#BR2016: Hackathon for the Homeless

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

Business Rocks 2016 hosted a global hackathon in a bid to help solve through technology the ever-growing problem of homelessness

[Two weeks ago, The Gad About Town web site participated with many others in publicizing the international tech meeting in Manchester, UK, Business Rocks 2016, with a focus on a planned hackathon to bring brilliant minds together to collaborate on solutions to homelessness. The two-day-long hackathon took place, and real solutions were created. Here is a report from the Hacktivist Culture web site.—Mark Aldrich, The Gad About Town]
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Despair Has No Wings …

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

To be is to despair and to despair is to remember the thousand tightly missed connections and not-yet completed conversations that will reveal themselves eventually as never really begun. The Surrealists got despair, perhaps better than most. They adopted Existentialism’s finer frustrations and rendered them with comedy, joy, and horror in sometimes strange proportions.

The comedy of coincidence and the tragedy of imminent abandonment dominate their work. Everyone is always alone, and this fact is simultaneously hilarious and horrifying in Surrealist Art.
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Today in History: April 28

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

Mutiny broke out on board HMS Bounty on this date in 1789.

The Royal Navy ship had been on a mission transporting breadfruit plants in the South Pacific. (Philip Larkin: “Boys dream of native girls who bring breadfruit, / Whatever they are …”) The crew spent about five months on Tahiti and in that time several of them fell in love with some of the native women who resided there. Acting lieutenant Fletcher Christian possibly considered himself betrothed to a young native woman whose name he changed from Mauatua to “Isabella.”

(Phrases heavy with words like “probable” and “possible” are necessary in telling the story of the mutiny.)
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