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Year: 2005

Blogging and Writing

December 16, 2005 • • 3 Comments

I’ve been blogging a little over two months now, and it seems a good time to stop and take stock of this new world that I’ve joined. One thing I love about the blogosphere is that it’s such a dynamic world. This is a world that is changing constantly, moving alongside the static internet and the offline world with its own rules, ideas, insights, opinion-makers and landscape. I feel like I’m part of a vast library that is being written as I type this. It’s a library in which the texts are all connected and alive like neurons in a brain. It’s also a library in which the small stories of people’s lives unfold alongside the big ones that make history, connecting and interacting in fascinating ways, either through posts or blogrolls. When I think about this, I feel lucky to be a part of it, though still a newcomer.

I also enjoy reading the daily posts on my favorite blogs. I love discovering the treasures and unknown musings of some fantastic writers and unknown thinkers, publishing their insights in this most perfect DIY medium. That do-it-yourself aspect is my favorite part. Anyone can publish and find an audience, albeit in most cases a small one. Filmmakers and musicians have been putting their work out independently for years, now writers can as well.

I love knowing that sometimes something I’ve written has moved a fellow blogger to comment or respond through email. That’s a great feeling. As is looking at the site stats and seeing regular readers, known only as familiar strings of IP address numbers, emerge in places where I don’t know anyone. For a writer, finding readers is a profound and moving experience. So to you who tune in regularly, thank you. You make my day.

I learn quite a bit by reading things that I wouldn’t have found on the static web. I’m learning about life, about writing, about the internet, about HTML and CSS, about politics, about everything.

And writing everyday, I learn about myself too.

That’s the best part: Writing on a daily basis again, even when it’s just quick posts has been great for me. I generally haven’t done it for years. I tended to set aside large blocks of time – a few hours a week, a summer vacation, a weekend day. But I never maintained that all important constant practice that is so essential. It feels like part of me is waking up again and that’s a nice feeling. I find myself more motivated than ever to either submit or self-publish that second novel that’s sitting on the hard drive, to get past page one of the third one that’s half-written in my head and in notes and outlines in my drawer.

And so, running the risk of laying it on a bit thick, I throw some Thoreau that comes to mind whenever I think about embarking on new adventures such as the beginnings of this blog and the start of new projects: “Only that day dawns to which we are awake. There is more day to dawn. The sun is but a morning star.”

So there it is. This experiment that I started in part as a way to give myself something to think about other than my dog who passed away a few months ago has gone from being just an experiment to being a regular part of my life, somewhere between a hobby and a way to work on my work.

And now, I promise no more blogging about blogging for awhile.

Cyber-Regionalism

December 15, 2005 • • 2 Comments

When I used to teach Fahrenheit 451, the classes always got into interesting discussions about the effects of mass culture on local variety. My students found nothing odd about the fact that one can drive from Miami to Seattle and eat in the same highway restaurants and stay in the same motels, all the while listening to the same music that everyone else is enjoying, and if you look at the other travelers in the other cars, most of them, regardless of where their plates say they’re from, will be wearing the same clothes from the same stores. One can get this impression from traveling through airports as well. I’ve often wondered what, if anything, is lost when our whole country develops this kind of paste-pudding sameness (to paraphrase Bradbury).

Many kids found it comforting. I find it disturbing. I like eating different foods, hearing new music and strange accents, but it seems to be quite difficult to find anything uniquely local anymore except in a few places (such as Austin – “Keep Austin Weird”) where concerted efforts are made to hold on to what originally made that place unique. If you want to see what some little one-horse town has that makes it special, you have to look pretty hard. Often you’ll find relics of what once made it special, but the place will be closed, the event cancelled, the people dead, senile, or moved away.

But then I start thinking about how many of us find our little niches online. How many CDs by obscure low-fi indie rock bands from random cities do I own? I know people from Chicago who’ve never heard of The Sea and Cake or Tortoise or Sam Prekop. So I start thinking that perhaps regionalism isn’t so much dead as perhaps it’s moved. Perhaps we still have our regional variety and local culture, but without material landscape. Instead we have sites that we inhabit and with whose denizens we share common interests and concerns be they movies, books, music, politics, religion, philosophy, whatever. It seems oddly comforting to think that we still have our hometowns despite the fact that they’ve gone digital.

The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe

December 14, 2005 • • Leave a comment

Last weekend, we went to see the latest big fantasy-based-on-literature blockbuster (a genre for which I’m a sucker): The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. It’s been a few years since I read the book, but I felt the filmmakers did a nice job bringing this story to the screen, which must have been a tricky task. CS Lewis provided great lengths of potential rope for filmmakers to hang themselves: talking animals, Santa Claus, child actors, unicorns. It’s all there, potential landmines to raise the audience cringe factor, and yet they pulled it off. Even Santa. It’s sometimes cute, but never cutesy.

There has been much made about the politics and religious subtext of this film, but my advice is put that aside and go for the ride because it’s quite a ride. If you want a Gospel allegory or a call to destroy evil, it’s there for the taking, but it’s not so overt that one feels beaten into submission to a message afterwards. First and foremost, this is well-crafted and lovingly-designed entertainment. The battle scenes are exciting and choreographed in the Peter Jackson/Lord of the Rings style that has become the new standard. The sound production at the very start of the big battle is amazing and must be experienced in a theater.

More importantly, though, Director Andrew Adamson does a nice job bringing out the underlying emotions and conflicts within the hearts of his young characters: Peter’s desire to fight for a cause; Susan’s logical skepticism; Edmund’s need for independence from his siblings; Lucy’s adventurousness. There are also moments of humor, fear, sadness and horror such as when Aslan upholds his end of the bargain with the White Witch. You know what happens if you’ve read the book, but it’s still terrifying and heartbreaking.

It’s a fun movie that gets the story right. If you have read the book, you won’t find anything especially new or insightful here, but it’s well-worth a trip to the theater and probably a second viewing when it comes out on DVD. I’ll be looking forward to the impending string of sequels.

New Template for Coyote Mercury

December 12, 2005 • • 2 Comments

I’ve been playing. Wanting to take my template tinkering to a new level, and because I enjoy fiddling with things, I decided to change the template for my blog, as I’m sure you’ve by now noticed. The three column template came from Thur’s Templates, and was very easy to set up. It took a few hours to insert all the add-ons and hacks I had in my previous template, but now that it’s done, I’m happy.

One cool thing about this is that it’s very easy to change the colors since Thur’s Templates has this in blue, white, and tan in addition to the grey. You just paste in a new CSS section and – Shazam! – a different color.

If things look out of whack with your browser/monitor combination, please leave a comment and let me know. Thanks.

Weekend Hound Report: Staying Warm

December 11, 2005 • • Leave a comment

Sweaters arrived just a day late for The Blizzard of 2005… er… The Ice Storm of 05…no wait…The Day It Got Below 20 and Some Bridges and Overpasses Froze of 2005:

Hounds in Sweaters

For you non-greyhound people out there, we’re not trying to humiliate our pups by dressing them up. They have no body fat to insulate themselves and so really do need sweaters when it gets cold, but even without sweaters, nobody froze. Phoebe (in red) revealed herself to be something of a scientist, carefully scratching, licking, sniffing and nosing every patch of ice on the back porch in an effort to determine the meaning of it all.

Daphne (in blue), who is a little less intellectual, displayed her alter-ego “dangerous greyhound” and kept trying to run full-speed across the icy patio and up the frozen stairs to the glass backdoor. Happily no bones were broken, and some cat litter on the steps helped her keep traction.

When the sweaters arrived, they tried them on and even though the weather had warmed considerably, the dogs seemed to enjoy wearing them. I suppose they know when they look good.

By the way, the sweaters came from Classy Canine, and they’re great.

[saveagrey]

Party Pooping

December 9, 2005 • • 3 Comments

After reading Burnt Orange Report’s post concerning speculation that Carole Strayhorn might abandon the Republican party (as she once abandoned the Democratic party) to run for Texas governor as an independent, I half-facetiously commented with this:

I like the idea of someone who has officially rejected both parties considering that joining a party seems to be the first step towards political corruption. Perhaps people who join parties ought to be stripped of their right to run for office. We should still let them vote though, I suppose.

Thinking about it a day later, I like the idea even more.

It seems to me that someone who has officially quit both parties isn’t as likely to be told what to do by outside interests. I’ve always felt that people who believe that one party is more or less corrupt than the other are only kidding themselves. The basic problem is that once politicians get entangled in a party, their loyalties shift from their constituents to the party they rely upon for coin. This seems, more often than not, the root of a number of political problems that we see today ranging from the crooked financial dealing being exposed in congress to Bush family cronyism to actions that hover in the gray world between political revenge and treason.

I have no problem when people say that they are liberal, conservative, libertarian (with a lowercase l), moderate, whatever. I am deeply suspicious, though, of anyone who says he or she is a Democrat, Republican, Libertarian or anything with a capital letter. Now, I’m not saying that everyone who joins a party is a crook or a traitor, but I do think that people who run as a member of a party have taken the first step on that road.

A local example. In 2003, the Texas GOP, under the influence of Tom DeLay, launched an apparently crooked mid-decade redistricting effort that split my home county of Travis into three districts in an effort to eliminate Lloyd Doggett, a Democrat. Incidentally, this is why DeLay now believes he can’t get a fair trial in Austin. Doggett kept his seat, but the effort managed to add several GOP congress-stooges to the US House, all of whom, naturally, owe everything to DeLay and the GOP machine that put them there and very little to the people who actually voted for them.

The most appalling thing, though, was the behavior of several members of the Texas House who went against the interests of their Travis county constituents and voted to spilt Travis County into three congressional districts in such a way that the city of Austin now has no US Congressional representative to call its own. I engaged in a thoughtful and interesting email discussion with my local house member, and the bottom line for him was that he had to stand with his “friends” (Tom DeLay) who had helped elect him. In the 2004 elections, the voters of Travis County wisely threw this guy out.

However, to say that corruption is a Republican problem is a fool’s paradise. This is why I won’t join a party, and will even support a competent candidate who is loyal to his or her constituents over a disloyal or incompetent one, regardless of either hypothetical politician’s party affiliation. I usually vote towards the left and since I live in the real world, I find I usually support Democrats over independents. I hate it, but there it is. Joining a party makes one an enabler, so when voting for either party, I’m hurting the state or the country. Of course, voting for independents seems to help Republicans, which in these times hurts us more. The best situation would be the total and simultaneous collapse of both parties, but that doesn’t seem likely.

Ultimately, I don’t know who I’ll support for Texas Governor except that it won’t be Rick Perry. I will also sit out the 2006 primaries so that I can sign Kinky Friedman’s petition to be added to the ballot as an independent. At least he’s trying. If Strayhorn decides to prove just how tough a grandma she is by going indy, that’s even better.

Del.icio.usly Tagging My Blog

December 8, 2005 • • Leave a comment

After continuing to experiment with categories for organizing blog posts, I broke down and started a del.icio.us account and began to experiment with tags. It didn’t take long to get hooked. Then I went back to freshblog’s Blogger Hacks and read up on categories using del.icio.us and various other methods. I experimented with this (which was cool but apparently doesn’t get picked up by Technorati) and read several other hacks, but ultimately decided I liked the ease of using this method, which relies on this bookmarklet to generate the del.icio.us and Technorati code for my tags.

I then tagged all my old posts (which only took an hour) and will continue tagging in the future. When I get a chance, I’ll install the del.icio.us tagroll or some other such tool in the sidebar to make it even easier to navigate.

Though I like the fact that the manual method doesn’t rely on an outside service and maintains a consistent feel to using the site, this is so much easier and doesn’t require constant re-publishing of old posts. I still wish Blogger would develop a system for internal categories, but for now I will tag. I’ll keep the categories link up and may continue to use categories for some of my posts.

In the meantime my del.icio.us tags are here.

Enjoying Arctic Air

December 7, 2005 • • Leave a comment

Coming from New England it’s hard not to smile when everyone freaks out about the occasional ice storms. I know that most people who aren’t used to driving in icy conditions can have problems, and it’s been seventeen years since I lived in Rhode Island so I’m sort of one of those people now, but I just don’t dread these kinds of fronts. In fact, I love them.

Right now, the sky is a dark, hard gray and the trees are swaying gently back and forth. It’s nice to go outside for a few minutes and remember how much I wish for days like this when it’s 108 degrees in September. Given the choice between heat and cold, I prefer cold, but my brother makes a good case to the contrary when he points out that one never has to shovel hundreds of pounds of heat out of the driveway. Still, I’ll enjoy the cold while it lasts.

So I take it all in. The air – damp and cold – rattles my lungs a bit; the wind bites and stings. At first it doesn’t feel too cold, and I wonder what the big deal is (The University of Texas closed at 2:00) but then it works its way in, and I start to really feel it. I love staying out past that point, just starting to shiver, before going in for my coat. I wish it would actually snow or at least ice over enough to shut the city down for a day or two, but that’s a bit too much to ask. By Friday I’ll probably be wearing shorts again.

Looking Up

December 6, 2005 • • Leave a comment

Last night, I got my telescope out for the first time in years and set it up in the driveway, which gave me a nice view of the Moon slipping below the roof of the house. Low in the sky and in its waxing crescent phase, the Moon looked beautiful to the naked eye. Through the ‘scope I just about got lost in the impact craters and mountains thrown into starkest relief by the sun’s light raking across its surface. I could have stared at it for hours, slowly tracking the telescope along the terminator, studying each mountain, each crater.

When it finally fell below the roof, I turned the ‘scope around to the east to try for a glimpse of the Pleiades, but a street light ruined the view so I’ll have to wait until later in the winter (or the night) to catch a better view when it clears the glare. I didn’t try for Mars for the same reason, but perhaps if I go to the backyard, I might be able to see it over the house, which might block the accursed light.