SC Educational Television-Fifty Good Years
South Carolina Educational Television is celebrating fifty years of broadcasting this year, and I would like to acknowledge publically the excellent work they do bringing the very best programming available on television into our homes. From locally produced documentaries to those that bring us the world, ETV is the most useful tool to opening your mind to what is going on in the world. There are currently five TV stations in the ETV network that produce shows as far ranging as the quirky Making It Grow to the informative The Big Picture. In addition to the programs ETV produces, they also bring us shows from around the globe via PBS. more »
The Year of Nothing
Obama is calling for more bipartisanship. Meanwhile Nancy Pelosi is playing hockey in the House of Representatives, body checking the Republicans out of every legislative play there is. Much the same is going on in the Senate. But now that the Democrats have lost their filibuster-proof majority, what is going to happen this year concerning all those issues the rest of us would like to see some action on-Healthcare, financial regulation reform, education. More than likely, we will see very little action out of Washington. more »
Aesthetics Books Criticism Culture Publishing Reading
by Matthew
leave a comment
The Fate of Libraries?
It is strange to note that Carnegie, who built so many libraries, never bought a book for a single one, nor paid for anyone to work in any of them. Populating the libraries with both books and librarians, were left up to the municipalities in which they were built. Carnegie, anything but a social progressive, was only concerned with erecting marble and granite edifices upon which he could see his name. It may be that the building long outlive the use for which they were built. more »
Yemen as Paradigm
The first time Yemen popped up on the radar screen for many was the Christmas day bomb attempt when Abdul Farouk Umar Abdulmutallab tried to set his underwear on fire while on a plane to Detroit. When I speak of Yemen being a pattern, it is not necessarily for the exportation of terrorists, though that may be one side effect.
One way or another we are going to get off of oil as our main energy source. Someone may discover a new simple green technology that takes the world by storm (though this is the least likely). It could be that we slowly wean ourselves off of oil while switching to different sources. Last, at some point or another, the oil will simply run out. When there isn’t any more to drill, we’ll have to find something else. more »
Education-The Answer to all Problems
Here I am talking about education again. When you get down to it, every problem there is can be solved by education. Poverty, terrorism, new energy sources, all of these and all the other problems in the world can be solved by education. Does this mean it’s easy? Not at all. It is very difficult to change the course of a culture, to make parents understand that their children’s education is the most important thing there is; not just pay it lip service, but to actually get them to know and work towards their children’s education. That’s here in America where children’s attendance at school is (supposedly) mandatory; imagine the places where the parents have to pay for school, or where there are no schools. Unfortunately, we have to worry about our own problems. more »
Reading or Technology-Bookfuturism
I posted the following on Bookfuturism.com but wanted to put it up here as well. Bookfuturism is a site run by Timothy Carmody and is inhabited by those who are interested in the reading, book, tech, and publishing worlds. The goal is to establish a dialog about the future of the book and publishing industries. Stop by and wander around. You are sure to find something to pique your interest.
I used to work in a bookstore and often parents would ask me how they could get their children to read more. Always, my first question was “what was the last book you read?”. Invariably, the return answer was “Oh, I don’t read.” <insert head in doorway, slam door hard until rendered unconscious.> That is one reason I was happy to find this site. Look at the tag line and the first line of the mission statement. I have looked at all of the posts here and read quite a number of them, but there isn’t really a single one about reading. Technology, platforms, what will the Post Paper Paradigm be like, this group versus that group, but not really a word on reading. more »
Future Casualties
Combat in Iraq is winding down, but in Afghanistan it will only rise as spring comes on. However, there is a greater threat to service members than either of these theatres. “Of the more than 30,000 suicides in this country each year, fully 20 percent of them are acts by veterans,” noted VA Secretary Eric Shinseki. With Iraq going on for seven years and Afghanistan now almost a decade, there are over two million veterans from these two conflicts alone. The problem is Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. more »
Open the Floodgates
Just as a knee can jerk for any range of people, I find it difficult to understand the conservatives’ appreciation of last Thursday’s Supreme Court decision regarding corporate campaign financing. How many times in the past few years have the conservatives, politicians and pundits alike, bemoaned the possibility of activists judges taking the bench, how bad it would be for America. Well, now we know that judicial activism can work on both sides of the political divide. more »
Writing is Easy, Right?
This post came about as a result of reading John Olson’s tirade against not wanting to read scripts. Not any scripts at all, but those who are given to him by people he meets or simple acquaintances. The post is funny, even though I think he goes overboard on the expletives. But it does bring up a bigger issue. Writing is easy, right? more »
A Few Words on Words
Language is conventional and arbitrary. My Greek professor used to say this all the time. Basically any group of sounds can come to have any meaning people want. That’s another thing, language is a living thing. It changes over time and geography, just look at the difference between British English and American English. We do speak the same language don’t we? Just think about how different Shakespeare sounds compared to how we speak today. Did people then really talk like that? Considering that Shakespeare was writing for the popular theater (it only became great literature hundreds of years later), I can only assume yes, people did speak like that. If you go farther back, to Chaucer and beyond, English begins to look like a very different animal indeed until you get to the point that the language spoken wasn’t even English at all. Imagine how a language that has been around a really long time like Chinese has changed over the millennia. more »