Talking to the Owl

Prise de Fer is having some great little fencing tournaments this summer.  Yesterday I went to the Canadian Elite Open, where there are two sets of pools. The first pool sets the initial DEs and the winners of those DE bouts go back and do a single pool against each-other to get the best of four.

If we haven’t had our baby by August 12, I think I’ll go to the C and under.  August 18 is a one-touch epee round robin - real duel fencing!

As far as my performance yesterday, it wasn’t great.  I need to play a much more patient game and improve my counter-attack style fencing to do more arm touches.  I also need to get better at the change-up footwork.  It seemed that whenever I feinted the attack, corrected my feet, and attacked, I got the touch.

I visited the letterbox I placed in Lincoln Woods back in August 8 of 2005.  A pen had gone missing so I replaced it, but the book was dry and the stamp was fine. 

Letterboxing is a fun orienteering-style game where you get directions to a letterbox and attempt to find it.  Mine can be found here, and I’ve posted pictures of each entry on my Flickr account.  Pretty much any place you go, there is a letterbox, so it’s a fun thing to do as part of a hike.  Even in little Gould, CO, there is a Lake Agnes Letterbox.  I’ll have to check it out sometime.

Letterboxing has a funny similiarity to blogging.  You put out little nuggets for strangers to run across and then see what they have to say.

I’ve had a morbid fascination with narcissism for about 4 years: How to recognize it. How to deal with it. How to laugh at it. Certainly narcissism has a dark side, but it also has a completely ridiculous side as well. One of my favorite narcissists is Nick Bottom in a Midsummer Night’s Dream. The scene where the director of a small theatrical troop (Quince) is introducing the play Pyramus and Thisbe is so insightful on how a narcissist approaches a project.

Quince: You, Nick Bottom, are set down for Pyramus.
Bottom: What is Pyramus? a lover, or a tyrant?
Quince: A lover, that kills himself most gallant for love.
Bottom: That will ask some tears in the true performing of
it: if I do it, let the audience look to their
eyes; I will move storms, I will condole in some
measure. To the rest: yet my chief humour is for a
tyrant: I could play Ercles rarely, or a part to
tear a cat in, to make all split. (blah…blah…blah)

So here is the wonderful introduction of the “workaday narcissist” he must function with charm to gather the idolation he feeds on but his real desire is to be a tyrant (like Richard III).

As Quince presents the roles to the other actors, Bottom interjects at each one, claiming to be able to do it better and he really would rather any role but the one he has been given. I can’t help but extrapolate to the development arena and think of how Bottom would act if he were a developer and not an actor. Bottom would want to write everything by himself! Instead of leveraging frameworks and application servers, Bottom would build not just the framework, but the entire application server - from scratch! His massive applications will transform computing as we know it!

The really funny thing about a Midsummer Night’s dream is Bottom’s treatment by Titiana after he becomes an infantile ass, braying about oats in the arms of a beautiful fairie. It is a wonderful deconstruction of the bully that he was in a few scenes before.

There’s a lot of interesting psychological stuff on narcissism on the net, but Bottom is my character study. I can usually spend about 10 minutes talking to someone and if their grandiose ideas and subtle intimidations start to trigger a “HeeHAW” in the back of my mind, I know I’ve made aquantance with a narcissist, and I would do well to let them crawl back into the unimportant anonymity where they belong.