On the Media’s blog roll is called [TLDR The Internet: Shorter]. I didn’t know what TLDR meant but a quick google let me know that it’s an acronym/word I should know since most of my blogs fall under its rubric.

 

I try to keep my word count to around 500 words or less per entry (not including the link section if I put one in) and put in pictures to help modern “readers” get a sense of what I’m writing in each section as well as to amuse myself (and hopefully some of you dear readers).

I got bogged down in the footnotes of The Miner’s Canary this morning. I noticed three articles in a row in the footnotes that I thought I might like to read. When I found the third one, I told myself I should just slow down a bit and see if I could get access to them.

The first one, “Translating Yonnondio by Precedent and Evidence: The Mashpee Indian Case” by Gerald Torres and Kathryn Milun (Duke Law Journal, 1990) led me to another online article.

Torres is coauthor of The Miner’s Canary (along with Lani Guinier).

They footnote his 1990 article when they discuss how courts of law depend on “stock stories.” They write, “Stock stories are those ways of explaining and interpreting the world that embody received understandings and meanings.”

“Yonnoondio” is an Iroquois word that Walt Whitman appropriated in “Leaves of Grass.” It is essentially an untranslatable word which Torres and Mulin put in their title intentionally to demonstrate what they are critiquing.

Here’s a link to the first article. (I’m not sure you can access it since I went through the college log on to Jstor to find it. If you are reading on a tablet you might have additional problems accessing it. I had Eileen test it and she could open the link on her smart phone [Helping me figure out that my browser wasn’t remembering my Hope logon to get access to it] but not her Kindle Fire. She reports that she could only read the first page.)

Anyway, in this article I was led to an online article you probably can look at if you wish: “Other Spaces: Utopias and Heteroutopias” by Michel Foucault (pdf).

I am still reading the first of these two articles. The second one is a translation of a speech Foucault gave. Post-modernism comes into play in the thinking and writing of  Guinier and Torres in The Miner’s Canary as well as “magic realism.”

But more on that some other time. I’m still learning about all of this  myself.

1. What’s Powering Facebook’s Reality Distortion Field? – On The Media

Blog post on “Reality distortion fields.” You’re soaking in it.

2. Pipe Organs as a Niche Market — Martin E. Marty | The University of Chicago Divinity

I put this link and the previous link up on Facebooger. I repost it here because I know I have at least one reader who doesn’t Facebook.

Marty was someone I contemplated doing a terminal degree with at one point in liturgy. Whew, that was close. Glad I didn’t. But he does have a good mind and it’s nice to seem him endorsing pipe organs.

3. ‘Network’ Told the Future – NYTimes.com

Once more the letters to the editor are as interesting as the article they are  responding to.

Ron Bonn of San Diego writes “I remember that we were all especially struck by Ned Beatty as a communications industry magnate, and his mad soliloquy on why great corporations like his should and would, in the near future, control the fate of America and the world. Wild and very funny satire.

What none of us understood in that moment was that we were not watching satire at all. We were seeing prophecy.”

4. When Emily Was Sold for Sex – NYTimes.com

I thought it was amazing when Kristoff describes “pulling out his laptop” and locating “Emily” on prostitution sites within minutes for the distraught parents.

5. Even a Stationery Logo Pits Palestinians Against Israel – NYTimes.com

As a Romanian once told me, “All governments are jerks.”

6. Sid Caesar, Comedian of Comedians From TV’s Early Days, Dies at 91 – NYTimes.

So you know the scene in “Blazing Saddles” where the guy punches out a horse. True story. The guy was Sid Caesar and the scene was a tribute to him from Mel Brooks. Another fun fact found reading obits.

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