From the epiloge of The Godfather of Kathmandu:

A cup of wine under the flowering trees;
I drink alone, for no friend is near.
Raising my cup I becon the bright moon.

– Li Po

Goes well with the poems from Thursday.

Here is another quote from the book:

In Nepal we don’t fly through clouds, because the clouds have rocks in them.

Those rocks, in case you are wondering, are the Himalayas which reach high into the sky. The real name of Mount Everst is Chomolungma, which means Mother of the Universe in Tibetan.

Live music. No quantization, no pitch-correction, no ProTools tricks… just a bunch of guys playing in a bar in Paris. Not my favorite kind of music, but nice.

Next week Apple is said to announce a new computer device… the iSlate? iPad? (((I don’t like either of those names))) and the New York Times decided to call up one of my favorite poets, Gary Snyder. They spoke with him and he offered this poem.

Tech Reflections – Digital Muse for Beat Poet – NYTimes.com
Because it broods under its hood like a perched falcon,
Because it jumps like a skittish horse and sometimes throws me,
Because it is poky when cold,
Because plastic is a sad, strong material that is charming to rodents,
Because it is flighty,
Because my mind flies into it through my fingers,
Because it leaps forward and backward, is an endless sniffer and searcher,
Because its keys click like hail on a boulder,
And it winks when it goes out,
And puts word-heaps in hoards for me, dozens of pockets of gold under boulders in streambeds, identical seedpods strong on a vine, or it stores bins of bolts;
And I lose them and find them,
Because whole worlds of writing can be boldly laid out and then highlighted and vanish in a flash at “delete,” so it teaches of impermanence and pain;
And because my computer and me are both brief in this world, both foolish, and we have earthly fates,
Because I have let it move in with me right inside the tent,
And it goes with me out every morning;
We fill up our baskets, get back home,
Feel rich, relax, I throw it a scrap and it hums.

Read the whole article here.

I am not surprised:

Schneier on Security: German TV on the Failure of Full-Body Scanners
The video is worth watching, even if you don’t speak German. The scanner caught a subject’s cell phone and Swiss Army knife — and the microphone he was wearing — but missed all the components to make a bomb that he hid on his body. Admittedly, he only faced the scanner from the front and not from the side. But he also didn’t hide anything in a body cavity other than his mouth — I didn’t think about that one — he didn’t use low density or thinly sliced PETN, and he didn’t hide anything in his carry-on luggage.

Full-body scanners: they’re not just a dumb idea, they don’t actually work.

A couple of images from yesterday evening: