Soccer Dad

Around the web - 12/08/2005

Legacies
My Obiter Dicta comtemplates the home of his ancestors; that has now been razed "...by a group that despises all they stood for."

Hirhurim thinks about his family name. For me Gerstman means something like "barley man" suggesting ancestors who were farmers or brewers. An Israeli, some years ago e-mailed me that his family name had once been Gerstman and the family (from Lviv/Lvov/Lemberg - actually not far from where my father's family is from, Horchiv/Gorokhov) had been wheat traders. Maybe then "gerst" also has a more generic meaning.

In the first of his series (hopefully) on the olive harvest, Mystery Achievement tells of the olive trees that have been in his wife's family for generations.

Pictures

Not quite perfect has a couple of especially stunning pictures Shell Path and Maths Toys. The latter is done with a new graphics program.

Abba Gav has a picture of an important device; one that separates M & M's by color. This could be really important if you get the ugly Halloween Mix combined with others. This somehow leads into a discussion of the demands different prima donnas make.

Talk about the weather

Speaking of pictures Maryland Weather blog links to pictures of mammatus clouds. They only look scary.

Though it's only scary to those in Middle of the Atlantic, Maryland Weather blog also notes that Hurrican Epsilon keeps going and going.

What's really scary is Psycho Toddler's account of driving in the snow to make a gig. Fortunately he (and his band mate) had the good sense to turn around.

Jews and Christmas

Elie's Expositions gives a nod to the Christmas music he enjoys.

Jack's Shack enjoys A Charlie Brown Christmas but prefers It's the Great Pumpkin Charlie Brown.

Baseball

Baseball Musings has a amusing posting on the Blue Jays signing B.J. and A.J. He left out the possiblity of D.J. the aardvark (Arthur's sister) being the mascot.

And he has a nice tribute to former Blue Jay, John Olerud, "the nicest guy in baseball" as he hangs up the spikes.

Double Bones
Dry Bones dusts off an old strip and adds new words. Unfortunately if he didn't identify them you'd be hard pressed to identify which one was contemporary and which one was 3 years old.

Not blogging
William Raspberry comtemplates the obsolesence of his job, the opinion writer:

It is that the ascendancy of the Internet and the easy access of ordinary people to both vast quantities of information and platforms from which to offer their opinions will make professional opinion-mongers relatively useless. Why make an appointment at the JCPenney studio when you can photograph the kids with your own digital camera and crop and print the results at home?

But then he still insists that:

News organizations have always done that, of course, in what some describe as a gatekeeping function. That is, they not only decide what is on the news agenda in any given news cycle but they also do their best to screen out bad information and to distinguish between hard fact and rumor -- something the unchecked Internet cannot always do. To say you read it in The Post or the New York Times is to claim some level of authenticity. To say you read it on the Internet is about as helpful as saying you heard it on the telephone. That's the branding function of newspapers.

But one of the reasons that blogs have become so popular is the failure of the MSM to do its gatekeeping function properly, either by not checking itself as it should or by being too one sided in some issues it covers.

Welcome

Biur Chametz is back. Including a spot on spoof of another blogger.

And a nod to
Critical Mastiff - Best Of The Rest
Israelly Cool! - Best Middle East or Africa Blog
and Meryl Yourish - Best of the top 251 - 500
for making the finalists of the Weblog Awards for 2005 in their respective categories. Vote early and often but no more than once every 24 hours per computer.

Technorati Tags: blogging.

Posted by SoccerDad at December 8, 2005 12:55 AM | TrackBack