Beer is proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy.
-Benjamin Franklin
Literature Rare collector . . .
Bibliomania and the collecting of rare books is not a comfortable addiction. Friends and family have felt obliged to shun me lest I drag them down with my sordid behaviour; my burblings of cracked hinges, crushed spines and discoloured front–end papers. I am abandoned to the company of quiet men in cardigans.
· Bibliomania [Spectator]
Marathon food fight at the Library
It was most amusing to see veteran stager/adman extraordinaire Jack Connors prating about the ''relaunch'' of Boston when we won the Democratic national convention bid last week. Because one thing is for sure - in our new avatar, we're not going to be renamed the City of Brotherly Love.
· Globe Columnist [Daily Globe]
Politics It's deja vu all over again...
According to Senator Lenin, a.k.a. Daschle, when radio talk show host Rush Limbaugh attacks those of us in public life" his listeners are energized to go out and hurt somebody. This is supposed to explain threats that Daschle says he is getting.
That is quite an accusation to make, without a speck of evidence. In more than a decade of listening to Rush Limbaugh, I have never heard him condone violence, much less incite it. Moreover, he has never rewarded people who commit violence with free air time to broadcast their views -- as liberal media journalists do routinely when riots break out to protest meetings of the World Trade Organization or other activities that the rioters don't like.
· The Act of Pressing Emotional Buttons [Town Hall]
The freedom to humiliate ourselves publicly
Webdiarist Robin Ford gives us four ways for the disempowered to hang in there:
vote for people who meet the eye-ball test,
take your body, fragile though it might be, to protest meetings,
write to politicians, with a pen, and
keep up with Webdiary and similar sites of honesty and hope.
To that I would like to add a fifth: Don't be scared to publicly humiliate yourself on matters of principle, however goofy and precious you may feel.
· Jack Robertson [Webdiary]
