Is a "Virtual Reading Group" at Salon Feasible?
Books Katherine B. - 11:08am Sep 9, 1999 PDT (# 6541 of 6561)
6/6/66 At a year and a half I am busy toddling everywhere, except at naptime, when (I am told) I lie in my crib, not sleeping, but staring quietly at the ceiling. Insomnia stays with me until my 30s.
7/7/77 YMCA Camp Minikani's specific torture is the twice-daily mandatory swim. I hide out in the small library at the lodge with a musty copy of "Kidnapped!" In the dining hall, I distinguish myself by winning an impromptu milk-drinking contest (12 large glasses). Miraculously, I do not throw up.
8/8/88 I am packing my bags for China, where I will teach English at a teachers college in Manchuria. I pack too many clothes and not enough books (though my mother would argue otherwise). Later, I remedy the imbalance in the Hong Kong bookstores with the fattest paperbacks I can find.
9/9/99 The dog, finding my chair surrounded by stacks of 50-odd newly bought books, crawls underneath the desk and lies down on the power strip, cutting off my post just as I'm finishing it. So I type it again. I'm back to one job, fresh off a two-week vacation, and life is good.
On the scale of history, as big as the industrial revolution
Technology and the Net
Steve Schalchlin - 04:51pm Sep 5, 1999 PDT (# 16 of 20)
Perhaps it was because I was so sick, so disabled, the chance to have the world at my fingertips with very little assertion was nothing short of a lifesaver for me. My net presence grew even as my physical presence withered.
Also, perhaps it was because I felt desperate, I didn't go looking around for someone to tell me how to use the net. I had something I needed to say and I found a way to say it. I actually set up my website before I started surfing, except to go to Yahoo to get HTML information.
When one bemoans what the net DOESN'T have, one only has to compare it with having no net at all to realize what a privileged position that is....
I still believe we have yet to see the first truly great work of art or lifechanging idea come from net (except for the net itself.). No one person has come forth as representing what the Net is all about. This is the radio before Jack Benny, the TV before Lucille Ball, the movies before Orson Welles.
The best hasn't even been thought of yet.
That accent! Ow my GAWD!
Home and Away
Tanya R. - 10:43am Sep 5, 1999 PDT (# 165 of 165)
Speaking of Chicago accents...
Ages ago, when I was attending a high school in a small southern Missouri town, my journalism class took a trip to Chicago. One evening we were all to meet at a well known restaurant for dinner. I think it was Ed Debevics. My group was having a terrible time finding the place. We turned to the person who you could talk into doing anything (every group has one), and persuaded her to go up to a nearby taxi driver and ask directions.
When she returned, she seemed reluctant to answer our queries of "whadyhesay?"
Finally she offered "He said 'it's to the right of my dick.'"
There was a rather long silent pause, then someone asked, "Well, which way was he facing?"
We trooped off in the indicated direction and eventually arrived at our destination. It was then that we realized that she had been given directions to the restaurant in relation to Mike Ditka's.
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