// standing in a grocery store with a list in one hand & a basket in the other… staring at walls of stuff & wondering what’s it all about
//decisions, decisions… eat lunch at my desk while editing audio recordings? or eat in the breakroom and read barzun’s house of intellect?
// best buys really needs to grow its customer service… a dozen people on the floor and only one person asks if need assistance.
Interview: Seth Godin on How Often to Post to Your Blog
From AdAge.com:
Seth Godin: My goals in blogging are:
- To spread ideas
- To put my ideas out there and get them out of the way of the next idea
- To encourage people to add alacrity to their diet
I find that I have about six bloggable ideas a day. I also find that writing twice as long a post doesn’t increase communication, it usually decreases it. And finally, I found that people get antsy if there are unread posts in their queue.
Hence, the compromise on daily.
How the city hurts your brain – Boston Globe
The reason such seemingly trivial mental tasks leave us depleted is that they exploit one of the crucial weak spots of the brain. A city is so overstuffed with stimuli that we need to constantly redirect our attention so that we aren’t distracted by irrelevant things, like a flashing neon sign or the cellphone conversation of a nearby passenger on the bus. This sort of controlled perception — we are telling the mind what to pay attention to — takes energy and effort. The mind is like a powerful supercomputer, but the act of paying attention consumes much of its processing power.
Interesting. Is this another call to simple, rural living?
// it’s snowing… i totally forgot to make a run on the grocery store for bread and milk… how am i going to survive a southern blizzard?
// watched high fidelity the other night… i want to be a record store owner… do record stores still exist?
CARIBOU vs. STARBUCKS
discuss.
My flavorite coffee den is Firestorm Cafe (but it’s not open in the mornings… and there’s no Caribou coffee in the area… … there’s Izzy’s, but it’s not on the bus route to the office and if I hiked over there for me daily brew I’d late for work… The Drip in actually on the bus route to the office, but if i stopped for coffee i’d have to wait 30 minutes for the next bus which would make me late to work… and there’s City Bakery, but that presents the same dilemma as The Drip… leaving me with Starbucks and the bad taste in my mouth that Asheville’s public transit is not as good as it could be.). So, ugh (I can’t believe it!)… I concede… Starbucks (at least for me morning dose of caffeine).
// somedays i fantasize that i’m a reviewer for the new york review of books… all day long i read engaging books and write elaborate book reviews… and then i wake up and realize most people don’t read engaging books… nor literary criticism… i’m such an anachronism.
From AdAge.com: Blog more. Twitter hurt some of the blogging for awhile but it’s meant to complement blogging, not replace it (for most). Get my blog off a TypePad template and start diving into the advanced features. Facebook Connect, here we come. Peruse less e-mail and unsubscribe from anything that doesn’t make a difference in my day. Pick up the phone more. It’s still one of the best social-networking tools. »read more
“Here’s a shocker: The one-night stand may be being replaced by long-term monogamous relationships when it comes to sex at academic conferences.” » read more
A lot of good links, but it might cause you to use your old bean to read and digest the discussion.
Blogs survive as scavengers
News-gathering is expensive. (Read previous posts on this theme here (The (read) sky (between) is (the) falling (lines)) and here (Pornographers don’t sell pornography).) That’s why I present this from Simon Dumenco for AdAge.com:
“unlike Salon, which… pays for its content, HuffPo [HuffingtonPost] has an ethically questionable content-generation scheme: It doesn’t pay most of its bloggers at all. Worse, it sometimes even lifts content wholesale from other sites that do pay for their own content…” (http://adage.com/mediaworks/article?article_id=133541)
‘Please know I love especially you, how every morning you turn over/ the languorous earth,…’
browsing through a copy of The American Poetry Review and Poetry (both arrived yesterday) while drinking a big cup coffee.
just finished watching a couple episodes of Marty Stouffer’s Wild America with the kidlingers
In the company of…
It is amusing to find lists of books that include a title (or titles) that I helped bring to the reading audience. This book list (http://www.goodreads.com/user/show/1852804) includes titles by C.S. Lewis, Ayn Rand, Chaim Potok and one of the books I published in the last few years. The company a book keeps on an individual reader’s bookshelf is very educational.
Book blogs are the enemy of reading. I discovered several such fascinating blogs this year and spent hours enamored of reading, listing the books I wanted to read, and reading others’ lists. Imagine my surprise when I realized that I had frittered away precious reading time staring at a computer screen. Apparently I was getting all the warm, fuzzy, readerly feelings without the commitment of turning pages. Sad.
// listening to the wind pull the barn door off its hinges.
Coffeehouse Junkie 