Conquistador Gets The Last Word

WORDCOUNT / Tracking the Way We Use Language /

SOMETHING WICKED IN YOUR PERIPHERAL VISION...

in which John Shirley tries parable, written just for boingboing, to explain dependence to those who don't want to know...

AP Wire | 07/20/2004 | Death-row magazine gives scholarships to crime victims

AP Wire | 07/20/2004 | Death-row magazine gives scholarships to crime victims: "In the back office of a suburban flower shop, a group of parishioners puts together a magazine from letters written by death row inmates.

Any money made from subscriptions of the magazine goes toward scholarships that are given to relatives of murder victims.

'We want to meet that evil with good,' said Fred Moor, 57, leader of the group that publishes Compassion.

The idea for the magazine came in 2001 when parishioners of St. Rose Catholic Church in Perrysburg received a letter from an inmate on death row in Youngstown."

Oh Say It Isn't So!

New Discoveries in Ghosts (Harpers.org):"Wide awake and alone in the broad daylight, I have heard the voices of two nobodies gravely conversing, after the absurd dream fashion, in my room. Then as for spectral sights: During the cholera of 1832, I, then a boy, walking in Holborn, saw in the sky, the veritable flaming sword which I had learned by heart out of a picture in an old folio of “Paradise Lost.” And round the fiery sword there was a regular oval of blue sky to be seen through parted clouds. It was a fact not unimportant, that this phantom sword did not move with my eye, but remained for some time, apparently, only in one part of the heavens. I looked aside and lost it. When I looked back there was the image still. There are hallucinations which arise from a disordered condition of the nervous system; they are the seeing or the hearing of what is not, and they are not by any means uncommon. Out of these there must, undoubtedly, arise a large number of well-attested stories of ghosts, seen by one person only. Such ghosts ought to excite no more terror than a twinge of rheumatism, or a nervous headache."

St. Paul Was A Book Burner?

CNN.com - Fire department bars book-burning - Jul 12, 2004: "Breedlove said a city fire inspector suggested shredding the offending material, but Breedlove said that wouldn't seem biblical.
'I joked with the guy that St. Paul never had to worry about fire codes,' Breedlove said.
The new plan calls for members of the church to throw materials into garbage cans and then light candles to symbolically 'burn' the material."

Incredible

ROBERT YAGER (gang) photography - via boingboing

What The Smart People Are Reading

What webloggers are reading this summer (Phil Gyford: Writing)

Nothing New Here... Move Along

The New York Times > Books > Fewer Noses Stuck in Books in America, Survey Finds: "The survey also makes a striking correlation between readers of literature and those who are socially engaged, noting that readers are far more likely than nonreaders to do volunteer and charity work and go to art museums, performing arts events and ballgames. 'Whatever good things the new electronic media bring, they also seem to be creating a decline in cultural and civic participation,' Mr. Gioia said. 'Of literary readers, 43 percent perform charity work; only 17 percent of nonreaders do. That's not a subtle difference.'"