by Jim Harrison in The Shape of the Journey

I went to Tucson and it gave
me a headache. I don’t know how.
Everyone’s a cousin in this world.
I drove down a road of enormous houses
that encompass many toilets. Down hallways,
leaping left or right, you can crap at will.
A mile away a dead Mexican child slept
out in the desert on the wrong side of a mattress.

Jim Harrison is sometimes a satisfying source of insight. He has some clever quips that show he’s trying to avoid resting on the surface of things…

So I was fiddling around with some of the new online home valuation services, like Zillow, and found them disappointingly superficial. Who thinks up these algorithms? Can they be a real reflection of our society? For example, I noticed I could just keep adding bathrooms to increase an estimate of a home’s value. It does not matter how many bedrooms, kitchens etc. are in the house; configure a single-story 1 bedroom, 5 bathroom house and it is worth far more than a two-story 3 bedroom, 3 bathroom house.

Clearly, the more toilets, the better off you are.

This extract of a poem by Stephen Fry, in his new book The Ode Less Travelled, seems especially fitting for information security practitioners:

How rare it is when things go right
When days go by without a slip
And don’t go wrong, as well they might.

The smallest triumphs cause delight –
The kitchen’s clean, the taps don’t drip,
How rare it is when things go right.

Your ice cream freezes overnight,
Your jellies set, your pancakes flip
And don’t go wrong, as well they might …