Category Archives: Blogs' Archive

Of course, the journalists who write for the science pages have exactly the same motivation as other journalists, which is eyeballs on the page.  You’ve got to have a headline with pizzazz.

More Than Meets the Eye

But, I could live without the phrase “This could rewrite history.”  I saw it today as the headline on an article about the recent discoveries at Stonehenge.  Well, sure.  They will certainly rewrite the history of Stonehenge. They will, almost undoubtedly, shed some new light on the inhabitants of southwestern Britain 4 or 5,000 years ago.  They may even be able to decide whether it was 4 or 5,000 years ago.  They may shed some light on the relationship of those people to civilizations developing elsewhere, i.e. objects may indicate more or less trade and cultural influence than we thought.

But when they say “rewrite history” I think of a discovery that proves Earth was visited by aliens in 5,000 b.c. and they left behind key agents who have been running human society ever since.  If they discover that ancient Britons had television and nuclear weapons, that would rewrite history.

Finding an ancient city on Salisbury Plain is not going to rewrite history in that sense.  It may rewrite the future history of British tourism, but since that isn’t  history yet, it’s more of a pre-write than a re-write.

Which we’re all doing all the time any more.  Every blog, every comment, every uploaded video, even the really bad ones, remains on the internet forever, helping to form the history of the emerging world of the linked human consciousness.

We are pre-writing history.  Let’s make it a nice story, with a happy ending.

Of course it’s sort of an arbitrary point to celebrate the start of our 365 day trajectory around the sun, it’s a circle so any point is as relevant as any other point and it’s not even the start of spring or anything like that, as an internet friend of mine pointed out.  True.  But it’s still just less than 10 days after the solstice, so the days have begun to get longer.  I feel good about this.  I am optimistic about 2015.

In a sense, the winter solstice is to the seasons of the year what the battle of El Alamein was to WWII, in the words of Winston Churchill (more or less, I’m not going to look it up.  It’s New Year’s Eve):  This is not the end.  This is not the beginning of the end.  It is, however, the end of the beginning.

I’m entering into the New Year on a high note, I think.  My first book -like, not poetry or a children’s book, but a big, thick book with lots of words and a story and characters and everything – is almost done.  I’m teaching lots of classes that I enjoy.  The kids are both doing well in school.

So, I am looking forward to the Spring, but I know the world is turning in that direction, so it’s all good.

The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2014 annual report for this blog.

Here’s an excerpt:

The concert hall at the Sydney Opera House holds 2,700 people. This blog was viewed about 15,000 times in 2014. If it were a concert at Sydney Opera House, it would take about 6 sold-out performances for that many people to see it.

Click here to see the complete report.

Well,  we are up at the cottage for a couple of days,  which is not my absolute favorite way to spend a couple of days, but I’ve got all my electronic devices with me, and left all my drugs at home, so maybe I’ll actually get some work  done.

I finished one of the two kindle books I got for Christmas, Reverend America, by Kris Saknussem, an author I highly recommend.  It’s an interesting story, about a boy who’s ‘rescued’ from an orphanage by an itinerant grifter couple and raised to be a  rabble rousing preacher, mostly because he’s an albino and they’re all about the gimmick, and it’s told from his point of view as an old man.

Tomorrow I intend to spend some serious time working  on my  own book.

It snowed last night, even in Prague, so there were a couple of nervous moments on  the drive up, but no serious problems.  I supervised Isabel and her 3 cousins sledding down the hill, which meant also pulling them back up like I was a mule and after doing that a couple of times I persuaded them to build a snowman.  I wanted to persuade them to go back inside,  but there was less hope of that than of getting Americans to accept reasonable limitations on gun ownership.

Watcbed “The Blind Side”  but in  Czech.  It was interesting enough that I want to see it  in  English.

All for tonight.

There were two conversations I had today that made me think about this internet culture we have, this means of communicating both among ourselves and within our collective mind, and just how we should act when we are using it.  There is apparently a great deal of difference in the attitudes of those participating as to what it is O.K. to post, and where.

First, a facebook friend who is a writer I don’t know in real life, although he posts interesting, intelligent stuff.  I don’t always agree with him (although I think we’re certainly close enough in our world viewpoints that we could spend real time time together without resorting to violence),  and when I don’t agree, I have been known to leave sarcastic comments.  Anyway, he wrote that it was out of line for someone to defriend him just because he’d blocked their comment on his page, which made me feel a bit awkward because I’ve unfriended people for precisely that.  If you don’t want to see my comments, then screw you.  However, I’m sure he wasn’t talking to me because, to the best of my knowledge, he has never blocked one of my comments.

The second case is someone I know in real life, who feels it is out of line for people to make sarcastic or aggressive comments on facebook and then when they see you in person, they just act like everything’s fine.  He’s got a point.  Before the internet, the telephone was the scary, depersonalizing technology, but nobody ever says “Oh, that was just over the phone.  I’d never say anything like that in real life.”

But, the internet is a bit  different.  Perhaps because it’s print, there is a less visceral feel to it, so we fell freer to use bad language and make insulting comments.  Perhaps it’s because we are so often communicating with people we don’t know.  That’s an area where I am nervous about slipping up.  When I get into a heated political debate, I have been know to leave such bon mots as “You are the most retarded person on Earth.  You must live in your mother’s basement.  I hate you,” which is something I would never say to one of my real life friends, but the problem is I don’t always check as thoroughly as I should and sometimes people go by different names.

I see the solution to the problem as twofold.  First I, and people like me, need to be a bit more prudent in the kind of things we say, or at least in how we phrase them.  Second, everybody needs to grow a bit thicker skin.  We are communicating more than ever before.  The words are flying like banana cream pies in a silent film comedy.  Things will be said.  Feelings will be hurt.

And life will go on.