Category: general

Wedding song

I try to be meek and mild. I try to be humourous too. And I’m always serious. Honestly. To some people, those don’t seem to go together well.
I’ve never received more complaints — verging on the indignant — than after I wrote about Wedding Song that

It may be a silly song, hastily written, badly rehearsed, and with some of the least successful poetic images Dylan has ever written (“I love you more than blood” – yuck!)

I’m sorry if I hurt someone’s feelings by trashing their favourite song, but I do think it’s a silly song. All reports agree that it was hastily written, and the recording bears ample evidence to the short rehearsal time, even though the performance miraculously hangs together and succeeds in the way that only Dylan can make it succeed and for which I love his music.

For once I agree with Clinton Heylin:

Though it is hard not to interpret the lyrics on a literal level, Dylan’s performance once again transcends the at times slipshod sentimentality. Which may well stand as the motif for all of Planet Waves. Though it is an album suffused with brilliant performances from both musicians and vocalist, Dylan had yet to fully excise some bad writing habits picked up during the amnesia. (Dylan Behind Closed Doors, p. 99)

The “slipshod sentimentality” keeps me from seeing the honesty that Dylan so desperately tries to display (or: that the persona in the song so desperately tries to display, or: that Dylan so desperately tries to make the persona in the song display), and which makes it sound dishonest to me, despite all the overwhelming images.

“You try so hard…,” as the Bard says.

Many have kindly suggested to me that “blood” is not to be taken literally. Frankly, I didn’t believe that Dylan was sitting at his breakfast table with Sara’s hand in one hand and a glass of freshly poured blood in the other, thinking “Now, which one do I love more…?” I’m well aware of the associations between family and blood. That still doesn’t make it a successful poetic image, for me.

There’s more to the poetic than making cunning connections or crafting rhetorical figures. Those things are to a poetic text what a virus is to a computer: They can be very powerful, but just being there — on the hard-drive or in a text — isn’t enough. As long as they don’t run — if they aren’t executed — they do no damage, nor do they do any good; they do nothing, apart from taking up space.
So, what does it take for an image to be executed?

The very sound of it is important, the physical qualities, that which is not connected with concepts, words, ideas. Already here, “I love you more than bleahd” fails, and not only because of the kitchen-table associations.

A certain broadness in the range of associations isn’t a bad thing either, instead of monomaniacal insistence on one topic (unless of course that insistence itself is what is on display). The blood image alone might have done it for me in a different context, but in the company of the other larger-than-life images in the song, trying to top each other in greatness of sentiment — More! More!! More!!! — it reminds me quite a bit of Dan Bern’s song Tiger Woods, which has the same escalation on overdrive (only this time successfully):

I got big balls
Big ol’ balls
Big as grapefruits
Big as pumkins,
Yes sir, yes sir
And on my really good days
They swell to the size of small dogs —

Balls big as small dogs — now, there’s some poetic imagery for ya!
But most important for how I judge a poetic image by its ability to project a persona which we all know is literary but whose experiences are close enough to our own that we can make them our own as if they were genuine. This is the fundamental failure of Wedding Song for me: I can’t for the life of me think of it as a genuine, honest expression of anything. Too many things stand in the way and prevent me from making it my own. And if that is the case, I’d rather go out there and get those experiences myself — and tell myself that I don’t need Dylan to tell me what it’s all about.
Which I did. There’s a reason why that particular song was featured on the front page on that particular day…

IE—FF 54—33

I’ve collected some browser statistics from the visitor tracker for the blog. IE is still in the lead, but nowhere near the 90% which was the state of affairs at the main site before november 1, 2004. A third of the visitors now use Firefox/Mozilla, which is what specialist’s and web developers’ sites usually have. I’m very satisfied with you!
The main site statistics are not as accurate — they only track the last 100 visitors — but there, the figures are 68%–18% at the moment. A little less for FF, which is expected, but still a good share.
Those of you who haven’t made the change yet, may want to read my top seven reasons not to use the thing with the blue e. (And, in case you’re concerned: you can have both browsers installed at the same time, and Firefox will ask if you want to import all your favorites from IE, so you will not lose anything.)

Here are the complete figures:
Internet Explorer (4, 5, 5.5, and 6): 15,481 (54%)
Mozilla (Firefox and the Mozilla suite): 9,450 (33%)
Netscape: 1,559
Konqueror: 963
Safari: 933
Opera: 264
——————
Total: 28650

The death of classical music, II: On whales and camels

Going off the rails
Norman Lebrecht has a lot of critical insight to share for those who care about the classical music scene (I don’t know if I do, anymore, but I do appreciate people caring). Recently (well, in January anyway — I’m slow) there were reports of railway stations in England playing classical music over the speakers, with the effect that the crime rate dropped dramatically.
“Wonderful! Behold the soothing effect of classical music on the human mind!” We’ve heard it before (“Mozart makes you smarter”, etc.).
Lebrecht comes to a different conclusion:

It works as a deterrent effect rather than a corrective one. Hooligans are not reformed by Mozart, so much as driven away by a noise that is as alien and hostile to their world as whale song to a camel herd.

there is not a jot of evidence to show that music can be made to work one way or other as a force of social engineering. The reports from peaked-cap inspectors at Elm Park, Whitley Bay and Sow Hill, as well as results from Canada and Australia, are anecdotal. They demonstrate only that in a limited area, for a short period, hooligans can be deflected by unfamiliar sounds.

I’m not saying that it may not be a good thing, and neither does Norman, nor the average traveller:

Travellers in musically protected areas say they feel reassured for their safety and culturally enhanced by the accompaniment to their waiting time.

So far so good. Music doesn’t make you a better person. If you like it, it may give you a good time, but the hooligans don’t become better people — they don’t disappear, they just move on to the next station, where there aren’t these strange, non-sampled sounds coming out of nowhere.
But to me, the most important question is: what does this use of music do to us, or to our appreciation of music? It’s related to the question why we don’t just DNA register the whole population — law-abiding citizens will have nothing to fear, and the positive effects are considerable. So why not do it? Well, because —

Music is a vast psychological mystery, and playing it to police railways is culturally reckless, profoundly demeaning to one of the greater glories of civilisation.

That’s why. Music and art are too important to be left to commoditifying and utilitarian officials, because they relate to how we think, and how we think to how we act. I say: musical structures can be meaningful because they resemble a language — the stylized sounds through which we think — and knowing them (and knowing them as such) can give us a glimpse from the outside of how language works, of how we think. But it is also a stylization of how we act: an aestheticization — a systematization into a framework of thought about physical acts — of common actions like walking, breathing, making love: a meetingplace for body and soul.
Now, after this cannonade of simplified aeshtetic theory, answer this: if music is a translation into sound of the patterns and tensions we live by as human beings, what does it do to your breathing (or your love-making) to be constantly surrounded by stylized versions of it, e.g. while you’re running to catch the next train?
I’m not saying the answer cannot be: “It does me good!” I’m just saying that as long as we can’t rule out that the consequences of this light-weight, ill-planned use of the materials of mind and body are potentially disastrous, I’d rather have my soundscape as clean as possible, as the default.
And crime rates? This isn’t a nice and cozy society we’re living in, as a rule, and don’t tell me that a little beautifying, some aural cosmetics here and there, will change that. The grim realities are that “Legalized abortion was the single biggest factor in bringing the crime wave of the 1980s to a screeching halt [during the 90s].” Not Mayor Giuliani’s efforts in New York, but the fact that “hundreds of thousands of prospective criminals had been aborted”, who previously had been brought into this wonderful world of ours. This is the conclusion that the Indiana Jones of economics and statistics, Steven Levitt, has come to in his book Freakonomics. Truly food for thought. Seen this way, legalized abortion is a self-regulating safety valve of a society — a political stroke of genius, albeit unplanned: let the poor buggers weed out their own scum before it even sees the light of day. Perhaps this is putting too much weight on links between socio-economical conditions, abortion, and crime, but at least it puts some huge issues on the table, and and the more I think about it, the more the thought of hearing music in trainstations makes me sick.

* * *

Norman Lebrecht doesn’t like this (ab)use of music either. He suggests an alternative: Look to Finland!

What are the Finns doing right? Every child in Finland is given an instrument to play from the first day at school. They learn to read notes on stave before letters on page. They spend hours at drawing and drama. The result is a society of with few tensions and profound culture. Finnish Radio broadcasts in Latin once a week.

Is it possibly as simple as that? Probably not, but it’s a nice idea.

Useful software

Now that I’ve come up with some new tabs, I think I’ve earned the right to talk about something else again. I’ve revamped my computer lately, and found some stuff that I thought I’d pass on.
After two years of heavy use, loads of downloads, installations, ex-stallations, trial versions etc., my computer was becoming excruciatingly slow — so slow, I couldn’t stand it anymore and decided it was time to do something more drastic than just a defragmentation.
The first step was a major clean-up of registry, junk files, etc. It’s not a good idea to mess around in the registry too much on your own (and if you don’t know what/where it is, don’t worry), but there are many programs out there to do the job for you. I chose Advanced System Optimizer, which has been rated the best system optimizer by C|Net. It comes in a free trial version, which found hundreds of errors here and there in the system jungle (and I wasn’t really that surprised).
The next step was a number of tweaks to enhance performance. That helped a bit too.

But the main target was Windows Explorer. Even opening the three items in “My Computer” (A:, C:, and D:) took an enormous amount of time — I wouldn’t say hours, maybe not even minutes, but hey, we’re supposed to be high-tech here, live fast and all that — every second counts, and many of those during the day adds up to a life. So I went looking for alternatives, and luckily others have had the same problem, so there are legio. I found four that came highly recommended:

xplorer2 is a lite version of a commercial product, which does a better job than Explorer, but didn’t do it for me (I don’t know why — perhaps it was the bragging tone of their home page: “Why are we head and shoulders ahead of any other program” etc.)
ExplorerXP was far more appealing, for two main reasons: the use of tabs, so that you can have several windows open at the same time, and the favorites window, where you can add shortcuts to the directories you most often use.
An oddball in the lot is FileAnt. It comes with two panels as standard, each with the possibility of multiple tabs. That will probably take a real power user for it to be really useful, but just having it there was nice. A smart handling of direct links to favorite folders, and ample opportunities for customization and keyboard shortcuts almost made me forgive the ugly interface. I didn’t pick it, though, both because someone said it did bad things to your system files upon installation, and because I found my favorite:
FreeCommander — it does nothing to advertise itself, at least not well. The home page is just a list of features, a download link, and a couple of screen shots which initially scared me away. I came back, however, took it home and installed it, and after I had changed most of the default settings, it looked good, felt good, worked fast, did what I wanted it to do, and I was happy. It doesn’t come with a help file, but mostly it’s self-explanatory. Two panels, each with its own tree, so moving files is no hassle at all. Integrated handling of zip and rar files, which you can browse as if they were ordinary folders, without the need for additional programs. Direct access to the Desktop, the Control Panel, the Command prompt, and System files and administration, calculation of the size of folders, and a way of saving favorites which I think I’m going to like. It also shows you all the files that Windows has decided that you don’t want to see. All in all, a superior product. And it’s free, of course.

But I still wasn’t satisfied. I needed an alternative to Winamp as well: it has become slow, and crashes all the time. I ended up with Media Player Classic. It looks like Windows Media Player used to look like (and I instantly wax nostalgic), but below the surface, it is a very powerful and customizable media machine, which plays files in every format you can think of.
With the extra packages Real Alternative and QuickTime Alternative, you can ditch RealPlayer, with all its annoying ads, its security holes and its frequent malfunction, and you can ditch QuickTime, and play it all in one program. (Before you install the two packages, you should uninstall any Real Media or QuickTime programs to avoid conflicts. Disclaimer: there seems to be a problem with streaming Real Media directly from the browser, but I’ve made it work by copying the link location and opening it directly in MPC).
If this isn’t enough, there are two additional packages of codecs on the same site, which should solve any problem file you may come across. I haven’t tested it, though.
Update: The newest version is 6.4.8.3, just released. Someone at a message board recommended to stick with the previous version, 6.4.8.2, since the “unofficial v6483 is very, very buggy”. That was posted before the final release of 6.4.8.3, however, and he seems to be referring to a previous beta version. I’ve tried both, and haven’t noticed any bugs, but not much of a difference either — other than in the file size: 4.8 Mb vs. 1.3 Mb)

While I was searching for these replacements, I found another one: FastStone is a really neat Image viewer, which has now replaced IrfanView, itself a really good freeware program, as my standard viewer.

I think that was it, for now.

Big brother is watching you…

I’m getting more and more comfortable with this blogging software. The latest additions are, as you may notice, a list of recent comments in the sidebar, and a different color to my own comments. What you may not notice, since it is not noticeable anywhere, is that I’ve installed some logging equipment — now I can track down what you had for breakfast and the angle of your screen.
Not to worry — that was a slight exaggeration. It’s fun, though. What is recorded is browsers, referrers, number of hits, that kind of things. I notice that a little more than half of the blog readers use Firefox. The statistics I have for the main site (available here) show a Firefox share of around 12-25% (the figures are based on the last 100 hits only, hence the huge variation). The difference is striking — an indication, perhaps, that my plugging in here has been efficient? or that the ones who surf around for more general contents are more likely to be “web-savvy” than those who just come in for the chords?
I also notice that someone has come here through a google search for “small plastic things”… The wonders of session statistics, indeed!

God On Our Side

The Nation | Article | Our Godless Constitution | Brooke Allen

As the Government of the United States is not in any sense founded on the Christian religion — as it has in itself no character of enmity against the laws, religion, or tranquillity of Musselmen — and as the said States never have entered into any war or act of hostility against any Mehomitan nation, it is declared by the parties that no pretext arising from religious opinions shall ever produce an interruption of the harmony existing between the two countries.

The Treaty of Tripoli, 1797 (endorsed by president John Adams, unanimously ratified by the senate)

ClearType

Today, I happened to look at this page on a computer without ClearType activated. And man … I had completely forgotten how ugly text on a computer screen can look. Really, with Clear Type, what you see on the screen comes reasonably close to looking at a printed page (whereas the “old” screen view comes close to looking at a piece of paper someone has dropped on a henhouse floor).
If you have Windows XP, this is already available, but for some reason MS have decided not to turn it on by default, and furthermore they have buried the setting in some menu one would not normally look for something like this.
Here it is:

  • Right click on the desktop and select ‘Properties’
  • Select the ‘Appearance’ tab and press the ‘Effects…’ button (who would have guessed? “Effects” makes me think of pointer arrows with blinking christmas decorations or weird screen savers, not typographical subtleties).
  • Check the box for ‘Use the following method to smooth edges of screen fonts’, then
  • select ‘ClearType’ in the dropdown list, and
  • OK your way out again.

That’s it — your way to a better browsing experience, whiter teeth, longer vacations, better guitar playing skills, peace on earth and most other places, or at least to a better browsing experience.
If you want, you can fine-tune the settings with a tuner program you can download from www.microsoft.com, but it works its wonders even without it.
Do yourself a favour and follow my advice — without it, what you’re looking at now is ugly (which means that all my web design efforts will have been spent in vain, so do me a favour as well).

Things have changed

Sometimes things happen quickly, and you stand there, left behind with a feeling that you didn’t quite catch up, and now it’s too late…
No, it’s not that my grandpa died and there were so many things I would have wanted to say to him — he died in 1984 — I’m talking about the blog…
Just my luck: two weeks after I set it up, WordPress comes out with a new version (1.5, mind you!), packed with new features that I just simply must have. I download, follow all instructions, upload, — and the comments won’t show up.
The temporary solution was to abandon the theme that I had so carefully designed to match the colours of the main page. Shit happens. Maybe someday I will sit down and figure out what went wrong. Maybe I will also take that as an excuse to sit down and figure out some of that php that I would need to revamp the main site.
The moral of this story is, of course, that if there is something you want to tell your grandpa before he dies, do it now. But not in my blog… :-)

Update: in the meantime I worked out a way to solve it, but now I’ve come to like the new theme… Hm.

Firefox and the thing with the blue e

Firefox — Rediscover the web

You may have noticed my shameless promotion of Firefox lately. It’s a love relationship that goes a while back, to when it was still called Firebird and was just a test thing. Now — well, it certainly has grown: 25 million downloads since November, a browser share that approaches the 10% which seemed a utopian goal only a couple of months ago (that’s the general share; at some sites it already hovers around 30%), and it seems that nobody who spends some time on the net could have missed seeing it mentioned. (Or am I wrong? If you want to give some feedback on this, I would be quite curious to know how many of you didn’t know there was something called Firefox until I started my “campaign”, how many have installed it now, and are you satisfied with it?)

Here are my top reasons to use Firefox instead of the thing with the blue “e” :

  1. It’s not the thing with the blue “e”, part I.
    That is: using Firefox, you are entitled to feel savvy and independent — you are free from the shackles of the huge corporation which heretofore has decided just about everything which has to do with computers — which means everything — and you can can count yourself among the discriminating bunch who know what they’re doing, who have consciously and willingly chosen to download, install, and use a certain program, and not just click on what came with the box.
  2. It’s not the thing with the blue “e”, part II.
    That is: it doesn’t share its peculiaritites and flaws. The thing with the blue “e” has its own way of doing things, it adds its own coding features and renders the otherwise generally accepted systems of http and css in a corrupt way. As long as it sat in 95% of the machines in the world, this might not have mattered, apart from the monopolizing effect, and the fact that its solutions are generally bad.
    One of them is ActiveX. At first sight it is a blessing for the user, with the way it enhances the interaction with a web page. But at most it is a blessing in disguise, at worst a curse. In any case, it is a huge security hole. Briefly stated, an ActiveX control is a Windows program like any other, and it can do anything on your computer that an ordinary Windows program can — which means everything. In order to run, it must be accepted by the user, usually based on a security certificate, but those are easy to get, and more in general it is a problem with a system which puts user-friendliness over security, but still gives the user the full responsibility.
    Firefox does not come with ActiveX. This has been presented as a flaw in the media but it received immediate response from all kinds of users as one major security advantage.
  3. Customization.
    The workspace can be tweaked and twisted to suit your needs, and if you don’t have any special needs, you can just leave it as it is, and it’s fine like that too. What bugs me most about Microsoft products, even the ones which are widely superior to any alternatives I’ve tried, such as Word, is that the “user friendly” interface stops being user friendly when you go beyond everyday use. From there, it’s hell to find the correct settings, buried deep down in menus or even program code. With Firefox, you can type “about:config” in the address field, and you get a list of all the configuration settings. It may not be obvious what to do with them, but at least they’re there, and a quick search in the Mozilla forums will usually give you an idea what to do. Better for advanced users as well as for “average surfers”.
  4. The extensions.
    The ultimate in configurability is the plethora of extensions that are available, ranging from small gadgets which add an item to the context menu or allow you to move up one level in the document hierarchy with Alt-UpArrow, to toolbars, text editors, color pickers, a full fledged Calendar, you name it.
    These are the extensions I can’t live without:

    • StumbleUpon. A toolbar which with a click sends you to a randomly picked site which someone has liked. I spend too much time stumbling, but I like it!
    • WebDeveloper. The perfect tool, not only if you are a web developer, but also if you just want to see how a webpage is constructed.
    • Calendar. I’ve tried to be organized before but always failed miserably (this can be confirmed by anyone who has ever had an appointment with me). The Mozilla Calendar project is still under development, but already at this stage it works wonderfully.
    • Minesweeper. Yes! With up to seven mines per tile, it makes this more of a challenge than the plain vanilla version.
    • Sage. An organizer for RSS/Atom feeds. Does what it’s supposed to do.
    • ScrapBook. Collects web pages or clippings from web pages, and random notes, in an organized way, where you can edit, add notes, or export the whole thing. Great for collecting info from different sources, e.g.
  5. Tabbed browsing.
    Once you’ve tried it, you’ll never go back. Ctrl-click ten hits from a Google-search, and they will load in the background in separate tabs. Indispensable.
  6. The community.
    I mentioned the forums… There’s always discussion going on about various features, future or present. If you want to join, that’s fine, but if you just need a quick answer about a setting (“How do I speed up Firefox at startup?”) you will usually find it (“Use the Prefetch function”). The fact that Firefox is Open Source not only means that it’s free, but also that there’s a whole bunch of enthusiastic people designing new, exciting extensions, things you don’t need, but definitely want, and vice versa.
  7. Speed
    The speed is a common argument in favor of Firefox, and it seems to be true. My only point of slight dissatisfaction is with the way Firefox rebuilds a page every time you visit it, even if it is in the cache, which means that going forwards and backwards in the browser window will take some time. Opera is far better in this respect: here, the previous page is back instantaneously. Something (more) for Firefox to copy…

“Don’t be evil!” Yeah, sure . . .

“Don’t be evil!” That’s google’s slogan. Apparently, it sounded better than “Be good!”, and there’s something to it.

  • Today, something like 75% of all external referrals to websites come via Google.
  • With Gmail, which offers 1 Gb of storage space, it is hard to come up with a better alternative to a free mail provider.
  • They have bought Blogger, which offers one of the better blog services. Free even that.
  • Googlenews provides a computer-generated synthesis of the best from 4,500 news sources from all over the world.
  • Google recently made an arrangment with the New York Public Library and the libraries of Harvard University, Stanford University, the University of Oxford and the University of Michigan, to scan their collections of books and make them available to the public.
  • Their new Desktop search is a very handy tool which allows you to search your own hard disk in the same way that you search the Internet.

Who can be without Google? And why should one?

In the beginning, everything about google seemed nice. I switched from AltaVista mainly because of the many ads that started to show up as the first hits there (as far as I remember). Then everybody said the results were better at google — it was something of a Harry Potter effect. Word of mouth can be a very efficient seller, when it works. And when it does, it’s usually a sign of quality.
So what is wrong?
For one, Google uses a cookie which registers the ip number, search terms, and other session information (“browser type, browser language, the date and time of your query and one or more cookies that may uniquely identify your browse”, quoted from Google’s Privacy Centre) for every search that is performed. These results are stored, for an indefinite period of time. The cookie itself expires in 2038, which makes this an unprecedented life-span for a delicious delicacy.
Gmail explicitly encourages users not to delete anything. And “even if a message has been deleted or an account is no longer active, messages may remain on our backup systems for some period of time.” quoted from Gmail’s privacy policy page.
There is not automatically anything wrong in this. They do so, so they say, to provide a better service: to be able to target advertisement, sell a better product at a higher price, which in the end is to the benefit of the users. Fine. No humans are involved in handling the information in the emails, and no personal information is disclosed to advertisers or anyone else. Fine.
There are exceptions, though. They can and will disclose such information:

when Google is required by law to do so; and when we are compelled to disclose personal information because we reasonably believe it’s necessary in order to protect the rights, property or safety of Google, its users and the public.

Then consider this: In the USA, email messages lose their status as a protected communication under the Electronic Communications Privacy Act after 180 days. For the first 180 days, a warrant is needed, but after that, a subpoena is enough to get that information out. What was that you wrote about this file-sharing site to your friend at johndoe@gmail.com?
The google-watch website has more information on this, for whoever is interested.

The privacy problems are grave enough, but they don’t bother me that much. After all, anyone who communicates on the Internet should be aware that it may not be “safe”; lines are tapped, hacked, or monitored, and there are things you may whisper in your lover’s ear on a mountain top without a soul in sight, that you should perhaps not disclose in a chat session.
What disturbs me more is the following scenario: Already now, webmasters who want traffic to their sites, need Google. So they send in the link to their site and hope for the best, i.e. that Google will register it, add it to their database, and start generating hits. Wouldn’t it be much easier if Google provided space for the website directly? Surely, they could do that for free as well. The site would get on Google immediately, no more crawling the net to find it, no more hassle — a win-win situation, but in the end google would sit with the internet in the palm of their hands.
Or this: through detailed information about the search preferences of the whole world, both collectively and individually, and good algorithms to interpret it, google can streamline the information they channel out (which today is mostly advertisement, but to an increasing degree also news and whole library collections of books), to fit each individual user’s needs. With the personal informations available through Gmail, Blogger, and the the search engine combined, the possibilities to personalize information are overwhelming. Again, we have what looks lik a win-win situation: in the bewildering mass of information available, each individual gets Google’s help to find the needle in the haystack, the news that are relevant to someone interested in gardening, the Cure, Thai cooking, and calculus.
But what happens to the free press, the instigation to search and aquire new information, information one didn’t know on beforehand would be necessary or interesting, but which widens one’s horizon and therefore alters one’s life?
Do yourselves the favour of considering this scenario, spelt out in this video from the Museum of Media History in the year 2014

I’m not saying that Google is evil, nor that they are good but carry the seeds of evil and that the bleak scenario will come true. What I’m saying is that “with great power comes great responsibility”. I hope that Google is as responsible as they claim, but there is a huge greyzone between “Don’t be evil!” and “Be good!” Most of all, I urge anyone who uses the Internet not to take anything for granted, to be aware and responsible. Spiderman’s motto applies to everyone.

Every decent site has a blog

. . . and so has mine. I have no clear idea what will go here, but a few unclear ones.
One: the “news” header of the main site has now tended to become more of a comments column, as the number of new tabs has diminished and my urge to communicate other things has increased. This is not necessarily wrong or bad, but rather an opportunity.
Another: I write quite a few mails in response to questions or remarks from people, with a character ranging from discussion of Dylan-oriented things to more general culturally oriented ramblings. I figured this would be a way to collect that, and also extend the communicability, and channel it, perhaps in a slightly different direction than the all-outs of the pool or r.m.d.
Three: “There are more important things in life than Dylan”. I said that, about a year ago. I intend for the range of topics to be taken up here to become wider than just Dylan and music. How about typography? Web design? Access databases? Knitting? (I kid you not)
Four: As a maintainer of a fairly well visited site in the world/space/culture that the Internet has become, I feel a growing responsibility towards/for this world/space/culture. “Towards” insofar as it consists of people, who spend large parts of their lives there. “For” insofar as I feel responsible for what I put out there, and for what I don’t. I watch with a mixture of a- and be-musement the obvious ease and naturalness with which my kids interact through the net. As much as I would hate to be the old fart who frowns at every change — for moral reasons (quite likely) or just because he feels left out — I will not either just sit uncritically and watch. In naturalness lies beauty and danger (yeah, the old fart rears his ugly head after all!) — that which glides effortlessly in meets with no resistance, no critique, no urge to overcome hurdles and take in more of the world.
It matters to distinguish between hyphens and dashes, because it has mattered enough to our predecessors to have felt meaningful to invest time and energy to provide for a distinction, and so it has shaped our society and the individuals in it, whether they know it or not; it is important to be aware of the source of our informations — we all know that Microsoft is evil, but what about google? Well, they say they’re not …