Say you were a goalie on a university hockey team, and you're busy studying for an exam the next morning. Then you're told that the local NHL team's goalie was injured and they needed you to suit up. Would you choose studying or suiting up?
Martin Filler on the collapse of the World Trade Center towers: “the towers' innovative external engineering that redistributed the walls' structural forces around the gaping holes after the attacks and kept the buildings standing long enough for a vast majority of their occupants to escape. Despite the ghastly death toll, the high survival rate for those in the towers below the impact points of the hijacked jets was no less than a miracle. Had the towers possessed conventional steel skeletons, they would have probably snapped and immediately fallen over, causing more catastrophic collateral damage than they did by crumpling onto their footprints.”
The book that Filler is reviewing, City in the Sky: The Rise and Fall of the World Trade Center by James Glanz and Eric Lipton may contradict the findings of American Ground by William Langewiesche (a book I've read, but in the form of the three magazine articles that were concatenated for the book, and a book which is recommended if you want to get an idea of the immensity of unbuilding the wreckage), at least about the reasons for the towers' collapse. Also worth checking out is an article by Lisa Kerr written in December 2001 about the Islamic influence on the buildings' architect and the buildings themselves.
Avi Salzman: “It's not Kingston, Jamaica, nor is it New York or Miami, but Hartford is most definitely a reggae town. In the last three decades, Hartford has become one of the hubs of the country's reggae market as the West Indian population has increased, more clubs have concerts and more of the top performers make Hartford a must stop on their tours.
Lisa responds to my interest in why she de-anonmyzed her weblog. Long story short, she didn't have to worry anymore if her boss was reading it.
David Kelly: “After making a measly £240 each per episode, the Pythons would find their true reward in the next life: the movies.
Frank J. Gaffney Jr.: “Notice had been served on the Secret Service and other security-vetters: Their job was to provide for the President’s physical security — the threat of would-be assassins — not to protect him from the political embarrassment (or worse) that might result from meetings with terrorist-apologists, or possibly terrorists themselves. If unarmed Islamists were able to secure access to Mr.
David Horowitz, in the preamble to an article written by Frank J. Gaffney Jr. on Grover Norquist's ties to Islamic militants: “Many have been reluctant to support these charges or to make them public because they involve a prominent conservative. I am familiar with these attitudes from my years on the Left.
Alan Charles Raul discusses recent court rulings regarding morality, using gay rights to have sex and to marry as some of the examples: “In a republican form of government, which the Constitution guarantees for the United States, elected officials are meant to set social policy for the country. They do so by embodying their view of America's moral choices in law.
As if limiting online access to two weeks wasn't bad enough, National Post—I could have sworn there was a "The" in front of it before—had decided to deny all access, starting January 24th, to non-subscribers. Well, to the good stuff, like the columnists, anyway.
Hopefully any Catholics and other foes of William Tyndale can put up with my quoting him without endorsement. This one appears on p. 110: “Matrimony or wedlock is a state or degree ordained of God and an office wherein the husband serveth the wife and the wife the husband.
A quote about Abercombie & Fitch's new catalog and porn.
Robert Scoble doesn't like group weblogs. Vancouver Webloggers more than qualifies as a group weblog, so I wonder if he considers geographically-concentrated weblogs like that, DFW Blogs and GTA Bloggers as inherently sucky. (My bet is yes.) I also wonder what experience he has in administering a group weblog.
Jay McCarthy: “A desire for love turned into an extremely judgmental view of relationships and a strange perception of the nature of love. Love was a particular ideal to me and anything that did not measure up to that was certainly not love, only an illusion that I had to be careful of. This meant that I entered every relationship with the assumption that this girl could never complete that picture and there would be no love from this one.”
Lisa Williams follows up on her imploration to blog in one place, saying that having a separate workplace weblog is fine. China Weblog is kind of a work-related weblog. More like a job-search-related one, it being a way to prove interest in and knowledge of its subject matter.
Dimmy Karras: “ideologues on both sides aren't respectful of one another and so they're unlikely to win over people who may even be somewhat open-minded/on the fence. Name-calling of Bush is only going to piss off a supporter, whereas an unemotional policy discussion may open eyes. But wonkishness is less entertaining and so is less likely to get noticed.”
John Cassidy on former Canadian soon-to-be-former publisher Conrad Black: “Black, who in 2001 gave up his Canadian citizenship to become a British life peer, is an imposing man: he is tall, broad, and possessed of a fierce temper. In the past, he has often lashed out at reporters who don’t work for him—and, at times, at some who do—but on this occasion he seemed unusually subdued.
I've been blogging for 3 years almost to the minute now.
(And yes, there isn't much to see in the personal section of this site. Yet.)