Sunday, December 19, 2004

Song of the day: Little Wing, for Jessica Cole. 4:13:48 PM    comment []

From an NYT mag article by Jeffrey Rosen about the ethics and realities of blogging: "[Former FCC chair Reed] Hundt said he has abandoned the idea that he can control his audiences and assumes that everything he says might be posted." This issue arose when I was covering the Bowles campaign -- a staffer came to me after one Bowles speech and said, you can't blog this, you didn't identify yourself as press when Erkine asked if there were reporters in the room...I laughed and said I wasn't the problem, I was a professional and would have spoken up if I was putting it on the record, the issue was with the rest of the crowd. 12:03:51 PM    comment []

An interview with my late cousin Edward T. Cone, with video, about composing, criticism and analysis, and performance. As a composer I think it's easy to know when something begins. I don't think I've ever had the experience of getting a musical idea and feeling that it belonged in the middle of something. I've always been able to think fairly consecutively, so when I get a musical idea it begins something. How to end something, that's more difficult...at some point we have to stand back from it and say that's it, I've said what I needed to say. It's finished. I don't know how you do it; you just have to know. 11:51:40 AM    comment []

Pete Bodo in the NYT on deer hunting: "No point in accidentally blowing off a leg or falling out of a tree in the dead of night; that would probably mean missing opening day." 11:43:22 AM    comment []

Radio blues: aggregator pages like NCBlogs and Greensboro101 won't link to specific posts at my blog because I don't use titles on my posts, and they can only read titles. But I made a deliberate decision not to use titles, because putting a headline on a one-sentence blog post is useless, and because I don't want to spend my time thinking of headlines for posts that are supposed to be pithy in the first place, and because this is a weblog not a newspaper. I'm stuck. 10:54:43 AM    comment []

This is encouraging: the website for Greensboro's newest alt-weekly, Yes!, has links to other publications. (via GIT) 10:47:47 AM    comment []

David Wharton has the most interesting post on the turret pitch of Greensboro buildings that you are likely to read anytime soon, although that may be damning his work with faint praise. Pictures, too. 9:18:23 AM    comment []

Michael Kinsley: "Most interesting, though, is how the Web enables people who are scattered physically around the globe, who share an interest in a topic as naturally uninteresting as the economic theory behind Social Security privatization, to find one another and enjoy a gabfest." 9:06:43 AM    comment []

John Perry Barlow is fighting the US government to protect your rights. As if writing Cassidy wasn't enough. Barlow: "(U)nconstitutional behavior by the authorities is constrained only by the peoples' willingness to contest them." 8:11:54 AM    comment []

The NCBlogs aggregator page now accepts RSS feeds, creating a dynamic table of contents for the whole state. Register your site here. 8:06:25 AM    comment []

Page 7 on Greensboro's latest attempt to feel good about race relations without actually doing any hard work: "Could this money not be better spent on programs that would pair up folks who were from different racial AND socio-economic backgrounds?" Update: Alert reader Ben comments that there's more to the program than Page 7 reports. But Page 7 says she couldn't get that kind of info when she went looking for it. From the same post linked above: "when I called the Mayor's office and the GSO communications folks (which is where I was directed by the City) no one wanted to answer any of my seemingly inocuous & benign questions. So this is my story about Mosaic based on the info I was able to dig up without the help of city leaders." 8:00:12 AM    comment []

Merry Christmas. There, I said it, and I meant it, too... ...Here's the thing about Christmas: It's an American holiday as well as a religious one. My newspaper column concerns holiday speech codes. I'm just fine with saying and being told Merry Christmas. But: Just because I'm OK with acknowledging the existence of a major holiday and wishing merriness upon all people does not indicate the following: that I want our secular government to fund religious displays; that I want to hear sappy watered-down Christmas music everywhere I go, starting in mid-November; that I want to eat fruitcake or read a long letter about your perfect life... Read the whole thing. 7:48:58 AM    comment []