A good feature about blogging by linguest Geoff Nunberg on Fresh Air today. He compared blogs to The Diary of Nobody published in 1892...getting at the inside and outside experience of daily life. Funnily (to me), he said, "my friend who has a blog of her own said..."
skp and I made it back from Nebraska safe and sound. The train ride was great; though it somehow seems longer on the way home. I uploaded some snapshots:
Nebraska
The trip to Nebraska by train was beautiful. There was snow in the Sierras, and all along the route until Western Nebraska. It was amazing to see the contrast from my earlier trip. The land seems hidden underneath the snow, but the contours more pronounced. And each snow saturated tree had its own personality instead of blending into a blur of forest. It was frustrating at times to watch it all roll by instead of being able to stop and explore areas in more depth; studying animal tracks in the snow, feeling the cold icicles in my hand, or following a path into the trees.
Last night I was on the highway between Omaha and Lincoln, Nebraska when I saw some strange lights in the sky. They looked like missles, and my first thought was 'oh crap, U.S. first strike'. I'd never seen anything like it before. Today, I found out it was probably an old Russian rocket burning up in the atmosphere. I feel lucky I got to see it.
I probably won't be posting for a while. I'll be on a train soon riding across the West. Through snow this time. And I'll be back with pictures. (like last time.)
The city council where I live is thinking about implementing a "no car day" on the first Sunday of every month. It seems to have polarized folks on both sides of the issue, and the meeting last night almost turned into a brawl.
Thanks to a tip from the music underground, I went out of my way to find a copy of Röyksopp's Melody AM CD. It's not available in the US, so I ordered it from the friendly folks at Norman Records, Leeds, UK. It was worth the effort.
How much is your local TV news influenced by the people who buy ads? Too much, according this latest report by the Project for Excellence in Journalism: "A quarter of news directors in small markets, those under 376,000 households, report that they have been pressured to censor their news. One news director in the Rockies described the situation as 'a very large problem in this market.'" If the pressure from advertisers to alter content is this bad at the local level, I can only imagine how bad it is for national news where the sums of money and numbers of viewers at stake are much, much higher. And with the economy in a slump, television news will need to find ways to remain profitable and keep advertisers. [via sotd]
Something tells me you won't see this reported in the news.
I made a little bookmarklet to run any page you're looking at through an HTML validator. If you'd like to use it, drag this link:
Validate!
to your toolbar. Because we all need validation. It's just a shortcut to opening a separate window for the site, pasting the URL, hitting submit, etc. I've only tested it with IE5. Void where prohibited.
Validate!
to your toolbar. Because we all need validation. It's just a shortcut to opening a separate window for the site, pasting the URL, hitting submit, etc. I've only tested it with IE5. Void where prohibited.