The Mongrel Dogs Who Teach

Tag: ramblings

  • What is a library?

    What is a library?

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    mongreldogs
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    I am far from the first to ask this question in an increasingly-electronic age, and I am sure that my answer will be far from unique.  But my wife and I have batted the question around a couple of times and I wanted to get my thoughts down.  The proximate cause of our discussion was…

  • Alternate History: The Speech that Wasn’t

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    mongreldogs
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    In preparing my second Convocation speech, I spent most of the summer at a loss. Once I had changed apartments, I sat down in earnest. Eventually, I ended up jettisoning my original effort and producing the speech as given. But in case you wonder what could have been, below I’ll post the speech I nearly…

  • Hidden meanings?

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    mongreldogs
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    I don’t know what this means, but I’ve discovered something weird with the iTunes Music Store. I wanted to find a particular song by Bob Dylan called “Dignity”. But the search box won’t find it for me, instead returning an error: “We could not complete your iTunes store request. The iTunes Store is temporarily unavailable.…

  • The Mongrel Dogs at Sea (10): Managed Disequilibrium

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    mongreldogs
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    Every night, the crew of the Regal Princess find some live entertainment to put on in the grandiosely-named International Show Lounge. Sometimes it’s in-house, like a crew sing-along. Usually, it’s more like a Vegas revue: Sometimes piano, sometimes comedy, sometimes live performance, sometimes old Broadway standards. For the most part, I’ve avoided this like a…

  • The Mongrel Dogs at Sea (6): Security Silliness

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    mongreldogs
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    I was going to write today about my visit to the USS Arizona and USS Missouri memorials and how moving it was. I suppose I’ll get to that, though maybe not today. Right now I’m going to blog about one of the deepening madnesses of the 21st century, the traveler security checkpoint. Let me say…

  • Irksome metric

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    mongreldogs
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    Today, there’s a piece by Maya Jasonoff in the Sunday magazine of the New York Times on the Americans loyal to Britain during the Revolution, and it has me irked. It’s not the thesis, which I agree with, that we should be more aware that the “self-evident” truths were anything but, to about 20% of…

  • Why I’m a Technophile

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    mongreldogs
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    For you to understand this post, there are two things about myself I should tell you — they’re already well-known to any of my friends: I drink a lot of Coke. I have catastrophically bad eyesight. More below the fold.

  • New, if silly, pursuit

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    mongreldogs
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    So I haven’t stretched my creative muscles very much lately, and I’ve been looking for something to do. Playing around with Poser and some models I got from the Net, I decided I was going to make propaganda posters from the First Interworld War, loosely conceived as the follow-up to H.G. Well’s War of the…

  • Pondering Hate Crimes and Hate-Crime Laws

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    mongreldogs
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    Apparently there’s something afoot in the House that has brought this back into national focus. Reading about it, I wandered across a blog post in Orcinus from 2005 January (!). I have to say, for the first time in many years, it gave me something to think about on this issue. I have always been…

  • Why We’re In the Mess We’re In

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    mongreldogs
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    Matthew Dowd, an adviser to President Bush, today said in an interview that he was disappointed by the President’s stand on the war, on the will of the public, and, well, just about everything. It’s clear that Mr. Dowd is conflicted in taking this public stance. Said Mr. Dowd: I really like him, which is…