Thursday, January 03, 2008

2007 and all that . . .

Some on LiveJournal are giving the first line of the first post for each month in 2007. The ones on the only LJ blog I read are evocative, touching, enigmatic. Mine, in turns out, are comparatively prosaic, perplexing, boring.

Nonetheless, here they are. I couldn't resist adding the beginning of the second post of the month once or twice and doing a bit more than the first line.
Monday, January 08, 2007
presidential slim pickings
David Broder's column in Sunday's Washington Post has the best anecdote on Gerald Ford that I've read. Broder quotes David Obey of Wisconsin.

Thursday, February 01, 2007
love, loss, and mastery
There are two wonderful, evocative, unselfconsiously artful poems on Gobbergo. Go there and read them.

Friday, February 02, 2007
a small diversion during a day of work
This morning my favorite radio station played "Le Boeuf sur le Toit" by Darius Milhaud and I spent a few moments finding out what it was, this ox of the roof.

Friday, March 02, 2007
big hands
[A link to a Youtube video] passed on to me by a music-cataloger friend here at work: Rachmaninov had big Hands

Sunday, April 01, 2007
Linda Pastan, What We Want
I plan to post extracts and links to poems by Linda Pastan this month. I'd give the poems, whole themselves, but that would violate her ownership and copyright.

Friday, May 04, 2007
a song for summer
Here is another poem from Parnassus, the anthology compiled by Ralph Waldo Emerson in 1874 (pdf). The Grasshopper, by Richard Lovelace (1649)

Sunday, May 06, 2007
Drummer Hodge
We watched History Boys. One of its achievements is to reveal the greatness of Thomas Hardy, the poet. He wrote the following a couple of months after the outbreak of the Boer War.
Drummer Hodge, Thomas Hardy

They throw in Drummer Hodge, to rest
Uncoffined – just as found:
His landmark is a kopje-crest
That breaks the veldt around;
And foreign constellations west
Each night above his mound.
Friday, June 15, 2007
photosynth!
Richard Wallis has a post on the Panlibus blog about photosynth: MS Photosynth - Jaw-dropping demo.

Sunday, July 01, 2007
government-directed investment funds
I haven't written on global finance in a while. Some recent news accounts led me to take another stab at understanding the subject.

Tuesday, July 31, 2007
tunak tunak tun
Went to a wedding recently where the groom, the groomsmen, and their friends were highly-educated, self-proclaimed geeks.

Friday, August 03, 2007
strong start for Paris bike program
The blog, Ma ville à vélo, is reporting that the Vélib' bike program in Paris had its millionth rental.

Sunday, September 02, 2007
one in 10
Here's a mind-blowing statistic. It's from a lead article in today's Washington Post: "As many as 60,000 D.C. residents -- one in 10 -- are felons, 15,000 of them under court supervision."

Thursday, October 18, 2007
Teaching, as it is and should be
As Ted Nelson reminds us, we mostly still see the computer screen as just a different kind of page -- an electronic stand-in for a sheet of paper, one with digital text written upon it. This isn't surprising. New things are always seen in terms of the technologies they supplant. It takes time for us to adapt to them and receive them on their own terms.

Saturday, November 03, 2007
vélib girls
I've written about innovative bike rental programs in European cities. Vélib, the high-profile, system in Paris continues to thrive.

Wednesday, December 05, 2007
snow, gentle and ferocious
We're having our first snow fall. It's gently descending. We'll get maybe an inch and a half over the course of the day. This summer's geraniums haven't given up yet. They're a bit droopy after a few frigid mornings, but still pretty.
A bonus: here are the most popular posts on the blog over the past few years.

pride and prejudice
guns, germs, steel, and friesians
prufrock at new college
story of a backhoe and a bike
desertification
thinking about studying picasso
diary of lady sheburne: fifth post, a ball
friesian horse rescue
diary of lady shelburne: third post
mulberry street: 1900
power of plain vs. aristocracy
motivatin

And, since much of the traffic on the blog comes from image searches, here are the most popular ones:



















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