Archive | 2003

Leave the Leaves. I’m not neglecting the yard; I’m fostering my local environment. From New Hampshire Public Radio – NHPR.org

p.s. Congratulations to NHPR on publishing an RSS feed.

THE GETTYSBURG ADDRESS:

Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this
continent a new nation, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the
proposition that all men are created equal. Now we are engaged in
a great civil war, testing whether that nation or any nation so
conceived and so dedicated can long endure. We are met on a great
battlefield of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of
that field as a final resting-place for those who here gave their
lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and
proper that we should do this. But in a larger sense, we cannot
dedicate, we cannot consecrate, we cannot hallow this ground.
The brave men, living and dead who struggled here have consecrated
it far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will
little note nor long remember what we say here, but it can never
forget what they did here. It is for us the living rather to be
dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here
have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here
dedicated to the great task remaining before us–that from these
honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which
they gave the last full measure of devotion–that we here highly
resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain, that this
nation under God shall have a new birth of freedom, and that
government of the people, by the people, for the people shall
not perish from the earth.

Those of you living where the city lights don’t hide the glory of the universe have a special treat the week: the annual Leonid meteor shower. One of my fondest memories growing up is sitting on my uncle’s front lawn, overlooking a black lake, and watching the wonders of dozens of shooting stars. Enjoy the magic!

Some of my posts do not seem to be making it to the server. I don’t know why. Time to investigate some Radio support sites…

Scott Simon on the NPR Weekend Edition program used his editorial time to talk about blogs. He started with “Blogs… blah. Two days don’t go by that a friend doesn’t send me a link to a blog” and ended with “Plato taught us that the unexamined life is not worth living. Blogs remind us that the over-examined life is not worth reading.”

Theodore Sturgeon summed it up years ago in Sturgeon’s Law: “Ninety percent of everything is crud.” Most AOL Home pages are banal. So is most literature. Recently, in a bookstore, I was astounded to scan two bookshelves full of audio tapes to discover there was little I really wanted to read.

But consider it from a different angle. Few of us sit down and take the time to write a letter, longhand, in pen and ink and post it via mail to our close correspondents. Blogging is the new letter writing, the new journalling, the new diaries. And, yes, 90% of them are crud, but 10% are not. And while much of what we have to say is pretty dull, there are the jewels to find, if not the comfort in reading that the lives of others are not that much different from our own.