Ly Lan
My friend the Vietnamese writer Ly Lan has a blog & she would like to wish the world a happy Valentine’s Day & a happy year of the pig, too. Chuc Mung Nam Moi! The hill on which the school Ly Lan attended as a little girl was blown out of existence by American artillery [...]
Filter Feeding
I’m a tiny little filter feeder — a bit of plankton — in the ocean of the internet. I’ve been using del.icio.us to filter my web reading into a box in the sidebar. In case you care what I’m reading.
Academic Blogging
Timothy Burke provides what looks like the outline of a talk on academic blogging. Seems to me that he covers the territory very effectively & I tend to agree with his predictions & formulations. I left a comment at Easily Distracted relating to my experience reading poetry blogs, noting that a lot of poetry bloggers [...]
The Great Backyard Bird Count
It’s not too late to participate in the Great Backyard Bird Count. Just count the birds where you are for a minimum of 15 minutes, then turn in your results at the site linked above. There is even help with identification. Useful information about bird population patters has been collected over the last few years [...]
Just Asking
How come every time George W. Bush goes on TV he has to tell us what his job is? It makes him sound like he isn’t quite sure or doesn’t quite know. “My job is to protect the troops,” he said today. Well, No, Sir, that isn’t really your job, even within a limited military [...]
Bonsai Census
I mentioned my bonsai trees the other day in passing. I am a very modest & casual bonsai cultivator, but I do get a lot of enjoyment out of my “plant pets,” as Carole calls them. In fact, some of my favorite trees would hardly be considered real bonsai the the most serious collectors. But [...]
Failures of the Free Market
Markets are powerful institutions that harness fundamental human drives for productive purposes. Anyone who has ever been in a village market in Mexico, or Vietnam, or a hundred other places will have seen “market forces” at work. Both the forces that allow for profits to be made & the forces — gossip, argument, supply limits [...]
But It Still Handled Like a Pig
I had one of these VW busses in the 1980s when they were still pretty cool. It was a fabulous camper. Built-in cuppboards, huge amount of room in the back to sleep. Carole & I had some memorable nights in the San Diego Mountains & east into the desert in the thing. A fantastic vehicle [...]
Concentrating the Mind
Saturday: I’m not what you’d call a confessional blogger. I don’t write much about my private life & I’ve been thinking all day whether to write this post & for the moment I’ve decided to write it as a draft. I may or may not publish it at some point. I saw my doctor Friday [...]
Sentimentality
Sentimentality is the substitution of emotion for intelligence; sentimentality requires the reader to assent to heightened feelings not legitimated by the matter at hand; sentimentality seeks to manipulate the reader’s emotional response by calls to conventional wisdom or attitudes; sentimentality seeks approval by reference to the vast warm blanket of majority opinion; sentimentality never, ever [...]
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