Christmas Eve, with Ukukele and Harmonica
Christmas Eve, with Ukukele and Harmonica
Its Christmas Eve here in Fargo and the evening is winding down. Since my brothers and their families are with the in-laws this year, it’s just mom, dad, and I. Earlier we had a few other folks over after church to share a Scandinavian meal of Swedish meatballs, potatoes, potato sausage, and lefsa, with rice pudding topped with lingonberries for dessert.
Mark Moore entertained us throughout the evening by reciting poetry and telling stories from his long life. He described how he learned songs from a cowboy in while mending fences in Montana and learned to play harmonica while in Alaska for officers training; he compared his experience fighting the Germans in WWII with what is going on in Iraq; and he recounted numerous near death experiences, including falling through ice when he was 16 into 65 feet of water–with his ice skates on. At age 86, Mark has now been retired for three weeks, having finished his job at the 12th Avenue toll booth where his has worked for that last sixteen years.
The highlight of the evening was listening to a medley of cowboy songs, big band tunes, old-timey hymns, and Christmas carols played by my dad on Venezuelan ukulele and Mark on harmonica.
Soon I’ll go out for my traditional midnight ice skate, a fitting end to this good Christmas Eve.Marin Outings
Walking and Chewing Gum
Of course there’s great irony in the fact that just as I’m writing an article on place blogging, I’m spending very little time either blogging or venturing very far beyond the space in front of my computer screen. In my darker moments, I fear that this is just an inherent part of academic work, the necessary divide between theory and practice that has infected scholarship in the humanities.
This is certainly part of it, but it’s also true that I’m just too busy and I can’t spread myself any thinner. In time I’ll figure out again how to write my dissertation and blog regularly, to walk and chew gum at the same time.
I will say that I’ve enjoyed my interviews with Fred, Lorianne, and Pica over the last month or so, and as long as they’re still blogging, all is still right in the blogosphere.
For now, I’m just glad I’ve made it to Cafenation in Brighton Center fairly early. The Christmas music is playing (Elvis as the moment) and I’ve must got my usual small cup of light roast. It’s time to get back to writing about place blogs.Ecotone Bi-Weekly Posts: A Modest Analysis
In prepraration for my interview with Pica from Feathers of Hope a couple weeks ago, I put together a modest quantitative overview of the Ecotone bi-weekly topics, just to get a better sense of who was posting to the site. The results are listed below:
Date range:
June 15, 2003-November 15, 2004
Basic Stats
Topics: 34
Unique bloggers: 55
Total number bi-weekly posts: 312
Average posts per topic: 920 Most Frequent Contributers (# of posts)
- 77% of posts were contributed by the 20 most frequent bloggers
- 50% of posts were contributed by the 8 most frequent bloggers
Other Contributers (# of posts)
HawaiiStories
About Us..
Essentially, HawaiiStories is a a storytelling community, a gathering place where web-savvy islanders and islanders-at-heart share their thoughts — be they random epiphanies, poignant observations, anecdotes, rants, questions, lyrics, poems, or anything else, really. Hawai`i is what ties the people together, but the things they share cross the whole spectrum of everyday life.
—Geeks would call it a “community weblog” or ‘blog, but not in the traditional link-collecting, web-spelunking sense of Metafilter. Rather, something more in the spirit of The City Stories Project, which (along with the now-defunct Surreilly.com) partially served as the inspiration for HawaiiStories.
Short with Delicate Wrists
Today I went to Boston Medical Center for the first time to take part in a BU med school research study on osteoporosis in men. I went primarily for the $75 I would earn for my hour and a half; what I learned was that I’m not the person I thought I was.
As it turns out:- I’m not six feet tall. According to the measurement, I’m 5’ 11 3/4th inches tall. When I was in junior high, I grew 6 inches in one year, played center on the basketball team, and was convinced I would be six foot five. By the time I reached my junior year, it was clear I had stalled out at about 6 feet, and that my days in the paint had not prepared me to play shooting guard.
- My bones are not as strong as I thought they were. In fact, according the bone scan I’m slightly below average in bone density in my hips and spine, and the results for my wrist was low enough to qualify as osteopenia. Last year I broke my first bone in a biking accident, so perhaps it’s time to get a bit more calcium in my diet, especially since osteoporosis runs in the family (Grandma Lindgren had it).
- I’m not six feet tall. According to the measurement, I’m 5’ 11 3/4th inches tall. When I was in junior high, I grew 6 inches in one year, played center on the basketball team, and was convinced I would be six foot five. By the time I reached my junior year, it was clear I had stalled out at about 6 feet, and that my days in the paint had not prepared me to play shooting guard.