. . . about the name of this blog . . .

future works is borrowed from a favorite idlewild song of the same name. idlewild is a scottish outift, and pound for pound one of the deadliest bands on the scene, though they've received scant attention this side of the atlantic. check them out at http://www.idlewild.co.uk/.

a line from the chorus of "future works" (and the song sings all around me) displaced another lyric, from the waterboys' "this is the sea" (that was the river; this is the sea), as my epitaph of choice, were i actually to be buried (since i have no intentions of taking up some chunk of ground, i suppose these songs will just have to be played at my wake instead). much of the appeal of the waterboys line is that it isn't egocentric,which, for an epitaph, is entirely too predictable in my opinion - there's no "me"ing, "he"ing or "i"ing going on, so the self-reference of the idlewild line gave me pause, but since the line is actually about that which is going on around me, and moreover, since the line wears its meaning less on its face than the waterboys line, i figure it'll do - we'll see how long it lasts. in any case, apart from a great lyric, the promissory tone of the title seems to me especially fitting for this project, particularly here at its inception; what keeps anyone coming back to a blog, after all, is always its future works.

appropriately, the title foto (see bottom for another, minus the title) is of the western highlands of scotland, and one i myself took on the road heading west toward the isle of skye from the south end of loch ness two summers past. i had given a response to a paper at the annual conference of the society for applied philosophy (sap), held in manchester, england that year. the missuss and i had originally intended to visit scotland for our hunny-moon (aka honeymoon), but never got around to it, so we took a couple of weeks on the backside of the conference to drive through scotland. scotland is literally breathtaking. the drive during which this foto was taken was as deeply a religious experience as ever i've had.

since my son will undoubtedly receive plenty of attention in future works, i should also take a moment here to point out that his name, clyde, is also scottish, though neither he - nor we - are. clyde is named after marcia's (the aforementioned missuss) great uncle, clyde steinmetz, of ephrata, pa, a good old fashioned salt-of-the-earth pa dutch guy. i'm 1/4 welsh and since clyde is also a welsh name, i decided to track down it's welsh meaning once we decided on that name. in welsh, clyde means "warm" with the connotation of "snug," which remains pretty a propos for the little guy. but in the process of scouting this out i discovered that the welsh is derivative of the scottish gaelic. clyde is the name of the river that runs through glasgow (which, incidentally, is where idlewild hails from - aha, not so random after all!) and means "powerful enough to be heard from a distance," which is: (a) SUH-weet in its own right, and (b) could not be more fitting for the lad! (not that clyde is fussy, he's just not shy about expressing his (regular) glee. good stuff!)