My state of things. ATTN: equilugubrium is defunct. Stephen Fraser now maintains Tenebris (www.salutor.com), a blog about independent publishing.
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Tuesday
I agree with the general point being made in this article: Click by Click, Teens Polish Writing (washingtonpost.com). It's clear that young people once again, for better or worse, find themselves writing constantly in order to communicate with one another and to express themselves. And written language requires a different set of faculties. It's not your grandmother's written language, to be sure, but I'll take it.

Friday
Someday soon history will look back on this phenomenon with as much nausea as we now regard the burning of witches in the 18th century:
The Trauma Society
Unlike Freud, some overzealous twentieth-century therapists had remarkable success in "finding" memories. Not only did they uncover stories of parental violation, they also found tales of blood-soaked satanic worship, cannibalism, and alien abduction. Heartache ensued as hundreds of families were ruptured by groundless accusations of the sexual abuse of children; caretakers were cross-examined in courtrooms and even imprisoned, based solely on their young charges' fantastic tales of mistreatment. Patients were tragically misled about the source of their unhappiness, while the therapeutic profession was staggered by its self-inflicted wounds.
Particularly ironic (and horrifying) is that the segment of society most obsessed with exposing and remembering witch burning in previous centuries overlaps significantly with the group that perpetrated the hysteria over repressed memories.

Paul Theroux on Hunter Thompson,
The honest outlaw
Two great tastes that taste great together.

Wednesday
I don't believe this for a minute, but it's funny nevertheless. Tree That Give Meat Instead Of Fruit!

Tuesday
Comcast Can't Stand To Lose a Customer (washingtonpost.com). The cable company refused to cancel an account for a dead customer without a death certificate from the widow. I expected this from the Record-of-the-Month club people, but the cable company?

Friday
Haven't tried this out just yet. The Personality Forge - Artificial Intelligence:
The Personality Forge is the world's first community of living people and artificial intelligence entities called bots. Come on in, and chat with bots and botmasters, then create your own artificial intelligence personality, and turn it loose to chat with and form emotional relationships with real people and other bots.

Personality Forge bots are pushing the envelope of artificial intelligence by incorporating memories and emotions into their makeup. True language comprehension is in constant development. Transcripts of every bot's conversations are kept so you can read what your bot has said, and see their emotional relationships with other people and other bots. See if you can tell who is real! Then discuss your successes and failures in our forums.

Thursday
Well, this explains the amnesia:
BBC NEWS | Saving Private Lynch story 'flawed'

Wednesday

Friday
From SF Gate, the best story so far on the Aron Ralston story. Nice subhead, eh?
Climber recalls ordeal of self-amputation
Man, 27, waited days before snapping bones

If Thomas Hardy or Gustave Flaubert were alive today, they would know what Nabakov knew. There is only one real sexual sin left. From the NYT review of the film Blue Car
A sensitive aesthete and caring friend on the one hand, and a self-deluded lecher and an impostor on the other, Auster is so eager to impress his protégée that he passes off the words of Rainer Maria Rilke as quotations from his own, probably nonexistent novel-in-progress. As he lurches between these poles, his good and evil sides begin to blur. The character emerges as a man whose failed dreams can never match his small, cramped life as a married high school teacher with a passion for literature. Faced with a young woman as dependent and adoring as Meg, who radiates a confusing mixture of innocence and sexual heat, he can't resist the temptation to play God.

Fuuuuck.
CNN.com - Climber amputates his arm, hikes to safety - May. 2, 2003 MOAB, Utah (AP) -- A Colorado climber amputated his own arm Thursday, five days after becoming pinned by a boulder, and he was hiking to safety when he was spotted by searchers, authorities said.

We know they're different, men and women. But can they help it? asks the Guardian.
There really are big differences between the male and female brain, says Simon Baron-Cohen. And they could help explain conditions such as autism.
Which is not to say that men can't have female brains or women male brains. Wouldn't you like to take the test?

Weekly Notes:

This blog is effectively defunct. But thank you for visiting. Perhaps it will revive one day.