Tvindy

Weekly Book Update II

I received some interesting feedback to yesterday's post, so I'll use today's entry to respond to it and talk some more about the book. (That subject never gets old, right?)

First of all, Alicia e-mailed me some selections from her blog, and I thought I would post them here, so people can offer feedback on them or suggest other entries by her. The first one is her preferred choice:

• in the third place
• World AIDS Day, a day late
• you say it's your birthday
• pensiveness
• I'm mad too, Eddie

Schmed made some suggestions for entries from my blog. Most of them were centered on photos, so I don't think they would work well in the book. (Although it might be interesting to someday publish a similar book that featured photographic entries.) I'm also a bit nervous about publishing the John Edwards post, since the word "fucktards" would appear in the title completely divorced from its proper context. But he did like the Cherry Coke post, which I had long ago forgotten, and Jason seconded it. So I guess that's one for the book.

There was also some discussion on how the book was to be organized. Will properly remembered the format that I had outlined previously, but I'll take this opportunity to describe it in more depth. Remember, none of this is set in stone, so if anyone disagrees with my ideas or has additional suggestions, please feel free to speak up.

The Title: I'm still working on this, so please feel free to make suggestions. I'm thinking something along the lines of this: "Gems from Blogdom: a compendium of outstanding writing by people who blog"

The Cover: Several of the entries have images associated with them (Chunderpuss, the accidental pie, Angry Sugar Bowl, etc.). These will be arranged over the front and back covers with no explanation. As people read the book, they will start recognizing what each one is. The title will be on the front, and a brief explanation of the book will be on the back. "Volume I" will also be printed somewhere, since the hope is that we put out one of these puppies every year for the next century or two.

The Sequence: The entries will be arranged in a random-like order. In other words, there won't be any pattern, such as by author, theme or date. At the same time, it won't be completely random. Care will be taken to keep each entry from immediately following posts by the same author. Also, very long posts will be kept separate as will any entries with similar themes or moods. I'm thinking of starting with The Legend of Chunderpuss for two reasons. First, anyone who reads that will definitely be enticed into checking out more entries. And second, it begins with "It was a dark and stormy night..." (Isn't that a great opening line for the book?)

The Format: Each post will start at the top of a fresh page with the title in bold. Paragraphs will be distinguished by indenting (as is normal in books) rather than by spacing between them (standard for blogs). At the end of the entry will be the author's name or pseudonym and the date that the post was originally composed. There will be no URLs in this section.

About the Authors: At the end of the book will be an "About the Authors" section. Each contributor will be asked to submit a paragraph written in the third person stating anything they feel is relevant (or entertaining) to the readers about themselves and their blog. This is where the blogs' main URLs will be printed.

Introduction: This is where I blather on endlessly about the purpose and significance of our great œuvre.

Table of Contents: This is pretty straightforward. There will be an ordered list at the beginning of the book listing each title and the page on which the entry begins. There will also be a secondary table of contents (after the first) listing the posts by author.

Sometime in January (probably not the beginning), I'll submit the material for publication. It will be published at cost to make it as affordable as possible. (This means there will be no profits.) I have been thinking, though, that we may want to add a dollar to the price if people actually start buying it. That way we can finance the next volume. That's something we can think about later.

If we do this again next year, I'd like to have some of this year's contributors volunteer to work together as a committee to help find, suggest and select entries. That would save me a lot of work and make the process more democratic.

Tomorrow I will make a point of writing about something (anything) completely unrelated to the book project.

Weekly Book Update

It's time once again for my weekly update on the book project. I realize some people may be getting a bit tired of hearing about it, but it's such a huge time-consuming process for me that I feel a need to blog about it every week. At this point, I could go on and on, but I'll try to stick to the basics.

If you check out the book page, you'll see things as they stand now. Anyone who wants to suggest more material or protest an inclusion, please do. I feel a bit uncomfortable with the lack of input thus far (although there has definitely been some for which I am very thankful). I looked through the suggested entries on eclecticism and chose the three that I think would be best for the book. But feel free to peruse them yourself and offer thoughts.

What I really need help with at this point is finding good entries for the four blogs listed at the bottom of the page. Since one of them is my blog, I'm really anxious for people to start looking at them.

Since last week's update, I've received a copy of Never Threaten to Eat Your Co-Workers: Best of Blogs, which I ordered from Amazon. I've been reading my way through it. It's almost scary how similar it is to what I envisioned for the book project, and it includes some really outstanding entries. The main difference is in how the editors went about finding their posts using a brute force approach. A small team of people read about 30,000 entries from all over the web and, of those, chose 170. These were sent to three professional writers who evaluated each on a scale of 1 to 5. The scores were averaged, and nearly everything that scored 3.5 or better went into the book.

While I can't argue with success, since they certainly did manage to identify some great material, I find it odd that they used this methodology. After all, one of the great things about the web is that much of the good stuff rises to the top. If you want to find good entries, ask other bloggers, and rely more on the blogging community. They didn't even allow outside suggestions, as if the blogosphere were nothing more than a uniform field of mostly mediocre writing with a few random gems of good writing that could only be located and identified by experts.

Of course, we're going the opposite route with an open invitation for submissions and suggestions from other bloggers, as well open discussions about what should and should not be included. Well, that's the theory anyway. (It would help if people were more active in the discussion.) The point is that our material strikes me as qualitatively on a par with theirs, but we didn't need to scan 30,00 entries to find it.

But there really is no need to compare. Their book is truly excellent, and kudos to them for being first. It doesn't matter that such a book already exists, since the point is to publish in print those posts that truly are outstanding and deserve to appear in a book rather than slowly fade away into the obscurity of the seldom-perused archive sections of people's blogs.

I'm Still Alive

I didn't post anything yesterday, and I don't really have time or inspiration to say much of anything today. This vacation thing is really taking a lot out of me. I just wanted to pop in and reassure everyone that I'm still alive and will probably have something more interesting to say tomorrow.

In the meantime, this is funny.

Presents

As I did last year, I'm listing all the presents I bought this year for my immediate family members. (I like to have an historical record even if it makes for a dull post.)

• For my parents -- More hours of recording time for their TIVO. The TIVO was a Christmas gift two years back. Now they can record nearly four times as much without having to delete anything. (The photo is of the guts of their TIVO after I opened it up to plunk in the new hours.)
• For my parents and brother -- A Shutterfly calendar of the twelve greatest photos of family members I have taken over the past year. (It really is too bad I can't post them here, but there's that pesky anonymity thing.)
• For my brother -- My old iPod mini. He seems a little mystified as to what it actually does or how he should use it.
• For my Aunt -- A $20 Amazon gift certificate.

Stocking

This is my Christmas stocking. My mother knitted it for me before I was three. I've been annoyed at her for the past few Christmases, because she stopped putting it out (along with my brother's) for Santa to fill. After several complaints, she finally saw the error of her ways and got out the stockings. For some reason, she put them under the tree rather than hanging them over the fireplace, but Santa was still able to figure out what was going on. This morning it was stuffed with good things.

Many many years ago I started a Christmas tradition of always leaving a bit of candy in the stocking before it got packed away. Then the following year when the stockings were unpacked there was always a bit of last year's candy inside. I seldom ate it, though, because there was always fresh candy to be had, but it was a cool practice nonetheless. I just kept putting the same candy back in every year. I believe that the candy it contains now is the same that I first saved when I was ten. How cool is that?

The presence of stockings this Christmas is a very good sign. It may mean that I'll actually get an Easter basket next year. God, it's been so long! I doubt the Easter bunny still remembers me.

Merry Christmas/Chanukah/Kwanzaa/Festivus/Holidays

Night & Day

Last night when all the snow was falling, I made my usual late night trek through the alley to my home. It was an unusual night. Despite it being just a little after 2:30 in the morning on a cloudy night in the dead of winter, the city was shrouded in an eerie glow. I took a lot of pictures (without the flash), and perhaps I will post more of them another day. For now, check out the photo of my backyard at 2:41 am, and compare it to the one I took this afternoon at 1:29 pm.

Yet Another Book Update

On a whim I did a search on Amazon to make sure our book project idea hasn't already been done dozens of times over. It turns out that it has been done before, but just once. Check out Never Threaten to Eat Your Co-Workers: Best of Blogs. I've ordered a copy, so I can see how they organized it. My impression is that our version is a bit more democratic. We don't have a panel of judges eliminating people, nor is Wil Wheaton a contributor.

I still plan to send everything off to the publisher sometime in January, but I'd love to get more feedback and suggestions from the contributors and anyone else. Please take a gander at the book project page, and let your thoughts on it be known in the comments section. I'm especially interested in suggested entries from the blogs listed at the bottom under "Other Contributors".

Solstice Hoax?

The solstice is tonight. Kimberly came across this article in the Seattle Times stating that we will have the longest night for thousands of years. If true, this is extraordinary, but I couldn't find any other information about it anywhere on the internet. Could this be a solstice hoax?

Dormitory Madness

Following up on yesterday's post pertaining to Indiana University, today I'll relate an interesting incident that occurred while I was studying there many years ago. (It really is too bad that I have chosen to start blogging during such a dull period in my life; all the really exciting stuff happened to me years ago, so perhaps I should think about retelling an old life experience as a weekly feature or, at the very least, stop trying to cram in so much parenthetical text.)

When I attended IU, I resided in a huge dormitory with four wings and fourteen floors. It was called Eigenmann. (You can see a picture here.) One night I was watching TV. Star Trek reruns came on at 10:30 PM every weekday, and all the good programs usually ended at 10, so there was always a half-hour window from 10 to 10:30 when nothing was on, and I had to sit through Fox News. On this particular night, the news began with a breaking story about a shooting in Bloomington, which is where the university is located. I thought that might be moderately interesting. After the commercials, the news returned, and it was announced that the shooting had taken place on the IU campus. Interesting. Then they showed a picture of my dorm -- the one I was in!

At that point, I decided it would probably be a good idea to stay in my room, no matter how much I might need to use the bathroom. I also phoned my parents to let them know that I was still alive. An emergency hall meeting was called to fill everyone in, but thankfully, it ended in time for me to watch Star Trek.

Here's what happened. A woman on the fourteenth floor had had a boyfriend in another state that she broke up with. (I believe it was Texas.) He was angry and told her that he would travel to Indiana and kill her, and he threatened to do this in various ways, one of which he followed through on. The police offered to post someone to insure her safety, but she declined. He showed up that night with a loaded shotgun, entered the building, took the elevator up to her floor, and started banging on her door and shouting. Apparently this went on for a very long time. Then she opened her door, and he started beating her up in the hallway. This also went on for a long time. Finally, two nearby residents came out of their rooms and tried to subdue him. In the end, he shot both of them and the woman. Then he ran out of the building and shot himself in the head halfway across campus. Then the police arrived.

All four people died. The Texan gunslinger died immediately. His ex-girlfriend died about a day later, and the other two people lingered on in critical condition for a few days before passing away. Each one had a scholarship set up in their name with a little donation box in the lobby.

Other than the fact that it was kind of upsetting that something like this had happened in my building, I was completely uninvolved in the incident. I do have a vague memory of hearing a siren, but the dorm is located a few blocks from a firehouse, so that was not unusual.

The reason I've been remembering this of late is that last year my dorm at the University of Oregon started reminding me a lot of the one at IU. When I started attending the U of O, I lived in a dorm called McClure, which was full of single rooms, and just like Eigenmann, it was a situation where the residents seldom socialized with one another, even though they lived in very close proximity. The RA said he liked that situation, because he didn't have to deal with interpersonal problems. The problem is that this can be a potentially dangerous situation.

I didn't know the woman or anyone else on the fourteenth floor at IU, but I would imagine that that floor was not unlike the rest of the building. People no doubt heard the shouting and banging but did not know anything about the situation and were not emotionally invested in the woman, so no one did anything for a very long time. I assume the police arrived late, because no one thought or cared to call them.

Living in McClure gave me very much the same feeling of vulnerability. I didn't know my neighbors; they didn't know me; and there was no mechanism for fostering a community in the building. In August, I moved into a different dorm -- Carson. It's a lot louder, and there is much more mischief going on. I'm still not close with my neighbors, but many of them are close with each other. And that makes me feel much better. So even though the noise is often horrendous, and I sometimes have to contend with people flicking Cheez-Its under my door in the middle of the night, at least I no longer fear for my life. And that is a good thing.

As a postscript to this story, several years after leaving IU I met an IU student who told me that the shooting was not only remembered, but new students to Eigenmann were told about the incident as a sort of initiation rite. Well, at least that means they're interacting a bit more than they did when I was there.