tedr:laughingsquid:The Relative Sizes of the World’s Largest Photo Librariestedr: I wonder how smugmug, imageshack/yfrog, and twitpic compare?wow.
I haven’t experienced anything that dramatic, aside from that feedback-induced near-emesis. But I have to lean in, far in, to hear people in noisy rooms. A meal or a drink somewhere loud means I lose my voice, especially if my wife isn’t there to remind me that I’m shouting in order to hear myself. Not good.Here is where I’m supposed to say I’m sorry. Here is where I say we must respect the delicate membranes within our ears. Here is where I beg, in cloying tones, that we teach the children to learn from these mistakes.
Screw it. I don’t regret a thing. Sound transported us to places most people never get to see. When my old band got asked to reunite this year at the All Tomorrow’s Parties festival in the U.K., our concerns centered on practice logistics and plane schedules, not on our battered eardrums. The old basketball star walks gingerly on aching knees. Me? My ears ring. I can’t hear a thing you’re saying in this noisy bar. And it turns out that my left ear’s hearing is noticeably weaker in certain frequencies—it has what ear docs call the “noise notch” that afflicts those exposed to serious sound. But I’m okay enough. If not, well, I accept the physical penalty without complaint. For now, at least.
I Gave My Ears to Rock and Roll - Magazine - The Atlantic.
Isn’t that kinda — what’s the word — kinda stupid?
There’s no pressing need for me to write about this, I guess, save that blogging is most often a means of expressing frustration or unhappiness or outrage and it is not often that we - that is, people who generally write about politics or culture - pause to reflect on the greater issues, far less note how often humanity or decency prevails in even the direst personal circumstances.
And the provision of perspective helps everyone, I think. As I’ve mentioned on Twitter, it has been sweet to see Andrew Sullivan, with whom Rod has had some fierce debates over the years, acknowledging Rod’s loss so kindly. Let’s have more of these acknowledgements of one another’s often-broken humanity, without the provocation of something as dramatic and grievous as a death in the family.
Certainly those determining acts of her life were not ideally beautiful. They were the mixed result of young and noble impulse struggling amidst the conditions of an imperfect social state, in which great feelings will often take the aspect of error, and great faith the aspect of illusion. For there is no creature whose inward being is so strong that it is not greatly determined by what lies outside it. A new Theresa will hardly have the opportunity of reforming a conventual life, any more than a new Antigone will spend her heroic piety in daring all for the sake of a brother’s burial: the medium in which their ardent deeds took shape is forever gone. But we insignificant people with our daily words and acts are preparing the lives of many Dorotheas, some of which may present a far sadder sacrifice than that of the Dorothea whose story we know.Her finely touched spirit had still its fine issues, though they were not widely visible. Her full nature, like that river of which Cyrus broke the strength, spent itself in channels which had no great name on the earth. But the effect of her being on those around her was incalculably diffusive: for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.
These magnificent closing lines of George Eliot’s Middlemarch are among the most famous in English literature, and very justly so.
I think of them today because of the news that Rod Dreher’s sister Ruthie has died, at the age of 42, leaving behind a husband and three young children. Rod has been writing about Ruthie this week on his blog, and it’s becoming increasingly and luminously clear to his readers just how many lives she touched in her circle of action. George Eliot is perhaps the only great artist to pay tribute to the Ruthies of the world, to whom we all owe so much — people who will never be famous, but whose influence is “incalculably diffusive” and often outlives their names.
Thanks be to God for Ruthie, and for all of her invaluable kind.
Course registration versus niceness; success versus compassion; “attainment” versus kindness. Something is missing from all these dichotomies, and that something is the life of the mind.Where in the list of ranked values are curiosity, discovery, reason, inquiry, skepticism or truth? (Were these values even options?) Where is critical thinking? No wonder the pledge talks about “attainment.” Attainment equals study cards and good grades – a transcript to enable the student to move on to the next stage. Attainment isn’t learning, questioning or criticizing. It’s getting your ticket punched.
Harvard is the strongest brand in American higher education, and its identity is clear. As its students recognize, Harvard represents success. But, it seems, Harvard feels guilty about that identity and wishes it could instead (or also) represent “compassion.” These two qualities have a lot in common. They both depend on other people, either to validate success or serve as objects of compassion. And neither is intellectual.
“Language is no barrier to writing a novel,” author Animesh Verma told the Indian Express newspaper in a 2010 interview, a statement that caused many novelists and book lovers to recoil in disbelief.“Grammatical errors, spelling mistakes doesn’t matter that much,” he went on to say. “I am not writing a literature.”
Indeed, many of India’s young – and best-selling – authors are no longer aspiring to write Booker-worthy novels. Instead, they’re writing free-flowing narratives on the travails of daily life in second- or third-tier Indian cities that resonate with the millions that live in these oft-forgotten towns.
Many of these barely-edited books, written in a colloquial style and the mishmash of Hindi and English known as Hinglish, are quickly outpacing sales numbers of Booker winners, selling hundreds of thousands of copies in a country where the benchmark for achieving best-seller status, until now, was a meager 5,000 copies.
There’s something more to this feral quality than the savor we find in stories. For what are we in the midst of networked, global, postmodern culture, all of us, but feral creatures of a kind? I’ve long been dissatisfied with the idea of the “digital native”; I’m not convinced that anything can properly be “native” to a habitat that changes so rapidly and thoroughly networked culture. And the whole notion of nativity, after all, seems tainted with the romanticism of the Wild (a new state of nature is still the State of Nature). The qualities of the feral, by contrast, answer to a particular way of thriving amidst the vast clamor of the online world. The nameless maps onto the pseudonymity and anonymity of digital culture; cunning catches the furtive ways of memes; denying herself the full panoply social cues, the online imagination subsists in an uncanny solitude. Hidden in its nameless mask, with all the patience and will of its cunning, impregnable in the fortress of its fluent autism, it watches, hungers, and waits — testing the freedoms and the fragility of the digital, both the powers it gives us and the susceptibilities, perhaps fatal, which it bequeaths.
Every generation gets the fantasy it deserves. Victorians had the stark realities of life and death depicted in George McDonald’s At The Back of the North Wind. The interwar generation could escape to Neverland, but the cost of not growing up was always clear in the work of JM Barrie. The Baby Boomers would inherit the world, just as CS Lewis promised in the works of Narnia. Thank God Thatcher’s children could rely on Roald Dahl to show them the truth of a world dominated by the selfish, callous and cruel.In Harry Potter, the Millennial generation has a fantasy that reflects its own obsessions. Harry’s problem is not so much that he is an orphan; rather, his real predicament is being trapped in a stifling lower-middle-class upbringing. Imagine if Harry hadn’t been lucky enough to have powerful friends to help him get to private school and a top-class education. Instead of becoming the world’s most powerful wizard, he’d have had to settle for a place at the local comp and, if he was lucky, a job in a call centre or, very lucky, as an estate agent. What if Harry had been left behind on Platform 9 and ¾ at Kings Cross? Forsaken to live a (possibly longer) mundane life, with only a dull sense of existential despair to keep him company as Hermione and Ron continued on to magic and adventure?
The Magicians is Harry Potter for grown-ups | Books | guardian.co.uk
This is an interesting combination of real insight and total BS.
Melbourn Village College – not far from Cambridge – has decided to ditch its Latin motto: “Nisi dominus frustra”. And I guess you can see why. It’s a contraction of the first line of Psalm 127, “Unless the Lord builds the house, those who build it labour in vain”… so you might translate the three Latin words of the motto something like “Without the Lord, frustration”, I guess. A touch pious you might think, and a bit Judaeo-Christian. But I can’t see that any world faith could seriously disagree and, anyway, it’s served the city of Edinburgh well enough for the last few hundred years.They have replaced it (after a student vote, it seems) with what sounds to me more like an advertising jingle: “Inspiring Minds” (which is bound to look “so 2011” in a few years time that it too will soon be ditched). According to the Acting Principal, they wanted a motto that was more relevant to the students. In the current economic climate, Latin was “largely irrelevant” in helping the students find work.