Saturday, May 31, 2003

Doozy: “NC is surrounded by money-sponges and is powerless to stop the outflow.”   I’m proud of North Carolina for not rushing into the lottery business. Lotteries aren’t so great, it turns out. But lotteries are big government that people love.   All that cash keeps going to Virginia and South Carolina, maybe some to Georgia, and now it looks like Tennessee is in the game, too. Raleigh needs money, bad. A North Carolina lottery feels inevitable. 5:18:37 PM

comment []

Alert reader Ken Smith turned me on to Karl Kraus, a sharp-witted Austrian writer who skewered journalists, politicians, and other easy targets. Kraus died in the first half of the 20th century but his aphorisms still zing in the 21st.   This one could be the weblogger’s motto: “Language is the mother of thought, not its handmaiden.” (What would Steven Pinker say about that?)   Kraus also anticipated the blogger’s definition of professional scribes: “Journalist: a person without any ideas but with an ability to express them; a writer whose skill is improved by a deadline: the more time he has, the worse he writes.”   But the Viennese master nailed an antecedent of  bloggystyle, too. “Baking bread from bread crumbs” was his description of popular essays on culture that added little original thought to the mix. (Smith, who annotates his own email, found that one in Wilma Abeles Iggers' book, Karl Kraus: A Viennese Critic of the Twentieth Century (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1967).) 11:01:29 AM

comment []

© Copyright 2003 Ed Cone.