More crumbs, but good crumbs

Herding my various tech into workable shape. Details when it's all in the paddock.

In the meantime:

ToyViewer is free (as in napkins), and nimble Mac OS X (Snow Leopard compatible!) photo editor more capable than Preview and less intimidating than GraphicConverter.

http://homepage.mac.com/t_ogihara/software/OSX/toyv-eng.html

Language Log, a delightful ongoing lesson in how snarky thoughtful linguists do meta, does a two-fer. It's a meditation on how quickly jargon words (like power and duration) lose their technical specificity and acquire their everyday meanings. Interesting in its own right, and we've all seen the parallel development of technical medical terms—moron, imbecile, schizophrenic—into casual epithets. PLUS the seed is a funny XCKD cartoon!

Wheelchair Dancer is an eloquent writer who makes art at the intersections of dance, disability, and race. She meditates here on a typically annoying New York Times piece:

 begin quote  Disability figures here in archetypal societally negative ways. We can't live actual physical lives, we live lives of the spirit and of the heart; our bodies are useless and broken. Disability is both a burden (sigh) and a passage to being a better human. No longer the rebel youth, Mr. Addison is now a societally useful person: a healer. And regardless of whether it is true that he lay on a slab in a morgue, does the story have to be one of rebirth -- rebirth into a crippled life that ultimately is his healing?

These are cliches. Broken. Useless. Spiritually barren cliches. How bad it is it? Well, what do people think? The NYT comments on this story are what you would expect -- of the "oh, this is so beautiful, so inspiring type." People know how to read this stuff. Ms. Jones even becomes an "angel" (Commenter #46). This is the danger of writing this story in the way that Ms. Jones does. It's an exoticized "chicken soup for the soul" memoir (my phrase). As a writer, Ms. Jones has a responsibility to do better. quote ends 

I first read Wheelchair Dancer as a guest poster in the fabulous Rethinking Walking at Flipflopping Joy. Where the most recent item is a thoughtful and necessary shout-back to the Ken Burns 8-hours-of-nature-porn series that's just concluded on PBS.

 begin quote And knowing [passing details of Native objections, exploitation of Japanese and Chinese workers] made it easier for me to deal with. Easier for me to just glory in the story telling and admire the nature porn.

But then last night, FOUR NIGHTS into the series, I find out that these little epicenters of light and DEMOCRACY—these pantheons of joy and DEMOCRACY, these schools of enlightened thinking and DEMOCRACY—were actually racially segregated until at least the late 1930s.
…
Overall—I am really glad that he made the series. I’ll even watch it again. He makes a compelling argument against unfettered capitalism that I think many mainstream liberals really desperately need to hear. …

He’s used his privilege and his power to put the environment and a different way to understand masculinity, public service and nationalism on the table.
 quote ends