Betsy Devine: Funny ha-ha and/or funny peculiar

If you’re rolling up the rug to practice dancing, here are a few tunes to put on a playlist so that you don’t have to keep restarting “I Left My Heart in San Francisco” on the DVD from Complete Idiot’s Guide to Ballroom Dancing:

16th Avenue (nice clear beat, love her voice, but don’t listen to the words if you don’t want to get all teary-eyed)

Lacy J. Dalton — Greatest Hits

Rockin’ Around The Christmas Tree (fast but not too fast, nice to hear little Brenda Lee rocking instead of being “Sorry”)

Brenda Lee — Great Women Of Christmas

How Sweet It Is To Be Loved By You (sweet indeed, and also sweet to dance to)

James Taylor — Greatest Hits

Jingle Bell Rock (caution, the music makes you want to bounce up and down a little but that’s not how foxtrot is supposed to look)

Brenda Lee, — Great Women Of Christmas

To Know Him Is to Love Him (a bit slow, but who can resist this pretty old tune in this amazing rendition?)

Dolly Parton, Linda Rondstadt & Emmylou Harris — Ultimate Dolly Parton

Yep, my iTunes library has some varied stuff!
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Update–revised list, and thanks to my little sister for the James Taylor suggestion! I’ve demoted a few from my danceable list, but they’re all such good songs, I’m keeping them in this blogpost, in case I turn into a whole lot better dancer, on a sub-list of “Foxtrots I love that aren’t quite idiot-danceable”: I Can’t Stop Loving You Ray Charles — The Very Best Of Ray Charles If I Could Phish — Hoist End Of The Line [this one’s a bit fast] Traveling Wilburys

Mysterious burglars just hit NH Democratic HQ. “Some items” were taken, but nobody’s saying what. The burglars didn’t take donors’ credit card info. They didn’t hit other offices in the same building. Asked if the break-in seemed politically motivated, police refused comment.

Hmmm. Back in December, TPMMuckraker declared the phone-jamming mystery had ended, after a statement that the $15,000 of Abramoff money that “helped” to pay the $15,600 phone jamming tab were just passed along by staffers for Sen. Judd Gregg (R-NH)–but Gregg himself had no knowledge about the phone jamming.

Well, who ever cared if Judd Gregg knew about the phone jamming? What we cared about was if Abramoff knew about it…and why the Republican National Committee chose to spend millions of their donors’ dollars buying high-priced attorneys for James Tobin.

It will be interesting to find out what motivated this very recent “second-rate burglary.”

Whew–how did it happen that I drove into Boston’s Chinatown this weekend? There be dragons, at least when it’s Chinese New Year.

Dave Winer hit the right coast this weekend for two conferences, with some new ideas for organizing our national conversation.

Back in 2003-2004, I remember a previous idea of Dave’s that I thought sounded pretty crazy–that the Dean campaign should spend $$ to create accessible blogging software/hosting. Piffle, said I and others–of course SixApart, WordPress and others have since then made millions doing exactly that.

In the photo: Dave Winer, Dan Bricklin, Mal Watlington and Amanda Watlington dim-summing at Chau Chow’s.
More photographs of Boston brunch/bloggers — e.g. Shimon Rura, Mike Walsh, Tracy Adams, and j, aka jkbaumgart — are tagged “Chauchow” on my Flickr page.

George Washington Carver (1861(?) – 1943 ) has been both praised and debunked at great length by many people in Wikipedia (and elsewhere of course).

But did he invent peanut butter? Well, probably not–depending on how you define “invent” and how you define “peanut butter.”

The funny thing over in Wikipedia is how some people want to define and redefine peanut butter so that it means essentially “something that GW Carver could not have invented.”

For example, Carver could not have invented peanut butter because ground peanuts were well-known in Africa. So peanut butter was invented in Africa.

Also, ground-up peanuts appear in an 1885 cookbook. So peanut butter was invented in 1885. Not to mention that “nutmeal” was patented in 1897 by Dr. Kellogg. Er, did I say “nutmeal”? Sorry, Wikipedia calls that invention “peanut butter.” So, GW Carver didn’t invent it.

Yet another reason Carver didn’t invent peanut butter–his recipe just described some peanuts ground up, disgusting and oily. Real peanut butter is the modern stuff that somebody patented in 1922.

It reminds me so much of the Wikipedia ruckus over questions like “Did Dave Winer invent podcasting?” Of course nobody ever asks such silly questions except for the people who want to define the words “invented” and “podcasting” to make the answer come out that just about anyone, maybe your Aunt Lulu, might be the one who deserves every bit of the credit for podcasting, but it sure as heck is not Dave Winer.

No, whatever Dave Winer did in modifying RSS and blogware and aggregators so they could link audio files to RSS — or in promoting “audioblogging” including gathering all the major audiobloggers at Bloggercon in 2003, after which podcasting really took off–well, whatever he did deserves barely a mention because he really didn’t “invent” podcasting, and anybody can define “podcasting” to make sure that somebody else did “invent” it.

Now, most modern sources don’t claim that Carver “invented” peanut butter. Most of what he published about his research appeared in agricultural bulletins for poor farmers. There he extolled long lists of peanut recipes, urging farmers to rotate their cropland from soil-draining cotton to nitrogen-replenishing legumes like peanuts and soy. At the suggestion of Booker T Washington, Carver designed a mobile classroom on wheels to carry his message out to the desolate farmlands.

George Washington Carver was a big-picture guy, and his big picture was the desperation of ex-slave farmers bent low under the heavy load of King Cotton. The teaching, the research, the promotion of his findings–those were all little details in Carver’s big picture.

But no, Victoria, he didn’t invent peanut butter. Lots of Wikipedia readers can tell you that.

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p.s. Clarification–my experience has been that *most* Wikipedia editors are sincerely trying to make articles better, more accurate and informative. But we do get some very persistent point-of-view pushers from time to time, and their antics are more fun to write about.

The always-eloquent Zen of Motorcycling just blogged this photo of two male cardinals in a moment of (rare) peaceful coexistence.

…which reminds me to recommend to you Self Made Man, by a writer-woman who disguised herself as a man, joined a bowling team, lived in a monastery, dated women, and otherwise explored just how the other half lived.

I won’t give a long book review–I’ve almost but not quite finished reading it–but I will say that halfway through the book I walked through a busy shopping center and liked every person I saw better than I would have before I started reading the book.

If you think about it, that’s a very strong rave review.

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The always-eloquent Zen of Motorcycling just blogged this photo of two male cardinals in a moment of (rare) peacefully coexistence.

Self Made Man, by a writer-woman who disguised herself as a man, joined a bowling team, lived in a monastery, dated women, and otherwise explored just how the other half lived.

I won’t give a long book review–I’ve almost but not quite finished reading it–but I will say that halfway through the book I walked through a busy shopping center and liked every person I saw better than I would have before I started reading the book.

If you think about it, that’s an excellent book review.

Nope, not one of my favorites made the finals. But check out the sheer variety of these finalists for Wikimedia’s Picture of the Year .

Then reflect that each image, with hundreds more besides, has been uploaded for free to the common domain.

1. San Francisco Airport (SFO) at night. Taken by Flickr user Andrew Choy.
2. Sans domicile fixe in Paris. Taken by Wikimedian Eric Pouhier
3. Animation of Newton’s cradle, resting on a copy of Newton’s famous book Principia Mathematica (animated). Created by Wikimedian DemonDeLuxe.
4. Lunar libration (animated) by Wikimedian Tomruen
5. The Aurora Borealis, or Northern Lights, shines above Bear Lake, Eielson Air Force Base, Alaska. Taken by Senior Airman Joshua Strang.
6. The wreck of the American Star (SS America) seen from land side, Fuerteventura. Taken by Wikimedian Wollex.
7. A Blue Jay (Cyanocitta cristata) in Algonquin Provincial Park, Canada. Taken by Wikimedian Mdf.
8. Barred Owl (Strix varia) Whitby, Ontario (Canada). Taken by Wikimedian Mdf.
9. Moon occluded by clouds over San Diego, California. Taken by Wikimedian Rufustelestrat.
10. Hoverflies mating in midair. Taken by Wikimedian Fir0002.
11. A paper match igniting. Taken by Wikimedian Sebastian Ritter.

Each one of these is inspiring. And so is the fact that they all exist.

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Ah, The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Ballroom Dancing.

I love this book.

Frank loves this book.

We have been having a lot of fun watching the DVD and trying some of the steps. Frank, who is a genius and not an idiot, brought this book home last week. We want to improve our dancing skills–well, doesn’t everyone?

After reading a lot of the book and also dropping it halfway into the bathtub (this is the mark of honor for a book in our house, it shows that a book is truly so enthralling that a reader can’t let go of it even when taking a bath), I decided to call the author’s 800 number (in the book) to see if he could recommend a dance teacher in the Boston area. But, to my surprise, he teaches dancers in Providence, RI, only an hour’s drive away, so we signed up to take some lessons from him.

Jeff Allen is not just a good writer but also an excellent teacher. We are having a lot of fun. Would we be able to learn so much so fast just from the book without taking lessons? Probably not–but the book and DVD just by themselves are very enjoyable and informative. And if you live close enough to Providence to take actual lessons from the author, I thoroughly recommend doing just that!

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Kevin Marks, whose contributions to Bloggercon 1 inspired my artistic-but-evil twin to create this image, is moving his X-ray vision and other skills from Technorati to Google. So say Dave Winer and a bunch of other people*. Will Kevin–(congratulations, BTW!)–be any different now he’s begoogled? I hope not too much, because Kevin was already super.

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* Update, February 17. Three days after I blogged this, Technorati still hasn’t indexed this blogpost or added me to their list of bloggers linking to Kevin’s post. Sigh. Yes, I long ago “claimed” my blog at Technorati. Yes, two days ago I manually “pinged” Technorati that my blog had updated. No, I don’t think bloggers should have to bow down like that to the gods of “who’s in the web conversation” to be included in Technorati’s much-vaunted record of “who’s in the web conversation.” And it didn’t do me any good anyway.

The Google blogsearch, however, added my post about one day after I made it. Not very fast, but at least it was accurate.

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Congrats to Harvard for doing something so smart as as president-ifying Drew Gilpin Faust, once aka Drewdie Gilpin, with whom I shared fourth-year math classes (just the two of us) way back when Concord Academy was an all-girls school.

Drew was then smart and serious and kindly (yes, I know those are funny words to describe a 16 year-old girl). With a little baby powder all over her hair, she made a perfect Southern Colonel for our senior class musical.

Now she has grown up even smarter but still warm-hearted and not so deadpan.

Drew moved to Cambridge just a few years ago as the dean of Radcliffe, which like Harvard has many brilliant and outspoken stakeholders–but unlike Harvard has less-than-infinite money. Hard to imagine how someone could survive that job–and some called her “Chainsaw Drew“? Ouch! But others (most) praised her low-key leadership, leading while listening, building consensus, to quote Newsweek, “without wielding sharp elbows.”

She will do a great job as the new head of Harvard!

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