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My dilettante interest in the Semantic Web has mostly been limited to thinking about making this blog. But recently I've been wondering how I can apply some of these ideas to DonorsChoose. (For a primer on the SemWeb, read Paul Ford's piece and this Wikipedia article.) Specifically, how can we use microformats to increase access to microphilanthropy? (I've been learning more about microformats from microformats.org and its listservs.)
DonorsChoose both gives grants (to teachers) and receives them (from the public). We have thousands of proposals that public school teachers have posted on our site, and individuals can give directly to those projects. Similar microphilanthropy sites include Kiva, Modest Needs, Global Giving, and GiveMeaning. All are essentially philanthropic marketplaces that bring together givers and recipients. And thus all could benefit from opening our data in a way that would make them accessible beyond our own websites.
Picture the following mashup possibilities:
These are the kinds of things that microformats could make possible. We at DonorsChoose have been talking about applying microformats to our proposals (each has its own page) to make them semantic, but none of the existing microformats seem to fit what we're doing. I also recently talked with Tom Williams at GiveMeaning who is also interested. I'm posting this here as what I hope will be part of a larger conversation about microformatting microphilanthropy.
Ideally we would have a microformat "hGive". This would allow organizations that are seeking contributions / in-kind donations / volunteers to use it, as well as organizations/people who are looking to volunteer, donate, etc. (I'm thinking of online volunteer clearinghouses such as New York Cares which exist in most US cities I believe.)
Here are some of the potential parameters:
I'm sure there are other possibilities / desiderata, especially around volunteer projects (one time vs ongoing, group vs individual, etc) but this is what comes to mind.
If there were an implementable standard, I'm pretty sure I could get DonorsChoose to start using it in the nearish future. And then, of course, Utopia Ensues.
A month ago I had 250 messages in my inbox. Today I have 25. Here's how I did it. Perhaps this might be useful to you as well. The method is geared toward Outlook users.
As I wrote in The Anxiety of Getting Things Done, one of the problems I have with the GTD system is the State of Grace:
In order for the GTD system to really work, you have to trust that your task list is comprehensive and complete. You have to capture everything that you have to do and organize it into projects. You (ideally) should have everything sorted, and filed. Take a few days to get yourself organized, the book advises. A few days? I thought, looking at towering piles of papers. Try a few weeks.The real problem is, if you aren't in this state of grace, the value of GTD drops precipitiously. Because you can't trust that your list of tasks and projects is actually complete. There's still the lurking anxiety that somewhere in that pile of papers you haven't attacked yet is something you really really need to do.
Maybe it's just me, but trying to get into this state is anxiety-producing in itself, especially if you're trying to get work done at the same time.
For many of us, one of the hardest places in our lives to achieve the State of Grace is our email inboxes. There's that constant inflow of messages, ranging from the important to the informative to the amusing to the offensive. There's spam. And there's our tendency, even after reading David Allen's book, to use our inbox as a to-do list.
So what to do? I've read up on methods like 43 Folders' Process to Zero. My main problem with this method (and David Allen's) is that your important messages, the ones you are supposed to actually do something about, are put into a folder (@Action or @Process or whatever). Which is fine in theory. In practice, whenever I try to use this method, I do not open the @Action folder. Why? Simple. Because I don't have to. It's Pandora's folder, and I know that all the things I'm anxious about lie within. So I don't touch the damn thing. The problem is worse instead of better.
My inbox, on the other hand, leaves me no choice. I have to open it. But I need a way to deal with a 250-message inbox. A way that won't cause me more anxiety than the third-rail folder solution.
So here's what we're going to do: we're going to temporarily hide the "Action" emails, enabling us to concentrate on sorting (or quickly dealing with) the rest.
What we will need:
The setup:
First you're going to create a new View for your inbox. What this View will do is hide all of today's emails. We're working on our backlog, so we're not going to worry about today's messages for the next half hour. The View will also hide any messages with Flags. More on Flags in a bit. Here's how to make the "Triage" View:
Once that is set up, close all other programs. No instant messagers, no web browsers, no nothing. Turn your cellphone off (or on vibrate, if you must) and if you can take your phone off the hook, do it.
Now set the timer for a five minute countdown. Your emails are now sorted by Subject, A-Z. You're going to deal with as many as you can in five minutes. For each message, you must take one of these five action steps.
The action steps:
Lather, rinse, repeat.
Once the five minutes are up, you're going to resort and repeat. You'll do six five-minute runs, each with the following sorts:
Why do it this way? First, breaking it into five minute chunks is easier than one half-hour slog. Second, the different sorts mix it up, forcing you to deal with emails that are scattered througout your inbox. (If there were a random sort function, that would be even better, but there's not.) And third, we've deliberately saved the sort by date ones for last. Presumeably, the messages you didn't deal with yesterday have a higher API (Anxiety Provoking Index, which I just made up). Same with those messages from eight months ago that are at the bottom of your inbox. So we'll deal with them last. Hey, even if you've only flagged them as emails you've got to answer, at least you've sorted with them.
So six sorts x five minutes = half an hour. You should be able to get through at least 30 emails, one a minute, in this fashion. More, once you get the hang of it. In your last five minutes, transcribe your To-Dos from your paper into your Task list. Switch back to your normal Inbox view. And if you're feeling especially virtuous, tackle one of your flagged messages. Or just take a break. You deserve it!
Update: You may also want to check out Adrian Trenholm's Tickling email in Outlook system for another use of views to manage your Inbox.
I've been thinking about history and History.
history with a small h is the brownian motion of capital and ideas and people. It's your grandpa's story about how his dad helped manage a vaudeville theater. It's the book you picked off the shelf in the used book store, and you read it, and it changed who you are. It's the small series of events that led to you getting your job. It's the story of how you met your wife.
Then there's History, the Great and Grand History, the Events that Will Be Recorded. The ones that will end up in the big shabby textbook, given to you at the start of the semester with the names of the students who had it before you inscribed on the inside cover, and their doodles and marks and scrawls throughout, until the book is too old, its recent history section too far in the past, and the thing is sent out to pulp.
Most of us live our lives in history, but occasionally the Events of History interrupt us. There are three such Events that have changed my own history.
The first is the Cold War. The Eighties Version. The Reagan Version. The Day After Version. The one where synthpop stars sang bad songs about how they'd very much like for the world to be not destroyed, please and thank you. The one where Lt. Col. Stanislav Petrov saved us all from annihilation, and none of us knew it.
I started working for SANE, because it seemed the only sane thing to do. I was fourteen. I thought I could do something about politics.
The second is the L.A. riots in 1992. I was in the last days of my senior year of college. I was trying to figure out what to do with my life. My political science studies, my work for various members of Congress, had all soured me on the political idealism of my earlier youth. Perhaps I should go into publishing, where I had some experience, and making books is a good thing, right?
"Have you heard? Los Angeles is burning." Sometimes History's herald is a fellow student whose name you will never remember, later. And over the next few days, watching a city tear into itself, I resolved that whatever small thing I could do, I would do it. And, ever since, I have been.
The third is 9/11.
I'm still figuring out that Event.
I started thinking about History's interruptions after reading an article in the New Yorker about how close we came to foiling the 9/11 attacks. (The article isn't online but you can read an interview with the author Lawrence Wright here.) And how infighting between agencies kept us from doing so. I've been reading intelligence history from WWII, so trust me, this is nothing new. But I was gripped by a profound sense that my small thing wasn't worth a damn. What can one person ever do? What damn difference does it make?
I am gripped by this sense, because it seems that if there's anyone who could have stopped the attacks it was Paul O'Neill and Ali Soufa of the FBI. If you were to describe them -- the brash FBI commander who didn't play by the rules, and the young Muslim FBI agent who argued theology in Arabic with the terrorists he was interrogating -- you'd say that they were too perfect, made-for-TV. The fact that O'Neill, having left the FBI for a job as head of security for the World Trade Center, died on 9/11 further adds to the strangeness of this history, a history that seems like fiction.
I am gripped by this fear that my own small thing I'm doing to repair the world is fruitless. Because it easy to believe that we can change our history. It is hard to think that we can change our History.
One of the marvels of history is how haphazard it seems; a series of accidents lead up to where we are. I could have picked a different college and never met my wife. I could have picked a different book off the shelf. I could have taken a different train.
But History carries with it the myth of its own Inevitability. Events happen, and afterward we explain the Forces that led up to them: this ideology, that economic trend, this political movement, that technology. Even O'Neill and Soufa can't stand up to History. That's what I'm thinking about when I'm reading the article.
Later that day, they announce the arrest of a group that was thinking of bombing the Holland Tunnel. My family and I live on an island.
Today 172 people died in a series of terrorist bombings on a train in India. Seven explosions.
My first thought is to all of our Indian and South Asian friends -- both those we know by face and those we've met through this blog -- I hope and pray that your families are all right. Hope and prayer seem like thin paper stretched over sticks of balsa wood. In a world on fire.
Whom were you trying to target? The working class men who struggle for an inch of space in local trains? The working women who knit and cut vegetables in trains on their way home? Young, dreamy students discussing exams and love? The babies accompanying their mothers, smiling back at the women around them? Darkness is fast falling. Its raining like it will not stop. Will the rains wash away the blood?
I start reading what the bloggers are writing, the firsthand accounts and the anguish and the recriminations, and then I just can't anymore.
So tonight I sit down and think about History. I put on Joni Mitchell's Blue, because nothing else will do right now.
There's some other music, actually, that I'm thinking of, a composition by Steve Reich, called Different Trains. Reich weaves taped interviews about World War II into his music. "During the war years, Reich made train journeys between New York and Los Angeles to visit his parents, who had separated. Years later, he pondered the fact that, as a Jew, had he been in Europe instead of the United States at that time, he might have been travelling in very different trains."
172 people could have travelled on a very different train. I could have taken a very different train. We get on trains every day, thinking they will take us where we always go. But then History arrives instead.
There is something terrifying in the idea of a History we cannot change. It is why I reject the myth of the inevitability of History. And yet there is a demon, a devil of History, who whispers in our ears that the myth is true, that we are ceaselesly borne forwards and cannot change what happens to us. We are on the train and there is no stopping it.
Some researchers in South America have recently found that a people called the Aymara point in front of them when talking about the past, and behind them when talking about the future. This reminded more than one commenter of Walter Benjamin's angel of history:
A Klee painting named Angelus Novus shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing in from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such a violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.
It seems to me that there is something quite natural about the Aymara's perception of the past before them and the future behind them. We can see the past, as we can see what is before us. The future is as invisible as the back of your head. Where your eyes don't go.
The angel of history is terrifying because as he looks backwards into the past, he can do nothing. The devil of history, or more properly, of History, is more terrifying still because he looks forwards into the future we cannot see:
The devil of History looks forward. His back is always toward us and we cannot see his face. He sees the glaciers melting, hears knives being sharpened in the dark. Species turn into fossils, empires will fall. Newer and clever machines are built. Humanity remains stubborn and beautiful and cruel. All this, he says, is in your future.
You, who cannot see the future, clutch at the devil whose back is always to you. It's not set in stone! you cry. You cannot know.
He laughs as events hurtle past you both. Look at the past, he says. Look at its follies and murders and grand disasters. Do you really think the future can be better?
But we can change it! You are angry. It's not too late. Someone is always the first to suddenly stand up from their soft chair. We can all do something.
You think you can stand against History? The devil mocks you. History will take no more notice of you than a tank takes notice of a pebble caught up in its treads as it grinds its way toward a distant battle. Tend to your clever machines. Write words that will not last. Only my words will last. Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!
You don't believe the devil. The devil is there to trick you, to make you give up. Perhaps his unseen eyes are blind. But you have no better answers to his prophecies and proclamations and predictions.
There is a great wind coming from the future. The devil's back is to you. So you turn your back on him. Hope and prayer are thin paper stretched over sticks of balsa wood. A sure knot, and the string is reeled. It goes from the kite to your hand, to the vessels that lead from your hand to your heart.
There is a great wind coming from the future. It bears your kite aloft. This is your banner. Your call to arms. Perhaps others will see it; perhaps not. Perhaps you can change something, prove the devil wrong; perhaps not. Perhaps nothing will come of your attempt and the devil's History will arrive. Then again, perhaps not.
There is a great wind coming from the future. Here you stand, with a kite of paper in a world on fire. You can do no other. May God help us all.
The calendar lies, really. It's not September 11th. We keep changing, like an particle jumping between eigenstates, from September 10th to September 12th, from reading movie reviews to reading casualty reports, from buying ice cream to buying bandages and batteries, from worrying about dinner to worrying about destruction.
I wrote that two years ago.
Last winter I came out of the subway, and ascended the stairs into unexpected snow. I love snow, city snow even, but suddenly -- there I was again. My heart racing. An ice grip constricting my throat. It wasn't snow, but ashes.
Oh no, I thought. Don't take the joy of snow away from me, too. I stood quite still, just watching the white flakes in the air, unable to move into the present, into September 12th, into 2004.
I wrote that last year.
This year, it's September 13th. Finally.
It's not that 9/11 has receded in my consciousness. I still deal with PTSD. It still comes back. Sunday I drove across the Brooklyn Bridge, and remembered the postal employees handing out water on the Brooklyn side. Sunday night I was grilling in our backyard, drinking a beer, looking up at the Towers of Light. That's where they were. There they are. And here I am.
So why is it September 13th? What's changed?
I'll be honest, things haven't been easy as of late. September's here again. The TV is showing us bodies again. Death, destruction, a million people trying to go somewhere, just to be safe. Again, it feels like there's so little I can do. Give some money, send some supplies, read the papers, write a blog post, get angry, get sad, get depressed, get numb.
But some things have changed. I've changed. Things are generally easier. I don't think about ashes that much any more.
And, this time, the nature of the disaster has changed. After 9/11, we confronted evil. Evil brought terror and death and destruction into our lives. We knew who the evildoers were, and as much as we grappled with what might have been done before, or what to do next, the object of our anger and rage was clear. Al Qaeda.
This time, there are no evildoers, at least not on a grand scale. One can't blame the hurricane, and I refuse to blame God. Instead, I rage against the incompetent and the corrupt. (What else can one call the elevation of Michael Brown to a position where lives are at stake?) Sins of omission are of a different moral order than sins of comission.
And this blog has changed. After 9/11, Ishbadiddle was a huge source of support for me. This little electronic community, mostly of friends, and some mostly pleasant strangers, and everyone trying to work through this together. Over time, that need faded for all of us, I think. And, over time, Ishbadiddle has become less of a group blog, and more of my own personal thing. It's not the community it used to be, and few posts receive comments any more. It's just happened that way, for a lot of reasons. Online communities evolve; more Ish posters have their own blogs now; there were too many heated arguments; people have lives. Lots of reasons.
But it's not my support group any more. Which is a good thing, I think.
After Katrina, I kept writing about it, trying to write it out, but feeling frustrated. Where is everyone? Hello? Is this thing on?
Of course, Rule Number One of Blogging is: Write For Yourself. If you're waiting for feedback, hit counts, kudos, a freaking medal or something, forget about it. Write for yourself, and if people read it, so much the better.
And, of course, just because folks don't comment doesn't mean they aren't reading, or even acting. I got an email from a friend -- a regular here, whom I won't name, as not everyone believes that charitable acts should be publicized. After this post, he and his family sent a bunch of supplies to one of the shelters listed. He wrote: "It isn't always easy to see the ripples we create when we throw rocks in the ocean. I imagine it is hard to know what effect a single person can have on a disaster as immense as Katrina with things as singular as blog postings."
And that made it all worth it. Really.
So, let me explain. No, that will take too long. Let me sum up:
Ish has changed, and I can't expect it to be what it was. (This isn't a please-post-and-comment guilt post, honest.)
I'll write what I want, and that's that. The response may be none, or it may be invisible to me (hi, lurkers!), but that don't matter.
And, finally, it's no longer a good idea for me to deal with Hurricane Katrina by blogging about it. I have a lot of other stuff to write -- a massive backlog of book reviews, for instance. You can all safely assume that I'm still concerned with Katrina and still doing something about it; I'll assume the same of all of you.
~~~
So it's September 13th. The air is clear, although I know it's not always. That sometimes the air is filled with anger, with ashes, with thunder. With things that cannot be understood, not easily. An airplane falling from the sky. The cries of the sick in an abandoned hospital, waiting for a rescue that never came. We take in this same air, we breathe it in, it becomes part of us. Toxic fumes, toxic memory, the exhalations of the dead, it's all in the air, inescapable, undetecable. And still we breathe in, breathe out. Still there's oxygen for our brains, our hearts, our very guts. There is song also in that air, and the breath of sleeping children.
Breathe in. How will you use that next breath? The world's inspiration?
The news out of New Orleans is too awful to bear. This is the worst natural disaster to befall our country. We must do something to help, now.
We are making a donation to the Red Cross Hurricane 2005 Relief Fund. I am asking you to do the same. Give whatever you can.
Debbie and I are starting the Ishbadiddle Relief Fund at $300. Let me know, either by comments to this post or by email, how much you've given to the Red Cross, and we'll add it to the total on the sidebar. If you want to give through another charity, that's fine. The important thing is that we do something.
Do it now. New Orleans needs our help.
Update: The blogosphere is giving. Tthanks to Mark for pointing me to Instapundit's page, who also gets us to the NZ Bear's blog for relief page.
Update: Lynn also suggests helping animals through the humane society, and giving through the Union for Reform Judaism.
Update: Be prepared: If you're a New Yorker you can check out if you are in a potential Hurricane Evacuation Zone and where to go if you need shelter.
I'm skeptical about the ability of any system to help me fix this. Even the basics -- make to do lists, break down projects into smaller pieces, prioritize, delegate -- are things that I know how to do, and know I should do, but I can't actually bring myself to do. And yes, I know, I've managed to get a couple of Ivy League degrees, have a family, a moderately successful career, and of course a blog, so how bad could it be, right? Well, sometimes it can be pretty bad. It's not that I want to be 100% productive. I just want to get things done without so much angst, anxiety, and adrenalin involved.
So it may surprise you -- it certainly surprised me -- to learn that I bought an actual self-help book.
Continue reading "The Anxiety of Getting Things Done" »
A blog of postcards of anonymous secrets. Sort of a combination of mail art and the now-defunct Apology Line (featured on This American Life.) The cards range from the amusing to the disturbing.
Note: Thanks to Google, this page has become a small Internet confessional. You're welcome to post your own secrets here. But (and I speak from personal experience) nothing can replace the help of professionals. They will also listen to your secrets, and keep them, and help you deal with your feelings about them. This site will help you find a psychologist. There are also some resources on our friend / superhero's site breakup girl. Don't go it alone. You don't have to.
There are three basic relationships in society.
The first is the Customer relationship.
The second is the Contract relationship.
And the third is the Covenant relationship.
A Customer relationship is built on exchange. I give you this, and in return you give me something else. If you repeat the transaction, trust is built -- but either party can always walk away.
A Contract relationship is built on trust. When we enter into a contract, we agree to act in certain ways over a designated length of time. Neither of us can walk away until the contract has ended. Until then we are bound together. Entering a contract requires some trust in the other party, although we have recourse in the law if that trust is broken.
A Convenant relationship is built on faith. When we enter into a convenant, it is for life. A covenant cannot be broken. A covenant demands sacrifice of us, and defines our personal responsibility. Our covenants are often not written down, yet they are embedded in our hearts. Our covenants are our most difficult relationships. Yet they define our society and keep it together. Our family relationships, our community relationships, our spiritual relationships are based on convenants.
To be an American citizen is to enter the American Covenant.
Our Constitution is the living expression of the American Covenant.
Like all covenants, the American Covenant demands sacrifice of us. It defines our personal responsibilities.
Yet the American Convenant is what binds us together as a nation. It is what gives us our destiny as a people. It is the blueprint for the shining city on the hill that together we are building.
In America, we take care of our own.
In America, we stand up for what we believe in: our personal beliefs, our spiritual beliefs, our political beliefs.
In America, we protect our families and our society. We protect the least among us. We fight when we must.
In America, we believe in fairness, in justice, and in our freedoms.
Conservatives want to break the Covenants of our society, and replace them with Customer and Contractual relationships.
Think about it. Why do they use the word "taxpayer" to define our relationship with the government? Unlike a citizen, a "taxpayer" has no responsibility. He pays taxes and that's it. In effect he is "buying" government services. That's why they say "it's your money" when they talk about taxes. It's true that it is your money. But it is also true that it is your society. We, as a society, have decided certain things about the way that we want our national family to be. We want to protect our family, so we fund policeman and soldiers. We don't want to be a society where children go hungry, so we fund food stamps. We fund firemen to put out our fires, and engineers and construction crews to build our roads and bridges, and doctors and nurses to help prevent the spread of disease.
Taxpayers don't do any of these things. Citizens do. We do. That is what your taxes are for -- they go to building the kind of society we want. We often disagree about what government can do and should do, and rightly so. But let us not forget what the government is for -- it is there to act on our behalf, to fufill the American Covenant.
Let me take two specific examples. The first is education. Conservative economists like Milton Friedman want to "privatize" our public education system. (See http://www.cato.org/pubs/briefs/bp-023.html ). They want to turn public schooling into a free market system, where families can leave failing schools and choose to attend better ones. Over time, the failing schools will close for lack of students, while the better schools attract students and resources.
First, let's think about this practically. In order for the free market to work, to raise up the good schools and eliminate the bad schools, families need to be able to freely choose which school to go to. But choosing a school is not a frequent transaction. You can decide where to buy lunch every day, but you can't decide where to go to school every day. It's simply impractical. At most, you get to decide once a year where to go to school. In economic terms, the "switching cost" is too high. In our framework, it really means that families are entering into a one-year contractual relationship with their school. With customers only able to "opt out" of a bad school on an annual basis, there are just not enough transactions for the market forces to truly reshape the schools. Even on conservatives' own terms, the idea of privatization doesn't work.
Now, let's think about what the public schools are really for. They are part of the American Covenant. If we truly believed that the free market was the best system for education, then society wouldn't pay for education at all. Only families who had school-aged children would pay for schools.
But we as a society, as a national family, realize that there are important reasons why all children should be educated. Public education is an investment in our economic future. Public education is an investment in our society. The public schools are where children from all over the community come together. It is the very kettle of our great melting pot.
To privatize our public schools is to break the American Covenant.
Let me take a second example: Social Security.
Conservatives talk about Social Security as if it were a bank account. You pay in to it, and when you retire, you get your money back.
This is a fiction. The money that the American worker puts into Social Security today does not go into an account with his or her name on it. It goes to pay people who are already retired. It is part of the American Covenant, a covenant between generations. Today's workers take care of today's retired workers. The young look after the old.
But conservatives want to break that covenant, and turn Social Security into a contractural relationship. That is why they want to give you "your" money back so you can put it into an investment account in the stock market. But "your" Social Security money is already spent. It paid for your grandma's rent, your grandfather's medication, the rent and the heating bills of the now-retired "Greatest Generation." Of course there is the practical question that if we start setting aside money into personal investment accounts, we won't have the money to pay today's retirees. Again, even on conservatives' own terms, the idea of privatization doesn't work.
But fundamentally, they want to break the Covenant between the generations. In the name of higher investment returns.
These are only two examples; the papers are daily full of others. But we do not have to let them happen.
We are all Americans, regardless of our political affiliations, of our state, our ethnic group, our religion, our wealth, our place in society. Today there are those who want to emphasize our differences. In the wake of the election, they call for expatriation, secession, expulsion. They may do so mockingly, but underlying their jokes is a real fear. A fear that the "other side" is so fundamentally different that we can no longer exist in polity, or even in politeness.
This is not the case. We have been through worse national trials. Our "more perfect Union" has been threatened time and again. But time and again, it is our belief in the American Covenant that brings us back together.
Remember the American Convenant. It is the basis of who we are. It is what makes us both great and good. And if we ever cease to be good, we will cease to be great.
I am so excited.
It's probably because I drank a full pot of coffee today. It's probably because I've spent most of the day talking about the election and what it means for us. But I am pumped up. I am ready to fight.
I refuse to be depressed. We lost, sure. We worked hard, we organized, we campaigned, we blogged, we called, we wrote, we voted. And we lost. But all is not lost. Not by a long shot.
So here it is, my ten point plan to take back the country.
I write to you today to urge you to vote tomorrow, and to tell you why I'm voting for John Kerry.
Continue reading "An open letter to my friends and family:" » 
So, I've finally done it. I've turned Ishbadiddle into a semantic web, of sorts. 3.75 years of blogging, 2,341 posts, have all been imported, categorized, and coded. (With help from our posters of course!) There are now 1,385 keywords in our subject index, covering everything from Abu Ghraib to Zombies.
Why bother? Wouldn't it just be easier to leave all the old posts alone? Well, of course it would be easier. But I wanted to fix what I see as a fundamental problem with blogs.
At heart, a blog is just a database. (I am indebted to Sun for our many conversations on this topic that helped push my thinking on blog organization.) URLs, post text, authors, comments -- it's all just data, and in theory we can slice it any way we want to. But most blogs only divide up the information by time. Which is useful, perhaps, for a personal diary -- what was I thinking about last June? -- but for a reader, it's probably the least interesting way of reading. When was the last time you casually read a blog's archives? Generally, if it's not on the front page, it's gone.
Worse yet, everything is in reverse chronological order, leading to what Eric Meyer calls the Memento effect: "Reading a weblog is like watching Memento, which I agree was a cool movie, except all weblogs are like that so it's as if every single movie released in the past seven or eight years was structured exactly like Memento."
This is one reason why we moved Ish over to Movable Type. With the old Blogger system, we were restricted to the reverse-chronlogy diary mode by default. MT lets us slice up Ishbadiddle by Author, by Category, and yes, by Month.
The category system is an essential organizational tool -- if you're just interested in current events, or to catch up on your friends, or read our peculiar cultural views, or our thoughts on technology, or just want to read the wacky stuff -- you can narrow down Ishbadiddle into these thematic chunks. Useful? Sure. But at best, it's only creating "sub-blogs" (sublogs?). These still don't get at the fundamental problem with blogs.
Continue reading "Turning a Blog Into a Semantic Web" » I can't let today go by. Not unwritten, not unmarked, not unlived.
Continue reading "It's Two Years Later" » 
Not 'an' Old Dirty Bastard, mind you, the Ol' Dirty Bastard aka Dirt McGirt aka Big Baby Jesus. I would never have expected to be asked that question in anything other than the hypothetical mode, but New York's a funny place.
A rental agent held an open house for our upstairs apartment in Brooklyn, and called us to say that Russell Jones, a rapper recently signed to Roc-a-Fella, was interested in our place (he must like parquet floors, I guess). She wanted to know if we would be willing to meet with him, his manager, his parole officer (!) and a VH1 camera crew to discuss terms. The only catches were that he needed to have an answer that night and he had to meet before his 9PM curfew. She emphasized that he was intent on straightening out his life and knew that the slightest violation of his parole (i.e. drinking, failing a drug test, skipping curfew) would return him to the criminal justice system. In addition, his mother would sign the lease and he'd pay a year's rent in advance. Really, she said, he's just a guy looking for a second chance.
I'll let you know what we did in the comments, but first I'd like to hear from the collective Ish as to what you would do in such a hypothetical (to you) situation.
Aaron writes:
Okay, now we all know that celebrity sightings here in manhattan are a dime a dozen and not generally worth getting excited about but this is an exception. I was thinking that the high point of my brush with fame on friday would have been holding the door open for Gwennie Paltrow at my local coffee shop, and since she was a little rude I considered letting the door slam on the (admittedly world-class) Paltrow-heinie.
But -- late that night I was hanging out with some friends at Chumley's, a former speak-easy in the west village, when this curly haired old english dude sat down next to me with two of his friends. I was kind of thinking the guy must be Sammy Hagar or something, because he had this artiste-rock-star aura. So I started chatting with him a bit, something along the lines of recommending the burgers or the shepherds pie, and we started talking about the struggles that artists go through or something along those lines. He went into a long discussion of how important it is to love your work, to really look forward to it at the beginning of the day and all that sort of thing. It was a little bit cliche but the guy was entertaining enough that I was pitching in too. To emphasize the point he toasted to our whole table "so here's to the best thing in the world --- to wake up bright and early and be given a chance to fuck everything up in an entirely new and different way."
So we swapped blackout stories, he and his friends got up, shook our hands, and said goodbye see ya round mates.
The waitress comes up to me totally breathlessly with "ohmygod how do you know Robert Plant?" Not being savvy or fast or sober enough to say "well if you're lucky darling one day I'll introduce you," I smoothly replied instead with a "huh?" (or maybe it was "wha..?") and looked around to see the guy leave and you know what she was right. Holy cats! I was drinkin' frosties with Robert Plant and didn't even know it!
Thank god I didn't say I thought he was Sammy Hagar.
Wasn't there an Ishbadiddle advisory about not posting new topics in the comments? If there was, I disregarded it, and now I'll put it right. After prolonged final status negotiations, Jay and I have decided to get married next summer, joining with the Owlanphys in turning next year into one big Gilbert & Sullivan finale. Here's the whole story.
p.s. Unlike Chris and Emily, we waited a very long time to do this (due to exhaustive pondering of Ennis's question), but we still consider them our cohort and we couldn't have asked for a better one!
It may be rather parochial news when two Ishbadiddlers announce a link-up; but since this is the prime industry journal for all things NYC-blogger-related...
I thought I would let y'all know that yesterday I asked Emily to marry me. Despite being, as you all know, a very sensible woman, she impulsively decided to say yes.
Molanphy and Owens decline to comment on the prospect of launching a joint blog.
Not A Sparrow Falls
Last week we took Ben and Zach to the Bronx Zoo. None of the Everett-Lane boys had been (myself included) had ever been, and Ben's mad about baboons lately. (Or, as he calls them "Babooo!") And tigers. ("Rrrrrrar!") Our first stop (after looking at the elephants en route) was the Dancing Crane Cafe for lunch. While Debbie was feeding Zach, Ben and I did some exploring outside. "Bir!" he pointed. Behind a drain pipe was a tiny baby sparrow cheeping for its mother and home.
Continue reading "Everett-Lanes to the rescue!" » 
Last night we were watching the special features on The Princess Bride DVD. (Did you know that André the Giant used to be driven to school by his neighbor, Samuel Beckett?) Deb asked if Chris and Susan Sarandon were related and so off to imdb. (Turns out they used to be married. Bonus trivia question: Chris S. was in another movie with a PB co-star. Name it for a Ishpoint!) Then we were curious as to what else Rob Reiner had directed. His latest project, as it turns out, is a romantic comedy based on a story by Dostoyevsky. "Out of all the Russians, Dostoyevsky is pretty much at the bottom of the barrel for romantic comedy sources" said Deb. But as it turns out, 90 movies have been made from Dostoyevsky's works. Tolstoy? 91. Gogol? 45. Pushkin? 54. Chekhov? A whopping 128.
Suddenly a new game is born! Find the authors with the most screen credits! We all know that the cultural relevance of an author is really measured by how many movies have been made from your books. All the arguments about the canon could be easily resolved by referring to the new Ishbadiddle / IMDB Author Relevance Index.
Can you beat these? More Ishpoints for any authors we've missed.
Continue reading "The Ishbadiddle / IMDB Author Relevance Index [Updated]" » OK, folks. This is the last time we're going to discuss this here. I am sick -- and tired -- of having every substantive discussion here turn into an anti-anti-war-protestor screed. Case in point. It's happened so many times over the last few weeks that I'm beginning to loathe to talk politics here, knowing that it'll devolve into an off-topic back and forth over protests. I know some of my fellow Ishers have already slacked off posting for this very reason. And so, by grand fiat, I declare this the Last Ishbadiddle Discussion on the Morality, Legality, Political Efficacy, and Fashion Sense of Anti-War Protests. No further posts on the discussion. All comments to be made here; comments that creep into later posts will be deleted. Anything else you have to say on the subject, you can start your own blog. Be my guest.
First, WTF? Like, we're fighting a war here, and probably changing the course of American foreign policy and the global strategic balance for the next century. I'd like some discussion of how and why we're doing this. (Did anyone read this?) Instead the right seems obsessed with trashing the anti-war movement. (It's not just here. I'd go and find links but -- oh, just go read Andrew Sullivan or something.) Now I'm not going to address here any of the actual meritorious arguments for or against war. Those are still fair game for later posts and comments. But herewith, I logically and methodically demolish each of these anti-protestor arguments. (Those of you who read Ish comments regularly will notice I'm repeating things I've said before, but in the interest of ending this nonsense, here it all is:
In response to M_____' recent challenge to the "War Opponents" to come up with better arguments than those expressed at protests, I started re-reading my thoughts on Iraq I wrote back in September. And, I realized that nothing in the events of the last six months has really changed my opinion. Which you can read as either a failure on Team Bush's part to make the case for war, or just my own stubborn refusal to change my mind. Anyhow, since the questions of the proper methods of crowd estimations, and the larger meaning of poll numbers have been adequately addressed in the comments to his post, I thought I would get to the meat of the matter: why shouldn't we invade Iraq? So, here's the cut-and-paste (although not cut-and-dried) post on Iraq:
Continue reading "Iraq, Redux" » I am not the person to write this. I am neither a Buffy scholar or a student of the occult. I've just noticed a couple of interesting correspondences between the Buffy mythos and the lost book known as The Necronomicon.
According to H.P. Lovecraft, The Necronomicon was
composed by Abdul Al-Hazred, a mad poet of Sanaa, in Yemen, who is said to have flourished during the period of the Ommiade caliphs, circa 700 A.D. He visited the ruins of Babylon and the subterranean secrets of Memphis and spent ten years alone in the great southern desert of Arabia - the Roba al Khaliyeh, or "Empty Space" of the ancients and "Dahma" or "Crimson" desert of the modern Arabs, which is held to be inhabited by protective evil spirits and monsters of death. Of this desert many strange and unbelievable marvels are told by those who pretend to have penetrated it. In his last years, Al-Hazred dwelt in Damascus, where the Necronomicon (Al Azif) was written, and of his final death or disappearance (738 A.D.) many terrible and conflicting things are told.
So how did Lovecraft know about this book? According to Colin Low, the book influenced the Norse eschatological myths. It has connections with Kabbalist creation texts. The medieval English magician John Dee translated it. in the 1920s Aleister Crowley found it among Dee's papers at Oxford and tried to pass much of it off as his own. While in America Crowley became involved with Sonia Greene of Brooklyn, who later married H.P. Lovecraft. The Necronomicon thus became a central part of the Lovecraft mythology, the core curriculum of Miskatonic University.
Well, not really. Lovecraft made the whole thing up. Lovecraft said it was a "synthetic concotion of my own." This has not prevented plenty of people from publishing fakes, and a lot of people apparently really really want to believe that the Necronomicon exists. Because, you know, it could be real. (Low has a pretty interesting postmodern take on the book's "existence".) Real or not (a flamewar I'm not going to wade into), the Necronomicon has taken its place in popular culture. (Astute readers will recognize the Necronomicon as the source of all the trouble in the Evil Dead movies.)
Interesting, but what does all this have to do with Buffy the Vampire Slayer? (A question I ask myself several times a day.) First, there's a connection to the Buffy creation myth. We've started watching the first season on DVD and in the second episode Major Exposition Giles explains:
"This world is older than any of you know, and contrary to popular mythology, it did not begin as a paradise. For untold eons, demons walked the Earth, made it their home, their Hell. In time, they lost their purchase on this reality, and the way was made for mortal animals. For Man. What remains of the Old Ones are vestiges: certain magicks, certain creatures..."This is basically Lovecraft crossed with Bram Stoker (or maybe Anne Rice). Low again:"The books tell that the last demon to leave this reality fed off a human, mixed their blood. He was a human form possessed--infected--by the demon's soul. He bit another and another...and so they walked the Earth, feeding. Killing some, mixing their blood with others to make more of their kind. Waiting for the animals to die out and the Old Ones to return."
According to Alhazred, the Old Ones were beings from "beyond the spheres", presumably the spheres of the planets, and in the cosmography of that period this would imply the region of the fixed stars or beyond. They were superhuman and extrahuman. They mated with humans and begat monstrous offspring. They passed forbidden knowledge to humankind. They were forever seeking a channel into our plane of existence.The Old Ones are identified with the Nephilim of the Jewish apocrypha, fallen angels who lusted after human women and gave birth to a race of giants:
This is virtually identical to the Jewish tradition of the Nephilim (the giants of Genesis 6.2 - 6.5). The word literally means "the Fallen Ones" and is derived from the Hebrew verb root naphal, to fall. The story in Genesis is only a fragment of a larger tradition, another piece of which can be found in the apocryphal Book of Enoch. According to this source, a group of angels sent to watch over the Earth saw the daughters of men and lusted after them. Unwilling to act individually, they swore an oath and bound themselves together, and two hundred of these "Watchers" descended to earth and took themselves wives. Their wives bore giant offspring. The giants turned against nature and began to "sin against birds and beasts and reptiles and fish, and to devour one another's flesh, and drink the blood".Not exactly the same as vamps, but you still have supernatural beings using humans to spawn monsters. Plus the whole blood drinking thing. (The naming of the Old Ones as "Watchers", compared with the "Council of Watchers" on BtVS -- well that's just weird.)
What's more interesting is the connection from the Necronomicon to this season's From-Beneath-It-Devours, First-Evil, Mighty-Morphing-Big-Bad. Buffy et al. have been tormented by a demon who appears in the guise of people they know and tries to tempt them into doing Very Bad Things. Debbie figured that the MMBB was the same as the Serpent in the Garden -- he doesn't actually do anything bad, he just tempts others to do so. As such this First Evil isn't corporeal and may be resistant to your average high-heeled-boot-kicking, stake-through-the-heart-type slayage.
And guess what? The MMBB shows up in the Necronomicon. Or rather, through it.
In 1909, Alisteir Crowley and the poet Victor Neuberg went to the desert in Algiers (the same one where Al-Hazred purportedly spent ten years receiving/writing the Necronomicon). Whilst there, he attempted to call forth the aforementioned Old Ones, using a magical system (the "Enochian calls") put together by the aforementioned John Dee, the medieval translator of the Necronomicon. During the 10th Call, he manages to bring forth the demon Choronzon, who says:
Choronzon hath no form, because he is the maker of all form; and so rapidly he changeth from one to the other as he may best think fit to seduce those whom he hateth, the servants of the Most High. Thus taketh he the form of a beautiful woman, or of a wise and holy man, or of a serpent that writheth upon the earth ready to sting.Low (who says he's not joking this time), in his essay on John Dee and the Necronomicon, says:
At this point Neuburg literally saw these many forms of Choronzon, even the form of a woman he loved. Sometimes Choronzon spoke with Crowley's own voice.Sound like someone we've seen on TV recently? It gets better. Low demon-strates that Chronozon, far from being that sort-of-pink-guy who battles Morpheus in Gaiman's Sandman books, is "identical with the Serpent of Genesis, and with the rebellious angel Samael in Jewish midrashic and kabbalistic legend." Hence, the First Evil.
OK, want to get really obscure? There's a third John Dee-Necronomicon-Buffy connection, which I found tucked in a footnote to Bruce McClelland's By Whose Authority? The Magical Tradition, Violence and the Legitimation of the Vampire Slayer. (Somebody, please stop this Internet thing before it sucks all my time from me. Away, Google, away!) Buffy's first watcher of course wasn't Giles, it was Donald Sutherland Merrick Jamison-Smythe, in the movie/prequel. McClelland thinks that name is
a cryptic reference to Meric Casaubon. . . . Meric Casaubon in 1659 edited and published a transcription of a mystical work that involved automatic writing between Dr. John Dee, mathematician and alchemist to Elizabeth Regina, and Edward Kelley, an alchemist-magician whose reputation did not stand up quite so well. The manuscript purported to have been dictated by the Angels in a language called Enochian, which had its own mystical (quasi-Hebrew-quasi-alchemical) alphabet.Which same ms. was used by Crowley in the desert in 1909 (and which I've actuallly seen at the library at Oxford). Coincidence? I think not!
I don't know where Whedon gets his material. Could it be that he's got a grimoire locked in his closet?
When did I stop believing in democracy?
War clouds are gathering, but I'm treating it like the weather: I'll check the paper every day to see what'll happen, but there's nothing I can do about it. My friends urge me to contact Congress, but I say to myself: what's the use? Will it actually change their votes? Will that actually have any effect on what the president does? I see notices for marches, town meetings, rallies, but I treat the proferred leaflets as I do ads for yoga classes, psychics, and cheap men's suits. No thanks, eyes forward, keep walking.
When did this happen to me?
Continue reading "When?" » September 11, 2002
Dear Ben:
You're only just over a year old now, and can't read this. But someday you will. And someday you'll understand what I'm trying to tell you, about last year, about September 11th.
It all happened so soon after you were born -- the day before you turned one month old. None of us will forget that day, although you were too little then to remember it now.
I had taken that first month off from work, while we all got to know each other, your mom and me and you. You were very small then and I would sing and dance around the living room with you until you fell asleep on my shoulder. You liked Paul Simon (the "mamma pajamma" song) and the Red Clay Ramblers (the "Queen of Skye"). You liked looking out the window at the traffic and the birds and the sky. You slept and ate a lot.
So September 11th was going to be my first day back at work, after spending all that time being with you and watching you sleep and holding you. I got on the subway like I usually do. But the train stopped between Brooklyn and Manhattan. The train stopped, everything stopped, because something terrible had happened at the World Trade Center.
When I was a boy (younger than you are now), and your grandpa lived in New York City, he and I and your Aunt Susie visited the World Trade Center towers together. We were so high up we were looking down on the Statue of Liberty. At that time they were the tallest buildings in the world. They were so tall that you could see them from anywhere in the city. When your mom and I came to live in New York ourselves, we could always find our way by looking to see where the towers were. They were huge, they were beautiful, and they were so much part of the skyline that we usually forgot about them.
But on that morning, while I was going back to work, some very bad men, some evil men, took control of two planes. They flew these planes into the two towers of the World Trade Center. The planes blew up. The towers fell down. Many people made it out, but a lot of people died that day.
I don't need to tell you everything that happened. You probably study it in history class now. But I want to tell you what I learned, because I lived through it.
It's not easy to explain. There are bad people in the world, Ben. There are people who believe that God wants them to kill other people. Some of them are sick and don't know what they are doing. And some of them know what they're doing, but they've convinced themselves that doing terrible things is somehow good.
They're wrong, Ben. There's no good reason for what those men did. God doesn't want us to kill each other. Maybe by the time you're reading this, everyone will have figured that out, and people won't kill each other over religion or land or oil. I hope so.
But I don't want you to be afraid. That's what they wanted, for us to be afraid, to feel alone and vulnerable. But instead of being afraid and alone, we helped each other. Let me tell you what I did, and what I tried to do.
When we were stuck on the train, some smoke started coming into the subway car. Some people got very nervous and upset, but I was very calm. I knew that I was going to see you and Mom again. I knew that I had to keep a clear head, to be ready for whatever was going to come. I took off my tie and wrapped it around my head so I wouldn't breathe so much smoke. And in a calm but loud voice, I suggested that everyone sit down, because smoke rises, and put something over their mouth if they could. And some of them did.
When they finally got the train into Manhattan, the station was full of smoke. Everyone was trying to get out at the same time. I saw that one of the stairwells was empty. "There's more stairs over here!" I shouted. So some people took those stairs, which was safer than if we had all tried to use the same stairway.
When we finally got outside, the air was full of smoke and ashes. It wasn't easy to breathe, even with my tie around my face. I saw a bagel cart, abandoned on the street, and stopped to look inside. Maybe there were some napkins, and I could give them to people to breathe through. I couldn't find any, so I moved on. (Later, they were giving out masks at a hospital on the way to the bridge, so that was all right.)
I don't mean to brag about this stuff; I haven't even told anyone before now. Your dad is not a hero. I didn't rush into any burning buildings to save people. I didn't labor at Ground Zero with the rescue workers. I just tried to do the right thing, and help other people out as best I could. That's what we all did. When I got off the bridge, there were postal workers handing out water. When I got home to you and Mom, we put up a friend who was stranded. In the days after September 11th, we worked to collect and sort relief supplies at the Community Book Store on our block, which turned itself into a volunteer center.
Everyone has stories like this -- 8 million of us New Yorkers -- about how we helped someone, or someone helped us. After we'd been shown what terrible things a few people could do, it was wonderful to see that a lot of people could do a lot of good things, too.
I guess that's what I want to tell you about what happened last year. I can't make sense of why people do evil things. I can't tell you that there was a reason why all those people had to die that morning, and it's hard to accept that there was no reason at all. But what I can tell you is this: in life, you'll face a lot of crises. Some of them small, some of them big, and hopefully none as catastrophic as the attacks of 2001. But there will be times when you're not sure of what to do. My advice is this: Stay calm -- whatever is going to happen, is going to happen. And try to do the right thing. If you're not sure what the right thing is, try helping someone out.
There's so much more I want to tell you, and I hope when you're ready you'll ask me about it, and I hope that I have answers. And I hope you'll remember my story, and my advice, when there's confusion all around you. I know you'll do the right thing, son.
-- Dad
There's this haunting little song, "September," that opens David Sylvian's Secrets of the Beehive. In less than a minute and a half, it sets the tone for this album of melancholy and beautiful songs. I don't remember buying the LP, but I played it a lot in college, when I had a hunger for melancholy and beauty. The vinyl has been untouched for years now. I put it on the turntable again last night, and listened.
"September's here again..."
Yesterday I watched a plane fly over my head. Coming out of JFK, still low enough for me to see its size, its heft, a huge metal machine. "It looks like a missile with wings," I thought. And then: "Oh, damn." Because I thought that was all over with. Being anxious about low-flying planes. Or when the subway stops between stations.
Continue reading "September's Here Again" » My Mom has chickens.
This still kind of weirds me out. I grew up in the suburbs. No one has chickens in the suburbs. Now my Mom lives in the country -- Upper Bucks County, Pennsylvania, to be exact -- and she's got a couple of dozen chickens running around. They lay eggs. They crow at inappropriate, non-dawn times. They make chicks.
She names them all, of course. My last trip there she referred to two black-and-white chickens (like I know the breeds; are you kidding?) as "Salt and Pepper." Somehow I heard "Salt-N-Pepa". Which got my mind to thinking: what if she named all her chickens after rap stars? Lil' Kim? Puff Chicken? Ol' Dirty Rooster? The Notorious H.E.N.?
This still makes me chuckle. Any further chicken name suggestions can be left below.
