Flickr mashups

I have been pondering many thoughts and such over the past couple of weeks, several of which have arisen directly from my work on this tutorial. Both, I think, have stemmed from the evidence and nature of creativity.
I have been looking through, at, and for examples of flickr mashups this week and have been amazed and delighted by the things I have seen and heard. I have had some fun with spell with flickr and and spent a bit of time on the fastr game (sort of fun, got old pretty quickly). And fixr is neat- taps into our collective sense of times past and lost only to the backgrounds of our memories.
I think the biggest element of wonder has come from the ones that to me best demonstrate the merging of creative energy/artistic vision with the technical skill/hacking ability to see it realised. I am awed. Flickeur (rhymes with voyeur, they say) is particularly cool. (Enter discussion of Beckett's Krapp's Last Tape here, anyone?)
I am considering downloading the clockr as a screen saver - just the thing to combine the artistic and time-obsessed sides of a personality, eh?
More broadly and well you know existentially speaking, some other thoughts that have been swirling round my mind-
There is perhaps a certain way of looking at the world around us and interpreting that world that not everyone has (maybe they don't want it, I don't know) that is Romantic and to me quite interesting (perhaps I am enough outside of it that I am not filled with all of the angst and whatnot that it necessarily seems to bring these tortured artist types - although this could be part of the reason I am attracted to books written for teenagers, all that remembered and imagined angst). When I see this vision fully realised as a work of art, I am delighted, and filled with wonder at the ability of the human imagination. To combine that with technical skill is something I do not possess, and so am intrigued. This I think is one of the reasons I never went any further in my musical studies - once it got too mathematical and technical for me, I was done for. I am assured by musician friends of mine that this is only at the beginning, the creative and artistic side soon takes over. These were the hurdles I could not jump, although I have not lost the faith.
Perhaps I was meant to follow a different path...
Another rather random thought wave I have been riding recently has to do with nature of 'free spirits' - I think there is something inherently sexy about this. I think not only of Gord Downie, but also other people/men who have held sway over my imagination and fascination at one point or another in my life. Jack Kerouac, Albert Nerenberg, Jim Henson, Jim Morrison, among others. I do not think it is just the outsider mentality, but there is something about the nature of this restlessness and endless searching (whether for spiritual enlightenment, the truth or something akin to it, free expression of inner turmoil, or just plain expressing innate creative genius - all of which exist in many forms) that appeals to me on an important and visceral level.
Okay, now is there something to how you define a free spirit? As with anything, it is all in the definition. Is this something one cannot see in oneself? If you think and say you are cool, you are most likely not so much. There are people I consider to be quite experimental who do not see themselves as outside the moulded norm at all. I may continue to think some more about the nature of cool.
Much of this has in fact stemmed from a male friend of mine who referred to Gord as a Sex God. This is perhaps not the first term I would use. Then again, definitions come into play - what exactly is a Sex God? Can anyone help me out with this? People with whom I work, they have may have had enough of my musings on this topic. I have every intention of writing a Gord-free post on this blog - one of these days!
In discussion with my friends, particularly with my male friends, there is a certain element of incredulity on their part - is it the nature of man, or is it just that they are not at all accustomed to my speaking about these things, in this way? Maybe, as Grandpa Simpson would say, a little from column A a little from column B.
Maybe it is time to live up to my blog name and have nothing more to say.
So, for once I will forgo the song lyrics, and quote from a children's book (and a beginning reader at that).
"When Bobby North came to his new school, he found that he was the smallest guy in his class.
He found that action figures were not cool.
He found that white coats were completely not cool.
'Okay', he said, 'so what is cool?'" Jamie McEwan