Month: October 2002

what’s in rebecca’s pocket?

Surely it would be a good thing if people were encouraged to climb outside their milieu. It would be nice, for example, if AmeriCorps became a rite of passage for young Americans, so that at least for a year of their lives they would be with people unlike themselves.

Rebecca quotes David Brooks.

Go here and here and here for more.

There’s more to this, of course, than the timeliness of this notion of a broader and more inclusive national service.

The unforeseen side-effects of being able to select your own information or build your own newspaper means you may never get the Recommended Daily Allowance of stuff you should be aware of. Like it or not, you need to be aware that the president is agitating for a war with a tyrant halfway around the globe while a sniper moves freely around the nation’s capitol killing almost a dozen civilians in public places.

On the one hand, the mainstream press may miss a story completely where overseas outlets or small independents (On the internet, no one knows you’re not the NYTimes) may cover it. Browsing and undirected serendipitous reading is still important.

Insolitology : the study of crackpots on the Internet

Welcome to Insolitology, the site about web oddities. Some people say that humour is only veiled derision – here at Insolitology, all of our derision is explicit.

The proprietors seem interested in the ongoing thread about the Voodoo Magick Box.

Some funny stuff here . . . .

Salon.com News | An ad George Bush should love

Imagine a soccer mom in a Ford Excursion (11 mpg city, 15 mpg highway) saying, “I’m building a nuclear bomb for Saddam Hussein.” Or a mob of solo drivers toodling down the freeway at 75 mph shouting in unison, “We’re buying weapons that will kill American soldiers, Marines and sailors! Yahoo!”

Think globally, act locally, indeed.

Regime Change Begins At Home | Powered by CafePress.com

This is taking off like a grass fire . . .

Regime Change Begins At Home

If everyone who’s worried about Bush’s plans votes on November 5, we can engage in a little “regime change” of our own. The good news is that a majority of the people in this country are concerned. But that doesn’t matter unless they voice that concern at the polls.

You know you want one of these.

GW Bush Went AWOL – Home Page

This is the story of how George Walker Bush walked away from a years duty while in the National Guard.

In the words of Medal of Honor winner Sen. Bob Kerrey: “I can understand if he forgot a weekend. But 18 months?”

The hard question I come back to? Would I do any differently for my own kids? Korea, Vietnam, and Kuwait (coming soon: Iraq) are not the same as WWII, so it’s not as if they would be defending their home turf.

Of course, the bigger issue here is not avoiding service but lying about it. The deeds of 30-40 years ago are done, but lying about it today is another matter.

Instructional Technology

Swift, in his “A Letter of Advice to a Young Poet” suggests that

A commonplace book is what a provident poet cannot subsist without, for this proverbial reason, that “great wits have short memories:” and whereas, on the other hand, poets, being liars by profession, ought to have good memories; to reconcile these, a book of this sort, is in the nature of a supplemental memory, or a record of what occurs remarkable in every day’s reading or conversation. There you enter not only your own original thoughts, (which, a hundred to one, are few and insignificant) but such of other men as you think fit to make your own, by entering them there. For, take this for a rule, when an author is in your books, you have the same demand upon him for his wit, as a merchant has for your money, when you are in his.

Typically these books were compilations of brief passages, often with commentary, ordered topically or thematically—in short they were collections of commonplaces—or, for those with the Greek tongue, koinoi topoi, or loci communes, in the Latin .

The sig-o-matic got me thinking of the old notion of the commonplace book, that portable and personal trove of epigrams, thoughts, and bromides that people used to treasure. The idea was that you read with an eye to noting for your own later use passages that resonated with you: these would be carefully transcribed in a blank book of your own, perhaps with your own observations, perhaps just as a collection of the wit and wisdom of others. Weblogs are an analog of this idea and the sig-o-matic (readers are invited to convert their favorite works in .sig entries) is a way of sharing your “commonplaces” with others.

Google Search: “regime change begins at home”