History: June 2003 Archive Page

"From Bouffant Hairdos to Platform Shoes, these are the fashion trends which were the style of the day, and the nightmare of the next decade." --Bad Fads Museum -- Fashion (Bad Fads)

The site also includes pages categorized under "Collectibles," "Activities" and "Events". I've seen similar nostalgia sites that are sorted according to decades... this one just sort of lumps everything together. And while the site claims to cover the last 100 years, it seems to focus mostly on the 70s.

The site also doesn't have a good entry page... badfads.com is a pointless splash page, and the page you get when you click the "enter" button rather lamely offers links to the 4 categories.

Via Distracted.

"Emerson was himself a sort of group blogger in The Dial, a magazine he founded with Margaret Fuller in 1840. He designed it as a compendium of the 'good fanatics,' like Thoreau, Alcott and Channing in his Concord circle. 'I would not have it too purely literary,' he wrote to Fuller, venting a blogger's ambition. 'I wish we might make a Journal so broad and great in its survey that it should lead the opinion of this generation on every interest and read the law on property, government, education, as well as on art, letters, and religion.'" Christopher Lydon explains why American poet and philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882) is "a man for bloggers to embrace". --A God for Bloggers (Lydon)

"When I was studying at York, reading the plays was part of the curriculum, and then, in the summer, there were a selection of the plays performed in the street (perhaps 15?), conveniently available to watch. Now that I am at Toronto, there are still medieval play recreations regularly available to watch, since the PLS is alive and well. The scholarly study of medieval drama has improved substantially since those early days, as Prof. Klausner made particularly clear in the Vagantes talk." S. Worthen --York Mystery Plays: Update (Owlfish)

Owlfish's blog post is a good overview of what's happening in medieval drama re-creation these days. I haven't exactly been following the field since I left Toronto, though I do tend to my PSim website, and occasionally field e-mails from students and researchers.

The ancient ossuary ("bone box") marked with an inscription identifying the occupant as "James, brother of Jesus" has been officially declared a fake:

"The varnish covered large areas of the ossuary surface and the patina had burst through the varnish in many places. Both varnish and patina coated a rosette inscribed on the other side of the ossuary. But Goren and Ayalon's meticulous microscopic analysis showed that the letters of the entire Aramaic inscription "James, Son of Joseph, Brother of Jesus" were cut through the varnish, indicating that they were carved long--perhaps centuries after--the varnish-covered rosette."

Also declared fake was a reputed record of repairs made to the Temple in Jerusalem nearly 3,000 years ago. --Gold Dust and James Bond (Archaeology)

Note to self: If ever planning forgery of important document likely to draw the attention of scholars from around the world, try to get the grammar right.

I previously blogged the Temple record as an example of ancient technical writing, so I'd better set the record straight.

The Corpus Christi Play was an annual outdoor event, involving hundreds of actors; it was already a long-established tradition by the end of the 14th century, and continued until suppressed by the Protestant Reformation in the late 16th century." --Medieval 'Body of Christ' PlayLiteracy Weblog)

Today is the day the medieval church would have celebrated the Feast of Corpus Christi ("Body of Christ). This website is one of my oldest online resources. I created the first version in C++, and it ran only on Windows. When I demonstrated it as a poster paper at my very first academic conference (almost 10 years ago), I learned just how many medievalists are also mac users. That led me to learn Java.

"Norma McCorvey, the woman whose 1973 U.S. Supreme Court case helped make abortion legal in the United States, today petitioned to overturn the historic Roe v. Wade decision. Known for years as just Jane Roe, McCorvey (pictured right) filed the below affidavit in support of a motion in U.S. District Court in Dallas. McCorvey, 55, stated that the landmark case 'was built upon false assumptions' and had 'caused great harm to the women and children of our nation.' McCorvey, who has been stridently pro-life for nearly 10 years, noted that when she filed her original lawsuit 30 years ago, she was unsure of what the term 'abortion' even meant..." --Roe of Roe v. Wade Files to Overturn U.S. Abortion Case (The Smoking Gun)

Just now, I searched Planned Parenthood's website for "McCorvey," but found nothing. While it's understandable that there might not yet be an official response to this breaking news, I find it strange that her name appears nowhere on the site. "Roe" appears 88 times, however, and there is a link to "www.saveroe.com". But here is an intriguing snippet from McCorvey's website, "www.roenonore.org", which may explain why Planned Parenthood would prefer to act as if the real woman behind Roe didn't exist:

In 1995, Norma was baptized and gave her life to God. She literally moved next door from the abortion clinic at which she was working to the national offices of the prominent pro-life organization, Operation Rescue. Later, feeling a need to share her personal message, Norma founded Roe No More Ministry in 1997 with the mission of exposing the lie that is Roe v. Wade.

See older blurbs about abortion language in journalism and abortion on the NOW web site. Pro-choice groups have been fairly successful at promoting language that decreases the gradient between the statements "I am pro-life" and "I am an evil bomber of women's health centers". But now that terrorism is much more a part of the daily lives of Americans, I wonder whether the same rhetoric will work, especially when building an argument against a former clinic worker.

Update, 20 May: Federal court to Roe: No.

On Barger, Books and BlogsLiteracy Weblog)

Unless I'm mistaken, Jorn Barger doesn't seem to have updated his Robot Wisdom weblog in weeks (yeah, yeah, I'm the pot, he's the kettle, I know).

The 2 Blowhards critique of book culture reminds me of "Theory: Write a web-book in a day", a usenet posting by Jorn Barger. Barger responded to my input by telling me that I should go find my own Internet where I wouldn't bother the idealists.

Barger incidentally coined the term "weblog" in a 1997 Usenet posting. The term was met with some snarky responses about bias and yellow journalism, but Barger replied as if the "yellow" comment is a superficial complaint about his choice of background color. Was Barger playing dumb, or did he miss the point of the critique? The exchange reads ambiguously to me.

Barger's Web Resources FAQ of 1999 is similarly terse and provocative -- which is consistent with Barger's casting of himself as a free-floating radical. He has in the past threatened to stop blogging unless he gets consulting work, and he seems to have disappeared from Usenet as well.

"Biographies? Serious travel books? Moneylosers for most of their authors. How so? Well, say you're lucky and your agent nails a $100,000 contract for you for a biography you're dying to write. Sounds good, huh? But run the math: First, subtract the agent's fee (10-15%), and then subtract taxes. You've got to write the book on the, say, $55,000ish that remains. Keep in mind that almost all books take longer to write and publish than expected. But, heck, you're a fast worker -- it'll only take you 3 years. That means you'll be living on $17,000 a year. And wait: you've gotta do some research -- what's a biography without research? Visiting some archives, interviewing whoever's still alive ... Guess where the money for these travels and aventures comes from? Your own pocket." --Tacit Knowledge -- Writing a Book (2 Blowhards)

For more depressing statistics on how institutions crush our creative fantasies, see "Courtney Love Does the Math," which presents the recording industry execs as a bunch of mean, evil dudes.

"I nonetheless found the darknet command line calm and comforting. Not threatening at all. I suppose it had something to do with the rhythms of the interaction, for while I knew the machine was capable of unleashing unthinkable power, I also knew it would sit dormant forever, waiting for my fingers to hit the keys. There was a kind of deep, deep patience in that prompt and cursor, those courier incantations whose art I've now lost. And that deep patience--that sense of time, of scale, of sustainable rhythm--also seems lost now, bulldozed under by the broadband blast of streaming screaming everything." Matthew G. Kirschenbaum --Darknet Nostalgia (Kirschenbaum)

Reading Stephenson's "In the Beginning Was the Command Line" was almost a religious experience for me. Elsewhere, Matt acknowledges that using the term "nostalgia" to refer to the preservation and study of the cybertexts of just a few years ago trivializes this important cultural archaeology.

For some reason, the text of his permalink seems to be black on black -- hit CTRL-A to select all the text on the page.