PUBLIC MARKS with search fear

The severity with which we restrict the roving of our eyes seems rather to indicate that we are aware of the fact that our gaze vaguely recognizes the monsters on the margins and that we fear it might encounter some familiar beasts and strike up a conversation that would recall an old friendship and a forgotten common language.

what concerns me is the question if this is going to keep working or not? For some time I thought spotlight-comments-based Tags would be a solution – and later have run into growing difficulties, Quicksilver not 100% working any more with Tags, TagBot occasionally overwriting Tags, the TagBot people simply going away etc. etc.

There was SpotMeta (which, if I recall right did use a similar "Xattr"-solution ) but with Leopard that was not compatible and not developed anymore. I intend to go with Apples further development of OSX (as long as my machine is going to support this) but I want to be at least assured that the people who implement this new scheme will make everything possible to make it likely that it wil continue to work in the reasonably future. Michael didn't start fear in my heart, he just gave me a starting point to ask these questions. (By the way I have asked a similar question the Tags-people, a question based on my past experiences with tagging solutions)

Social critic Neil Postman contrasts the worlds of 1984 and Brave New World in the foreword of his 1985 book Amusing Ourselves to Death. He writes:

What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. Orwell feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture, preoccupied with some equivalent of the feelies, the orgy porgy, and the centrifugal bumblepuppy. As Huxley remarked in Brave New World Revisited, the civil libertarians and rationalists who are ever on the alert to oppose tyranny "failed to take into account man's almost infinite appetite for distractions." In 1984, Orwell added, people are controlled by inflicting pain. In Brave New World, they are controlled by inflicting pleasure. In short, Orwell feared that what we fear will ruin us. Huxley feared that what we desire will ruin us.

My obligatory need to organize my recipes emerged, at least in part, from a fear of forgetting. I am not a chef or a food blogger, just a reasonably good occasional cook. I will never have enough recipes to lose track of the ones I have. And they’re kept in two places - in that pile in my kitchen, and in my head: There is a recipe clippings room in my memory palace that I hadn’t realized existed. What brings me there is sometimes rational (I need an appetizer) — but more often it’s emotional and sensual. When I think of my beloved grandmother, and I think of her matzo ball soup, I think of the page I wrote it on in a little book given to me by friends on my 22nd birthday. When I remember one of the best dinners I’ve ever hosted, I remember the lamb kofta recipe on its glossy magazine stock in that tattered pile. My pumpkin bread, made hundreds of times, still seems like the perfect thing for every occasion.

the determination to make something insanely great is a kind of hubris, the flip side of which is a terrible fear of making something merely ordinary.