"The best tour I took was with a group of radical reference librarians in town for the Anarchist Bookfair in Golden Gate Park."

"The question of accessibility is a question of invitation: will individuals feel
invited to participate in and contribute to a democratic culture or will they live
in a world where most content is corporate-owned and -provided? The
promise of the Internet-as-Alexandria is more than the roiling plenitude of
information. It's the ability of individuals to choreograph that information
in idiosyncratic ways, the hope that individuals might feel invited by the
gravitational pull of a broad and open commons to "rip, mix, and burn"-to curate. This new sort of curator, in effect, is one definition of blogger: an amateur experimental librarian for the Internet, the curator of (in blogger/writer Cory Doctorow's phrase) a digital Wunderkammer,
a private informational choreographer who has made her alignments public."

I love Harper's Magazine.

Nu?

So, what do you think of the banner? BESIDES that it's too big; I already know that.

No, really.

Neither is worse-is-better.blogspot.com...

Today, a little something for my dear friend, Talk-to-the-bird. You know, *that* blog name isn't taken yet... :)

the meta-post

So, the thing is, I'm not sure why I started this blog, or why I somehow feel like I should blog, or what exactly is the Point of All This. The blogs that I like are those of real-life friends (I should say, for one in particular, those of real-life fiends!) of mine or those that are pretty specifically and intelligently about a particular topic. So, why should anyone read *my* blog? What do I have to say? Why do you care?

Ok, if you're my friend, maybe you care because you care about me. But still, if I go on and on about nothing, even you can get bored, right?

And what do *I* get out of this? It's not like I specifically need a place to put my daily thoughts and activities; I already have that and it's called my journal and I write in it nearly every single goddamn day without missing any days except in cases of extreme trauma or extreme exhaustion. (In the latter cases, I almost always make up for it the following day. In the former case... well, I broke up with him and eventually got over the block, more or less.)

I have considered a few different aims, or themes, or raisin-duh-etres for this blog, as follows:
0) I sort of started this around the time I started thinking more seriously of writing fiction, so I thought maybe this would be a good place to post bits of that and see what y'all thought (see this post, for example.) But I haven't really been doing that, and none of you posted on *that* particular posting anyway.
1) I already post my quick thoughts on each book that I read, elsewhere on the web, and I thought about expanding that a bit, since I also like to learn new vocabulary from what I've read, keep track of what I recommend, remember quotations from the books, etc... but it's not clear that I need a new place to do that, separate from where I already do it, and I'm clearly not up to reproducing the effort in two places, since I often fall behind in the one place...
2) I am a teacher, and I learn a lot from teaching. Sometimes I think my focus here ought to be recording my thoughts about teaching, since there are lots of days that I lose sight of my so-called "teaching philosophy" or days that I'm not the best teacher I can be, and maybe recording my daily ideas/triumphs/failures/illuminations about all that could be helpful to myself for remembering and possibly even helpful to others. Plus my students say damned funny things sometimes and I've considered the latest-best-kid-ism theme.
3) I believe the original or truest definition of the blog thing was not "here are my musings" or "here are my pictures" or "here's my diary" but "here's a link to something I found somewhere else on the web that you should see, and also here's my original and insightful commentary on that thing". So I've considered doing *that*, but who am I kidding? There are umptimillion people doing that better than I could... I hardly even surf!

Basically, so far this blog is still totally unformed and camp is imminent which means either: you won't hear anything from me for the next nine weeks and then I'll start all over or not, OR, this'll continue to be an unfocused mash of all of those things until a particular urge gets stronger and it becomes Something Real. In the meantime, if you *are* reading, I hope you'll comment and let me know what you think, because I am clearly casting about alone here :)

AND: Dude who claims to be the BoMD: reveal thyself! I'm tired of waiting :)

What's the name of his other leg?

Ok, I've never been crazy about pirates and pirate crap like some others I know, but I loved this and had nowhere else to stick it, so I'm sticking it here:


I mean, a pirate joke is a pirate joke, but a joke that's pirates + books, I give in. Ha!

Recount / Sure to stirrup controversy

So, twice recently someone has been counting money for me and would have (unintentionally) stiffed me ten bucks if I hadn't've been paying attention: first, at the BANK, the teller couldn't count out $200 for me correctly the first three times she tried it and I said "try again" until she got it right (and then looked incredibly embarrassed and apologized a lot). Then it was the woman giving me cash back at the grocery store who was starting to get annoyed with me when I asked her to re-count, but she too apologized when she realized she owed me ten.

What is this, Florida?

(The deeper question is: seriously, why does Erica need so much cash?)

Also this week, LATAWNA, the Naughty Horse, Learns to say "No" to Drugs. Thanks, Jim; I needed that. (No, wait, what I needed were these reviews on amazon, ohmigod!)

kizmeet

"I can't believe you're still out here!

"It's just that I had about six imaginary conversations with you as I walked out before, and I've just had three more on my way back in... including one in which I told you about this imaginary conversation, and imagined telling you about it and... frankly, it's to the point where I'm lost in the recursion. Anyway, how's the car?"

Send Sympathy

I have three stitches in my head! The first (only?) three stitches of my life. Outpourings of love welcome... as always :)

ultra-violet whaa?

I will, myself, one day lament the dearth of snarkiness in this blog.