Serenity… refocus – seek joy – thrive

Annoying habit #3572 – giving odd titles to draft posts, with no indication of what they mean. Like…

“theoretical life at the intersections of ice cream and bran flakes”

What the heck? That doesn’t even sound like me – but apparently I wrote that in November and I have NO idea at all where I might have been going with it. I wrote no text in the post, just the title. Hate when I do that.

And I don’t even drink, so drunken midnight revelations is no excuse.

Read it, and weep (after you laugh hysterically, of course):

via Zuky (and bunches of other people on Tumblr)

PS – the site for this really exists:

Anthologize lets you make a book or publication from selected posts on your WordPress blog. Their tagline is “Your Blog. Bound.” And that’s pretty much what it is. It’s too early for me to think of spiffy ways of explaining what it does, but here is part of their press release. How the product came about is pretty interesting too:

After one week of intense collaboration, participants in the One Week | One Tool workshop , organized by the Center for History and New Media (CHNM) at George Mason University, are pleased to announce the launch of Anthologize, a free, open source tool to publish weblog content in a variety of book formats.
Anthologize enables anyone working with WordPress to grab blog posts, feeds, or newly-authored works; craft and edit the content; and then publish that content as a compelling volume available in several formats, including PDF, ePub, and TEI, an open XML format for storage and exchange.

Right now it is in Alpha and only works with WordPress installations, not the WordPress.com blogs, but they are changing that in future versions.

Anyway, I spent an hour or so playing around with it this morning, for no particular reason but that it looked interesting. And it is! It’s very easy to use, after the initial “what’s this for?” stage. First you create and name a new project (which will also be the book name,) and then you create “parts”, which are like chapters. Once you have a “part”, all your posts are listed on the left hand side of the screen and you can just drag and drop them into the part. It’s also easy to switch around posts between parts, should you decide you want this to go here, and not there. One caveat on the posts – it lists ALL of them, including drafts, so just be aware and careful of that. Mind you, you can filter the posts listed by tags or categories and stuff, but still. You can also bring in posts from other blogs through rss and add them in for your book or whatever. The imported posts go to the same list, right along with all the others.

So, how does it do? I put together a project of posts, both from here and imported, this morning. It took me about 15 minutes (and that included flubbing time, because I didn’t know what I was doing) to make a book of about 8 or 10 posts. I exported my project to both PDF and HTML with just a click of a button (well, two clicks – one for each export) and viola! there was my book! I would show you how they turned out except I haven’t a clue where to find them now. I assume they are on my hard drive somewhere but, if I was them, I would extend the point-and-click just a tiny bit further and have a little notation that “you can find your book here.”) That’s only a tiny complaint, though, and easily solved.

So. I would not, yet, use this for any sort of professional publication (as I said, it’s still in Alpha, but it’s open-source and I fully expect that third-party folks will soon be making stuff to add to the functionality of the plugin.) I can think of a few things, though, that Anthologize would be excellent for right now.

Genealogy sites/projects: I have a sort of family history site, but it’s also all mixed in with my posts about Black history, nattering about my book, little things of this or that that no one really is interested in. With Anthologize, I could just cull the relevant posts and send them out to family in PDF, for easy printing and sharing through email. Each part, or chapter, could be about a different branch of the family, or related history or whatever.

Or a more organized person could gather all the information, facts and dates and stories, about a particular branch of the family and send it to, say, a young relative who is just beginning to get interested in where they came from.

Show me your work!:  I can see Anthologize being useful for building a portfolio of sorts, of your best work.  Instead of sending someone to a dozen different links, one can just either send them the PDF file, or direct them to the HTML page that you’ve exported.

About that HTML page, by the way – it’s very basic, no formatting or CSS. I think, eventually, third party applications will take care of that, but for now I imagine that one might have to take the extra step of either linking it to an existing CSS stylesheet (not too difficult, especially if you have some sort of WYSIWYG program. Or styling it yourself. It’s still readable as is, but ugly. The PDF output is also fairly plain, but much better formatted. Remember, though, I haven’t yet spent a lot of time with the product, so there may be something I missed – but I didn’t see a way to format any of the stuff.

I’m sure there are plenty of other things one can do with this book creator but that’s all I can think of at the moment. I really like the idea, though, and the ease of use. And how it all came about. I’ll have to see what sort of other things they’ve been, or will be, working on.

You can download Anthologize here, or install from your plugins within WordPress.

At least when the sun is shining. Even, sometimes, on cloudy, wind-swept days. I know, now, why people warn against them.

The other evening I was innocently walking along when I looked up and stopped right where I stood, transfixed by the sundowning sky. It was brilliant! Storm clouds closed ranks overhead, dark and billowy, shot through with flashes of white and light gray. Steel-wool balls and bubbles. They parted at the horizon just enough for the vanishing sun to fling splashes of brilliant color this way and that as a parting gift. The yellows, golds, and grays were not subdued but they could only serve as background noise to the shouts of the reds and oranges. And even they paled before the shrieking fuchsia that wove in and out as the light moved. God, it was beautiful.

I stood and soaked in the vision – then sighed, and reluctantly pulled down my rose-colored glasses. It was just as I feared. A lovely, though fuzzy, sunset, to be sure, but someone had brushed a pale white glaze over it, blurring and subduing the entire scene. The steel wool overhead softened into dirty soapsuds. The golds and grays refused to give prominence to the oranges and reds, instead insisting on sharing equal space and saturation. And the fuchsia, far from shrieking, did not seem to exist at all.

I replaced the lenses and thrilled again by the vision, I strove to keep it in my mind so that it could overlay the real thing. I wanted both pictures – the real and the not-so-real. I had my camera phone but what I did not want was a photo, because the camera would record what was there — not what I saw. Not one passerby looked at me strangely, by the way, as I stood in the middle of the sidewalk staring into – as far as they knew – nowhere as I flipped my glasses up and down over my eyes. I suppose that says something about… well, something.

I like my dual vision of the world; my lying eyes show me hidden wonders in the dreary and the mundane. The dull bark of a tree suddenly acquires shadows and depth, as if I can reach out my hand and pull earth from the deep brown valleys that wove between rich burgundy hills. I call up a memory, years old, and still marvel at the bright, shimmering green of the palm fronds as they spread themselves wide, a perfect contrast to the small, autumn-colored leaves of its neighbor tree. So California, this combination. The two together made each stand out more than they ever would by themselves, I reasoned.

It was when I was gazing at that particular scene, in fact, that I happened to look over the top of my rosy glasses and got my first shock of realization. What I was seeing was not what was actually there. Or, rather, it was there – just not exactly how I saw it. The two trees still stood next to each other, and fronds of the palm still waved gently in front of its neighbor – but gone were the deep hues, the brilliant colors. The shimmer! They, together or separate, were just … trees. Not that there’s anything wrong with that.

So, yeah, I see the world through rose-colored glasses sometimes. I bask in it, even. But I always remember that underneath that world lies another that is not quite as brilliant, or soft, or beautiful as I imagine. Yet.

After all, the brilliant colors I saw may not exist in my sunset – but I think they do exist somewhere. Don’t ever give up looking.

[sunset photo from here, where they also have many more lovely pictures]

My mind has been like a butterfly lately, unable to settle on just one thing.  Or, since I seem to be more distracted by online poop equivalents, toxic posts and threads and such (well, as well as some really good ones), perhaps a better comparison is the common house fly.

But even when I am actually working I need to learn to control my wandering. I will start on one project and right in the middle of a sentence will get an inspiration for a different one, and when working on that some this or that, that had been eluding me will surface so I’ll switch to capture the revelation before it disappears again, and before I know it I have five or six things working at once, and nothing finished.

(Er… one of the things unfinished is obviously the grammar section labeled “run-on sentences.”)

Anyway, all is not lost. I have finally figured out where I am going (or should be going) with each of my sites (triple the distraction, triple the fun!), I have three or four articles or posts almost completed and hopefully next week  will be the one where my thought processes learn a bit of discipline.

(Don’t laugh.)

ETA: Um… I went looking for a “distractions” photo or graphic to add to this post and, who knew? Apparently “distractions” is another word for “boobs.”

Was my great-grandfather, on my mother’s side (Margie, Marguerite, for fam.)  I’ve noticed a few people coming to this site from a search on his name, for whatever reason, so I thought I’d give little bit of basic, not particularly organized,  information on him.

James Nathan was a contemporary of W. E. B. Dubois and Booker T. Washington, born in 1860 Alabama  into slavery, and died in 1930 in Chicago, Il. He, his brothers and one of his sisters (Thomas Junius Calloway, Clinton Calloway, Caroline Calloway) were all graduates of Fisk University (Thomas Junius attending with Dubois, which is where their friendship began. In fact, they worked together on the Paris Exposition of 1900 photo thing.)

The three brothers all worked at one time or other at Tuskegee Institute in Alabama, as instructors, school principles and so on. I think Thomas Junius was actually more in a consultant type role, as he had his law practice and all that. I know he was sometimes used as a sort of emissary to politicians in D.C.  (I don’t know about Caroline – the women in the family seem to have died fairly young.) My great-grandfather, James Nathan, led a Tuskegee Institute supported expedition to Togo in West Africa, to help with some part of the German colonization of that country. He and his group were there to teach the people in Togo how to grow cotton, U.S. style I think. I’m still coming to terms with that.

Anyway, I am (slowly! yes, yes, I know) doing some genealogy type research and gathering information on these relatives and more, which will mostly be posted on my other site, which I am setting up to discuss and discover black history, genealogical research, family stories (mine and anyone who wants to tell theirs) so on. Though I am also happy to answer any questions about my great-grandfather (or any one else in the family that is not of the current generation), to the best of my ability, if anyone has any to ask.

That perches in the soul,

And sings the tune–without the words,
And never stops at all,

And sweetest in the gale is heard;
And sore must be the storm
That could abash the little bird
That kept so many warm.

I’ve heard it in the chillest land,
And on the strangest sea;
Yet, never, in extremity,
It asked a crumb of me.

by Emily Dickinson

[photo of this intrepid little bird via Gulf Recovery Fund]

So,  the “true progressives” at FireDogLake have a front page post up about mounting a primary against President Obama in 2112.  In order to… er… save the Democratic Party. (I guess maybe in one of those “we must destroy the village in order to save it” type things?)

Anyway, nothing new or startling, considering the source, but I did have to laugh at one of the comments. I have bolded the question asked by one of the commenters. The rest is the answer another commenter gave to oldgold’s question. I have also bolded a few things in the answer because they are just… well, you’ll see.

Talk about la-la land.

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December 5th, 2010 at 12:49 pm

link to comment

Pretty much about using the National Archives for genealogical research, including ways to find former slave women.

“… the women and children of colored soldiers …”

And about what an excellent resource the National Archives’ Prologue magazine is.

I’ve mentioned before that I’ve had a tough time finding  some of the women – of my family or any others – so I am anxious to try some of the methods the Prologue article suggests. I will write about what I find on TBoL, and list resources as I come across them on the Research page there.

Glenn Greenwald went short today. See, usually he is long, long, looong winded and me eyes are old, so I don’t read his stuff much. Or, at least, not all of it. Still, he commands great respect in some of the “progressive” blogosphere – why, just about any argument will sputter so a simpering halt once someone brings out a – “But Greenwald says!” His influence with some looms large. Very large.  He is also a very popular Salon.com opinion writer – and though Salon is not what it used to be (and who among us is?) it is still fairly widely read and influential.

In other words… Greenwald has a Presence.

One has to wonder, then, why one itty bitty wordpress.com blogger has frightened him to the point where he’d not only go short-winded – he’d go Godwin?

To our joy, the tweet even has its own clever little tag so that we can see how many of his 28,435 (as of this writing)  followers retweeted Greenwald’s blurb of brilliance to their large or small lists of followers.  It is, of course, unfortunate that we may never know how many of these followers and followers of followers rushed to tell the itty bitty Obama-lover, who does the dastardly deed of… posting pictures of Obama,  just what they think of her Hitler-recorderish tendencies.  I imagine it’s mission accomplished, though, for sure.

Not that we blame anyone, including Greenwald. After all, what’s a Big Important Blogger to do when, in the course of being in his big importantness,  an infinitesimal  blip catches his attention alerting him to the fact that someone, somewhere, in some obscure corner of the Internet really likes President Obama? What can he do but take his continent sized foot – and stomp on her?

‘Tis what bullies do, after all.

[via GOS]

[edited for clarity and links]