mandarine

We humans grew up as serfs. We have a double servility history: a personal servility history when we were kids, and a collective servility history when we were ruled by kings. Wherever we went, whatever we did, whomever we met, there was always someone or something telling us what to do, what was good and what was bad. What to wear, where to live, what to do for a living, whom to marry, which God to worship, what to love, whom to hate…

Then we gained freedom. At least in some lucky places, we are free on an unprecedented scale. Our forebears, crushed under the weight of injustice, fought dearly and won. It was a strange victory, in which they did not defeat injustice, but they won freedom, and passed it on so that we could be born free. But are we grown-up enough to be endowed with such an awesome gift? [more]

And vice versa.

Even though I had informally decided not to mention new year’s resolutions under any shape or flavour, Lorelle chose otherwise with yet another compelling challenge. Below the picture are ten goals for the mandarine blog in 2007.

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Following the publication of STOVE 1.0 a team of eager geeks has come up with a mighty plugin: PanRack 0.103. It comes with two default skins: weathered copper (screenshot below) and stainless steel.
The plugin is developed with an OAK kernel, a linSEED\OIL frontend and the SLate.NaiL technology for the user-interface.

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A list of 19.99 non-commercial things that are invaluable nonetheless:

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Boldly borrowed from Pierre Rahbi:

How wealthy are nannies (who take care of our children)?
How wealthy are bankers (who take care of our money)?

‘For as long as we both shall live’: how long might this be? To back up Litlove’s recent illustration of this question, let me point out that a couple of centuries ago, people who had survived to the age of marriage could reasonably expect to live until 40. This means that roughly half the people died before that age. Therefore, the probability that someone would stay married to the same person for more than 20 years was at most one in four. Nowadays, the probability that both husband and wife
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Just to let my readers know that I am stalled on the bit about fidelity (my third installment in the 10th-anniversary pontificating series about marriage). I understand that by publicizing my writing difficulties I will heighten expectations and therefore make the writing even more difficult to meet said expectations.

I take the risk.