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Catching up on commentary and linky leftovers

April 25th, 2005 · No Comments

Here are links that caught my eye and stayed in my mind from the past month as the days disappeared somewhere…

Chicken soup is good for the soul and the body…and the other flu remedies in the comments are helpful too. [Rebecca McKinnon’s recipe resembles one I’ve heard from Ted’s side of the family]

Multipurpose peels: don’t throw them away! Now I had heard that orange peels were not good for the compost pile. They can be turned into plastics or fuel [via Rebecca Blood] or carved into artful images. [via Pen-Elayne] Bonus link: how to peel an orange. [ Question: would plastics made from oranges be safer and less poisonous than products currently used? ]

Oh, the orca!:Fireproof Killer whales are now our official marine mammal of Washington state. (ironic that both of these stories appeared in our local headlines in the past month)

Yes, the $64,000 question:
Do statistics in these posts by Jason Kottke [ via Roland Tanglao] and Paul Beard prove the truth of Lisa Williams’ passionate opinion? Jason Kottke received support from less than 1 in 300 readers of his blog, while Paul Beard, reported 16 people purchasing from Cafe Press out of 5400 requests for the page on his blog (when receiving some nice traffic links). Whenever I read Worthwhile I’m inundated with thoughts on passionate work. But then I read Lisa’s exhortation

Listen to me, people: Deprofessionalize your passions!

Art and thinking and all the Important Stuff is WAY too important to be left to the increasingly small number of people who are getting paid to do it.

Hmmm…got to think about this one.

Every nation has its own story
I’ve heard bits of the American version but not the Canadian side of this history: from Yule Heibel:

We also know that the railroad couldn’t have been built without Chinese labour. But what many of us don’t know is how badly the Chinese were treated by the Canadian government. Once the railroad was finished, Canadian politicians in BC and in Ottawa went on a desperate spree to rid Canada of the Chinese and, failing that, to stop further immigration and effectively to restrict Chinese to ghettos: they couldn’t vote, the couldn’t practice trades, they couldn’t even be reunited with their families.

Powerful statistics in her post…

Powerful pictures in Richard Eriksson’s links to reports and photos from anti-Japan protests in China.

The value of life: I wish I had more elders as friends but perhaps blogs can help. Here’s Ronni whom I admire:

uring busy adulthood with careers to build and children to raise, there is little time to look back. As the years pass and there are fewer ahead of us than behind, pressures abate and memories naturally come forward with their pleasures and pains, lessons learned, knowledge gained and we use those memories to help us determine, in our later years, the meaning of the active, adult lives we’ve led and to prepare us for an acceptance of death.

It is what elderhood is for. But by making youth, youthful pursuits or their facsimiles the gold standard of life unto death, as American culture insists, we are missing, on a personal level, the opportunity to understand why we were here. And in the community at large, we are impoverishing the culture by refusing the wisdom of elders and losing the usefulness of their influence.

In making a new friend, Rayne wrote I must make friends with Death..

New babies on the way for Lucy and her family and also Myk and his (who are moving). Big changes for Lenn and his family too. I agree Life’s about more than just news.

Outsourcing parenting: I thought about critiquing this Wall Street Journal piece that begins with It is now possible to outsource most aspects of parenting. but Brad at DadTalk beat me to it. I see a place for experts, but I don’t believe parenting should be a profession, only performed by those with certified expertise and education. Funny how we DIY (do-it-yourself) in many categories from painting to computing, yet the trend in parenting seems to be to hire someone else to do it for you, from burping to bike riding. As if parenting is only for those who can afford all the specialists. But who would want to miss this? As Tim Bray wrote You only get maybe one of these per child and, like they say, “You never forget”.. Derek Miller described it as A once-in-a-lifetime event. To Euan Semple, it was amazing. As if to disprove the WSJ piece, in the past few weeks, in my aggregator I’ve read three dads describing the joy of seeing their children learn to ride a bike.

In contrast to the professional parenting piece, I preferred Punkymoms [ via Brian Chin]

“It’s fine if one of us is a blue-haired vegan while another is a Catholic homeschooler.”

“I don’t know what I’m doing as a parent, so I figure if she’s out there living life with me, that’s gonna stick.”

Getting dizzy: The Vertigo tour has begun! U2 fans can get filled at a number of blogs and find out about T-shirt prices, set lists and quotes from articles…[The real reason I haven’t been posting is that I’ve been practicing my dress and dancing, in hopes that Bono will choose me up onto the catwalk…if you know me, you know I could odds are slim, nevermind the fact that I may not be able to see the band from my seat ]
Bonus U2 links: Bill Gates appeared at last night’s U2 show in Seattle: reviews from the Seattle P-I (with a guess on tonight’s set list) and Seattle Times.
Also a great Vertigo video 14 comes after 3 from Clint Sharp [via Chris Holmes].

Why do some deaths receive more attention than others?
Thoughts on this inequity from Amanda Witt and Euan Semple. Steven Noels posted his sobering calculation of child deaths the same day I saw this video [ via U2 Sermons] on the significance of three seconds (why do I have the feeling I may be seeing this film later tonight…?)

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