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Sunday, March 18, 2007
Worth a thousand drinks 
Standing up
| | I missed St. Patricks Day here. Was too busy exploring history and geology with The Kid. |
| | For awhile I had this idea of visiting the subject of Irish background, via pix of Grandma Searls' family, courtesy of my cousin Martin Burns, who scanned nearly all the shots in this collection here. Grandma used to say "All for the Irish stand up!" And we did. |
| | Grandma was actually half Irish. The other half was German. My wife represents the same ratio, the product of which is Very Organized Party People. |
| | The pair in Grandma's case was Trainor and Englert. Grandma's grandpa was Thomas Trainor, who came over from Letterkenny in 1825 at age 15. He worked as an indentured servant to a boston carriage maker, married the boss's daughter (a McLaughlin), moved to Manhattan and set up his own carriage business on lower Broadway while his family lived on a farm in Harlem, as I recall. |
| | Grandma was born in 1882 and died in 1990, short of her 108th birthday. She was lucid nearly all the way. It's great to have pictures to go with the memories of the stories she told of her childhood, and of life in times now long gone but still well-remembered. |
| | When I have time (which I won't, but I'll make some), I'll put some detail on all these pix. Meanwhile, enjoy looking into the windows. |
| | Also, to all the Burns, Dwyer, Searls, Apgar, Englert and other relatives... feel free to post comments and corrections to those pictures. |
| | Somewhere around here I have a thick looseleaf notebook filled with copies of outstanding genealogical work by Catherine Burns, Martin's mother, who is still with us and doing fine. I can't find the book right now, so most of my notes are from memory — or from Martin's scans of handwritten notes on the back of the photos. |
39 years to the outside
| | Sentences such as 'It is raining' and 'It is snowing' are linguistic lies - there is no 'it' that is raining, there is only the rain. |
| | wisdom can be bought and sold as though it were a toaster . |
| | read the list of shit that don't work |
| | then silently point a crook finger toward the middle distance. |
| | 'I will blow your paradigms away'. |
| | hing more than agreed upon lies. |
| | There is no 'I' in 'I am thinking'. As William James wrote in 1890, 'thought itself is the thinker'.
William James The Principles of Psychology Vol. 1 p401 |
| | Of course it's not 'stuff', for the same reason(s). |
| | Anyway, h::ds is young, smart, fun to read and given to giving old farts like me a case of Xtreme perspective. For example, I used to think Danah Boyd was my best window into Youth Whatevr. All due respect (and I retain the max) for Danah, h::ds (or do I call her j.black?) knocks me out the window with |
| | I love the concept - sociology/anthropology in contemporary youth/tech culture. Oh that's great. But I still, as someone who's nine years younger then danah, have problems digesting her perspective on youth culture & the internet, as I think it's a little precious and feels it never spoke to me & the way I used the internet, but rather a population of highschoolers who I never knew. While she stands outside and looks in, I sit inside and look out -- and sometimes I feel she's looking at culture This Very Moment in the present, and I'm looking at The Potential Moments in the future. Or maybe not, anyway. |
| | If Danah's nine years to the outside looking in, how far out does that put me, three decades to the senior side of Danah? |
| | Anyway, I'll TiVo the Eddie thing on Monday and see how it goes. |
| | Meanwhile, keep following all those links. Except maybe the first three. (They only want your eyeballs anyway.) |
Only 100?
| | I make #95 among eWeek's first installment in its "Top 100 Most Influential People in IT", as "Open-Source Booster and "Editor-in-Chief of Linux Journal". (Which I'm not. I'm Senior Editor. Nick Petreley is the EiC.) Dave Winer makes #87 as Blog Pioneer (which is correct). |
| | The links go to a slide show. You can't really stop at any one of them. If I had influence over eWeek's IT, I'd make them give us a link to a list that's static and not an advertising tour. |
| | Still, I do appreciate it. |
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