A wonderful graphic, ‘quoted’ by Seb and repeated here so I can find it again:
The first time I can remember hearing the phrase “Pigs Might Fly” was in Kind Hearts and Coronets, as memorably mouthed by Glynis Johns. It would be enlightening to collect such bits of eidetic imagery and phraseology… I woke this morning thinking of the phrase “You’ll eat food from sawdust” that accompanied a 1950 Popular Mechanics article on the World of the Future.
Found via an entry in Sébastien Paquet’s blog: Postmodernism Generator. The source is another blog, Martin Terre Blanche’s Collaborative Learning Environments. The bit Seb picked out from Martin’s posting is worth repeating here:
One tends to think of Google as a tool for locating some particular thing (say a good academic paper on critical psychology in South Africa), but I suspect that most Google searches have as much to do with getting a feel for context as with locating something specific.
…an exemplar of the ways in which exploring this medium gooses me into thinking differently about the quotidian…
Reading further, there’s a great deal here that I find especially resonant at the moment. Another bit, Martin’s comment on a comment, says just beautifully what I’ve been thinking myself but hadn’t found the eloquence to articulate:
It could be fun to be read by zillions of people, but the real reason I write is not because I hope to reach a large audience. In a way putting one’s stuff on the internet is to already have such an audience. Writing here is a way of being in conversation with a few million others out there, contributing my part to the what is being said, without demanding that everybody must suddenly shut up and listen to me exclusively.
Later in the day, happened upon this by my highschool-era friend Matt Cartmill (incidentally, one of the dedicants of Heinlein’s Rocket Ship Galileo [1947]):
As an adolescent I aspired to lasting fame, I craved factual certainty, and I thirsted for a meaningful vision of human life – so I became a scientist. This is like becoming an archbishop so you can meet girls.
(quoted at http://www.bornfamous.com/archives/000519.php)
Much of today’s work was loosely around coffee as a Globalization example –the usual gathering up of too much material to really digest or even put into the right order, with various detours. One of them had me revisiting Max Havelaar.
I also added an entry to the disgruntlement file, to work off some irritation with institutional costiveness.
This (early) morning’s troll of the sites I visit frequently brought Topix.net from ResourceShelf, and I was able to find a good variety of stuff on TODAY’s Sarawak news (for example), and also to explore globalization as it appears in news reports. The downside is a bunch of advertising, but as another tool for explorations, it looks like a winner.
…and more on King Rat: I assumed that the music Miéville wrote about was imaginary, but come to find out it’s a genre I missed…
The basics of look-and-feel are still a mystery to me –how to implement CSS, how to tweak appearance and functionalities displayed. It’s like any other medium: conceptual stuff seems daunting until you know the tricks, and then you wonder how you could have been so dense…
In this case it was a matter of a simple edit to the /mt/index.html file, to add /mt to the path for the stylesheet. I suppose it’s a win that I did figure it out…
…but now I can’t make it stick… when I SAVE this edit, it reverts to the vanilla form, without the formatting I specified. It’s probably something in the setup that I’m overlooking.
Moving the stylesheet to the directory above /mt/ seems to have done it…
Today’s activities mostly around globalization, but I also started thinking about words about music, and transcribed a vibrant passage from Miéville’s King Rat
A day of exploration of RSS led me to http://www.lissakaytoo.com/, which had superb instructions for installing Movable Type. I’m intending to use this blog as a means to track various things I do, as a replacement for my current.html file, which has become too overstuffed to be very useful. I think I’ll still use my W&L Webspace for a lot of my activities, but link them here as new threads and projects and digressions are begun.
