homoLudens

BAWP TC Kimberley G writes from the Big Apple: “It’s nearly 1:00 AM and I am tired, but sleepless. I’m spending three weeks “apartment and kitty sitting” for two young friends who just married and are off on an international honeymoon. (I think they went to the tropics to escape a New York summer! Yikes!)” [Gilles, Kimberley BAWP] This is exciting. Kimberley is joining the blog writing community of BAWP. But hell, she should have asked me about that August in New York thing.
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See Rafe’s pithy summing up on the Magdalene Sisters homes in Ireland, the subject of a notable documentary: “When one reads about Ireland’s Magdalene Asylums, it makes it clear that the Taliban aren’t as far divorced from Western culture it would be comfortable to believe.” And that “c” in the ‘one church universal’ is a capital “C,” as Frank Rich researches in Mel Gibson’s case: “These days American Jews don’t have to fret too much about the charge of deicide ó or didn’t, until Mel Gibson started directing a privately financed movie called ‘The Passion,’ about Jesus’ final 12 hours.”
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“There’s an interesting thread on Phil Ringnalda’s blog today regarding the naming process for the !(echo/atom/pie) syndication format project??? I’m not yet at the point where I see wikis as adding sufficient value to any process I’m involved with to justify the installation, configuration, and learning curve for users necessary to add another tool to my social software arsenal. Like Phil, I continue to be troubled by the inherent a-historicism built into the wiki environment; like Shelley I find the lack of social cues to tell me if I’m treading on someone’s toes by changing content to be inhibiting; like Dare, I find that large-scale active wikis are often too chaotic and disorganized, making it difficult for me to find what I’m looking for. But I’m still willing to be convinced.” [Corante: Social Software]
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Item title comes from a brilliant Joy Williams essay in her collected non-fiction, Ill Nature. The link to this hilarious video is from [overstated] “Last week I was in Ottawa attending the International Society for STD Research (ISSTDR) convention. By far the funniest thing that transpired during the entire event was a commercial played midway through King Holmes’ keynote lecture???”

Advertisement (quicktime, 6.8MB)

Advertisement (mpeg, 3.2MB)
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Nice T-shirt too.
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Will Richardson’s got a new ISP (Weblogger) and a lovely new theme. The banner photo was taken just north of Perth Amboy, near my home town. Really.

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Writing on the Mac. There’s a line wrap problem with the composer built into Mozilla 1.4, at least in Manila. Keeps breaking urls. So this is a test of a Netscape Development rich text editing demo. We’ll see if it does the same thing. How about a ref to the new eBN-hosting of Manila site? Prices can’t be beat.
Doesn’t let you edit in source view, though. Anyone have other suggestions?
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“So here’s an interesting struggle in a corner of creative space you might not expect???: Open Source Yoga. The attempt to resist the control of copyright over Yoga (yes, really).” via (Meryl) [Lockergnome Bytes]

During over 20 years of doing yoga, my most relaxed moment came in a teacher training class. No poses involved, no breathing, just some reading about the history of yoga. Janet Macleod, the light-hearted and far from dogmatic teacher noted an article which explored the extraordinary similarities between the traditional sun salutation sequence and the 19th. century calisthenics regime of the British Imperial army. “Oh,” I thought, “it’s just a nice exercise.” Maybe somebody can copyright ringolevio and kick-the-can.
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