|
|
Interesting Reading in the Interweb Tubes
- Shooting Our Way to Safety (“Guns, as even half-wits ought to realize, are manufactured not by freedom-loving patriots, but by people for whom private profit outweighs public good. … Preventing criminals and mentally ill people from buying guns would cut into their earnings.”)
Blog Headline of the Week
Bookish Linkage
Nonbookish Linkage
Fulfillment is often more trouble than it is worth.
Mason Cooley, City Aphorisms, Second Selection
I was largely incommunicado the last week or so because I’ve been wrapped up with (and worn out by) a family get-together and celebration in Massachusetts.
Doing as I said, not as I did, my youngest daughter, Tracy, was named a 21st Century Scholar at UMass-Amherst last week. Doesn’t sound like a big deal but… She was one of 11 to receive the prize, given to the University’s “most talented and accomplished graduating seniors” — out of a class of 5,500. Aside from a young woman from South Africa, she was the only non-Massachusetts resident to be selected. She was also the only winner from the College of Humanities and Fine Arts.
It was a somewhat wearing number of days. My wife and I flew out last week and the other two daughters flew in separately from their respective locations (the first and perhaps only time all of us are together this year). We actually attended four celebrations from Thursday through Saturday. One was for the Women, Gender, Sexuality Studies Department (one of her majors); another was for the Commonwealth Honors College (where she designed her other major in using media to assist in public health for persons with disabilities); there was the general commencement in the football stadium (it took 47 minutes for the commencement march, even with students entering from four different places), where she was on the platform throughout; and the HFA ceremony (where we stood for more than two hours). We also attended the Chancellor’s commencement dinner, where Tracy formally received her award.
She wasn’t the only one who had something to celebrate. Our middle daughter, Andrea, received her master’s degree in community and regional planning from the University of Nebraska the week before. At the same time, she gained full-time employment at the Nebraska Rural Futures Institute, where she worked as a graduate assistant.
We spent some enjoyable dinners with the faculty member who became Tracy’s mentor and close friend. One get-together included other faculty and staff, including her undergrad advisor and the School of Public Health faculty member woman who supervised Tracy’s honors thesis. Then we went to Boston as neither of the oldest two daughters had been there. That, of course, required a Red Sox game and general touring. (The trick to driving in Boston? Drive there, park near a T station and use the T until you leave.) And, of course, I returned home with six more books than I left with, supporting independent bookstores in Amherst, Northampton and Boston
Everyone flew home this week, except Tracy. Wednesday, she left for New York City, where she will spend the summer interning at the Clinton Global Initiative before returning to Amherst to pursue a master’s degree in public policy. All I know is my wife and I were both worn out. It’s hard to keep up with the young ‘uns.
As has become evident by how well each of them has done (and how proud I am of each), they’re lucky their mother did such a good job.
Confronted with infancy, I was exceptionally no good. …I was really marking time until they were old enough to be able to hold a conversation.
Christopher Hitchens, Hitch-22
Interesting Reading in the Interweb Tubes
Blog Headline of the Week
Blog Line of the Week
- “Well, back in OUR day … when we wrote uphill in the snow on a tight deadline in a smoke-filled room filled with booze-soaked reporters, as the AP wire chattered away, well that, yup, that was journalism.”
Mea Culpa (Maybe)?
- A man convicted of murder in a Texas courthouse shooting shouts to the court that “the bitch” (his daughter) is “the one that should be dead.”
Bookish Linkage
Nonbookish Linkage
You measure democracy by the freedom it gives its dissidents, not the freedom it gives its assimilated conformists.
Abbie Hoffman, Tikkun magazine, July-August 1989
Nonfiction works constituted both the good and the abandoned this month.
Abandoned:
I Got a Name: The Jim Croce Story, Ingrid Croce and Jimmy Rock — Perhaps I’m too much off a stickler when it comes to nonfiction. Recreating conversations between people is somewhat acceptable in my view but when the only participants are dead, it strikes me as invention. It makes me wonder how much else of what I’m reading is “recreated.” Certainly, a story can be told without trying to directly quote conversations or tell us what a deceased person was thinking at a particular time but more than a third of the way through this biography I reached my limit of these devices.
Something entirely different led me to abandon Georges Bataille’s The Trial of Gilles de Rais. The book purports to tell the story of this 13th century serial killer of children through the documents of the trial. Before we ever get to that source material, however, Bataille spends far too much time discussing and evaluating his subject in terms of his family and the “archaic” thought prevalent among the aristocracy of the time. The problem is significant parts talk about occurrences or actions we don’t know anything about yet. Throw in a timeline that seems frequently juggled and it was just too much.
Loved it:
 I seriously considered reviewing Diary of a Man in Despair by Friedrich Reck, A back cover blurb, though, clearly identified my problem. “Very, very rarely one comes across a book so remarkable and so unexpectedly convincing that it deserves more to be quoted than to be reviewed,” Frederic Raphael wrote in his Sunday Times review of the book. Reck’s diary of what happens in Nazi Germany from May 1936 through October 1944 is revelatory and prescient. He condemns the European powers for not standing up to Hitler and warns as early as September 1937 of a “coming Second World War.” Although a conservative monarchist, His assessment of Germany’s political situation and where it is headed hit the mark. Equally impressive is Reck’s refusal to censor his thoughts, including his unbridled hatred of the Nazis, when putting them on paper in a totalitarian society. He hides his papers in “the forest” each night and fortunately they survive to this day. The diary takes us inside the thoughts, frustrations and perceptions of those who opposed Hitler but for whom a united and actual resistance was essentially unachievable.
What is unbearable is that this horde of Neanderthals demands of the few full human beings who are left that they also shall kindly turn into cavemen; and then threatens them with physical extinction if they refuse
Friedrich Reck, Diary of a Man in Despair
Bulletin Board
- My J-school buddy Tom Lawrence has started a blog called Prairie Perspective, which will provide “news, commentary and history on politics, life and culture in South Dakota and the Upper Midwest.” (Must say I like the name.)
Interesting Reading in the Interweb Tubes
- Who is the Real Enemy of the State? (“In essence, the [National Defense Authorization Act] seeks to designate the United States as an active war zone in regards to allegations of terrorism, or support of terrorism, wherein our most cherished all while putting your basic Constitutional Rights subject to the President’s whim.”)
Blog Headline of the Week
Blog Lines of the Week
Batshit Craziness of the Week
Legal Inanities of the Week
Bookish Linkage
Nonbookish Linkage
Even in a country with constitutional guarantees of freedom, something more is needed to resist fear and its manipulators. That is courage.
Anthony Lewis, Freedom for the Thought That We Hate
Bulletin Board
Interesting Reading in the Interweb Tubes
- The Hell of American Day Care (“The United States has always been profoundly uncomfortable with the idea of supporting child care outside the home, for reasons that inevitably trace back to beliefs over the proper role of women and mothers”) (via)
- Why Doctors Can’t Give You LSD (But Maybe They Should) (“Part of the problem with studying psychedelics–and other illicit drugs, such as marijuana–for medical use, is simply that they’re not high-tech, and no pharmaceutical company needs or wants to get involved. There’s no money in it for them.”) (via)
Blog Headline of the Week
Bookish Linkage
Nonbookish Linkage
I think “experimental fiction” is a synonym for “Give me a break.”
Anna Quindlen, NYTBR
The Googlization of the world occasionally provides unique — or bizarre — insight into what people are thinking or interested it. That is particularly true with its search autocomplete feature. As you type, it suggests potential searches reflect “the search activity of all web users and the content of web pages indexed by Google.” (Autocomplete can also be personalized a bit based on your web usage but I have both the personal results and web history options turned off on my Google account.)
It can be interesting to see what autocomplete suggests. Here’s a few examples of my first exploration into “autocomplete for fun.” Except where indicated otherwise, each of the results are in the order listed.
- For “why can’t,” the first two suggestions are “why can’t i get laid” and “why can’t tertiary alcohols be oxidized.” I don’t even understand the second one so for all I know it is related to the first. (If you just type “why,” “why can’t i get laid drops to number three.)
- Typing “why can’t obama” produces both sides of the political spectrum: “why can’t obama be impeached” and “why can’t obama close gitmo.”
- Autocomplete also indicates that people want to know if “republicans are”: idiots, evil, crazy, the problem. For Democrats, evil moves to number one, followed by racist, liberal and socialists. Perhaps that is why the second suggestion for “democrats and republicans” is “democrats and republicans are the same.” And I must say I found a bit of pleasure that “politicians are like diapers.”
- We lawyers don’t fare too much better, though. The first suggestion is “lawyers are scum.” I’m not sure if that’s better or worse than evil but ultimately I needn’t worry. Evil is number four in the autosuggest while “lawyers are liars” is second.
- Getting back to more generic search suggestions, “where” prompts “where is chuck norris” and “where’s my refund.” I’m fairly certain the latter keeps moving down as we get past April 15 but I’m not quite sure why people are so concerned about Mr. Norris.
- “Did I” produces “did i shave my legs for this” and “did i stutter,” suggesting webizens are fairly interested in wisecracks. “Did you,” in comparison, produces the straightforward “did you know.”
- It’s probably only fair to end this first round of the autocomplete game asking something about the feature itself. The results suggest that problems with autocomplete may have something to do with typing skills: “google autocomplete is not working corre” and “google autocomplete is not working corre marshmallows.”
If autocomplete is based on what web users are searching, I’ll leave you to ponder correlation between Goggle Autcomplete and marshmallows.
Google is a global Rorschach test.
John Battelle
Each year during National Library Week, the American Library Association releases a State of America’s Libraries report. One of the highlights (or lowlights) is that it contains the Top Ten List of Most Frequently Challenged Books, compiled annually by the organization’s Office for Intellectual Freedom. So here’s this year’s “winners”, in order, and the reasons they were challenged:
- Captain Underpants (series), Dav Pilkey (offensive language, unsuited for age group)
- The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, Sherman Alexie (offensive language, racism, sexually explicit, unsuited for age group) As an aside, Alexie spoke at SDSU to kick off the 2012 South Dakota Festival of Books last September.
- Thirteen Reasons Why, Jay Asher (drugs/alcohol/smoking, sexually explicit, suicide, unsuited for age group)
- Fifty Shades of Grey, E. L. James (offensive language, sexually explicit)
- And Tango Makes Three, Justin Richardson and Peter Parnell (homosexuality, unsuited for age group)
- The Kite Runner, Khaled Hosseini (homosexuality, offensive language, religious viewpoint, sexually explicit)
- Looking for Alaska, John Green (offensive language, sexually explicit, unsuited for age group)
- Scary Stories (series), Alvin Schwartz (unsuited for age group, violence)
- The Glass Castle, Jeannette Walls (offensive language, sexually explicit)
- Beloved, Toni Morrison (sexually explicit, religious viewpoint, violence)
I doubt anyone is shocked that Fifty Shades of Grey is on the list and while there are a few perennial “favorites” (And Tango Makes Three and Beloved, for example), there’s also some new entries this year. Thirteen Reasons Why is a 2007 young adult novel dealing with the reasons why a young girl committed suicide. Looking for Alaska, meanwhile, is a 2005 young adult novel that takes a before and after look at another young girl’s death. Both won numerous honors when released.
Instead of asking – “How much damage will the work in question bring about?” why not ask – “How much good? How much joy?”
Henry Miller, The Air-Conditioned Nightmare
Bulletin Board
Interesting Reading in the Interweb Tubes
Blog Headline of the Week
Lawsuit of the Week
Legislative Time-Wasters of the Week
Bookish Linkage
Nonbookish Linkage
All knowledge, the totality of all questions and all answers, is contained in the dog.
Franz Kafka, “Investigations of a Dog”
Got the most part, I stay away from the political here. Yet this image, seen in the Seattle PI books blog, really struck me with its message. It is very powerful and could suit either a gun control or censorship campaign:
The organization it promotes, Moms Demand Action For Gun Sense In America, was formed following the Sandy Hook shootings. I don’t know who it is using for creative direction for its material, but it also has a rather impressive video on its site.
England, where no one has guns: fourteen deaths. United States … twenty-three thousand deaths from handguns. But there’s no connection and you’d be a fool and a communist to make one.
Bill Hicks, Love All the People: The Essential Bill Hicks
|
Disclaimer The views expressed here are mine and mine alone. I do not speak for my law partners, our associates, staff and clients or my family and friends. Not only should any opinions here not be attributed to them, chances are they probably don't agree with me.
 Contact me You can e-mail me at prairieprogressive at gmaildotcom.
|
