A few days ago, I wrote about how difficult it can be to learn about cultures that are unconnected to one's own; how we lack a context in which to understand what we are trying to learn. Part of my difficulty in this kind of learning is that
Life
One positive to riding home this evening on a packed, slow-moving TriMet bus in 102-degree heat while wearing pants and a long-sleeved shirt: When I got home, weeding the shaded side yard in 90-to-95-degree heat for an hour and a half seemed like a
Books
In the post immediately below, I note how good British commentaries on the United States can be. One example: Henry Fairlie was a British journalist who worked in the United States from the mid-1960s until his death in 1990. If you like American political history and ever have the
I regret the lack of histories of the United States available in English by writers from non-Anglophone countries. Someone from another culture who approaches the subject using a different set of assumptions can provide insights that a native would never reach on his own. British commentaries can be bracing
Music
While I'm on the subject of mishearing things (see post below)... Nina Simone's Little Girl Blue album has been slowly growing on me, and you should give it a try yourself. However, her enunciation on "He's Got the Whole World in His Hands&
Portland
One of the entertaining side effects of getting older is that I sometimes mishear things in amusing ways. I could swear that I heard someone say "strange is in the air" (as opposed to the usual "change is in the air"). What a lovely slogan for
Senior American politicians who cannot tell a Sunni from a Shi'ite have been rightly roasted in recent years. However, to learn about a culture completely alien from your own is difficult. My ancestors are mostly from Western Europe. I grew up hearing the names Locke, Kant, and Descartes,
One reason why I wanted to have a blog again was to have an outlet to share these sorts of things—ideas and memories that have been put away for years or decades. My spring cleaning this year led me to wonder what I would do with my boxes of
LIS + DataSci
A paraphrase of something I wrote in 1997: Human societies have two ways of storing knowledge: Written down in libraries, archives, etc.; and memorized in people's minds. The amount of knowledge that is written down is ever-increasing, but the amount that an individual can memorize is biologically
Music
A charming video of the Getz/Gilberto version of "The Girl from Ipanema".
Video
The pseudo-documentary "My Winnipeg" is playing at the Hollywood Theatre. One of the film's recurring themes is sleepwalking, which might explain why I fell asleep while watching it.
History
I find these quotes from Bernstein fascinating because popular history books so often mention money, but so rarely describe what that money was. [The eight-real "Spanish dollar"], which flooded the European currency markets in the sixteenth century, was approximately the same size and weight as the Bohemian