http://www.vanityfair.com/culture/christopher-hitchens/graydon-201112

Mr. Hitchens was the most compelling wit I have ever known. I had the pleasure of spending a few minutes with him in a cab in Las Vegas. Naturally we got into a debate — he was adamant and dismissive. I also saw him briefly once on a plane. I am not sure I ever saw him without a drink in his hand. He was a fine man and I can only aspire and never achieve his command of our language.

UPDATE: does anybody at wikipedia notice that the personal appeals, often dramatic and sometimes negative, are equiavalently annoying to a the average national brand banner ad?  If the argument is that users will find advertising annoying, and that’s why they don’t have advertisements, are they aware that the advertisements that they are already running, i.e. the personal appeal begging banners, are annoying?

 But these designs are astoundingly boring. 

 C’mon Poland, don’t phone it in.  I know you can do so much better.

Very measured defense… the only good one I see out there! 

http://blog.retrosight.com/MicrosoftAndTheConsumerMarketReview2011.aspx

…and why is it the only one?  Interesting.

http://blog.speculist.com/2011/01/18-year-old-att-predictions.html

http://taosdaily.com/index.php?fuseaction=home.viewarticle&article_id=4170

Here it is, as written mostly in Doc Martin’s cafe and the lobby of the Taos Inn.

Eulogy for Carl Fritz 12/4/2010
Hello Dad it’s me your son Cort. I’m here to deliver your Eulogy. Your tribe has gathered here to celebrate your life. Every member of your family is present today in person or in spirit. We are all holding you now, in our hearts, together, all as one. I can feel this love for you and it is powerful.

So this eulogy is straight forward in three parts. First I’m going to tell you about why I am proud of the life you lived. Then I’m going to thank you for some of the gifts you gave us. Finally I’m going to reflect back to you a few iconic “classic Carl” images that stay with me and bring me comfort.

So, dad, first and foremost I am proud of the distance you traveled in your life. I mean this in terms of the social and spiritual distance. You were born a child of the segregated South. Your father when he spoke often used a variant of N word. You came here from far far away. From another planet. On the other side of the galaxy. When you first landed here in Taos you were sort of like E.T. Waddling around, showing everyone your heart light, trying to get somebody to take you home to live in their bedroom. I don’t think many of us can even begin to understand the place you came from. Dad, I am proud of you for having the bravery to embark on that journey. I am proud of you for following your wild vision. I am proud of your fortitude that helped you withstand the challenges you faced along the way. I am so proud of the love you made with these people who each helped you get here.

I am proud of you for your recovery from addiction to alcohol. I am proud of your 25 years of sobriety. You began that journey the night of December 10th, 1983. I know the precise night because it was the night of my 16th birthday. On that night you had a dream. In that dream you were driving drunk. You drove into a person and they dropped beneath the car. You got out and saw that the person was a child. You rolled the child over and saw that it was me. The next day you joined AA and didn’t drink again until a few years later on the night of Eliam’s barmitzvah when you did drink again. From the next day forward you were sober for the rest of your life. It is an interesting mystery that you connected your sons together this way. I think I understand it. Of course your recovery was for you. But in an important way, it was for us. In recovery, you went on to save your sons’ lives by being present for us when we needed you badly and by teaching me about the insidiousness of this drug that I am so very built to enjoy. That, father, was a noble choice. I am proud that you made that choice. I am proud that you were so tied to us that you began your sobriety at the moments we came of age. I am proud of that poetry of action. And dad, I am proud of you for paying the gift of sobriety forward to the uncountable number of men you sponsored and the people they sponsored. I can’t imagine the number of other sons I don’t know who got their fathers back because those fathers, these men you sponsored, became sober, like you. I can’t imagine the number of grateful wives, parents and friends who saw these men emerge again back into their lives. Some of those men are here today. I am proud of them and you together. You all did good in this world. I am proud of you.

I am proud of you for this odd family you built. They are beautiful. Thank you for bringing us all together. I am proud of you for the breadth and depth of the bonds you cultivated with care and sincerity. There are profound lifetime connections in this room that would otherwise never have existed without you. You brought good people together and therefore made their lives better. You loved doing this. You were great at it. You made families with the three great loves in your life. I am proud of you and very much proud of them that they should all choose to be here today.

Carl, I am proud of you and mystified by the life you built. I honestly don’t know how you pulled it off. If I understood it I would write it down and publish a book called “A hippie’s guide to mysteriously getting your shit together and retiring early and happy”. You made it look easy. I don’t know how to do that. And I am proud of your ex wives and widow who were each so crucial to that strategy. Thank you Sharon, Judith, Mom for giving so much to this man. I don’t know how you did it. You made it look easy. I am proud of you.

I am proud of the way that you faced your death. You knew it was coming. You approached it without illusion. You knew it was not going to be easy. This was a marathon of bravery. You faced it every day for years. In your our last week, each hour was tougher than the last. And each hour you rose to the occasion with profound dignity. In terms of depth of grace and presence of mind, I want to die the way you died. I am proud of how you left this earth.

So, I am proud of your life. Now let me begin to thank you for your gifts to us.

First and perhaps foremost, thank you for taking the name “Carl Rodney Fritz the third” off the table.

Thank you also for your green chili recipe.

Thank you for putting your sons through rafting school. Thank you for introducing us deeply into the wild, to know nature, to read a river to struggle against a current. I don’t know who I would be without knowing how small my place is in this vast world. Thank you for teaching us about our actual size in space and time and our actual power in this universe. Thank you for teaching us to be humble. These are the gifts that your love of nature gave us.

Thank you for your service in the Army. You were called to defend our country in a time of war and you served honorably. Thank you for that service. I know some of that work was ugly and very hard for you. But you did it. You sometimes thought that doing that work was a moral failing, but it was the opposite of a failing. Being a soldier is very hard. Thank you for that sacrifice.

Thank you for your lifetime pursuit of wisdom. Thank you for raising me into a world of books, of dialogue, of the dialectic and synthesis of concepts. I am privileged to have been brought up in a world of ideas, contemplation, debate and meditation.

I am desperately thankful that you taught me your sense of wonder and play. You taught me by example and by directly creating magic in my life. I remember clearly that time we spent doing art upstairs in the loft on Quesnel street all night long. Painting on canvases. Heating knives in the burners of the stove until they were glowing red so that we could use them to melt crayons onto those canvases. Making potato chips from scratch. In the morning, and a few of you will recognize this behavior, heating bear claws in the oven and eating them with vanilla ice cream on top. Sitting on the couch looking at a wall full of work from last night. They can judge us, but I try to live my life just like that as often as I can. I try to live my life with my daughter just like that as often as I can. If I could live like that every day I would. Thank you for showing me how to live properly, with a sense of wonder and play.

Finally thank you for connecting me to this tribe you built. I love them and I am so glad to be connected to them. Thank you in particular for connecting me to my brother and sister, Eli and Dani. I don’t know who I would be without Eli and his wife SJ in my life. Thank you for that. Thank you for connecting all of these people to each other. It beggars me to think about all the life and love that resulted from your saying “you need to meet this person”

Ok Dad, I am almost done. Let me now reflect back a few lasting images I have of you that bring me comfort.

You are behind the stove, shaking some sauteed something back and forth. There is a three foot flame coming out of the pan. A delicious smell is filling the kitchen. We are in your restaurant or we are home. I have seen this many times. I will miss this.

You are behind the oars of the raft, floating easy down river. You are content. I will miss this sight.

You are smiling, behind cards at cribbage. Cards which will prove to be suspicously superior to mine, again and again and again. I might not miss that.

You are naked or nearly so, wild and woolly, maybe you are at home. Maybe in nature somewhere. Perhaps in someone else’s home. Maybe in our VW bus. Might be in a pool. We are alone or maybe there are many present with us. In any case you are naked or nearly so and you are entirely comfortable in your natural habitat.

You are downtown Chicago wandering around. It is raining. You are tripping on acid. You pass by an army surplus store and see a military insignia on a patch on a jacket. You are so profoundly moved by this symbol that you go immediately to a tattoo parlor to have it tattooed into your chest next to your heart. Most of us know this tattoo, the waves pierced by a lightning bolt. Above the waves the latin word “Oneri” below them the word “Pares”. Oneri Pares, equal to the task. This was your motto. And I thought a pretty macho one at that. But macho wasn’t exactly what you meant. Sure, you were going to be equal to whatever task you took on. But you realized that this could mean something else. You meant it to say that when you embark upon a task, that the universe reacts in a manner that is equal to that task, to your effort. That each action we take is met by the world exactly as it should be. This profound view of providence, of fate, this view was something you strived to be in harmony with. Through all your wanderings, through every bend in the river, you strove to be in harmony with existence. And of course, you succeeded. Oneri Pares dad. I love you. You were equal to the task.