How sad can the loss of a beloved one be? Yesterday my father died, after a life mostly spent in illness. During the latest dozen years he just went from bad to worse, and in these latest few days his body finally surrendered and decided to put and end to a vane fight against deseases, taking him into a coma which lead to death. He’s gone through near death situations several times, and he’s spent many weeks of his life in hospitals, since he was young. Now, he rests in a coffin I’ve had the task to choose, and while what remains of that heavily plagued burden of flesh which his body has become through the years is hidden in a sealed box of wood and zync, everything else remains in our hearts and memories, and in the things he’s built or bought, like the homes we live in, the lands he’s managed to purchase and so on. I definitely miss him, but I was ready for this inevitable moment, more than I though, probably. I’ve cried, of course, and I’ll cry again anytime the memory of him comes again and touches my heart. Maybe one day this memory will be ‘distant’ enough to bring just a little bit of sadness, who knows, but now I’m here with all the moments spent with him and the rest of my family, like the not so distant hour in which I held his hands and we prayed together, me and him, to ask God to put an end to his sufferings, after a very frightening moment in which he went so close to death to make his wish stronger, but nothing happened and I told him ‘Sorry dad, God knows when the moment is right, and we just have to accept that’.
That moment was yesterday, and I really hope he’s enjoying the relief of not being tied anymore to a sick and almost totally paralyzed body. Bye dad, I’ve loved you, I hope you still feel our love and the appreciation for everything you’ve done.
Thinking of the past, it seems to me that every time an important, positive change occurred in my life I was in a state of ’simplicity’. I mean, there was nothing ‘cluttering’ my daily existence, bringing chaos into my everyday reality and confusion into my thoughts and intents. Most importantly, tehre was nothing to be attached to, besides one clear, single thought, upon which I would focus every day, with enthusiasm and vital energy.
As soon as things started cluttering my life, on the contrary, my energy seemed to be drained away by them, by their ‘passive’ presence, by the large number of thoughts and intents tied to them, which in turn tied me to themselves. A tangled life brings nowhere, as I can see, and attachment is like a heavy burden that stops you from flying high and free towards better goals. The heaviness of ‘having’ keeps down the lighness of ‘being’, of ‘becoming’, of ‘doing’. Letting go is the key, as it sets you free and makes you capable again of shifting your life and changing your paradigms, creating new realities and bringing positive changes to the lives of others, too.
If you, too, share this view of life, maybe could find some useful starting point in the following blogs, articles and documents I found after writing this post with just a quick search (thanks Google, thanks Net, thanks to you all sharing your wisdom, netizens!). Feel free to add more using comments, of course, for the benefits of everyone.
… let me share with you a strange parallel I’ve always seen between two famous couples… don’t you think the Gates-Ballmer duo steals an incredible resemblance from the Young Frankenstein’s scientis-creature couple? I can easily imagine Bill shouting the ‘Can! Be! Done!’ exclamation…
Maybe it’s just an impression, but… take a look and judge yourself!
Update: Just when I thought my vision was going too far… I see I’m not alone! This is just an example, try looking for Ballmer Fankenstein in Google:
If you still haven’t heard of the Asus EEE PC subnotebook or just want to know something more, I can help you.
Thanks to Italian Asus PR agency, I was able to test an EEEPC subnotebook for a couple weeks and, as I feared, it was love at first sight. Now the EEE PC is gone, back to Asus, but I couldn’t resist writing an article titled The Asus EEE PC Experience and publishing it in a blog I’ve created to celebrate this great machine and collect all the relevant news, reviews, info and tips.
So, just head to my Asus EEE PC review and blog to discover the EEE PC Planet (also in Italian!).
BBC on-line is one of the many Web sites announcing, today, the depart of Arthur C. Clarke, one of the greatest SciFi writers ever lived on Planet Earth. Those of you who, like me, got lost in the worlds and scenarios depicted and summoned into our mind and heart by novels like Childhood’s End, Earthlight or The Songs of Distant Earth will never forget the precious gift of such a great novelist. Arthur C. Clarke inspired Kubrik’s unforgettable 2001: A Space Odissey with his short novel The Sentinel, too, and the following episodes in writing and on screen. I would like to say my personal goodbye to a man who filled our brains and souls with such beautiful stories, bringing our hearts in a magical flight far into the realm of fantasy and helping us grow up with a broader vision and enriched creativity. Thanks, Arthur, we won’t forget what you’ve done for SciFi and for us readers.
P.S.
I would also like to send a public message to Mr Ray Bradbury, one of my all-time favourite SciFi writer, to beg his pardon for the journalists who’ve written, in their articles about Clarke’s depart, “the last great old man of SciFi dies“. Even a popular SciFi Italian portal seems to indulge in the same error, together with other sites and blogs. Yes, Ray himself has described himself as a non-SciFi writer, and the legendary Martial Chronicles themselves as Fantasy, not Science Fiction. Nonetheless, who would say that many his works are not pillars of this literary genre? It would be like affirming that Matheson or Heinlein or Herber are not SciFi writers as their novels delve deep into the Horror genre.
Ray, please forgive these ‘journalists’, and please stay well and live long, maybe I will have a chance to meet you and thank you personally for the great works of genius and wit you’ve brought into our lives since we were kids if you come to visit us together with your great friend Ray Harryhausen here at the places where his great Jason and The Argonauts was filmed, Palinuro. After all, we have great expectations and good hopes about your longevity, since Mr Electro said ‘Live for ever!’ touching you with his magicl sword
P.P.S. You can read Clarke’s last interview on IEEE Spectrum and also listen to the related podcast
This is the first in a series of translated posts from the previous entries in my blog. They will be seleceted for the topics that may prove of major interest to a wider audience, thus translated into English. Well, let’s start.
There a lot of debate about ‘digital divide’, but the reasons for which so many people live at the fringe of society in Italy are of a deeper ‘analog’ nature.
Italy is, still today, a rural Country, let’s admit it, with all the technological disadvantages deriving from it. People living in cities and principal towns aren’t aware of the frightening size of ‘human mass’ spread into smaller built-up areas where everybody suffers for a shortage of jobs, technology, prospects… it’s true, the big cities’ stress and pollution are also missing in those places, but their inhabitants suffer for a different kind of stress factors. For example, the miles (sometimes several dozens) they must travel to reach public offices and obtain documents made necessary by the abnormal Italian bureaucracy or the miles needed to attend a higher school, the weak (or even missing) signal for mobile phones or television (satellite dishes are a must), or the absence of broadband Internet connections or even difficulties in obtaining a simple phone line at home.
Statistics are very clear: on a totalof 8.101 Italian municipalities there are over 6.000 of them counting less than 5.000 ‘citizens’, while 3.644 of them host about 2.000 ’souls’ (we’re talking about almost half of Italian municipalities!). But there’s more, because these few thousands of citizens don’t even really exist: yes, it’s true, and it’s because nobody’s taking the trouble of counting the citizens really residing in those municipalities where they ‘officially’ live (for a reason or another). If you don’t know about these ‘rural’ (a very suitable definition, in this case) Italian communities there’s a solid chance you’re asking where are the ‘missing citizens’ resulting in the official counting. Read the rest of this entry »
A few days ago I was discussing about multi-dimensional Universes, String Theory and similar topics with a friend of mine, after reading an interesting article on the Italian edition of Focus magazine, and it came to my mind a sketch I drew a few weeks ago.
In that drawing, I tried to describe an idea of time as a trhee-dimensional and multi-layered structure: just imagine something different from the usual timeline-shaped path (the one where birth and death are connected via a linear series of events which describe our earthly existence from start to end).
Imagine this alternative view of our individual lives as a sphere-shaped grid where an infinite number of linear paths are connected each other in ‘nodes’ or just cross their respective paths without touching, distributed on various levels like strings in a tangled wire-ball, but following an order.
Now imagine every crossing path of those strings like a moment, in your life, where a choice, decision or ‘event’ made you shift your path and move along a different string, and so on. Of course different shifts could bring you to similar ‘outcomes’, non necessarily to different ones.
For example, you could meet someone in a train station and ignore him/her, and find yourself traveling with the same person months later on a plane where you start talking with him/her, or start the same friendship on the first chance and then meet again on the same plane being already friends. This example moves along two different paths, but ‘crosses’ twice in similar ‘nodes’, keeping the intermediate path separate. Along the intermediate path anything can happen, producing again new chances of shifting towards other paths.
I know it sounds a bit confusing, and my knowledge of the English language may not be good enough to make this descriptions clear, but I would like to finish this reflections with an even more crazy idea: just imagine that the ’shift’ from one ‘universe’ to the other happens while you sleep, and you wake up in a different ‘dimension’ every time, according to the shift you produced with your thoughts-actions, without noticing just because you were sleeping and changes, at waking time, are so subtle you cannot see them. This could explain ‘dreams’ as a sort of computing process where actions and thoughts of the day are processed and produce a ‘resulting’ shift.
Owl’s hoot is often seen (shoud we say ‘heard’?) as a sign of bad luck, but I hope this post won’t count as one of those, at least for Yahoo! and the aura surrounding the popular search engine (and portal) at the moment. After some heartbeating news about the Microsoft bid, the following Google comments and Yahoo!’s refuse, the talking now involves the media mogul itself, Mr Murdoch (read a summary of the chronicles on the Web edition of ‘british’ Telegraph to keep up to date). Talking about misfortune, anyway, the sad news seem to involve, instead, the Yahoo! Design Innovation Team as a whole, who’s been fired (as reported on Portfolio.com). Let’s ask, now, why on heart the company didn’t hold on and just wait before deciding for such a bad move considering the delicate moment they’re going through right now.
Let me start this first ‘international’ post with a title which surely is going to ring a bell in most of you, tied as it is with both a movie and a music album known by the same sentence. You’ll forgive me for any mistake I’m going to make writing in English, as it’s my second language and not my mother tongue, but as I explained in my previous post I’m going to write in English from now on as a form of peaceful protest against the disillusion with many facets of my daily life in the Country I’ve had the luck and misfortune of being born. Please, comment with suggestions about any error I’m eventually putting into the articles you’ll be reading here, thanks.
So, back to the post, which (as the title clearly suggests) is related to one of the worst ‘misfunctions’ of Italian national clockwork: (in)justice. I was reading of the nth case of a male, guilty of abuse, who’s free (after a short time since his previous crime) to perpetrate his new violence where the casualty is a woman or a child. But, as usual, this is just the tip of the iceberg, as most of these horrible facts never become news. What’s worse, Italian justice still keeps on holding in jail people guilty of theft or fraud but gives dangerous criminals a way to wander free in the streets in search of their next innocent victim.
We (Italians) often say, reading or watching on our national media about criminals left free to wander or kept for long time in courts with no punishment, things like “If this was happening abroad the criminal would already be prosecuted and punished the way he/she deserved“. The main problem is, in Italy, that villains are even among those in charge of government and justice itself. As they say, quis custodiet ipsos custodes? (who watches the watchmen?).
P.S. A note about the picture I used for this post, it’s been borrowed from the site Eccleshall Past, just because I thought it may best symbolise what I’ve written. If the authors or any related people thinks there’s any reason not to use it here, I invite them to let me know and I’ll promptly remove it. Thanks.
Questo è il mio ultimo post in italiano su jackventura.com, i prossimi saranno solo in inglese. Comincia così la mia protesta contro una nazione di ingiustizie, sprechi, delusioni, violenze, vergogne e abbandono. Sono stanco e disgustato per una situazione che non accenna a migliorare, anzi peggiora a vista d’occhio, e non credo più che ci sia la forza e la possibilità di reagire e combattere contro un nemico che viene dall’interno, una piaga che ha ormai attecchito nelle strutture portanti, che ha infettato l’organismo della nazione nei suoi organi vitali e più profondi. Per il momento non posso andarmene fisicamente e abbandonare geograficamente questa nazione allo sbando, mi accontento perciò di farlo virtualmente, culturalmente e linguisticamente, a partire dal mio blog personale. Il giorno che potrò andarmene davvero, emigrare finalmente oltre i confini nazionali invece che semplicemente regionali, come ho già fatto più volte, festeggerò alla grande. Per ora, saluto i miei lettori che non conoscono la lingua inglese, and welcome to everybody else, at least the ones who can read and understand the English language.
How sad can the loss of a beloved one be? Yesterday my father died, after a life mostly spent in illness. During the latest dozen years he just went from bad to worse, and in these latest few days his body finally surrendered and decided to put and end to a vane fight against deseases, taking him into a coma which lead to death. He’s gone through near death situations several times, and he’s spent many weeks of his life in hospitals, since he was young. Now, he rests in a coffin I’ve had the task to choose, and while what remains of that heavily plagued burden of flesh which his body has become through the years is hidden in a sealed box of wood and zync, everything else remains in our hearts and memories, and in the things he’s built or bought, like the homes we live in, the lands he’s managed to purchase and so on. I definitely miss him, but I was ready for this inevitable moment, more than I though, probably. I’ve cried, of course, and I’ll cry again anytime the memory of him comes again and touches my heart. Maybe one day this memory will be ‘distant’ enough to bring just a little bit of sadness, who knows, but now I’m here with all the moments spent with him and the rest of my family, like the not so distant hour in which I held his hands and we prayed together, me and him, to ask God to put an end to his sufferings, after a very frightening moment in which he went so close to death to make his wish stronger, but nothing happened and I told him ‘Sorry dad, God knows when the moment is right, and we just have to accept that’.
If you still haven’t heard of the 
BBC on-line is one of the many Web sites announcing, today, 
A few days ago I was discussing about multi-dimensional Universes, String Theory and similar topics with a friend of mine, after reading an interesting article on the Italian edition of Focus magazine, and it came to my mind a sketch I drew a few weeks ago.
Let me start this first ‘international’ post with a title which surely is going to ring a bell in most of you, tied as it is with both a 
