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February 5, 1998
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Links du jour: Karen Thorndike's Daily Report Karen Thorndike on her yacht "AMELIA" is striving to be the first American woman to circumnavigate solo. She just arrived at her next planned stop, Hobart Tasmania.
Two weeks until spring training! |
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11:17 AMIt looks like it rained a little during the night but no precipitation is falling right now. The sky looms gray and heavy. Why am I getting up so late? Actually I was up at 9:00 (not that that's early) and spent quality time petting and playing with Wilbur the demented orange wacko. I listed to The Connection on WBUR for the first hour of the show because the topic was affective computing. 3:38 PMOK, now it is snowing. But what's the big deal? A few icy flakes are spitting out of the sky and barely covering the ground, hardly a blizzard of epic proportions. much later...The roads did get a little icy and I used that as an excuse not to drive into Cambridge for my meeting. I guess I can now be classified as a weather wimp. The Boston TV stations have put on the most overblown blitz of weather hype in decades. What we had was your basic sleet storm. Nothing much. The tides were higher last week or whenever the last storm was just as a consequence of the new moon. Are the weather guys bored? This has been a very mild winter: warmer than usual temperatures, lots and lots and lots of rain, a few snow storms some of which were unpredictable, but nothing people who live here haven't seen many a time. Problem is this leads the forecasters to get excited about the tiniest little storm and hype it up so they can get film of people lining up to stock up on white bread and batteries or something. If they keep crying wolf like this, the next time there is serious weather, people are not going to believe them and we'll have a bigger mess because people won't be ready and won't stay off the roads. But more disturbing than the hype coming from tv is the indisputable fact that I have given in to weather phobia and refused to drive into Cambridge on icy roads. What is wrong with me? I grew up in New England. I learned to drive in New England. I drove home from Maynard to Hudson on Rt. 62 during the blizzard of '78 and lived to tell about it. A little black ice scares me? G*d help me. It must be time to retire to an adult community in a dry sunny state, and I'm only 46! about the links du jourQuite a while ago I started surfing the web for online journals that didn't fit the stereotype of "women's writing" (cringe, cringe) or "normative identity formation" or whatever, but weren't post-postmodern and ironic either - and still held my interest. That's when I found Karen Thorndike's diary of her attempt to circumnavigate the globe solo. It's spare and sparse but I found the fascination building even when all she reported was her position and the weather. As for The Roo Report, when I first discovered it Shayne was still in the minor leagues and I liked his honest portrait of what it's like to play baseball at that level and what it's like to be Australian in the US and Canada. Again, this is so far from the type of diary that attracted the attention of ebr that it deserves attention. He writes about everything from his first ride on a New York subway train to the death of a beloved aunt to thinking about pitching with a real freshness. One of the pleasures of reading online journals is the opportunity to see the world through someone else's eyes. All the more fascinating if the writer's life is way different from mine. I'll never sail around the globe on a yacht or pitch in the major leagues, but reading what it's like for someone else to do that opens my world up a tiny bit. |
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