The stories are heartbreaking, infuriating, inspiring, and they are ours. These people are workers, business owners, teachers, parents. They are not millionaires, bankers, CEOs, or celebrities. They don’t want bailouts or tax cuts, they want the inequity that has concentrated most of the wealth of the nation into the hands of one percent of the population to end. They are…WE are the 99 percent.
It must be something in the water. Not one but two of my blogging buddies now have daughters off traveling the world AND blogging about it at the same time.
First, there’s Iris, whom you and I have known for so many years as “Beta” on her father’s blog that I’d almost convinced myself that was her real name. (Which reminds me of the time Mig sent me to a cello-maker’s house to scout a carbon-fiber cello for him and I learned his real name from that guy’s wife…another story, but your secret is safe with me as long as you keep the payments regular, “Mig”) Annnnnnyway, Beta has been spending the last few weeks tramping around India with what seems to be a somewhat variable group of young people. The blog is called “meinasia”, which was supposed to be a sort of bilingual word-play being both “me in asia” for the English-speakers and “mein asia” for the German-speakers (The Family Von Mig lives in Austria, where they make dirndl skirts and sell watery beer to gullible American tourists). Apparently, though, the German part of it doesn’t really work. Whatev. The blog reads like a behind-the-scenes look at an episode of “The Amazing Race”, with train stations, airports, weird border crossings, and scary encounters with pushy souvenir peddlers. Because the trip is only six weeks long, the posting won’t last much longer, so be sure to have a look before it ends.
Meanwhile, my old friend Tony‘s oldest daughter, Lindsay (who, to the best of my knowledge has never had a cool Internet secret name) got on an airplane during the middle of Hurricane Irene and headed off for an entire semester in Uganda. Pretty ballsy, I think. She also fired up a blog as she was on her way. It’s called “Lindsay Leaves Home”, which doesn’t leave a lot of mystery, but at least there aren’t a bunch of people in Austria scratching their heads over some possible double entendre. When most of us think about a semester abroad, we tend to think about kicking around Paris or Rome, learning how to drink too much wine, smoke nasty cigarettes, and hookup with oversexed Eurotrash. There’s not a lot of glamour and romance in Uganda, I’m afraid, but not many Americans have even the slightest comprehension about life in a Third World nation, so the learning opportunity seems a bit more valuable than the typical 16-week European holiday semester. Lindsay is a pretty intense person anyway, so that’s fair. She’s only been in-country for a couple of days, so the stories haven’t had time to go too far yet. I hope she sticks with it for the whole time.
The thing that’s fascinating about blogs like these is that you get to learn about the authors as they are learning about themselves. Old geezers like me and Mig and Tony, we are fully-formed creatures for the most part, and if our blogs are revelatory, it’s usually because we carefully choose what we want people to see. Soon enough these young women will be vastly different people than they are right now, and the journeys they have set upon will be the agents of a great deal of that change.
I don’t know if anyone will be blogging at all another decade from now, when Charlotte is old enough to set out on such an adventure. And I genuinely despair that the world will not offer itself up so readily for her then. But even if she doesn’t get to see some exotic far-off place, I know she will find other agents of change that will shape her life, and I hope I get to see it through her eyes just like this.
One of the earliest and best-known original blogs, Jim Romanesko’s “Obscure Store And Reading Room”, is being retired at the end of this week after thirteen years. Romanesko is also giving up his gig blogging for the professional journalism industry website Poynter.org (which *will* remain running). He isn’t giving up blogging, he’s consolidating into a single new site, but the end of Obscure Store is genuinely a milestone in the world of blogging.
I have been a regular reader of the site since the fall of 2000, not long after I launched this website and realized I needed to find some sources if I was going to find things to post with any regularity. From the outset, Romanesko was tuned into enough newspapers and news organizations to have plenty of links to weird news stories, when most of us were still figuring out the whole idea of using the Internet to get and share news. As my blog evolved, I found plenty of other places to find stuff and didn’t very often use his links, but I read it virtually every day. In the olden days, he also had an extremely eclectic blogroll, linking to online zines, other blogs, and unusual websites. A lot of those sites are long since gone and completely forgotten, but it is via Obscure Store that I first came upon MetaFilter, which was also only about a year old in the fall of 2000. Eleven years later, that site remains one of the premiere community sites on the web and is one of my main hangouts online. I believe I also “discovered” FARK through Obscure Store, and the very-much-missed Grow-a-brain.
I’ll be very interested to see how Jim Romanesko’s new site develops, but I will unquestionably miss one of the real legends of the Golden Age of Blogs.
Here’s a pair of posts from a blogger named Mike Gene, who normally writes about “intelligent design” (pace):
Back in 2009, he came up with a list of 10 precepts of intellectual honesty that he felt everyone who engages in the never-ending rhetorical war of the Internet should follow. Given the rather contentious nature of his field and many of the proponents thereof, it is a very measured list of do’s and dont’s that anyone who wants to engage in sincere debate and discourse would want to emulate.
Late last year, he followed that up with a list of “10 signs of intellectual DIShonesty” that he found on another blog, written in response to his original post. The blog where he found it seems not to exist anymore, but he was good enough to share the list, which strikes many all-too-familiar notes about the practices of the “blogosphere” (do we still use that term?), not just in arguing over evolution, but in pretty much everything else.
Both are worth keeping in mind.
Not being a big follower of sports, I had no idea that the Dallas Cowboys were getting a new stadium for the rapidly-approaching 2009-10 season, but apparently they are and it’s open to the public for tours over the next several weeks.
The maximum capacity of the stadium is 100,000 people. Surprisingly, that will only tie it for tenth-largest in the world, according to Wikipedia. North Korea gets the nod for the largest stadium in use, and the largest ever built was Strahov Stadium in Prague, which seated 220,000 (although it is estimated that the ancient Roman Circus Maximus could have held over 250,000 spectators). Nevertheless, it is the largest stadium in the NFL, seating 20,000 more people than the next largest, Giants Stadium.
Blogger John P., who writes “One Man’s Blog” (one of my daily reads), took the stadium tour recently and has a good post about it today, including some excellent photos.
Lately I am bored with everything I see on the Internet. As more and more people flock to Facebook, MySpace and Twitter, they have less and less to say that is the slightest bit worth paying attention to. Like everything else about our culture, it’s “dumbification” pure and simple.
So, I’m even more glad than usual to discover a couple of blogs I hadn’t seen before and gladder still that some of the ones I’ve been reading for a long time can still come up with great posts.
My two favorite “discoveries” are very different beasts. The first one is a blog by long-time comedy writer Ken Levine. Levine was a regular writer for “M*A*S*H*” and “Cheers” and has been involved in many other fine sitcoms over the years. His blog is like getting a table at lunch with the cool kids and finding out all the stuff you always wanted to know about a world you’ll never be a part of. Levine’s blog came recommended via Mark Evanier’s blog, and Evanier himself needs to be nominated as a National Treasure for his devotion to the history of television. Those of you who share my interest in television and show-business history (and you know who you are) would be similarly captivated by Ken Levine.
The second one came to my attention through Adam Gaffin’s Universal Hub. It’s called “Other People’s Emergencies: Random Thoughts of an Urban Paramedic”. As the title implies, it’s written by a guy who is a paramedic, working in Boston. He’s done that job for more than twenty years, and the posts I’ve read so far really show that depth of experience in the sense of having a very unvarnished view about the situations he encounters, without coming across as jaded or burned out on the real tragedies. This post about a shoplifter playing injured to get away from the cops is a typical example of the realities of the jobs of cops, firemen and paramedics in a large city, while this post with a somewhat apocryphal story about an ER resident too quick to cut open a chest is dark humor at its finest.
My blog-buddy John Tolva isn’t exactly burning up the bandwidth with posts to his blog, but the other day he posted this photograph:
It’s a picture of the corner of North Sheridan Road and W. Dakin Street in Chicago as it looks now, with an enlargement of an old photo of John’s father, grandfather, and uncle standing in the exact same spot about fifty years ago. These sort of “past-present” photos are always interesting, and I thought this was a good example, but it also reminded me of a fantastic post John wrote a couple of months ago that told the story of his great-grandparents immigrating to Chicago at the turn of the 20th century and then interwove the tale with a present-day account of him (John) finding himself at the EXACT spot where his great-grandparents lived.
Lastly, a huge shout out to Alan Taylor, one of the small group of online friends I actually know in “real” life via our mutual friend, Andre Torrez. He is the person behind the amazing photo blog that appears daily at Boston.com, The Big Picture. The Big Picture celebrated its first anniversary last week, and in one short year has managed to garner all sorts of awards, praise and imitators. His idea was really simple: every day the Boston Globe, as well as dozens of other newspapers across the country, receive dozens and dozens of news photographs from the wire services, but very few of them are ever actually used in the newspaper or online. His idea was to take the pictures that aren’t used and feature them in large-format, high-definition size, organized topically. After all, the paper pays to get the images, and some of the most spectacular news photos just end up ignored. Alan isn’t a photographer, a journalist, or an editor, he’s a web developer, and he does “The Big Picture” in between all of his regular daily duties for Boston.com. With the fate of the Boston Globe in question, I certainly hope that the New York Times or some other news organization is able to keep this blog available for a long time to come.
Wow, it has been just a smidgin over four years ago since I started out on a whole new adventure in my life by quitting my IT job and trying something completely different: cooking school. My life, however, has never traveled in a linear path, and I wasn’t really sure what I expected to get out of cooking school except a way out of a job that had come very close to killing me (literally). Now, four years later, the path I find myself on at the moment bears almost no resemblance to the one that seemed to lay before me then.
On the other hand, my friend and cooking school cohort Jo Horner had this really lovely post about how the path we set out on back then has taken her exactly where she wanted to go. Her business as a chef instructor and caterer has taken off, even in the present economy. If there is such a thing as a “Happily Ever After”, I think Jo has found it. It’s very reassuring to hear that some people do indeed make good on the promises of change they make to themselves. And she is not the only friend I have who seems to be making headway on lifelong dreams, just the only one I know with a blog to post to about it. :-p
Midlife isn’t the vast empty wasteland that younger people make it out to be. A lot of people allow themselves to be limited by their own outdated models of how the world should be, or by paying more tribute to someone else’s articulation of happiness, and so for them midlife can seem like a trek across a desolate plain, but it is not necessarily so. Even if the path to something wonderful and fulfilling isn’t as straightforward for some of us, I think the opportunity to explore and learn and discover is a pretty good alternative.
I am proud of my friend and happy for her that things have worked out so well, and also for my other friends who are seeing the rewards of their adventures beginning to bear fruit as well. You inspire me and give me the strength to continue my own journey, wherever it may take me.
Links too good not to post, but which don’t have much in common:
The Associated Press has decided that they’re going to charge bloggers who quote more than five words in a row from an AP story, with a minimum charge of $12.50 for a 5-to-12-word quote. Be sure to read Cory Doctorow’s little screed in that BoingBoing link, because he nails it cold.
Meanwhile, in it’s announcement, the AP said it was meeting with some group called the “Media Bloggers Association”, but, as Teresa Nielsen-Hayden discovered, there is no such organization. There’s just some pathetic right-wing blogturd named Robert Cox who passes himself off as a “representative” of bloggers and has put up a site called “Media Bloggers Association” to justify his lame hornblowing. She dissects his shtick pretty thoroughly, so I hope the brain surgeons at the AP have a chance to read about who they’re dealing with before they think they’re going to start collecting any money from anyone.
Why is it that “old media” people have been so utterly unable to understand the mechanics of the “new media”? Thing like this, or the New York Times’ ill-advised “Times Select” paywall, do nothing but shriek out loud the complete cluelessness of the people who run these businesses. Even the television people are finally beginning to not fuck up every single thing they try, but the “dead tree” folks seem to think its still 1919 and William Randolph Hearst runs the world.
A few links related to some previous posts:
All Original Content Copyright © BrianKaneOnline
All Other Content Copyright © Its Original Authors
Built on Notes Blog Core
Powered by WordPress
