The Seven Deadly Sins: Lust

Four down and three to go as anger, envy, gluttony, and greed have been dealt with.

The next deadly sin to receive the Form Your Troika treatment is lust.

Ahhh…lust.

This posting, sorry to disappoint, will not be about the type of physical, flesh-showing type of lust that springs first to mind. Sorry, you can link to thousands of other websites to receive your fill of NSFW images.

Lust fits in with some of the other deadly sins. Lust is a desire. Envy is the desire to want something or someone that is not yours and cannot be yours. Greed is the desire to have something that anyone can have. Lust is the desire to have a specific something or someone that is based on a lack of reason and is driven solely by base emotions.

Where lust is often thought of the physical tactile desire to have another person, lust can also be transferred onto objects.

Today’s case in point is the lust people feel towards that company from Cupertino.

Folks want iPods, iPads, and anything containing that logo with the fruit with the bite taken out of it as shown by the latest profit news from the company out of Cupertino.

Yet this desire can be shown to be lust because it is a desire driven by pure emotion and not reason.

Lust is the only excuse I can think of why people flock to purchase devices from a company that…

…uses a company to manufacture its products that has been accused of mistreating its workforce (sampling of stories here and here and here);

…is accused of using its power to manipulate prices in the electronic publishing marketplace (sampling of stories here and here and here).

If that company in Redmond, Washington, were to be accused of the business practices mentioned above, you can bet dollars to donuts that the Cupertino evangelists would be all over the blog-o-verse pilloring Microsoft for its evilness.

For my parting words to consumers of products from the design mind of Jobs, I defer to Prince and his lyrics…

It’s time
u learned love and lust.
They both have four letters, but they
are entirely different words

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Weekly Photo Challenge: Together

WordPress announced that their theme for this week’s photo challenge is together.

My offering is of similar tubular objects. They are together at one point and here you see them branching out.

Coils

This picture, along with my previous post, was when I was head over heels over sepia.

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Photo Friday: Portraiture

Portraiture

That’s the theme from Photo Friday for this last Friday in April.

Now portraits can be of faces, busts, and even self-portraits.

As for me and this challenge, I’m going to go with my foot.

What a great idea for a gravatar.

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Not the Only Game in (Cyber)Town

Since I started up this blog twenty-eight months ago, one of my categories from the beginning was “veridiction”. That word is my term for the practice of verifying predictions. I started this category because I became tired of watching talking heads on television and hearing so-called experts pontificate on podcasts that QRS would happen or that TUV would not occur. What made me angrier was that when QRS did not happen or when TUV made the headlines, no host would ever have that “expert” back on to explain why and how they were wrong.

People just made predictions and then went on their merry way.

With my electronic space, I hae looked at the predictions from various institutions and people including the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), The Old Farmer’s Almanac, MIT professor Yasheng Huang, pundit David Frum, and political consultant Ed Rollins.

Some have been right and some have been wrong. Either way, it has been great fun to hold on to those predictions and then come back to them to hold the proverbial feet to the fire.

However, I am no longer the only player in the veridiction marketplace.

Ladies and gentlemen, I whole-heartedly embrace the entrance of PunditTracker into the space of blogging about verifying predictions. So far, they have written about the stock picks of Jim Cramer (from CNBC’s Mad Money) and the March Madness predictions of various sportswriters.

To read what PunditTracker is about, jump to here.

If more and more people took finger to keyboard and took to task the posturing pontificating predictor who was wrong and also praised the orating oracle who was correct, I would surmise that the world would be a better place.

Don’t hold me to that prediction, though.

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Ceditra: Triple Word Score

As the cliché goes, the subject for this entry was ripped from the headlines. Okay, headlines from central and western Maine…but headlines nonetheless.

The article linked to above about a Scrabble tournament to raise money for a non-profit outfit that helps folk battle illiteracy reminded me of a ceditra entry I wrote two years ago. My random method of generating topics to write about (by itself, “random” scores nine points in Scrabble) pointed me to the dictionary, which is appropriate because that is where most beginning Scrabble players head off to also.

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April 5, 2010

From Page 453 of the Oxford Pocket Dictionary of Current English, my method of ceditra (the process of creating art through any random process – a term coined by early 20th century Brazilian artist Abril Pajyaso) landed me on this word:

levigate – v.tr: 1) reduce to a fine smooth powder; 2) make a smooth paste of

In all honesty, I can say I have never seen nor heard this word.

I’m sure my mother-in-law has because she loves to play Scrabble. As much as I like to play games and work on puzzles, I must admit that the tiled board game from Hasbro has never quite had much of an allure for me. It would seem natural that I would gravitate towards a game that stresses a knowledge of vocabulary.

Yet, I don’t really care for the game.

This ambivalence even predates my marriage so I can’t blame my blasé attitude towards Scrabble on my mother-in-law since she always beats me soundly.

Part of my lack of interest in Scrabble may lie in the fact that I can’t recall my parents ever playing this game. We played backgammon and Rummy Q and Mom even taught me how to play gin (and Dad taught me how to drink it – rimshot). I can’t recall us breaking out the Scrabble board or even if we ever had one.

So if the board games one’s parents played have an impact on a child, what does our game-playing history foretell for Christopher, Jared, and Ophelia. We’ve played Life, Monopoly, Cranium Cadoo, Trivial Pursuit Junior, and Junior Apples to Apples.

My mother-in-law plays Scrabble with the boys when they visit and she trounces them also. She almost (dare I say it) levigates them.
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Weekly Photo Challenge: Sun

For this week’s theme of “sun” from WordPress’s Weekly Photo Challenge, I am returning to a 2007 visit I made to the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum Stephen F. Udvar-Hazy Center.

Outside the Center, in the parking lot, is an impressive metallic sculpture entitled “Ascent“.

From the Donald Engen Observation Tower, myself, the sun, and “Ascent” lined up perfectly so that I could have this photo.

Sun and "Ascent"

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Photo Friday: Crimson

Crimson.

Going back to my garden once again for my offering concerning a weekly photo challenge (this time from Photo Friday).

Crimson Bloom

Spring is such a wonderful time.

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