AFA Issues: Culture - Commentary by Matt Friedeman. This is an interesting article. Not so much for its conclusion which I find a bit tenuous, but rather for the reference it makes at the start. There was an article in the Chronicle of Higher Education some years back (here is a link if you happen to have one of their overly-expensive subscriptions) about how students in college studying Shirley Jackson's classic short story "The Lottery" had moved from sharp criticisms of the fictious culture that held a lottery to choose someone to stone to death eacy year to proclaiming that we have no right to judge other cultures. If this is what that culture does, who are we to say it is wrong. That article struck me as central to some of the major problems in the world today. That people can read Jackson's wonderful and disturbing story and not feel that a society which kills members annually in a completely arbitrary fashion is in some way inherently wrong is incredible to me. Anyway, it's on my mind this morning for no particular reason except that I stumbled upon it accidentally.  10:52:03 AM    

Ftrain: Robot Exclusion Protocol  5:50:30 AM    

Please to ignore. This is being a test.  5:06:15 AM    

And now I've stopped messing around with my old blog. I'm fine with the setup I have now.  5:01:23 AM    

I'm messing around with my old blog, blackcat.editthispage.com because it is after 4AM and I have nothing better to do. Well, I do have better things to do but at 4AM I can't really do them. My brain won't let me.

So, I've got this editthispage.com blog. I've got this radio blog. And I've got this blogger blog. And I want them all. Two are mirrored (radio and blogger) -- if I can pull in the manila one as well... well, that would be truly weird.

See? 4AM. Not much you can do with that time.  4:28:27 AM    

This posting, item, whatever you call it (what is an individual unit of a weblog? a bloglet?) serves no purpose except to force an update of my site on the radio server so I can test something out.  3:41:45 AM    

One of these days I need to make my own design for this site. Themes are nice and all, but it means your blog looks like everyone else's. If you are reading this on raggedcastle.com you probably have no idea what I'm talking about. Go check out the other version of this same blog here.  3:26:01 AM    

World Wide Words

Nothing like a sleepless night for finding some fun links...  3:09:39 AM    

My friend Chris Kagy is in Nigeria on business the next few weeks. I can't imagine having to go to a place going through so much trouble right now. As you can read in his weblog, he's pretty much staying in the hotel and going to work. Nigeria is not a place to go sightseeing... Needless to say, we'll all be a lot happier when he comes back home safely.  3:04:34 AM