Accept no substitutes

Month: December 2006 (Page 2 of 4)

The South in Black and White

Tim Tyson will be leading a course through the Center for Documentary Studies called “The South in Black and White” to be held January 16 – April 24, 2007 Tuesdays 7:00 – 9:30 PM at the Hayti Heritage Center, 804 Old Fayetteville Street, Durham, North Carolina.

The class is open to the general public and is given for credit for students enrolled at NCCU, Duke and UNC – Chapel Hill.

“Joy is Here” is bumped to New Year’s Eve

An exchange of notes with my editor goes like this:

She: [other poet] sent me a christmas poem, so i’d like to run yours on new years eve. okay?
Me: You mean it’s more joyful than mine?
She: Not necessarily. [other poet]’s is more Christmasy.
Me: More Christmasy that a contingent and contextual look at the compromises we make to achieve joy?
She: [other poet]’s has a star in it.
Me: if i add a star somewhere in my poem can i be the christmas poem? i already have birds and a tree.
She: yours will be the perfect poem to greet the new year.
Me: What if someone shows up with a poem with party hats and champagne in it, will I get bumped again?
She: hmm. well .. let me think about that.
Me: Wait! Wait! I’m rewriting now. Mine will have a party hat. And it will have a very large acorn.
She: ok! you’re secured!

Such are the battles of literature.

Mourning the closing of the Daily Grind

Our favorite social space and coffee provider is being boarded up and moved out of their/its building for renovations. The Daily Grind was moving into a trailer yesterday. Not even an Airstream (to Don’s disappointment), but a rectangular FEMA trailer or one like you might see at the State Fair or at a, say, steeple chase event (to cover a couple of ends of the social spectrum).
Don and I are now in Carrboro working outdoors at the Weave.

Interestingly enough, we are running into many of the people here that we often see at the Grind — or make that saw at the Grind.

The Grind will reopen in the trailer then in the renovated space. But in the meantime, we’re in mourning.

You are the Person of the Year

And so am I. Time chooses YOU, meaning all of us participating in media and information construction and sharing on the Internet, as their Man (now Person) of the Year.

Time begins: “Person of the Year: You — Yes, you. You control the Information Age. Welcome to your world.”

As long as we have Net Neutrality that will be true.

And JJB points us to a Chrysler advert which gets it right by getting it wrong.

Dan Gillmor points out that the correct pronoun would be US not YOU.

NOTE to pathetic PR employees working for the anti-Net Neutrality duopoly: I won’t allow your obvious spammish links and misleading comments on this blog. In fact I’m more likely to do even more pro-Net Neutrality articles in response to your postings.

CEO of Reuter’s on Citizen Journalism

Tom Glocer is CEO of Reuters and he is also a blogger. Where better for him to publish an article called “Trust in the Age of Citizen Journalism” than on his blog?

The article is the text of a speech Glocer gave at “Globes Media Conference in Tel Aviv on Monday 11 December 2006.” About the talk he says: “It’s about trust in media today, taking into account the growing
popularity of blogging and all other types of citizen journalism.”

Reminds me that when I met Lobsang Wangyal, the Reuters reporter amongst exiled Tibetans, he was most interesting in talking about his newly formed Association of Tibetan Journalists. The Association’s biggest task, he told me, is preparing citizens to be journalists by educating them about strong and respected news practices — values, ethics and skills.

Glocer’s talk via Dan Gillmor and the Center for Citizen Media. Dan has his reservations about parts of the talk.

Birdsong silenced in Raleigh

Gary Birdsong - Nov 2005
“And no birds sang” as Keats ended his poem, “La Belle Dame Sans Merci.” But in this case, the silence befell our favorite pitpreacher, Gary Birdsong as he tried to take his redemption show on the road to the general public.

Gary has been preaching hell fire and damnation at UNC and other campuses or well over a decade that I can recall. But once he started up on Raleigh’s Fayetteville Street in front of the Wake County Courthouse, he upset the gentile dinners at Yancey’s Juke Joint who called the police.

Ryan Teague Beckwith has the story on his News and Observer blog.


The people at UNC-Asheville aren’t nice to Gary either.[YouTube]

We ibiblians have some nice pictures of a slightly younger and less hairy Gary in classic poses.

new ibiblio record over 24 million files in one day

Munch - Ashes
Thanks to Google’s Edvard Munch celebration yesterday and to the historic WebMuseum hosted on ibiblio, we handled over 24 million requests yesterday — about 10 million of those for images of Munch’s paintings.

Our Cogent link to Atlanta managed the extra requests easily without going over our limit (in the 500 mbs range). And thanks to Squid caching, our servers easily handled the load.

Overall, a great test of our new datacenter and networking arrangement with NCREN and a big success there for all of us.

Thanks to Nicholas Pioch of Netscape-AOL France for maintaining the Web Museum for almost 15 years and to Mark Harden for his contributions to the Munch area.

Song of Joy (coming soon)

I’ll be off the net all day today (Wednesday), but I do have unrelated news. I have a poem upcoming in the News and Observer’s Sunday Journal. Not sure which Sunday as I write this. I can’t put the poem here since it needs to appear in the Sunday Journal first, but I can give you the 99 words of the introduction to the poem:

I heard a voice in the night saying “Joy is here” then after a pause “It might be insincere.” I noticed that the lines created a perfect triplet of three lines of three syllables with rhyme. Of course they should occur three times in a poem. But the poem’s length? The most magical number would be ninety nine; the sum of the sums of divisors of the first eleven integers. Incidental to this mathematical epiphany, I suddenly recalled William Wordsworth‘s wonderful poem “The Tables Turned.” The birds sang as the sun rose. I wrote this poem. Hope you enjoy.

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