I like how it works here and how it doesn't quite work

1. I like this picture of my daughter vs. the Mississippi at near flood stage, downtown Baton Rouge. The big paper clip thing is a riverboat landing dock and all the boarding ramps that riverboat travelers would normally use are now twenty feet under the muddy water.

Don Cherry, Old and New Dreams
Muhal Richard Abrams, Sound Dance

2. I like how Steve Wilkerson's river essay-as-Facebook-note is making the rounds. Journalism-wise, something there too is cresting. I know Steve, but I forget how, which is the nature of social media or mediated society or whatever. I like how that works.
3. I like how this page explains the deal with the Mississippi/Red/Atchafalaya/Old River confluences utilizing (basically) bar napkin sketches. (hat tip to Lucius Fontenot). I like hubris and how Captain Shreve was all, well, let's solve this traffic problem by digging a new river.  I like how we tip hats. I like how, despite all the intellectual property fears, the Internet is a credit-where-credit-is-due kind of marketplace of ideas, and how in the real world, who-did-what is of little consequence now. I like how we never really learn the lessons of credit.
   
   
4. I drove across the Morganza Spillway/Old River Control Facility late at night a while back. It is eerie, alien country out there, at least at 1 AM it is.
   
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   I like how the river control complex feels like one of those vast abandoned Russian sites you see on the Internet or the X-Files, something built in close but forgotten antiquity to dangerously harvest nuclear power with nothing but vastness to protect the rest of the world from what's going on there.  I like how the relationship civilization has with nature is tense in ways that we can't even comprehend because it is mediated through trappings/milestones/yokes of civilization, and yet those civilized means are the only means by which we can come to grips with the vastness of it. I like how we always give up the chase before we completely come to grips with it (anything), because we have to. Our hands are only so big and can only grip so much. I like how Google Maps lets you get the embedded map just right before you post it.
5. I like how the whiff of impending, wet disaster leads one to the high-n-dry sanctity of lofty thinking, sweeping that nasty water away with sweeping judgments. I like the tectonic interplay of the HTML ordered list with breaks. I like how it works here and how it doesn't quite work right when the post gets cast out through an RSS feed. I like to think there is some kind of poetry in that. I like thinking everything is poetry. Or is at least fuel for poetry's fire. I like how flawed that thinking is and how we really never learn anything.