Dichroic Reflections

some words, some games, and some shoes

Go read href="http://www.livejournal.com/users/ionas/34636.html?#cutid1">Ionas today.
His last three paragraphs (from "I can understand..." on) rang true for me, and
rang again with the beauty of the words he used.

There is a Google
game which involves finding a two-word-search for which your site is the only one
returned. I tried that a while back for various combinations of words dealing with
dichroic glass, reading, and rowing, but couldn't find a good one, though there
were more than a few for which this was one of two or three sites returned. I was
very surprised to find, looking at my Google hits, that this was the only site
returned for a short
quote from Susan Cooper's The Grey King. (I confess, I'm linking
instead of quoting to preserve that singleton status.) I used that quote to
respond to an href="http://www.joannemerriam.com/journal/ampersand/ampersand.html">Ampersand
prompt two days after September 11, 2001; in a painful bit of irony, the prompt
was, "the end of the world". It's shocking that no one else on the whole web has
ever (according to Google) written about that one line of Cooper's. There's just
so much to say about it, both in and out of context.

Speaking of that
game with the Google search terms, a more interesting version is to come up with
some combination of activities or experiences that you are the only person on
Earth ever to have done. A single unique experience is easy to find: for instance
I am the only person who has ever been married to Rudder, been a duaghter to my
parents, been a sister (in the non-metaphorical sense) to my brother. I am the
only person who has ever rowed in my boat, unless they rigged it and found a
lightweight person to test it before shipping, which I doubt. I am the only female
ever to have slept on my bed, which we bought it new. But if you limit the
experiences to generic ones that other people could have had, the gam becomes more
interesting. As I mentioned href="http://dichroic.diaryland.com/1few.html">yesterday, we seem to hear the
phrase, "You're one of very few people ever to have seen this," with surprising
frequency. So: are Rudder and I the only people ever to have both slept on the
Antarctic continent andlooked up from the bottom of a seven story missile
silo? The only ones ever to have done either of those things and competed in the
Head of the Charles? To have done any of those three and toured the DMZ between
North and South Korea? Or been in one of the apprentice shelters the students at
Frank Lloyd Wright's Taliesin school of architecture build?

The only
thing wrong with this game is there's no way to know if you've
won.

On a completely different footing (sorry), OK, OK, I'm a shoe
whore. But they were cute! And on sale!

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