The Kinks performing We Are the Village Green Preservation Society, 1973:
A thing of beauty.
Month: April 2007
Victory at Sea [Updated!]
Many thanks to Dan from Madison for his kind hospitality in inviting me to go fishing with him last week. I can tell you now that Dan is a very nice guy*, not to mention that he was willing to commit himself to spending six hours on a boat with a complete stranger**. He is also a great sportsman, as befits one of Madison’s foremost bloggers and Chicago Bears season-ticket holders.
Knowledge vs Knowingness
Lead and Gold excerpted a very interesting article by Michael Kelly, the Atlantic editor who was killed during the early days of the Iraq war. In the article, published in February of 2002, Kelly draws a distinction between knowledge and knowingness;:
Knowingness, of course, is not knowledge—indeed, is the rebuttal of knowledge. Knowledge was what squares had, or thought they had, and they thought that it was the secret of life. Knowingness is a celebration of the conceit that what the squares knew, or thought they knew, was worthless.
(go read the entire excerpt)
It strikes me that many trends in today’s society–especially in academia but by no means limited to it–are at least partly about enabling the attitude of knowingness.
Trafficking in Stolen Goods
It would be nice if Americans who knowingly profited from the communists’ looting of Cuban households would be prosecuted.
Again
On April 19, 1995, Timothy McVeigh set off a truck bomb that destroyed the Murra Federal Building in Oklahoma City. The truck was parked at the loading dock, directly under the day care center. My daughter, three years old at the time, was in the day care center on the first floor of the Kennedy Federal Building in Boston. It is next to the loading dock. My wife was working on the 19th floor. When I returned to work the next day, someone in the elevator joked that it was too bad the bomb hadn’t taken out the IRS. The ride was short, and I was able to stay still.