Do you want to see a real, live dinosaur? Read up on the linked article - this author is probably the dino of dinos. Apparently, dude thinks “bloggery” doesn’t really help anybody so it sucks. Yep, by that awesome logic, we don’t need classic literature either since it doesn’t really help anybody now, does it?
Library Journal - Revenge of the Blog People!A blog is a species of interactive electronic diary by means of which the unpublishable, untrammeled by editors or the rules of grammar, can communicate their thoughts via the web. (Though it sounds like something you would find stuck in a drain, the ugly neologism blog is a contraction of “web log.”) Until recently, I had not spent much time thinking about blogs or Blog People.
He also says - “Given the quality of the writing in the blogs I have seen, I doubt that many of the Blog People are in the habit of sustained reading of complex texts.” - I guess I can say given the quality of this gentleman’s rants against blogging, I don’t think he is in the habit of dealing with actual people in the real world who like expressing themselves. What I really want him to explain is what exactly does he mean by complex texts? Shakespeare? Literary Classics? I can point a dozen bloggers who have read every single book he can throw at me. I can probably come up with a dozen equally complex texts he has probably never read. What is really the point of this superiority-complex? Who wins by this entire screed against people who range from law profs, to Iraqis expressing themselves to 10-year-olds expressing their crushes?
This is what baffles me about this everyday onslaught of every decent news organization against bloggers - Hello people, if Dan Rather didn’t run with the forged documents, if Eason Jordan only released the video of the Davos conference, nothing would have happened. Don’t fuck up and then get mad at those who caught you with your pants down. I am really sick of this crap. I think these idiots who write anti-blog rants probably take bloggers a lot more seriously than bloggers themselves.
I love what I am doing on my blog - does that mean I want to be studied in a literature class instead of Charles Dickens? No. I don’t make any claims to greatness and my readers and other bloggers I know of are all aware that we are simply people putting forward topics of discussion or little monologues of what interests us. By constantly attacking us, those who do are exposing nothign but their pettiness.
p.s. Apparently dude mentioned above is so technically advanced that he hates Google. Go figure!
JK talks about the monsoon in this post - varnam: Below Normal Monsoon Predicted - and brings back memories of the rainy season :)
I remember that my sister and I loved getting drenched in the rain. As soon as it started to rain, we would make some excuse to our mother and start off to a block of stores 10 min. walk from my home. She would give us umbrellas, but very "mysteriously" we would still come back soaking wet :)
Another thing I remember happened when we had just moved into our own house - now a posh locality in the city of Vishakhapatnam, MVP Colony wasnothing more than a big flat field full of coconut trees and palm trees at the foot of Kailasagiri and with a gorgeous view of the Bay of Bengal. My sister and I had as usual set off to the store as soon as it started raining. Our roads were still not paved and very muddy.
Suddenly we see something just scramble by us - It went so fast and was about 4 inches ling, so we didn't catch a good glimpse of what it was. And then there came more of those when we suddenly realized what was going on - the rain seemed to have disturbed a nest of snakes (we had snake-holes all over the place) and what we saw slithering around our feet were a bunch little-bitty baby snakes! Needless to say that it took us both exactly one minute to get back home and we refused to go out in the rain for a long time after that :)
Yeah, I know you don't come here to hear my blather about how the day has been, what I cooked for dinner, or what I talked to my co-workers about - you know, inane stuff like that. I don't much like talking about it either. But sometimes, there are some vignettes of my life that I find funny or important in a lot of ways, so I will be categorizing them as "Memories", just so I don't forget. You are welcome to skip right over them for more important stuff.
When I read about the Johnny Paycheck's death and that he wrote the song "Take this job and shove it", I remembered the incident below.
From around 10/99 through 8/2000, I lived in the San Francisco downtown and worked there for an Austin-based company (it was one of those jobs where you are the client-site 5 days and fly home for the weekends). It was my first real job and the most memorable to me.
On the project I worked on, my Technical Lead (Dave) was this Gemini, Jewish guy who was just drop-dead gorgeous and had the most wacky sense of humor I had ever seen. Needless to say, we got along famously and in time, he became something of a big brother to me - he didn't work for my company - he was a contractor, but he defended me from the team leads who worked for my company. He was really sweet that way. See, I had this affinity for Jewish people for a while.
So this manager was being transferred from our project to another project in Virginia, so we all took him out for dinner and then to a karaoke bar. It was me, Dave, the transferred manager (Mario), my project team lead (Troy) and the replacement manager (Norm). We were browsing through the song lists, and listening to horrendous singing from other people and I was humming out a couple of songs that I knew. So Dave gets this bright idea - he thinks I sing well, so he wants to get on the stage and sing.
We were drunk enough that the idea seemed half-way sensible. So, he picks the song - "Take this job and shove it". One small problem was, I had never heard of the song before. Oh well, did I mention we were drunk? So there we are on the stage both of us - I was still asking him how the song's tune goes, and the lyrics start scrolling by on the screen in front of us. Oops. Ever tried to catch up with a karaoke song you don't know after 30 seconds worth of lyrics have already scrolled by? It was a disaster. I was reading the lyrics off the screen, Dave was cussing at the audience to join in so somebody is singing. We then pulled Troy on the stage to try and salvage whatever we could of the song, since he had sung done a beutiful rendition of a country song just before us. Needless to say, it didn't help.
Anyways, so ended my extremely short stint as a karaoke artist.