A Dead Blog

One of the links I carry on this page is to the blog Cafe Third Edition. Cafe Third Edition is a descendant of the Great Books Cafe formerly hosted by Ken Roberts (before the Canadian regulations governing political correctness forced him to shut it down). The concept was good, but the blog never reached the critical mass of discussants, which I might define as the number of participants necessary to ensure that a) something new will be posted at least once daily, and b) there is a fair chance that someone will respond to any new post.

The last person to post to Cafe Third Edition was me, back in May 2010. I'm going to leave the link up on the sidebar, but I think we may declare Cafe Third Edition completely and utterly dead.

Best-Laid Plans

August was a low point for this blog, at least in terms of the number of posts. I posted three items in August, after a whopping seven in July. I have excuses. We traveled to Tennessee in July, and we toured parts of Colorado, Utah, Arizona, and New Mexico in August and September. But nobody wants to hear excuses. (By the way, if you want to see pictures from those trips, you can go to http://www.facebook.com/ and look me up.)

So here's another excuse. I had posted 12 pieces in November when, just before Thanksgiving, our computer stopped displaying anything on the monitor. The computer might have been working, but we couldn't see any product. After trying a few things, we took the computer to Staples, and it's been there ever since. Well, the day before Thanksgiving we authorized them to send it to a subcontractor. They said it would ship on the Friday, but it didn't ship until the Monday. They said the subcontractor worked on weekends, but they don't. They said the subcontractor would provide updates; they haven't. And it wasn't back by December 10, so we flew off to Florida not knowing if our computer liveth.

Now I'm in Florida, using my mother-in-law's computer - Windows 98 and a dial-up connection. I have managed to get through my e-mail, and even send a few e-mails to people. I have visited my Facebook account and used the messaging service there, as well as commenting and posting some items. Now, I'm going to see if I can successfully post to my blog from here.

Regards,

Glenn A. Knight

Changes to Castle Ramparts

Castle Ramparts is my list of blogs I enjoy and would like to share. I update the list from time to time.

Today, for example, I removed the blog for the United Nations Association of Westchester because it seems to have gone under. I moved Arts and Letters Daily to my News, News, News sidebar. I added a new blog, SplinterScript, in hopes that the owner will blog actively there. And I added one of the biggest blogs in the business, Daily Kos.

I added some additional on-line news sources to News, News, News. I fixed the link to the Huffington Post, and I added the Drudge Report, The Daily Beast, Salon, and The Economist.

Suggestions for additional blogs or news sources are welcome. Enjoy!

Things Are Always Changing

I added Anthony Bourdain's blog here today. Bourdain's blog is sponsored by The Travel Channel, but he seems to make frequent personal contributions.

I subtracted The Brooklyn Educrat. I went out and visited each of the blogs on the sidebar today, and I found that The Brooklyn Educrat had not been updated since 2007. The author's profile indicated that he had two other blogs, and the most recent update to any of them was in 2007. So I'm counting that as an inactive blog, and there's no point in wasting my space and your time with a dead blog. The other one that hasn't seen much action lately - and I've been responsible for most of it - is Cafe Third Edition. It's on the short list for removal.

If you have any other blogs you think I should be tracking here, please recommend them.

Reviews and Opinions

I am going to share a secret with my readers: I don't have time to read all I wish to read, and then write reviews and commentary on all I read for use on this blog. If I try to read a great many worthwhile books, I can only produce reviews of them at rather long intervals. If, on the other hand, I try to write more commentary on events of the day, articles in the periodical literature, and so on, I won't have time to read enough books to provide subjects for my reviews. So it goes.

I posted a review of The Commission: The Uncensored Story of the 9/11 Investigation a few days ago. I would like for some of you to comment on the review (there are three comments so far, including my response to a reader.) I would like even more for some of you to read the book and then come back here to provide us with your own comments on it. Those of you who have read the 9/11 Commission Report might also tell us how Philip Shenon's account of the investigation and writing sorts with the report itself. (I have not yet read the report.)

I suppose I'd like to see more dialogue and debate here, and I'd like to have less of the feeling that I'm sealing messages into wine flasks and casting them into the sea. Perhaps book reviews are too much of a "closed" medium to attract a lot of comment.

This is the date of William Wordsworth's birth in 1770. Bertrand Russell said of Wordsworth: 'In his youth Wordsworth sympathized with the French Revolution, went to France, wrote good poetry, and had a natural daughter. At this period, he was called a 'bad' man. Then he became 'good,' abandoned his daughter, adopted correct principles, and wrote bad poetry."

Russell often preferred to be clever, rather than kind, and this may have been one of those occasions. I wonder if Russell was asserting that Wordsworth was a good poet (and a more sympathetic character) only when he was bad, and that good art is associated with bad behavior. Perhaps he was only suggesting that there is no correlation between one's morals and one's artistic abilities. It may come as a shock to some of you, but there doesn't seem to be any consistent relationship between one's "goodness" and one's skill at a given art or craft.

This may be because "goodness" is judged by society on the basis of conformity to standards of outward behavior, while artistic talent is judged by one's work product's conformity to standards of beauty.

I have been reading the book of Mark in the New Testament. My current reading plan has me reading a couple of chapters every day for a week, before going on to the next selection. In Chapter 7, Jesus rebukes the Pharisees for preferring their traditions to God's laws. He goes on to say that it is not what goes into a man that makes him unclean, but what comes out of him, as lust, immorality, and so on. There may be less to this than meets the eye. Whether one is condemning a violation of the dietary law or judging the goodness of a person's heart, what one has to go by is the person's behavior. Perhaps eating pork does not make one unclean, but would a good person eat pork, knowing that such an act would be offensive to the community?

On this date in 1775, Samuel Johnson declared, "Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel." I'm not so sure. In this day and age, a lot of scoundrels have chosen religion as their last refuge. Moreover, while a scoundrel may use patriotism as a refuge, many good people may perform patriotic acts of sacrifice. Does a scoundrel's use of patriotic cover may all patriotism suspect?

By the way, the Current Reading sidebar of the blog provides you with the titles of the books I am now reading. If you run out and find copies of them now, you could finish reading them by the time I come out with my review.

Cafe Third Edition

Terence Berres visited and left us a present: his own blog address. Terence's blog, Cafe Third Edition, is here: http://gbcafe3.blogspot.com/. There are a number of interesting-sounding posts on the blog, and I tried to comment on a post by Agim Zabeli, but messed up somehow. That means, I suppose, I'll have to answer Agim's post on this site, thereby creating an inter-blog dialogue.

Good to know that Terence and Agim are still out there.