Saturday, January 25, 2003

Bush Fatigue Sets In: Nation Weary of War, Economic Strife Bush at 54% in New WSJ/NBC Poll

Bush barely pulls a majority approval rating now. That's practically unheard of even in hypothetical ’wartime.’ Bush is well on the road toward securing his proper historical legacy as one-illicit-term wonder footnote.

Creativity Being a pain in the ass helps creativity

Without innovation we are doomed—by boredom and monotony—to decline. The idea that something called creative class exists in our society is rather old. The missing definitions & pieces, it turns out, have been youth, diversity, and collaboration. Being a pain in the ass also helps.
Richard Florida has been one of my favorite writers since I read Rise of the Creative Class last September (which, in blogyears, was centuries ago). Richard has a bit of Andy Grove’s survival of the paranoid in him as his creative capital theory goes like this: ‘You cannot get a technologically innovative place unless it's open to weirdness, eccentricity, and difference.’

Steve Himmer points out what distinguishes his blog-writing from his novel-writing: It is scattershot, chaotic. It's a scratchpad where I kick ideas around and churn them up and bounce them off others. But he also adds that he's concerned that we (I) lose something by writing so unstructured for so long: there's a value to discipline (I've never said that before!), though there's also a value to freedom.
· Chaotic Discipline [One Pot Meal]