 anos e, durante seu noivado, tiveram uma correspondência de mais de 700 páginas. (Só achei trechos das cartas em inglês, infelizmente.)
In 1912, Kafka wrote to Bauer about how she had become inseparable from his work, and also how anticipation of her writing kept him awake at night. He wrote:
“Lately I have found to my amazement how intimately you have now become associated with my writing, although until recently I believe that the only time I did not think about you at all was while I was writing. In one short paragraph I had written, there were, among others, the following references to you and your letters: someone was give a bar of chocolate. There was talk of small diversions someone had during working hours. Then there was a telephone call. And finally somebody urged someone to go to bed, and threatened to take him straight to his room if he did not obey, which was certainly prompted by the recollection of your mother’s annoyance when you stayed so late at the office. — Such passages are especially dear to me; in them I take hold of you, without your feeling it, and therefore without your having to resist.
… [It takes] every imaginable effort to get to sleep — i.e., to achieve the impossible, for one cannot sleep and at the same time be thinking about one’s work and trying to solve with certainty the one question that certainly is insoluble, namely, whether there will be a letter from you the next day, and at what time. The night consists of two parts: one wakeful, the other sleepless, and if I were to tell you about it at length and you were prepared to listen, I should never finish.
Eleven days later, Kafka wrote to her:
“Fraulein Felice!
I am now going to ask you a favour which sounds quite crazy, and which I should regard as such, were I the one to receive the letter. It is also the very greatest test that even the kindest person could be put to. Well this is it: Write to me only once a week, so that your letter arrives on Sunday — for I cannot endure your daily letters, I am incapable of enduring them.
For instance, I answer one of your letters, then lie in bed in apparent calm, but my heart beats through my entire body and is conscious only of you. I belong to you; there is really no other way of expressing it, and that is not strong enough. But for this very reason I don’t want to know what you are wearing; it confuses me so much that I cannot deal with life; and that’s why I don’t want to know that you are fond of me. If I did, how could I, fool that I am, go on sitting in my office, or here at home, instead of leaping onto a train with my eyes shut and opening them only when I am with you?”
Why “The Art of Waiting”?
By pigwhisperer, June 22, 2009
Why “The Art of Waiting”? Because life on a farm is about waiting: waiting for coffee cherries to ripen; waiting for pigs to go into heat, to gestate a new brood, and then to give birth; waiting for the rains; waiting 12 months for a cured ham to age gracefully into prosciutto. But waiting does not mean falling into idleness or inactivity. There is an art to patience. We must adhere to Nature’s calendar, but must work hard in the meantime. We try our best to curb the farm’s natural chaos: stopping vines from suffocating baby coffee trees, pruning plants, feeding animals, breaking termite mounds, painting walls, trimming hooves.
Writing, too, requires a good amount of waiting. The creative process, like farming, demands periods of activity and then contemplation. Putting words on a page (or, in my case, typing them on keyboard) makes me feel productive, but my most fertile moments are often when I’m away from my desk and my computer. The best ideas aren’t forced. They arrive because we’ve kept a space for them in our minds, like keeping a chair empty at the table for long-awaited guest.
Themocracy