Choose your tag with care

The official tag for the recent Dublin Core Conference in Berlin is dc2008berlin however my colleague John Robertson noted that more than a few conference participants had uploaded images to flickr tagged dc2008. This tag also turns up lots of holiday snaps from Washington DC along with images from some rather more exotic events including DragonCon 2008.

dc2008

Do you know where the Description Set Profile Working Group is?

By Foenix. Some rights reserved. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Licence.

DragonCon 2008 055

Baleful twitterings

I recently heard a reading of the Tang Dynesty (8th century) poet Du Fus Ballad of the Army Carts on the radio. Normally Im not a fan of radio poetry, I find it a bit trite, but this was sufficiently moving to make me stop what I was doing and listen. Its a powerful meditation on the endless futility and waste of war and it was impossible not to appreciate the poem’s continued contemporary relevance after all these years. Sadly my musings on this evocative work were rather abruptly punctured by the final line:

The new ghosts complain and the old ghosts weep, and under the grey and dripping sky the air is full of their baleful twitterings.

Somehow that just conjured up all the wrong sort of imagery¦..

Translator (David Hawkes [1967]). A Little Primer of Tu Fu. Oxford University Press. ISBN 962-7255-02-5.