G as in Good H as in Happy

Who Says Rap Isn't a Flowering Cultural Seedbed?

Rapper Jay-Z's "I'm like Che Guevara with bling on" suggests a new and richly transformative (as in Chomsky and deep-structure transformative grammar) linguistic meme.

"I'm like Gandhi with a gun."

Submissions invited.

Blogs, journalism, blah-blah-blah with a point of light emerging

In a lightheartedly serious vein, a profile of the living embryo of new, local, on-the-ground journalism is posted at PressThink in Jay Rosen's absence. As many have pointed out, there is as yet no market model for the New Thing.

H2Otown from Watertown, MA, is written by the charming, prolific, dedicated Lisa Williams, and covers "news" that is local, from political to social and economic on a (mostly) small and large scale. If she lost interest or disappeared, there is no overarching institution to continue the job.

A proposal for a new interim model: The economy becomes so productive through automation and inspired institutional models that leisure proliferates, and is used in this fashion by enough talented independent people that whatever structure is emerging has time and space to do so.

Time will tell. As the anarchists and anti-capitalists keep saying, it's not all about money.

World's Oldest Map...

November 18, 2005

...has been found.

Known as the Soleto Map, the depiction of Apulia, the heel of Italy's "boot", is on a piece of black-glazed terracotta vase about the size of a postage stamp.

Via Croanaca

Woe un2 Txtmsg Dvls

"Milton's Paradise Lost, one of the most sublime works of Western literature, [can be] reduced to a four-line text message (txtmsg)...

Saying Goodbye to the Gods

November 17, 2004

The departure of Princess Sayako of Japan for her wedding.

Dressed in the traditional multi-coloured kimono, Princess Sayako visited shrines in the Imperial Palace grounds that are dedicated to Japanese gods and emperors of the past.... Japan does not allow women to take the throne, and therefore the youngest child of Emperor Akihito and Empress Michiko must leave the imperial family after the wedding.

One function of royalty for the populace is to act out important turning points in life writ larger than one person's story. Big Deal! So a daughter is getting married. But the numinousness with which these figures of ancestral importance shine, is dramatic at a near-archetypal level, and in those terms may be said to justify their careful training, their wealth, their prominence. It is a sacrificial and harrowing existence for many royals, sustained only out of duty and taboo.

A tender-hearted child grows up, gets married, goes away. Life. Fully felt by virtue of rite and pageant.

BBC story via the ever-varied Althouse.

Making Friends with Futility

The idea of "making the best" of things has, in our pragmatic English, a grudging, second-best connotation.

There is, however, a way of understanding the knife-edge between passivity and fruitless agitation that opens the eye of a needle threaded with complex and fruitful joy. It hypothetically requires a formation of reverence, virtue, and devotion to something besides circumstance, though.

Here is a man whose life seems, only seems, thwarted by others before he could really get on with it.

As Sure as God Made Little Green Apples and Spherical Orange Prescription Bottles

Thomas Sowell encourages governments and drug manufacturers not to pedal right off the porch.

Via Betsy

FEC Good News

Apparently, the Federal Election Commission issued an advisory opinion that blogs -- at least the blogs it addressed in the opinion -- are "press" for the purpose of exemption from the abominable and unconstitutional campaign finance laws. As Redstate says, this is a huge win.

They're Americans. We get to speak our minds. Nobody has to listen, or agree. It's a good system.

Lileks on Ice with Cigars

Gloating alert. This Lileks post is suitable for warm (if bracing)-clime  readers only. Central Texas, California, Alabama; Indiana questionable. Long Island OK, New Yorkers are "city & events," not "weather" people.

Name them One by One

A common factor that keeps arising from one after another "happiness strategies" research is

Count (3-5) blessings once a day.

They don't have to be the biggest, or the most profound or impressive. Do it now. We'll even get us all started:

1. Access to a computer (and most likely you can see it.)
2. Ability to read English (and perhaps another language.)
3. Somebody, somewhere, loves you. (This is not the long shot it seems -- why wouldn't our readers be lovable?)
4. ____________________________________
5. ____________________________________

Well?  Happier yet?