Ah, well, here we are at last

Not quite what I had in mind at first, but it'll do...it'll do. What's with the name? If you have to ask, you're probably either over 60 or under 30, without either children or parents who played music from the late 1960's. Or perhaps you're not American. (Not that there's anything wrong with that.) Here's the clue: Paul Simon and Art Garfunkle were a singing duo at the tail end of the 60's. Two of their better (if not more popular) songs were titled, "A Simple Desultory Philippic" and "The Dangling Conversation." (Please pardon the popups; at least I avoided sites that install spyware.) "A Simple Desultory Philippic" was a name-dropping commentary on the times. It's now terribly dated, but I've always loved the vocabulary-expanding title. Go ahead, pull out an old-fashioned print dictionary and look up the definititions of "desultory" and "philippic." I had to, you do it too. Then, Google both words. Warning - Swedish death metal lurks therein. (I am not a fan of Swedish death metal.) "The Dangling Conversation" was a still-relevant and rather lyrical look at the emptiness of a worldview devoted to purely intellectual pursuits. "You read your Emily Dickinson / and I my Robert Frost / and we note our place with bookmarkers / that measure what we've lost." The danger still lurks thirty-odd years later. Perhaps it is more important now than then to remember to put down the book (or shut off the computer) and GO OUTSIDE AND DO SOMETHING USEFUL. If I have a point to this blog, I suppose that's it. We'll see what happens from here. In the meantime, here's my original site - www.itasca.net/~corrie (Well, it's not actually the original. The original was at solon.com, which went dark in the mid-1990's. Yes, I had a site way back when the web was hot, exciting, new and different.) But there's at least an hour's diversions at slash-tilde corrie, including religious / political screeds, music, and tediously technical stuff about instructional design and cognitive apprenticeship. I'll allow comments at least for the present just to see who notices apart from spammers. Maybe we can get some juicy religious and political discussions going. Until I figure out how to do a blogroll here, check out http://www.lileks.com www.hughhewitt.com, www.powerlineblog.com, and www.captainsquartersblog.com .