Too much thinking... or not enough?

Oh good grief. I've been wanting to blog for days, thinking about little things like the amazing mulligatawny stew I made the other day, or the yummy birdseed bread...

and thinking about big things, like mitzvot (commandments) and all the obligations we are called upon to think about during the High Holidays. One of the greatest mitzvot, sort of the heading underneath which many of the better-known ten commandments fall, is simply: give a damn about how your actions impact those around you. Every day, in every way, big choices and small, we are creating the world we live in. This is so fundamental to Judaism. We are not stewards of G-d's creation, no, we are co-creators. We are here to add our bits, our colors, our weavings, our songs, to the grand spectacle of this world, this life. G-d has given us the materials to work with and the rules for how to use them, and through our actions and our mistakes we are culpable, responsible ~ every little thing we do is linked in ways we can or cannot see to everything else around us. Even when we are wronged we play a role and are responsible for it.

I did so much thinking... and so far too little writing. But the thoughts are there... banging away inside my head. Bees and flies and ladybugs caught in the bottle of my mind.

And I've been thinking about other big things, like dirty, mud-slinging campaigns and why anyone would think it would be a good idea to treat your opponent like an enemy and link him to traitors and terrorists... and what have we become, this country, when the puppet masters pull the strings and we froth at the mouth so much it seems we could never come together to solve anything. At the library I work with good people from across the political spectrum. We all get along well. We all find good things in each other. We all smile and stand a little taller when it's a warm sunny day in the fall. We all cringe at the thought of winter heating bills.

Even when we all know we vote for different candidates.

But you'd never know this from watching television. No, there you find the news-makers and news-shriekers, stomping about like so many adrenaline junkies, willing to do just about anything to raise the ratings and key up the horse-race with their daily doses of outrage.

I shake my head. I have to wonder why we can't seem to do any better than this. This isn't news. That isn't a campaign. This is the WWF. That is theater, over-acting, big hair and winking for the camera and the guys who would laugh at VPILF jokes. Whip up the mob and send 'em running off to the voting booths.

And while this may make for great ratings and fundraising now, where, seriously, will it leave us on November 5th when the votes have been counted, the dust has settled, and we as a country have to turn our attention from the mesmerizing horse-race to digging ourselves out of this hole?

It's beyond sad. It's a disgrace.

MySpace Rant

Okay, first confession: I really abhor the use of Internet sites for ranting. I hate that whole mentality that blogs and other online tools are the perfect opportunity to say to yourself ooh, here's my chance to say every mean thing I ever wanted to say but didn't because of societal taboos.. Well, politeness and proper grammar are two things I am always in favor of. And I like it when people use their "library voice" (which is not the same as a whispery church voice) online and everywhere.

So you will realize how badly MySpace has annoyed me that now I want to come to my friendly neighborhood blogger blog and rant about it.

You will recall that my sister invited me to be her friend on MySpace. So, big sister and generous soul that I am, I accepted and have made a very real attempt to make, if not a home, at least a quasi-comfy box there. I even went back and re-learned some basic HTML code so that my profile info would not look like word salad.

Did you catch that? MySpace, the reigning king/queen of Internet socializing sites, forces you to use HTML or CSS if you want to add any kind of formatting -- including line breaks (!!!) to your profile. That is so ridiculous!

Just for sheer entertainment value, I googled "Why MySpace Sucks" and found a DIGG article by that title, as well as some others. I don't agree with that rant -- it's really just a chance to bash the people who use MySpace. That's not my beef. I don't care if someone wants to write on their profile that they don't have much to talk about. That's fine by me.

What really annoys me about MySpace is not the people who join it, but the people who have made it, and have infused it with a proprietary nature that prohibits javascript and widgets and all the fun stuff that's out there to use to make your blog/site really interesting. After all, I thought one of the great fundamental values of Web 2.0 was interconnectivity: collaboration, sharing, communicating, creating. MySpace is set up to prohibit much of that -- or at least make it difficult enough that users might be tempted to purchase (for anywhere from $12 to $25) books that have been written about how to personalize your profile.

Also, I don't like how everything about MySpace seems to be about steering the user toward ads for music, movies and television shows. For me, clicking into MySpace music or videos is instantaneous information overload. I feel bombarded by ads, flashing icons and pictures of pretty, preening people. I get a headache just thinking about it. (Ooh, how old does this make me?)

So, without a doubt, I dislike MySpace.

But...

And you knew there was a "but" coming...

My sister wrote a short blog entry about the great day she had with my nephews. She doesn't often write letters or call - she's a busy mother of two young sons - but she'll blog. And I'm in heaven because I get a glimpse of her and my nephews. She wrote about holding 2 year old Tommy to watch jets fly low over the Northern Nevada plains, so close that she could almost see the pilot grinning back at her. It was sweet and honest and almost made me cry from missing them so much.

So, thank goodness for MySpace.

Thing 11 -- Delicious

Onto another thing which, like so many other things, has led me on to so many other things that I could easily fiddle my day away at the keyboard and accomplish not one single thing on my list of many things to do on this absurdly cold Friday.

Okay, is anyone else out there COMPLETELY SICK OF WINTER YET? It is March 6, and this morning IT WAS 18 DEGREES BELOW ZERO... STANDING TEMPERATURE.

Sorry. Please forgive the shrieking. I'm just do damn sick of winter I can hardly focus on anything else. At the library we put up tropical decorations to try to take our minds off of the weather. Patrons get a laugh out of it, in between grumbles. We did this a couple of weeks ago, thinking it would be warmer by now. Now, we're cold and starting to get weary of the hula-skirt look. These things shouldn't happen.

So, anyway, back to Delicious. I like the idea of it, and am eager to spend more time getting comfortable with it. There have been many times that I've been either at home or work and wanted to get to a page that I had bookmarked on my computer at the other place. Delicious can help with that.

While putzing around Delicous I found a blog called "Groundswell: Winning in a World Transformed by Social Technologies," by Charlene Li and Jeff Bernoff. Their post for the day is called, "The Future of Social Networks: Social Networks will be like air." In other words, ubiquitous, and if we find ourselves without them for any amount of time we'll start gasping and feeling freakishly anxious. (Okay, I'm paraphrasing.)

Although I haven't a clue who Charlene Li is or whether she is someone I ought to be paying attention to, it does seem like a noteworthy article on a few points. Li suggests that five to ten years from now, "[W]e will look back to 2008 and think it archaic and quaint that we had to go to a destination like Facebook or LinkedIn to 'be social'."

Fortunately, Li does point out that the technology needs to be ubiquitous. Like phone service, Internet service must be available everywhere. However, when will Internet access be as easily affordable as a telephone? I've yet to find an article that addresses this. Yes, just about anyone can purchase a phone, thanks to Walmartization (don't get me started). How long will it take for that to be translated to the Internet?

This also makes me think of an article I read a couple of weeks ago from Multi Channel news. The article, "Cable 3.0 Is Aiming to Co-Opt Web 2.0," speaks to emerging cable technologies that will bring social networking to our television sets. In this future, "a 'My TV' personalized screen... [will] combine a list of someone's favorite movies and TV channels with recommendations on videos to watch from friends and Internet content-like video blogs."

And right below this article, another one titled "Advanced Ads on Tap," telling us that "Google wants to take the ad-targeting capability that powers Internet ads and marry it with the 'emotion' provided by television advertising." It's coming soon, as some companies are "already selling interactive overlay ads to let viewers request more information from a sponsor."

Oh brave new world...