Great comment on TPM story thread:

Things in the air often surprise.

Per Petterson in Out Stealing Horses on the topic of New Year’s Eve:

In less than two months’ time this millennium will be finished. There will be festivities and fireworks in the parish I am part of. I shall not go near any of that. I will stay at home with Lyra, perhaps go for a walk down to the lake to see if the ice will carry my weight. I am guessing minus ten and moonlight, and then I will stoke the fire, put a record on the old gramophone with Billie Holiday’s vice almost a whisper, like when I heard her in the Oslo Colosseum some time in the 50s, almost burned out, yet still magic, and then fittingly get drunk on a bottle I have standing by in the cupboard. When the record ends I will go to bed and sleep as heavily as it is possible to sleep without being dead, and awake to a new millennium and not let it mean a thing. I am looking forward to that.

So Flickr allows direct posting to blog, eh? Even to an ancient, ill-used Manila blog it seems. About time there was some motivation to freshen this page up. To the right, the lovely corner (”el rincon”) that I’ve been given for morning times.

We’re in Amsterdam, in the first week of the first two months of travel during this undeserved but most welcome sabbatical year. Our close host is Nico B., with his partner Azito a distant host in Brooklyn, where Nico will join him in a few weeks while we house sit the cat and ducks and chickens and various other fowl that add flesh to the bones of santeria practice around this place.

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Is blogging a means (or a tool) to achieve other goals (content knowledge or skills)?~~ OR ~~

Does blogging have a set of intellectual habits and skills that are worth learning for themselves?

Tom says the obvious answer is ‘both.’

I’m not sure I agree. The whole “blogging” as a genre idea makes me uneasy for some reason. Maybe I’ll have something to add to the discussion after I re-read Henry Jenkins’ ‘Confronting the challenges of participatory culture’ and then join Paul and Christina Cantrill from the National Writing Project (NWP) for a Thursday morning breakfast discussion about “things next.” Following Mark Bernstein’s experienced advice, two quick comments here from a vacation connection:

1. Kudos to Tom for the nod at NWP’s technology initiatives, where early advocates of blogging for the teaching and learning of writing continue to work thoughtfully and without a lot of fanfare or self-congratulation to implement this stuff in real classrooms with real teachers.
2. And speaking of real classrooms and blogging to achieve other goals, I can testify that having a blog gets you, if nothing else, the education discount for Nilaja Sun’s Off-Broadway “No Child???”. I showed up at the ticket office yesterday afternoon without my union card or any other proof of profession. With a little cajoling, the ticket seller checked our school weblog community’s url, selected library from the nav bar and saw my beaming face staring from the blog banner. Voila! 50% off. The show is worth more than even the full price of admission, btw. Sun stuns with her energy, wit, eye for realistic detail, and mind-blogglingly fast changes of character. Yeah, it ended on a note of qualified hope that I found a little precious. We need a k-12 version of ‘The Office,’ a relentlessly hopeless and funny BBC-style drama called “The School,’ to do justice to the working conditions, for teachers and students, inside of real schools. Until that happens, “No Child???” is the funniest, sharpest and most realistic dramatization of teaching that I’ve ever seen on the stage.

YALSA announces new MySpace Page: “The Young Adult Library Services Association (YALSA), the fastest growing division of the American Library Association, has announced the debut of a YALSA MySpace Page.

Now is there someway to entice the SLAC-ers into using this?

The Blasphemy Challenge:

“The Blasphemy Challenge” Rewards Participants for Demonstrating Non- Belief on YouTube

Philadelphia — December 14, 2006. The Rational Response Squad has launched a $25,000 campaign to entice young people to publicly renounce any belief in the sky God of Christianity.

Called “The Blasphemy Challenge,” this campaign encourages participants to commit what Christian doctrine calls the only unforgivable sin — blasphemy against the Holy Spirit. (The “Holy Spirit” is an invisible ghost who Christians believe dwells on Earth as God’s representative.) [Via Richard Dawkins.net - MySpace Blog.]

Me? I’m takin’ my most blasphemous self and other to sinful New York. Anyone in Manhattan from Dec. 23 through Dec. 30 who might want to hook up with me and Paul Allison for a blogTech drinkTalk, drop me a note.

Total War: ???All along, I’ve had the sneaking suspicion that the choices in Iraq would ultimately boil down to mass butchery or defeat. But, as the above post indicates, over the years I’ve become progressively less certain what the ultimate decision would be — and whether and when the American military would flinch from the implications of that choice.

Next year may be the year we find out.

Go read the whole thing.