The Safari Reader Feature

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There is a new feature in the Apple browser called Safari that I have to remember to use. When I do remember to employ it I find myself foolishly gratified. It's kind of dopey when I feel this way. Grateful is not one of my more polished attributes.

The feature is simply called Reader. It does one thing pleasingly well. It converts an article I'm interested in reading on an internet site, so that it automagically removes all the extraneous stuff like advertisements of all kind, and enlarges the type on a pleasant neutral background, and lets me focus on entertaining myself without distraction.

There is one aspect to this feature I'm not sure of. If an article spreads out over several pages the Reader anticipates the need to click "Next Page", and downloads all the article in the background so that reading the article is one smooth production from start to finish. I haven't tested this theory much. It doesn't appear to work on some sites, but seems to work seamlessly on others. I may be hallucinating that part of it.

I don't know if the iPad browser has this feature for reading books. If it does, then it's almost unfair to all the other tablet computers that are trying to get into the digital book market. I haven't tried this out on free book sites that carry all those Public Domain masterpieces.

Now I have. I stopped writing to see if it works. It does. Beautifully. It even allowed me to copy this paragraph from the Reader program itself:

"Sartre was the chief proponent of French existentialism, a philosophic school--influenced by Soeren Kierkegaard and German philosophy--that developed around the close of the World War II. Existentialism stressed the primacy of the thinking person and of concrete individual experience as the source of knowledge; this philosophy also emphasized the anguish and solitude inherent in the making of choices."

http://people.brandeis.edu/~teuber/sartrebio.html

Naturally, from finding out it worked as above, I had to try it out on Wikipedia. The Reader feature removed every extraneous sections like all the Wikipedia self promotion and presented the article on Sartre in its entirety without any distracting gobble de gook.

I get distracted fairly easily if I don't have a solid purpose in mind. The paragraph on Sartre above has that one sentence that caught my attention, "Existentialism stressed the primacy of the thinking person and of concrete individual experience as the source of knowledge".

I've never quite gotten a handle of what is meant by the term "existentialism". I do know that once I was able to get into reading Being and Nothingness that even though it was a translated work that Sartre was writing his tour de force just for me.

It took me months of reading each night before I went to sleep. The experience was like no other reading experience I've had. It was like I was receiving instruction on how to interpret his me-and-thee-ing (meaning) as I skimmed through each chapter.

I'd have to go back and read it again, and sometimes again several more times after that. I think I must have read each chapter ten times or more before I got to the end of the book. I felt like I understood a bit during the process of reading each night, but each morning it was if I didn't understand any of it. Any understanding happened in an immediacy the immediately seemed to evaporate.

I've finally stopped going back and reading Being and Nothingness to see if there is anything more I can glean from my additional efforts. It's like the Wilhelm/Baynes translation of the I Ching for me now, ten years after I was told in a dream to stop using it. I sometime use quotes from both books, but I don't use them as an oracle any more. I be-co-me with them to act as and channel as the oracle myself. I ate the whole thing.

Capturing drifting thoughts with words has not been easy for me. I have to do it about every day for several hours to stay in practice, and even then it's not always there for me whether I want it to be or not. It has been dangerous to both my health and my wealth or lack thereof since puberty.

I got this body from it's original owner when it was fourteen years old. Right away, as it new owner I began retreating to a hermetic lifestyle the previously occupied body did not understand. To be what I am is threatened it's ground-for-being. Candidly, that can be tough because the brains of this body belonged to another with a selfish purpose, and had a tendency to treat me as if I am is were just a rebound lover who will soon discard it as if use-less. No blame. I guess I do have a history.

Time, the tie-to-me, is not so flexible as cultural demands need for it to be, in my case, and it took decades for me to reclaim what I'd gained ere transitioning to a fresh young body. This kid had fourteen years to create a set of rules of conscience before I could even begin a rescue effort to abandon them wholesale. The fool had been brain-washed into think he was duty-bound as a Christian to let his conscience be his guide. Socked in, man, what a drag.

Some friendly people are possessed by their definitions of what friends like me should act like. I can be a great disappointment to them. I couldn't even do that for my parents or ex-wives or their children. They appear to forget how I can be. They try mightily to get me to meet them halfway to allow for my possible ignorance. I don't even pretend to go there anymore. It's useless. Too many fixed signs in my natal, and/or too few in their's.

I could almost swear they want me to dumb down to what they can reach for inside their subjective tribal box, and yet, hold me up as their model for how to get outta there simultaneously. I don't seem able to explain why that ain't up to me, but that it is only up to them.

I can't assuage their self-inflicted pain due to the very fact that I have no say so in the matter. Meaning (me-and-thee-ing) only goes so far when soliciting the favors of the Comforter.
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