Jon's Introduction: A Few Words about Things

Objects tend to remain in our possession like magical, cursed artifacts due in most cases to their purely Newtonian tendency to stay exactly where they are if left alone. As I move through the orbit of my days and years little things trace unpredictable but almost universally closed epicycles around me. There is a mug sitting on my computer desk which I used over the winter break for brewing tea. Its brown earthenware, and it has a green pear painted on it in broad brushstrokes. I have no idea where it came from, I have more or less stopped using it, and now it moves about my desk whenever I get a fit of cleanliness and move,more or less ineffectually, everything around, seaching for a more pleasant arrangement of objects. Maybe one quarter of the books on my desk I picked up when a library or a professor was giving away things they no longer wanted to keep. Some of my text books are terrible (Huang's Statistical Mechanics, I am looking at you) and others are in fields which I have only a marginal connection to (I don't even know what a Reed-Solomon Code is). And all this is just what is at my desk at work.

In short, I have a lot of things, many of which I am in possession of only nominally. Maybe Gimcrackery is about making that possession active, or maybe its about launching some of these satellites out of orbit. Jon_, Introduction_