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

Robert Wright has a good article in Slate: “What you should and shouldn’t worry about as we go to war.” Says Wright, “Brace yourself for a round of I-told-you-so’s from Iraq hawks. And blame it partly on Iraq doves. In trying to head off war, some doves have warned of nightmarish consequences that are in fact not all that likely, thus setting the stage for a postwar public relations triumph by hawks.”

He’s right. Yeah. I’ll feel smarter next week for reading his piece. But tonight I don’t care that much about feeling smart. I just feel sad. The war has started. No, I don’t even want to talk about it.

Reading this morning’s New York Times, I feel as bleak as the weather. From the Editorial, “War in the Ruins of Diplomacy“:

“Once the fighting begins, every American will be thinking primarily of the safety of our troops, the success of their mission and the minimization of Iraqi civilian casualties. It will not feel like the right time for complaints about how America got to this point. Today is the right time.”

The editorial goes on, powerfully and well, and you think they’ve said it all, until you check out Paul Krugman’s “Things to Come” and discover there’s more:

“So now the administration knows that it can make unsubstantiated claims, without paying a price when those claims prove false, and that saber rattling gains it votes and silences opposition. Maybe it will honorably refuse to act on this dangerous knowledge. But I can’t help worrying that in domestic politics, as in foreign policy, this war will turn out to have been the shape of things to come.”

Yesterday was such a beautiful day for walking around in Boston–sunny, balmy, full of the promise of spring. Today, a chill wind is moving across the melting heaps of disappearing snow, and the sky is gray. Dave Winer claimed he was bringing warm weather across the country from California. Yo, Dave, if yesterday’s weather meant you got here at last–did you decide to leave again sometime after Bush’s speech?

A rant worth raving about–and very funny–from Steve at OnePotMeal, starting with:

“Blogs are like fanfiction we write about ourselves.

Wars are like fanfiction politicians write about themselves.

If only politicians all got blogs they could show each other how cool and great they are instead of bombing the fuck out of the people who happen to be standing between their palaces.”

Betsy’s quote of the day:
“…with nations as with individuals our interests soundly calculated will ever be found inseparable from our moral duties, and history bears witness to the fact that a just nation is trusted on its word when recourse is had to armaments and wars to bridle others.”
Thomas Jefferson, Second Inaugural Address

I last quit smoking in 1995 or so–and it worked. (unlike all the billion other times I quit.) My doctor got me into a free-trial study with a nicotine patch.

“My blog is my email to the universe. I write what I want, when I want. People read when they want, what they want.”

I’ve just been filling out a questionnaire for a grad student studying blogging and gender. Did you ever notice that other people’s questions help you find out the answers to questions of your own?

“What would it take for you to become an A-list blogger?” she asked. Here’s what I said:

“I would love to have more people read my blog and send me comments. I think if I keep doing what I’m doing–writing about stuff I care about and know about–that people who are interested in my stuff will find me. I don’t aspire to be an “A-list blogger.” Metaphorically–a real concert pianist plays 6+ hours per day. Great, we all love to listen to that pianist, and I love to read those glorious A-list bloggers. But…by practicing an hour or two a day, I can play pieces I enjoy, please all my friends, and have a good time. That’s the kind of blogging I aspire to.”

Betsy’s quote of the day: “I am not so lost in lexicography as to forget that words are the daughters of earth, and that things are the sons of heaven.” (Samuel Johnson, 1709–1784)

Some of my favorites among the sons of heaven: Roadside America Hall of Fame.

Halley: Halley’s father

Ohhhhh, those sick kid blues. I remember, although for me it was way back when. We did a lot of reading aloud to pass the time away, and even listening to recorded books together. (With my older daughter, born 1974, we’re talking pre-history–wonderful 33 1/3 rpm records of Tammy Grimes oh-so-naughtily reading the Frances books.) Years later, those sick days stand out in everyone’s memory as some of the best days there were.

Rainer Brockerhoff blogging about what other people said about World of Ends.

Did you see the recent Inquirer article–Joy of Blogging: Like the Joy of Sex but Not Really? Darn good, considering the author is (whispering) not a blogger!

“Alice at once fell in love….In that flash of ecstasy she suddenly knew what all poetry, all music, all sculpture, except things like winged Assyrian bulls, or the very broken pieces in the British Museum, meant.”
Angela Thirkell, Pomfret Towers

Both like and unlike young Alice, I get flashes of ecstacy from other people’s words. Some of my favorite quotes are basically funny–dear Angela Thirkell, god bless her. But that quote of hers stayed with me, and gave new meaning when many years later I got to see winged Assyrian bulls in Chicago’s Oriental Institute, or when, on another occasion, I had to smile (discreetly) at the reverential assembly of rubbishy bits of once-grand marbles, their ears and noses and dongs all lost to history, at LA’s Getty Museum.

What is it about the quotes that live in our memories–like pebbles rubbed almost smooth by a New England glacier, and carried thousands of miles from the place they started? (Or like a sweater handed down by your mother.) Their previous lives make them precious, weighty, authentic.

I plan to share some of my favorite quotes in this blog.

This morning I got up and put on my mithril sweater. It isn’t metallic or even colored silver–it’s a big, blue, Irish woolly thing, cable knit. My mother wore it for warmth and comfort on winter days like today. And when I put it on, I feel completely safe.

Could scientists study the magic of favorite clothes? Clothes magic is private magic, quirky and secret.

When I was little I needed two kinds of magic. I had rough-tough-roaming magic shoes and shirts that made me strong in the world of tree-climbing and mudfights. I also had pretty-party-magic dresses that made me feel light and lovely and ready for fun surprises. Even today, when I see white polka-dots on pale sky-blue, I think of my favorite silk sixth-grade party dress.

Grown up now, my fears and ambitions need different magic. I do have a couple of pairs of far-walking shoes for ambitiously long days of exploration. But my most magical garment now, my elven cloak, is an old London Fog black silky raincoat. It was almost free because I bought it in the wrong season for raincoats (how can there be a wrong season for raincoats?) and it was on “deep remainder.” The hood keeps off rain, the pockets are huge, and the cut is so simple I feel deliciously invisible when I wear it.

Now, warmly girded in my mithril sweater, I’m off to struggle with my book again.

Thursday was a three-ring circus of good things–
but today, Friday, has been a two-ring anti-circus–
my dog, with a bladder infection, is puddling everywhere, and
the right side of my face is still sulking from an hour of dentist drilling.
And for a third bad thing, one of my favorite bloggers Dave Winer is driving through the wild, wild, wireless-less west and hardly posting anything these days.
Hmmmmph.
But Thursday was great.

First, I had a chance to meet the actual Elaine of Kalilily, who was visiting her grandson. For me, one of the newest bloggers on the block, it was an incredible learning experience–and yet so much more fun than most real-life learning experiences. (Benjamin Franklin said, “Experience keeps a dear school, but fools will learn in no other.”) Hope you had a safe and peaceful trip home, Elaine, and come back to Boston soon.

Second, I raced from my lunch with Elaine to see two old friends (compared to me, two very young friends) bringing home their first baby. In NH, where I come from, people show up with soup or a cake or a casserole wrapped in tinfoil if neighbors have babies or broken toes or whatever. But I’m not in NH any more–I’m in thrilling Cambridge, the first big city I ever have lived in. So instead of slaving over a kettle, I had lots of fun options to find good things for a care package, including a tiny $4 bottle of champagne and a lemon meringue pie just big enough for two people.

The baby is named Jonas, and he is very beautiful and tiny, swaddled in pale soft blankets much more expertly than my babies ever were. (At dinner last night, another young husband told me the secret–husbands now learn how to swaddle babies in childbirth classes–he practiced on a doll to refine his technique. Wow.)

And the third cool thing yesterday was the lecture on Escher I blogged about Feb. 20–wonderful, you really should check out the incredible animations online of Escher’s tricks.

“They hang the man and flog the woman
That steals the goose from off the common,
But let the greater villain loose
That steals the common from the goose.”
(18th century English folk poem)

In Medieval England, villagers shared the rights to a common pasture. Your cows, sheep, or geese could wander and feed there freely. Slowly, in village after village, commoners lost the rights they had enjoyed, because powerful families asserted exclusive ownership of the once-common land. The rich were few, but they had or could buy friends on the judicial bench. Hence the metaphor: “enclosure of the commons.”

I am feeling inspired by The World of Ends to fend off the loss of the Internet it describes. David Weinberger and Doc Searls write about the Internet as it can be and should be. But I see enclosure ahead for our Internet “commons”–not just in the future, but already starting right now.

Already–*Competition among proprietary browsers means that almost any web page is “broken” for someone. *Spam merchants flood your mailbox, spam-blockers struggle to keep up with their tricks, and our government won’t even outlaw deceptive headers and spoofed return addresses. *Instead, our government exerts great effort to punish music-sharing by kids. *Pop-ups and pop-unders have made millions of dollars for advertisers, meanwhile degrading the web for everyone else. *Smarter advertisers pollute the Web community with astroturf (fake grassroots) websites, discussion-group comments, and instant messages.

“It seems ironic that a company would want to manipulate a phenomenon that’s so generally bent on exposing things,” said Doc Searls in a Newsweek interview about fake weblogs. The trouble is that exposing the bad guys in weblogs only works sometimes. * Weblogs were credited with breaking the Trent Lott scandal–but that story got legs only when the mainstream media took it up. * The fake republican letters to the editor were a big scandal in weblogs, but few dead-tree papers responded. GOPTeamLeader.com is still going strong.

If we could find a way to work together, we’d have a much better chance of fending off attacks on the Internet commons–or at least giving warning when such attacks get underway. Let’s not end up like the goose in the nursery rhyme, looking longingly back on the “rights” we used to enjoy. Let’s get together like the Roman geese who cackled and squawked and woke up the sleeping Romans when Gauls tried to sneak inside the Capitol.

Maybe we could start by thinking about the web-degrading mistakes described in World of Ends. When we spot someone trying one of these ugly tricks, we could try to get our weblogs squawking together–scare off the attacker!

One thing for sure: if we don’t defend it, the Internet goose is cooked.

The Court of King George III London, England

July 10, 1776

Mr. Thomas Jefferson c/o The Continental Congress Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

Dear Mr. Jefferson:

We have read your “Declaration of Independence” with great interest. Certainly, it represents a considerable undertaking, and many of your statements do merit serious consideration. Unfortunately, the Declaration as a whole fails to meet recently adopted specifications for proposals to the Crown, so we must return the document to you for further refinement. The questions which follow might assist you in your process of revision:

1.In your opening paragraph you use the phrase “the Laws of Nature and Nature’s God.” What are these laws? In what way are they the criteria on which you base your central arguments? Please document with citations from the recent literature.

2.In the same paragraph you refer to the “opinions of mankind.” Whose polling data are you using? Without specific evidence, it seems to us the “opinions of mankind” are a matter of opinion.

3.You hold certain truths to be “self-evident.” Could you please elaborate. If they are as evident as you claim then it should not be difficult for you to locate the appropriate supporting statistics.

4.”Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” seem to be the goals of your proposal. These are not measurable goals. If you were to say that “among these is the ability to sustain an average life expectancy in six of the 13 colonies of at last 55 years, and to enable newspapers in the colonies to print news without outside interference, and to raise the average income of the colonists by 10 percent in the next 10 years,” these could be measurable goals. Please clarify.

5.You state that “Whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute a new Government….” Have you weighed this assertion against all the alternatives? What are the trade-off considerations?

6.Your description of the existing situation is quite extensive. Such a long list of grievances should precede the statement of goals, not follow it. Your problem statement needs improvement.

7.Your strategy for achieving your goal is not developed at all. You state that the colonies “ought to be Free and Independent States,” and that they are “Absolved from All Allegiance to the British Crown.” Who or what must change to achieve this objective? In what way must they change? What specific steps will you take to overcome the resistance? How long will it take? We have found that a little foresight in these areas helps to prevent careless errors later on. How cost-effective are your strategies?

8.Who among the list of signatories will be responsible for implementing your strategy? Who conceived it? Who provided the theoretical research? Who will constitute the advisory committee? Please submit an organization chart and vitas of the principal investigators.

9.You must include an evaluation design. We have been requiring this since Queen Anne’s War.

10.What impact will your problem have? Your failure to include any assessment of this inspires little confidence in the long-range prospects of your undertaking.

11.Please submit a PERT diagram, an activity chart, itemized budget, and manpower utilization matrix.

We hope that these comments prove useful in revising your “Declaration of Independence.” We welcome the submission of your revised proposal. Our due date for unsolicited proposals is July 31, 1776. Ten copies with original signatures will be required.

Sincerely,

Thomas Pilkington, Bart.

Management Analyst to the British Crown

I wish I knew who wrote this funny spoof–Google has 123 hits on it, going back as far at 1995, but none give the name of the author.