Not All Who Wander Are Lost

My name is boyhowdy, and I have a transparent pseudonym.

Yeah, I posted my true wikiname in the previous entry. No, I won't go back. Why change the past when it is yours to embrace? Let the archival cache of the internet, the worlds largest unforgetting elephant, recouple first and second self.

A little research and a bit of close attention to context cues wil bring you to the meat-me, now short of hair but a bit longer of breath since last week's bout with asthmatic bronchitis and the doctor's subsequent mandate for sudden smoking cessation. Yes, me in all my glory: rediscovered by old friends using only the most obvious of keywords no less than thrice a week, on average.

There have been times -- o, many times indeed -- when I would not scream what I would write, would not stand by my words in a crowd. To realize that, as time moves ever onwards, I find myself trustworthy enough to allow myself to be found is without price.

The only problem is that some secrets are not ours to share. In a connected life, some risks cannot be isolated unto the self. Ironically, in a lifetime of wandering, more public means more taboos, content-wise.

And more taboos means a bit less life on the blogblock.

Blog about work? Only if you're willing to stand by your opinion in the potential face of willful parental misinterpretation, and risk family hearth to do so. Blog about the known personal problems of family and friends, however pseudonymic? Only if you accept that their arrival herein could reopen thinskin wounds, regardless of intent.

My parents drop in and watch my brain tick. My wife reads the blog and corrects my embellishments. My pre-literate daughters, in some ways the most important, most intentional of my once-and-future readership, should not have to see my heart and head in anger anywhere, even here.

Symptomatically speaking, for those of us that blog eclectically -- specificially, allowing the personal to intermingle with the professional and vocational -- it's a disconnected life that remains fully public. Unless you're heartless, I suppose. Or have guts I neither want nor afford.

In some ways, it's wonderful to realize that I've placed so much of my life off-limits and off-line. It means (I think) that I'm truly blogging for those close as well as half-imagined, that I blog with love for those I know, and that they visit to recieve it.

And so I take it as a sign of my growing closeness to family and friends that I not only have chosen to protect more of them, but have more of them to protect in the first place, as time goes along.

Sometimes it means more silence. But a little introspection never harmed the psyche in the long run.

And the world remains as rich as ever, ripe for wandering, sweet with wonder. As long as there is you and I, there will always be a blog. Though it may not contain as much of my heart as it once did, there is heart here aplenty, and it is good.

And the rest of the heart? Let's just say it's where it belongs. Another wonder. Another literacy. Another piece of the infinite self.

Let us remember not to treat the blog as the self, for there is always more than words to offer. And silence is, in truth, oft golden.

For my family and friends -- you know who you are.

Scavenged, snipped, and reworked from an email to my father. Because it was blogready, blogrelevant, and plenty linkified...and because it's good Coulton karma.

...The song "Ikea" is downloadable at Jonathan Coulton's website, which I also recommend for the oddest cover of Sir Mix-a-Lot's "Baby Got Back" ever.

I'd generally include direct links to the songs themselves, but Coulton prefers that you visit his page, not just pass along the link. That's partially because he makes these songs available by a Creative Commons licence which allows them to be freely downloaded and traded...but he does ask that, if you like the songs and have some cash, you consider donation in response. And you can't send a donation to an mp3.

Incidentally, Coulton specifically encourages his listeners to consider word-spreading, especially via blog, as donation. Thus, by passing this song to both you and Christina in the past week, I've actually paid him back for his music. It's an interesting post-digital economic model which semi-surprisingly realizes cash profit long-term; Cory Doctorow uses a similar premise, though in his case he doesn't want donations; he's happy to let folks buy books if they want, and seems to be solvent as a result.

It's a pay-what-you-wish potlatch world, I guess. Proof that the anti-mp3-trading folks have got their economics wrong, if nothing else.

More about Jonathan, who is the official Contributing Troubadour of Popular Science magazine, at Wikipedia. Who knew Popular Science had (or indeed needed) an official troubadour?

And the offer for company if you descide to wander out to the new Stoughton Ikea store still stands. It's my kind of place, actually -- all-consuming "nation-as-packaging-frame" commercialism at its most proto-phenomenological. And I'm curious to see exactly how identical the new Stoughton store is to the New Haven store -- supposedly, the storespecs are identical down to the last rivet, as if each Ikea store was a macroversion of the shelving and furniture they've made cheap and famous. Wonder if they deliver the stores in impossibly-heavy flat boxes of component parts, just like our coffee table, couch, and shelving?

...In other and very-much related news, the Eliza Gilkyson song we heard on the radio last night -- the one I was trying to think of this evening on the phone --is, according to amazon.com, "a surprise cover of World Party's 1993 hit "Is It Like Today." (See, I knew the word "world" was in there somewhere.)

The original song got some minor radioplay when it first came out; both Darcie and I recognized it, and she's not much of a pop-musicphile, so it must have been popular enough to stick in our ears all these years. Also possible the song crept into our audio-favor at one of Gilkyson's Falcon Ridge appearances, of course, but I recognized it as a cover song immediately, so the original must be somewhere in the grey matter.

You know I'm a cover nut, so I'm hoping to burn a copy of Gilkyson's Paradise Hotel when we next come in...but if you're feeling like a challenge tech-wise, I'd not object to you digitizing a copy of the song and sending it along as an email attachment...with the caveat that, if you copy it in iTunes, it will end up in a format that I cannot hear without iTunes, which I still cannot install on my laptop because it remains locked administratively, which in turn is merely because I have yet to be in school on the same day as the right technician, and won't be, at least until February.

That is, iTunes will "rip" the CD songs to iStuff-only format UNLESS you specify that you want to make a copy in .mp3 format. Tricky to push iTunes to do that, though. Fastest would be to use your PC-provided MusicMatch software to mp3-format the song.

Okay, that sounded technical even to me. Never mind, I guess. I can wait a couple weeks.

...Interestingly, while the subjectively-obscure Coulton has a full wikipedia article, wikipedia's entry on Eliza Gilkyson consists of ONLY a discography (given the user-created nature of Wikipedia and the general interest of those users, it makes sense that Coulton would get wikified first due to his net-slash-techgeek cache).

Wikipedia refers to Gilkyson's sort of entry as a "stub", meaning it is neither complete nor truly connected to other entries which might mention it. The Wikipedia entry on stub says:

Stubs are articles which have not yet received substantial attention from editors of the Wikipedia, and as such do not yet contain enough information to be truthfully considered articles. The community believes that stubs are far from worthless; they are, rather, the first step articles take on their course to becoming complete.

If you ever want to feel like you've made your mark on the web, adding value to Wikipedia is very satisfying. Or at least I've found it so. If you're there, check for the user "jfarber" (or just cheat by clicking here) to see three of the more recent additions I've made to what is increasingly recognized as a real and valid resource of some significant value, despite the esoteric and (in my opinion) media-overblown "danger" of the wiki-as-resource phenomenon we've discussed before.

Possible trivia tidbit which would help connect Eliza Gilkyson's entry to the rest of Wikipedia, incidentally, is that her brother, Tony Gilkyson, is/has been guitarist for the L.A. punk band "X". Even odder: Tony got his spot as a replacement for Dave Alvin. Amazing how much smaller the world grows each time I go online.

Sometimes you got nothing; sometimes you just need some help winnowing it all down. This week's cartoon caption contest possibilities:

You wouldn't believe what they're doing with stem cells right now.

The moral is, read the prenup.

I'm a sucker for a good maternity leave policy.

We're considering home birth.

Adoption, probably. It's not really a good time right now.

"Shower" sounds so feminine. Just think of it as an excuse to hit the Gap.

We're doubling up for the child credit this year.

I dunno. Where do you think "want to feel the baby kick" falls under our sexual harassment policy?

Vote below if you dare.

Think you can do better? Voting closes the 23rd over at The New Yorker...

In the first place, the idea of gum that tasted like -- what, nothing? cigarette filters? what? -- was just a bit too weird. I'd started with the mint, and stuck with it through the introduction of a surely nasty Orange flavor; it seemed safe to assume that gumflavored gum was best.

Then one day all they had was Original Flavor Nicorette.

I've been chewing nicotene gum for a while now, ever since I first tried to quit in earnest. Since then, multiple failed quit-dates have come and gone, but the gum stays regardless, ready to serve as barely acceptable nicfit substitute for long flights, long drives, and the occasional long meeting.

For most of that time, chronologically, I've been an occasional minteater.

But then I started teaching again, and the schedule doesn't allow cigarette breaks. I started taking a piece of gum before lunch, and couple more through my last classes.

And what we had was that Original flavor stuff, which -- honestly -- was bitter and tingly in weird places. Chewing it felt like chewing cardboard.

But somewhere along the line, I began to look forward to that odd taste. I relished the first burst of flavor, began to detect subtleties of foretaste and aftertaste. Nicotene gum got good to me. Like a friend.

And then, this week, I actually figured out how to quit.

Since Tuesday, I've chewed up half a box of that jaw-stiffening tingly treatment -- an hour or so of oral delivery at 4 mg and just about 70 cents a pop. But we ran out in Boston over the weekend, and all they had at the WalGreens was that mint stuff.

Each piece of which is too soft, too strong, too sweet, and two sizes too small.

I miss the full rich original flavor of nicotene gum. Oh, that hint of wax. Worth rooting through old coat pockets for.

Acquired tastes are funny. Beer once tasted bitter; moldy cheese was for playground jokes and cheese plates for company, not midnight pate-and-bagel snacks. I've just started eating fish in the past few years, after an oversensitive lifetime of strong icthyo-gag reflex. Caviar's not good to me yet, but it will be.

If experience matures what nurture and environment create, my daughters' tastes will not be mine. Already at 3 and a half to the dot, Willow talks southern barbecue, exotic vegetables, sushi; kani was one of her first words and her favorite finger food. Baby Cassia at 9 months prefers flute to drum, abstract concepts to concrete nouns, veggie puffs to anything. To wonder where they will wander from here is to envision a great and centering path before each.

Not everything can be acquired, of course. Nor is it all worth acquiring. Quite the contrary. We cultivate such simple singled-out pleasures not to consume, but to specialize, to reinvent ourselves in careful pleasures, to savor.

But you have to start somewhere. Choosing your path may be a constant affirmation, but it's knowing thyself that makes it all worthwhile.

And, once you've found them, a good country pate, some Eliza Gylkyson, a good idea, a keyboard, and thou make for a pretty damn rewarding oasis. Pass the gum.

Birthday, Marc Chagall

33 years ago today your host boyhowdy popped into the world just an hour before Superbowl VII kickoff time, and boy, was the doctor relieved. (Factoid: in beating the '73 Redskins, the Miami Dolphins became the first NFL team to go undefeated in a season. But I think the Doctor was just happy to get to see the game.)

Authors born on this day, according to A Book of Days for the Literary Year: Hugh Lofting, creator of the Dr. Dolittle series; John Dos Passos; Tokyo novelist, playwright, and son of samurai Yukio Mishima (Kimitake Hiraoka). Also, according to Wikipedia: pro crankyman Andy Rooney, musician's musician T-Bone Burnett, alt-director Steven Soderburgh, and LL Cool J. Also Paul Anka's son-in-law, Jason Bateman.

Probability tells us that as the number of people in the room hits fifty, the odds that two people in it share the same birthday anniversary approaches 1 pretty darn fast. I get over fifty hits a day.

So. Jan 14th. Anyone else?

An interesting consideration of online friends as "imaginary" courtesy of my blogexplosion battle opponent FyreGoddess. I've actually pointed out as much to my students, have encounted plenty of phenomenological ramifications, and concur with much of the good Goddess' assessment, however subjective the experiences that led us to this.

(In my case, one such experience involves my own joy and surprise at receiving a CD from a previously-online friend over the summer when I needed it most. Imaginary friends can't burn CDs, can they?)

The question of what is real, especially outside the self, has always been a fun one for phiosophers to toss around. Also true: the concept of "real" gets slippery in a half-virtual world. Rather than drag out the old college textbooks, it's worth pointing out that full participation in the world of textuality without tonality -- i.e. the half-there persona we see through the glowing screen -- requires clothing others with the imagination.

Everything from Trolling to the rapidity with which online folks tend to open their minds and hearts to each other comes back, ultimately, to the fact that we must clothe that username, that language, that origin, that other in some sort of self-generated humanity in order to make use of it. Even the tendency to forget that the global includes the local -- a fact that has caused much hot water for an unforgettable few of my blogging students over the years -- is merely risk and ramification of this absolutely vital approach to being, truly, digital.

On the other hand, the associated truth -- that those who are both most imaginative and most able to remember that it is their own imagination that clothes these online denizens are those who will ultimately be most successful in the online world -- makes me happy, too.

Other half-productive wandering today included a first-glance at Webster's new open-source space -- a nice healthy way of keeping language real and fluid from an otherwise traditionally high-culture source -- and a few turns tightening up entries on everything from old employers to fave cheesy fantasy author Lawrence Watt-Evans over at Wikipedia. An interesting pair, that. Gotta do something with all that time on my hands -- might as well add value to the universe.

Doctor's check-up for the three-year old today; I didn't go, but Willow's favorite plaything is her own doctor's kit, so -- no surprise -- she loved every minute of it. Save one: Daddy, next time I go to the doctor, I'd like to pee in the toilet, not in a cup, okay? Thought for a while this might prove a good learning opportunity, but on second thought, maybe it's better not to dwell on the idea of pee as worthy of study. There's a reason toy doctor's kits don't include urine-testing equipment.

According to Howdyspouse Darcie, the new pediatrician suggests we start giving the kid choices for behavior, but backs off quick when informed that we've stopped doing so, as this kid responds to choice-sets with no, Daddy, that's not the choices; I'LL tell you the choices right now.

In other news of the precious, at just under nine months, baby has begin her own path towards self-sufficiency. Tonight at supper she looked down at three neat piles of chopped broccoli, chicken and rice, immediately swept 'em to the floor, looked me right in the eyes, and said Play!. She ultimately accepted a juice box and some healthy veggie puffs as a temporary substitute, though we spotted her trying to stuff the last bit of broccoli into her pacifier when she thought we weren't looking.

Me? Still sick and a bit delirious from the sudden nonsmoking, but hoping I get my strength back pretty soon. It takes a pretty strong will to stay on top in this homestead.

10. Stuff that gets smaller

9. The top four movies starring that guy who's only in, like, four movies

8. Things you found in the glove box of a rental car once

7. Potato chips: 1987

6. Everything under a dollar!

5. 50 more ways to leave your lover

4. A lifetime of brunch!

3. Dress shirts wanted to buy later but didn't

2. Where I've seen ducks

1. Nine kind visitors have exposed themselves in honor of National De-Lurking Week. Won't you join them by leaving a comment? I promise not to point and laugh.

2. Though BoingBoing editors chose not to post my comparative stylistic analysis of Mark and Cory's posts on the same subject -- in all probability because it was both a) a bit too meta and b) not so much news as it is pseudointellectual fiddle-around -- Cory was kind enough to stop by to acknowledge and clarify.

[UPDATE 1/13 1:24 am: Mark stopped in, too -- and declared himself tickled by the whole idea!]

Other than to mention what an honor it was to interact with ~~a much-admired writer~~ two much-admired writers we'll save any subsequent consideration of the effect of the Internet on fandom for another day.

3. Still sick. Still delirious. Still not smoking. Still listening. Still not reading; good thing I read ahead.

In other news: there are so many things wrong with paying teachers based on student performance, I don't know where to begin. So I won't.

An interesting coincidence of simulposting over at BoingBoing this evening provides a nifty opportunity to explore the difference in posting styles of fellow BBhosts and all-around amazing gentlemen Mark Frauenfelder and Cory Doctorow. Analysis follows, but first, just in case it goes away, a look at the doublepost in question:

Subtle differences abound. Some of the more obvious:

The blogentry titles are significantly different. Cory’s post title celebrates the cookbook itself; Mark’s refers to a "scanned copy OF" the cookbook. Meanwhile, Mark uses and capitalizes the actual name of the cookbook, and the longform of the year (1950s) while Cory shortens both, making for a shorter title overall

Note the different choice of pic. Given the same source info, Mark went for the oddest inside-the-book pic, thus reinforcing Cypher’s language (and a WHOLE SECTION just for…) while Cory goes for the equally weird but much more colorful cover. Shape and layout come into play here, too -- wide vs. tall pics frame the text differently; I wonder if either choice was made with visual impact of the overall entry in the larger context of the page itself in mind?

Given the same information, Cory provides a backlink w/thanks to the poster and also a link to the material posted, though they are arguably/ultimately from the same sourcehuman. Mark, on the other hand, provides no such double-link to Cypher, though his site is not the same as the ground meat cookbook site.

Mark eliminates the redundant wordage (ground meat, from the 50s) from the content, since it’s in the title. Cory allows the redundancy, thus preserving (we assume) Cypher's original quote.

Cory capitalizes the sender’s name, and uses the ubercool “sez” to introduce Cypher’s original language. Mark uses actual English words but does not capitalize "cypher".

Also worth including, if anyone decided to take this up as a thesis topic, would be the context, both before and after. Has this happened before? Is there some protocol for Mark and Cory to follow from here? Once the incident has come to the attention of the four bloggers over at BoingBoing, will the two posts be mashed-up into one single post, or will one ultimately be dropped by someone -- and, if the latter, by whom: the original poster, the "other guy," or perhaps a third party, such as Xeni?

With or without such aftermath-watching, a more detailed, thesis-level analysis would necessarily note that much of the difference in style is consistent with the obvious difference in perspective that both Mark and Cory bring to the table. There are few surprises, in fact -- stylistically, these differences could have been predicted by us regular BoingBoing readers with some accuracy.

In closing, then: the opportunity to close-read this massively popular web compendium is priceless; glad we could be there to see it.

And a caveat: No disrespect or even critique of either Cory or Mark is intended herein. Each is enjoyable -- incredible, I daresay, and inspirational to boot -- in his own way, both on BoingBoing and in other ventures, digital and non-. It wouldn't be BoingBoing without them. I'm just glad they're each unique.

UPDATE: 2:56 am:

If my read of posting times is accurate, Cory -- who was online anyway, posting other material -- seems to have withdrawn his post. Happily, the screenshot above is going nowhere. Now: will the folks at BoingBoing think this worthy of passing along to their readers?

Expose yourself, darn it!

Blogexplosion claims to bring in 40 hits a day, but I get few-to-no comments on the inanity herein. Why not change your tune, just this once, and leave a comment in honor of National De-Lurking Week? Anything accepted, from friendly shout-outs to evil trollishness; pick a post below or hit me up with some randomness herein, just leave your footprint before wandering off, eh?

Look, I hate to beg, but this is a national holiday, for blog's sake. In return, I promise to actually clicky-clicky and recipro-visit your blog. Maybe we'll both learn something.

Hint for Blogexplosion surfers: commenting on bloggerblogs doesn't seem to work in frames; open comment boxes in a NEW window in order to correctly enter the secret prove-you're-not-a-bot code. The secret bonus in this workaround: you can comment here while moving on for credits there simultaneously.

Being home sick -- alone, for much of the day, since Wednesday is library storytime and preschool playgroup day -- has left me to my own devices, and despite the lure of more high-culture textuality on the shelf before me, I'm finding the attention span just isn't there for more serious literature than a daily double-dose of well-thumbed Heinlein.

I'd love to drop down for more floor-based babytime, but the mere thought of doubling over brings up the nasty raspy, even with a new steam vaporizer happily albeit ineffectively bubbling away at my feet.

Instead, all this time on my fingers has led to more screen time in 48 hours than I tend to average in a week. And I teach computers.

So far, my addled state plus an effectively endless amount of time at the computer has me posting drivel to both the group blog of total inanity and the workblog just to keep from wasting the brainbuzz. Especially proud of my post on the workblog, incidentally -- most edublog topics for the lowtech middle school level have been done to death, but I suspect edu-folks have not yet thought much about trying to harness the ubiquitous student iPod for curricular good.

But there's only so much one can write without the ability to think logically. Thus, a day of mostly-surfing has also brought me everything from this low-tech NaNoWriMo lite to Cory Doctorow's totally engrossing comparison of personal experiences with misrepresentation in both Wikipedia and in the "real" press, in which he presents evidence subjectively but clearly, and ultimately concludes that

it's clear that if you're going to have your name dragged through the mud, it's a better deal if it comes at the hand of an anonymous Wikipedia troll than from a paid journalist in a mainstream news-source.

Glad you quit your day job, Cory. Looking forward to that next longform essay.

Daily telemarketer experiences indicate that a certain Mr. Robert Shoemaker had this phone number before we picked it up in October.

A serious spate of those annoying calls where you run to get the phone and no one is there suggests that reaching Robert is high on someone's priority list.

Although it is tempting to try beating the telemarketers at their own game, I'd rather do so on my own behalf. As such, if anyone knows Mr. Shoemaker, do please let him know that we'd be happy to order more vinyl siding for him, but cannot do so unless we know how much more he needs. Thanks!

Teaching remotely -- via one-page instructions to a class substitute you've never met, in this case -- is getting a bit odd. Instruction via full network potential is one thing -- I've done the blog/chat/forum/courseware thing myself, as teacher and student, and I hope next time to post instructions for labs and webquests on a blog, then send in the address -- but curriculum without pedagogy isn't really my thing. For all my classroom discourse about King Content, I never really meant to shave style from substance.

On the other hand, quitting smoking on the fly turned out to be a breeze. 8 cigs since Sunday was all I had been able to gag down anyway, and most of that wasted. Hard to tell if the illness, the meds, or just the sheer mental weirdity that immediately follows the quitmoment is to blame (yes, I've done this before) but man, am I flying.

Been hard hanging with the kids much, though. Cassia asks me to hold her all the time, but I don't have the stamina to dance; Willow was a peach in the doctors office -- lots of curious questions, though I was little help explaining the stirrups -- but I miss being able to lie down with her at the end of the day and make up yet another story of Simon and his magic chalk, sing quietly of the things she is not (trees, birds, ceilings, floors, bed, pillow, ad infinitum) until her own breathing becomes heavy and I slowly, carefully, slip my arm out from under her neck and sneak away.

Heck, I miss being able to lie down. Stupid lungfluid.

Once bonus of being upright so long with little work to do and no alarm clock to follow is the time catching up on the virtual world. Mock The Stupid and Overheard in New York are guilty pleasures delivered in big gulp size. Elsewhere, the AV Club interviews a surprisingly sedate, thoughtful Fred Armisen, and sequel week over at McSweeneys brings us a hilarious account of The 4 Year Old On A Blind Date, which sounds much less funny than it turns out, trust me. It's not all funny, either -- I even managed to learn some stuff, though don't ask how I ended up there...or what, exactly, one learns from discovering a multiply-feminist critique of copyright laws.

Once you have children, listening to music with headphones becomes a much more fulfilling experience. Especially good music. And I ain't talkin' no iBuds, either. Gillian Welch into Steve Earle, warm and fuzzy on my ears? Maybe it's the 10th hour of nonsmoking talkin', but it just doesn't get better than that.

Though Byrne's playlist is enough to make me regret skipping that Laura Cantrell show that night in San Francisco with Dad all these months ago. Hey, Dad, there's some great downloadables over on her website; I especially like this toned-down cover of Letters, and this Bragg and Wilco cover. Oh, and where the heck did Doug Sahm come from? This rocks, man.

Spent the day at a series of medical errands, from doctor's office to pharmacy to nearby hospital for X-rays (to rule out pneumonia; results tomorrow).

Diagnosis so far: a severely contagious and long-lasting acute asthmatic bronchitis.

Now I'm sequestered home until next Tuesday on doctor's orders, with five different kinds of meds for all sorts of primary and secondary symptoms -- from the bronchial wheeze to the starburst headaches and gushing nosebleeds I get from coughing too hard.

As an added bonus, according to the nurse practitioner, I have now officially quit smoking whether I like it or not. I think her actual words were "Unless you want to spend the rest of your life on oxygen and steroids, you just smoked your last cigarette."

Let's see...a pack and a half a day times 18 years...carry the one...yeah, that sounds about right. 197,100 cigarettes and I'll be stopping just like that. No problem, hun.

Congratulations accepted in the comments below. What with the usual symptoms of cold turkey quitting, the uppers and downers in the meds, and my 33rd birthday on Sunday, it's going to be a pretty odd week from here.

Via BoingBoing:

Last Thursday, President Bush signed into law a prohibition on posting annoying Web messages or sending annoying e-mail messages without disclosing your true identity...

Of course, the statute doesn't define annoyance. And, as Declan McCullagh reminds us in the above-quoted article, there are plenty of legitimate reasons to lean on anonymity, from blogging about a boss' sexual harassment to sending an anonymous "Letters to the Editor" via email...not to mention the developmental benefits of identityplay.

But "Preventing Cyberstalking," an innocuously titled easter egg squirreled away in the otherwise unrelated Violence Against Women and Department of Justice Reauthorization Act, is no joke: Criminal penalties include stiff fines and up to 2 years in prison.

See you in jail, folks.

Counterpoint: More Anonymity Is Good, Wired Editor-At-Large Kevin Kelly's suddenly much-more-dangerous idea. Also via BoingBoing.

Oddly Disappointing Update, 3:45 pm:
According to the resulting BoingBoing thread, the new act does not do what we think it does, and the word "annoy" dates back to my thesis subject: the Communications Act of 1934.

Fat Lady Hasn't Sung Yet Second-Tier Update, 5:37 pm: After hearing these critiques, McCullagh continues to maintain that the law has indeed changed as he described it. Question mark added to entry title in response.

File under 52 Books in 52 Weeks

Home sick, which explains both the unusually avid blogging (see features on David Byrne's Radio Mix and The World Question Center below) and the completion of a second book in my 52 Books series: The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2005.

I've enjoyed the Best American series for years -- my parents tend to buy me the Best Essays and Best Fiction collections for Hanukkah, and I find the collections thorough, well-selected, and ultimately prized. The addition of Dave Eggers to the mix in 2002 brought a new perspective but no less scintillating a selection criteria: this year, Eggers and his crew of intelligent, iconoclast adolescents have once again found the best of short writing from all over the Dewey Decimal map, fiction and non- alike. I'd single out a few short pieces for special note, but they're all that good. Really.

Never posted a review of McCourt's Teacher Man, the first book of my 52, finished over the weekend, but that's okay -- just read it, for the wry voice and the storytelling. Even if the teacher stories don't resonate, it's a quick read of hidden depth, easily and skillfully mixing tales of McCourt's development as a teacher over 30 years with his personal history outside and before his life in the classroom.

Next on the list: McKibben's The Age of Missing Information.

For those keeping track, updated booklists will live on the sidebar, over that way ------>

BoingBoing -- who loves Jim White as much as I do -- points to this month's playlist over at Radio DavidByrne.com: a wonderous and well-selected assortment of neo-country, clocking in at four hours plus, featuring the unquestionable best of Lucinda Williams, Wilco & Billy Bragg, Emmylou Harris, Jim White, Waylon Jennings, Lyle Lovett, Shelby Lynne, Laura Cantrell, et. al.

Byrne's monthly radiostream comes complete with genre-defining liner notes of the highest quality; past month playlists from this metamusician have included classic country, old-school club music, psychadelic artists new and not-so, italian classical, and single-artist features from Missy Elliot to Bob Zimmerman.

Posted with my father in mind, but recommended for pretty much anyone with ears. And acceptable bandwidth, of course.

What if The Bell Jar wasn't wrong after all? Is the world fundamentally inexplicable? Will parenting require licensure in just two generations? Is school inherently bad for kids? Are there some ideas so dangerous that the world's best and brightest should not (and do not) mention them, let alone discuss them?

Each year, The World Question Center asks over a hundred of the brightest minds in science and technology to consider one question. This year:

What is your dangerous idea? An idea you think about (not necessarily one you originated) that is dangerous not because it is assumed to be false, but because it might be true?

Answers range from religion to race to reality in evry shape and size; from the complexity of "The simulation and the real have become permanently and inacceptably interchangable" to the irresistable simplicity of "This is all there is." Each is mystifying and thought-provoking -- even those few which merely respond that some ideas are SO dangerous they should not be spoken.

Plan on hours to read terrifying "what-if" results from the likes of George and Freeman Dyson, Sherry Turkle, Clay Shirky, Stewart Brand, Richard Dawkins, Howard Gardner, Diane Halpern, Michael Nesmith (!), Stephen Pinker, and a holy host of fellow futurists, psychologists, historians, builders, makers, shakers, and science-types. You'll never look at the world the same way.

I blogged about this last year, too!

You sound really sick today, Daddy. You should take some pills or something.

Yesterday it was a cold, the full-blown worst of the season: sneezy, achy, chilly, brain-fog-to-the-point-of-hallucination, compounded by the irritation of dust and dander kicked up by a flurry of pre-guest cleaning until the lungs felt like fire, the head felt like cotton wool.

It drove me from the in-laws house to a surprisingly head-clearing trip to downtown Brattleboro, where I finished the last few pages of McCourt's Teacher Man over a latte, and ogled a man in a tree playing guitar to the aging hippies walking by, the usual crowds of halfgrown Saturday smokers loitering there, cool, backs against the bricks in the midtown lot.

But respite was short-lived. Last night it was something else again: stuffed and tired to the point of delirium, a hazy nose-bleeding two hours down south and home again, all funereal dinners quickly forgotten in the rush to return.

This morning it's full-blown bronchitis, a familiar and feared annual visitor. I can barely breathe; my limbs and head ache alternately icecold and feverfuzzy; the headache teeters on the edge each time I cough my penultimate rasp, desperately drawing breath. Hot showers, horseradish, even forced glasses of juice and water have little effect.

Five classroom days per section to the end of the semester and a wholesale changeover of students at work -- after two days funeral leave, it's tempting to go in tomorrow just to make sure their last days are cohesive, since my hybrid position rates no substitute willing to actually carry on curriculum. But alas, I know this weakness; know that tomorrow and perhaps the next day too I will be neither sensible nor clear for my students or myself. Pity, that -- there was so much left to do.

Woke up to a leg cramp: the world's best alarm clock, gets you on your feet in a hurry.

Outside among the stillwhite trees some sort of precipitate fills the air like a shimmery scrim. We're off North to help with the arrangements for Darcie's Grandmother, so I head down to check for forecasted driving conditions online.

To my surprise, according to the map on Weather.com, though the surrounding states run from light snow to rain, we're dead center in a totally dry spell.

Just then, the air clears outside.

Two days of funeral leave off from work; we'll be back in Brattleboro by noon. Taking Teacher Man with me; if all goes well, I'll post my first report from my 52 Books project when I return, or sooner.

After years teaching kids and adults to be aware of gender issues in media and technology application, I consider myself a media-sensitive feminist.

My wife and I have made a conscious decision to try to raise our children without the traditional trappings of dick-and-jane societal gender preconcepts. For years we have spoken of heterosexual marriage, for example, as but one of many possible options for our daughters -- both in our own conversations and in talking to them about their own eventual choice-making.

All the more ironic, then, that after hi, dadi, kitty, doggy, tree, light, and a holy host of proper nouns, the 8 month old suddenly smiles today and begins naming parts of the universe pretty.

Maybe she learned it from the three-year-old. Sigh. And they both treasure dolls more than anything. Guess there's some serious nature involved in gender identification after all.

Note to self: buy conditioner...

Cory calls it: though the Erasable Shower Note Tablet could come in handy, getting great ideas from shower to organizer (or, in my case, to brain) remains a problem.

Still, a neat present for the man who has everything, including a constant stream of good ideas. Waterproof crayons could come in handy elsewhere, too.

Now, if only someone would create an archivable/tranferrable solution for ideas logged in the car, I'd be all set.

She was old when I knew her -- the family matriarch, widowed decades earlier, long a solo presence in the life of my in-law family. Though a vague persona down the road apiece when I first met Darcie's family, by the time we married ten years ago she was in the house next door to Darcie's parents, and we visited her often, cleaning her garden, raking leaves in the fall, chatting on the porch, washing the windows in the spring.

She was opinionated, and -- truthfully -- often oddly so. Her closest relatives found themselves on "the bad list" for the most minor transgressions, often without even realizing how they got there. Early in our acquaintance I got myself in hot water at a holiday dinner by defending the recently-learned concept of situational ethics; it was months before she was willing to forgive, and there's no knowing if she truly ever forgot.

She was religious, a commited churchgoer and knitter for church sales until her very last driving days. Rumor has it that when she first learned I was Jewish, she asked if I was "one of those Jews for Jesus, at least" -- figuring, with little knowledge of the true JfJ credo, that belief in Jesus would be a saving grace for a grandson-in-law.

Edith was always given the head of the table at any gathering, where she could hold court with reminiscence: of growing up one of seven siblings on the farm, life with husband Harry home and off in the military, her years in the classroom. It became a kind of family tradition for those of us in the grandchild generation to run new prospective mates through the tiral by fire -- I did it for years; Josh's girlfriend Clay reminds me that I made it a point of handing the responsibility to her the first time we met; most recently, Alicia's husband Matt has held the honor -- and his own -- with aplomb.

Her family -- three daughters, six grandchildren -- loved her very much, and with good reason. She loved my children, and was gentle and firm with them in turn. And, in case it isn't obvious, I liked her a lot, which is more than most of us can say for our grandmother-in-laws, isn't it?

Edith never wanted to grow infirm in her old age. She was a trouper for so long this last year, watching her TV and filling every surface in the house with jigsaw puzzles in various stages of completion as always, even as the memory started to go, the body started to betray. It surely saddened her to have to move towards assisted living these last few weeks, initially prompted by a stay in the hospital.

She seemed healthier Friday, coming off a half hour of physical therapy for a short chat and plenty of close contact with four generations of her family. But last night Edith ended up in the hospital again, and today Darcie's father called to let us know that Edith did not make it.

It's what she wanted, but whether Edith was right about the world and its afterlife is not the point. The point is, though it took a little longer than she intended, she went out the way she lived -- on her own terms, flying solo, and sure of herself. I'm proud to have known her, and know that she is happier where she is now. Goodbye, old gal. We'll miss you terribly.