Friday, June 27, 2003

Ok, so the data-line is being used by another c-w, so I am typing on word with the intent to cut and paste…….atop my blogging agenda today is the issue of blogging…..the herald-leader ran a canned article today on the ‘dangers of tell-all web logging’ which mainly focused on people who disclosed extremely personal stuff like gender-identity and pregnancy-test results and/or anti-familial religious tendencies on-line………I have had my fill of this sort of thing…..my oldest child refuses to read any family blog on general principle……even though his sibling is blogging from belgium………he sees only the underbelly of blogging………I, on the other hand, can say confidently, that since I have started blogging I have not once felt hopeless or depressed………the catharsis of blogging has a tremendous healing power…….just like a written/private diary might have in another age……..i discovered on my vacation that writing in a journal with pen and paper is now quite difficult and foreign……… on to better humours…..the new yorker reviewed a set of biographies of Ben Franklin…so many tidbits to quote……..’there are no bad biographies of Franklin for the same reason there are no bad three stooges films….’ The gist of this article is about how we will ever know what Franklin did or did not do…Did he really discover electricity? Or does it really matter?………. The last paragraph is classic……..’The moral of the kite is not that truth is relative. It is that nothing is self-evident. Scientific truths, like political beliefs, , are guesses and arguments, not certainties. Dr.. Johnson’s great, comforting gloss on the Christian funeral service comes to mind: “In the sure and certain hope of a resurrection” did not mean that the resurrection was certain, only that the hope was certain. “We hold these truths to be self-evident” similarly, means that we hold them to be so. We hold these truths as we hold the twine, believing that, without being sure, that the tugs and shocks are what we think they are (referring to electricity felt whilst holding the kite). We hold the string, and hope for the best. Often there is no lightening. Sometimes, there is no kite.

It is Friday afternoon, and that statement sounds so-Zen-line for a Friday………..

For what it is worth, Princess was here when I got home………….

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