when you travel … you have adventures, to a tourist … time is valuable
Adding experiences in Georgia and Virginia and the Carolinas to their knowledge of Florida, the Johnsons saw and drank deep of Savannah, Charleston, Asheville, Richmond, and Newport News.
They were able to do all five cities in six days, while the Bezuzuses had taken eight for them.
In Charleston they saw Calhoun’s grave and learned all about the aristocratic society.
They were so pleasantly entertained there, by a very prominent and successful business acquaintance of Mr. Johnson’s, a Mr. Max Rosenfleisch of New York, who had bought a fine old Southern mansion in Charleston and thus, of course, was right in with all the old families socially.
Mr. Rosenfleisch said he liked the aristocrats, but was going to change a lot of their old-fashioned social ways, and show them how to have a real swell time, with cabarets and theater parties, instead of these slow dances, and teach them to dine at seven instead of three or four.
The Johnsons were quite thrilled at witnessing the start of this social revolution—I tell you, it’s when you travel that you have such unusual adventures.
They themselves would actually have met some of the inner social set of Charleston, but Mr. Rosenfleisch was having the den redecorated before giving any more of his smart, exclusive parties, and meantime the Johnsons had to be getting on—to a tourist, time is valuable.
Adapted from I’m a Stranger Here Myself as reprinted in I’m a Stranger Here Myself and Other Stories by Sinclair Lewis (Dell, New York, 1962).
to shoot the wall clock make it stop, better yet, keep backing up slowly
It’s not so comic the way that clocks race themselves with us in fragile tow and it’s not enough to say “What are we waiting for?” or “Why are we holding back?” though that might occur to us later.
We are far less capable of those radical emotional moves advocated by magazines that specialize in puddle-deep psychologisms, the usual seven steps to a victorious emotional life, as if we could put ourselves on a figurative grease rack or automated assembly line for overhaul.
It was all so ordinary though I wanted to shoot the wall clock, over and over. Anything to make it stop or, better yet, keep backing up slowly.
From True North by Jim Harrison (New York, Grove Press, 2004).
I woke from a dream the other morning where all was as it was when I was a kid on the shore of Lake Michigan.
It was a disappointment when I woke and realized it was a dream.
It was all so ordinary though I wanted to shoot the wall clock, over and over.
Anything to make it stop or, better yet, keep backing up slowly.
You can’t can you?
It’s not so comic the way that clocks race themselves with us in fragile tow and it’s not enough to say “What are we waiting for?” or “Why are we holding back?” though that might occur to us later.
state is stronger with vibrant parties, stronger when have clash of ideas
“I believe that our state is stronger with vibrant parties. I think we, as a whole, are stronger when we have a clash of ideas. I think that’s true at the national level. I think it’s true at the state level. We are stronger when we have a clash of ideas and we can discuss those policy goals,” Massey said at the time.
“Republicans are stronger when the Democrat Party is vibrant and viable.”
The split is about where the agent lives, not what it does
Strip away the branding, and Spark and OpenClaw do roughly the same job. Watch an inbox, draft the status update, browse the web, run the recurring task. Both are converging on MCP for tool connectivity, though the implementations differ in maturity. Both promise the assistant who does things rather than answers questions.
The substrate decides who holds your context, who sees your credentials, and who can change the terms later.
The difference is the substrate. OpenClaw runs on the metal you bought. Spark runs on metal Google rents to you and never names. That sounds like a deployment detail. It is actually the whole argument. The substrate decides who holds your context, who sees your credentials, and who can change the terms later.
Convenience usually wins this fight, and Google knows it
The self-hosted version asks for real work. Buy the Mac mini, keep it awake, install a daemon, set up Tailscale, and rotate the key when it expires. The reward is control. Your credentials and workflows can stay under your own hand, depending on how you wire up models and integrations. That control is not the same as safety. A misconfigured local agent with shell, browser, and inbox access is its own hazard, and Chinese regulators have already flagged exactly that risk with OpenClaw.
Spark asks for nothing. It is already inside Gmail, Docs, and Sheets, with no manual wiring, because Google owns both ends. That out-of-the-box reach is the structural advantage no third-party agent can copy. The history here is fairly settled. Dropbox beat the home NAS. Gmail beat the mail server. Managed nearly always beats self-hosted for the median user, because most people will trade control for not having to think about it.
According to his bio on THENEWSTACK, Janakiram MSV (Jani) is a practicing architect, research analyst, and advisor to Silicon Valley startups. He focuses on the convergence of modern infrastructure powered by cloud-native technology and machine intelligence driven by generative AI. Before becoming an entrepreneur, he spent over a decade as a product manager and technology evangelist at Microsoft Corporation and Amazon Web Services. Janakiram regularly writes for Forbes, InfoWorld, and The New Stack, covering the latest from the technology industry. He is an international keynote speaker for internal sales conferences, product launches, and user conferences hosted by technology companies of all sizes. His previous experience includes Microsoft, AWS, Gigaom Research and Alcatel-Lucent.
I have been working in the online world since 1995.
I just read what Mr. Janakiram MSV wrote.
And I want you know, I don’t know what it means either.
At least I think I don’t.
After reading it 4 times, I am afraid a lot of what Mr. Janakiram MSV says seems to start making sense.
So, maybe, I do not think that I do not know what it means.
In a way, I find that just as scary.
But that one line ….
because most people will trade control for not having to think about it.
Somehow I think it reaches a lot more topics than just this one.
land and people hold memories they keep old things that never grow old
The land and the people hold memories, even among the anthills and the angleworms, among the toads and woodroaches — among gravestone writings rubbed out by the rain —they keep old things that never grow old.
Adapted from the poem, Cornhuskers by Carl Sandburg, as published in The Complete Poems of Carl Sandburg (Harcourt, Brace & Co: New York, 1950).
