1. The Whuffie Factor: Using the Power of Social Networks to Build Your Business by Tara Hunt. Link.

It sounds like a real page-turner, doesn’t it? I’m interested mostly because it refers to Whuffie, a concept created by one of my favorite authors and personal heroes, Cory Doctorow in his book Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom. It refers to a reputation-based currency — in a world where everything is provided and is free for the taking, whuffie is an incentive to do creative and useful things. In turn, the higher your whuffie levels, the better the parties you are invited to, the cooler your friends are, etc.

Outside of Doctorow’s novels, it has taken on a general meaning of building your reputation. There are many organizations now that are on Facebook, or have Twitter to communicate with their constituents. I maintain the Facebook page for my organization, and hopefully can learn some strategies  to make the networking more effective.

2. Spunk and Bite: A Writer’s Guide to Bold, Contemporary Style by Arthur Plotnik. Link.

The media has been talking a lot about Strunk & White’s Elements of Style lately, a book that spouts outdated truisms about writing effectively. Don’t get me wrong, I have a copy of Strunk & White’s book — I think it is fun to read, and it really does have some good advice. The writing style is that of an old stodgy retired professor uncle (or Butter). The pages are rife with droll witticisms that I am endlessly amused by. A lot of what it teaches (use nouns and verbs, not adjectives and adverbs; never use passive voice) are truisms that aren’t really all that effective. Spunk and Bite appears to be a direct response to that.

Here’s part of an Amazon review:

What is unique about this book is Plotnik’s witty and irreverent remarks about the wisdom of taking calculated risks. Try using an original “one-off” phrase if it suits your purpose and don’t be afraid to experiment with lively tropes or figures of speech. Will you occasionally make dreadful mistakes? Absolutely. However, you have a great deal more to lose (especially your audience) by playing it too safe.

Good advice! I’m looking forward to this book.

3. Down from Moonshine by Mary Ann Cain.

Mary Ann Cain is a creative writing professor at IPFW. I took a couple classes with her, and now after graduation, I consider her a friend and sort of a colleague, as she has been involved in the organization

Thiis is her most recent work, and her first novel. Click here to read an excerpt.

Mary Ann is skilled in writing magical realism stories, and while I am not sure yet if this is going to fit in that category, I know she’s worked long and hard on this novel.

You can pick one up, I believe, at Borders or Hyde Brothers.

4. Secret Ingredients: The New Yorker Book of Food and Drink Edited by David Remnik. Link.

Every autumn when the New Yorker comes out with their food issue, I always make sure to read it up, even when I am not currently subscribing. Although I love most everything written in the New Yorker, the articles about food are the best. Although I wouldn’t want to eat the vast majority of the things they write about, I love to read about it. That’s why I like books like The Year of Eating Dangerously (Tom Parker Bowles is such a badass), and television shows like Good Eats and Bizarre Foods.

Highlights from the book:

A particularly wonderful profile introduces a wild-foods forager capable of making a ten course meal from ingredients in the field near his house; he and the author dine on cattails and watercress while canoeing through an icy November river. Another winning profile explores the life and times of a cheese-making nun with a Ph.D. in microbiology. But perhaps the greatest pleasure here is the gorgeous prose of masters like M.F.K. Fisher and A.J. Liebling. Liebling, in particular, knows how to turn meals into stories; though he wrote of Paris before the war, his descriptions are so immediate and enticing a reader wants to run out and buy the first plane ticket to France.

I’m psyched about this book — it’s 582 pages of New Yorker Food Issue content! However, due to the awesome but thick New Yorker-style writing, this one might take me all summer. Maybe I’ll read it in parts.

Wow — this is the first book list I’ve made that isn’t primarily fiction. That’s all I used to read. I’m sure there will be the occasional science-fiction novel I’ll pick up. And I’ll try to blog about those when I find them. What books do you want to read this summer?

Butter and I have been hard at work these last few months at our respective academic and professional careers, so I’m afraid the blog has suffered. We intend to bring back a Music Post-off again, and now that Waffles has Twitter, we can drive traffic to the blog to vote on their favorite songs.

As much as I detest those “OMG, I promise I’ll start blogging FOR REALZ” posts, I’m afraid I’m in that boat, too.

Keep checking back, although I think Butter and I realize that our slacking has lost most of the readers of this blog. We’ll work hard to get you back.

(Reposted from Freethought Fort Wayne)

London buses will soon be running an ad on the side that says “There’s probably no god. Now stop worrying and enjoy your life.”

This is probably the best advice anyone can get, ever. See the article, here.

The British Humanist Association (BHA) is sponsoring the campaign, which was only intending to raised £5,500, with another £5,500 to be donated by Richard Dawkins. But through their own efforts, they’ve raised over £36,000 by themselves!

Sez Professor Dawkins:

“Religion is accustomed to getting a free ride — Automatic tax breaks, unearned respect and the right not to be offended, the right to brainwash children. Even on the buses, nobody thinks twice when they see a religious slogan plastered across the side. This campaign to put alternative slogans on London buses will make people think — and thinking is anathema to religion.”

Do you ever think we could get away with this here across the pond? I bet there isn’t a bus company out there that would accept this sort of contract.

May God bless America!

There was a little Michael Moore-ish grandstanding, like when he got tossed out of the Vatican for barging in with a camera and wanting to talk to the Pope, but those moments were mostly tongue-in-cheek side jokes (unlike a Moore film, where they carry the weight of the whole polemic). And the über-trendy canted camera angles, like it’s some MTV special where the host is so cool that we’re presumed to want to see camera shots of him talking to some other camera, were just jarring and dumb.

But there’s enough meat there to overshadow the sparse bits of egotism and amateurism. He’ll give subtitles exposing the lies of the opulently dressed megachurch megapastor as the guy speaks; he’ll interview Catholic priests (including the Vatican astronomer) who giggle at the idea of hell and Creation and all the stuff their flock is goaded into taking literally; he’ll get the Senator to equivocate on evolution, he’ll hammer at the Jesus actor, past all the “God-sized hole in your heart” rhetoric, until the guy pulls out Pascal’s Wager; he’ll show you the salesman for the crazy kosher workless wheelchair—and he’ll do it with that affable, I’m-on-your-side schtick that disarms his opponent.

He delivers the goods, and he’s honest enough to speak directly to his target audience at the end, telling you to get off the fence and actively oppose superstition if you’re smart enough to find the preceding hour and a half disturbing. The film is clever enough, and chooses its targets well enough, to be funny even to someone who’s already an atheist and well-versed in the issues and the players in the debate, while still summarizing those issues and players concisely for a moderately intelligent but apathetic fence-sitter. It’s the Michael Moore populist-polemic-documentary genre done right—which really shouldn’t be too hard, when your targets are this pathetically easy to pick apart. I’m glad he did it.

Me, I’ve always loved sacred choral music in the Western tradition. I was in school choirs from the age of ten; in high school, our mixed concert choir was given a variety of styles, and “classical” sacred works were often among them. One year (my junior year, I think), we, like lots of other high school choirs everywhere, did Mozart’s Ave Verum Corpus. It’s a short (only 46 measures) motet setting the hymn—part of the magic cracker sacrament—to a fairly chromatic melody, with accompaniment:
 

I wish I could credit the performers, but the info on the YouTube clip doesn’t say; it does, though, sound suspiciously like this performance of the Wiener Sängerknaben, the Chorus Viennensis, and the Vienna Radio Symphony Orchestra in 2006.

It’s a strange death cult of a religion, but it gave rise to (or perhaps just latched itself onto) some beautiful emotional expressions. I love how in this piece, Mozart is able to throw in accidentals, and use big leaps sparingly, to evoke this feeling that’s warm and joyous, but not romantically so—it’s a reverent and distant kind of joy.

I’ll find some other sacred music that I’ve enjoyed in church services and in choir, and post it on following Sundays.

People consider starlings pests, but I don’t. The avifauna around here would be poorer for having no enormous roadside flocks of shimmery black beauties swarming in the evening. (See this previous post for an example of the enormous proportions this phenomenon reaches in Europe.) And they can talk.