Quote of the Day - 1/26/2012

WHEN all the panes are hung with frost,
Wild wizard-work of silver lace,

I draw my sofa on the rug
Before the ancient chimney-place.

(Poems Of Thomas Bailey Aldrich)

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When Aldrich published these lines in the 1880s, fireplaces were a major source of heat in the home. Now our houses are heated in other ways primarily but the majority of houses are still built with fireplaces. Maybe the rationale is articulated by this poem. When we visualize a ‘cozy place’ on a cold winter’s day/night, there is almost always a fireplace in the picture. Maybe the sofa is replaced by a wing back chair or a rocking chair. Maybe there is a footstool or a cuddly quilt. Is there a cat or dog with you? What about a good book/eReader….or is the television on? Next time there is frost…’wild wizard-work of silver lace’… make your ‘cozy place’ a reality and then enjoy.

The book is also available to read online at American Verse Project at the University of Michigan http://quod.lib.umich.edu/a/amverse/.

Quote of the Day - 1/25/2012

History can’t give attention to what’s been lost, hidden, or deliberately buried; it is mostly a telling of success, not the partial failures that enabled success. - Scott Berkun in The Myths of Innovation

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History is often taught in timeline fashion with milestones of wars as major drivers of change…and always written by the victor who throws away much of the context from the other side. We need more than the this kind of documentation to understand the how and why of the changes that occurred. Some changes were not driven by war at all.

We also should strive to remember that the perspective of the historian is always embedded in the telling; no one is totally objective. We can solve the problem of ‘single perspective’ by getting multiple viewpoints of the same events or time period. This is why we are intrigued by the connections that the ultimate success had to seemingly unrelated or partially related events. Check out James Burke’s Knowledge Web project site for an update on his work since the Connections television shows he created.

In your own personal history - think about your successes? Were there partial failures (or successes) that led to that success and do you include them in your personal history? 

10 Years Ago – In January 2002

Many years ago I started collecting headlines as a way of honing my reading of news. Over the years, the headline collection has been warped by the sources of news I was reading…increasingly online. I recently looked back to the January 2002 headline collection and picked 10. 

1. Dave Thomas (Wendy’s) dies
2. Ford cutting 35,000 jobs
3. Enron scandal
4. Cuba base for war on terrorism detainees
5. The color of the universe is light turquoise
6. A 984-foot-wide asteroid, discovered Dec. 26 and labeled as being potentially hazardous by NASA, came within 516,000 miles of hitting Earth
7. Dead Sea is Sinking Lower
8. Kmart files chapter 11
9. Amateur satellite doing well in orbit
10. Ex-UK PM Thatcher suffers stroke

Were these the most important things in the news 10 years ago? Some may have been (Enron and Cuban base). Others were simply things I was interested in at the time. I enjoyed looking at the whole list and forcing myself to pick 10. It somehow gave the current news more perspective.