Northierthanthou Stopped By

I loved the name.  He's from Barrow, it turns out, so he can get away with it.  He left comments here on pictures (not mine) that I really like too.

I checked his blog.  There's lots of good stuff there.  I'm adding it to my Alaska blog list.  Something I haven't done for a while.  His current one looks at atheism in a way I'd never thought of before:  Silencing the Base Villains and Sending us Back to the Old Narratives: Yep ‘Atheism’ Again

His "About Page" has a long, long list of of comments from people thanking him for leaving a comment on their blog.  When I first started blogging, one of the recommendations for increasing blog traffic was to stop at other blogs and leave comments.  It often got the other blogger to leave a comment at my blog.  In those days when I didn't have a counter the only way I knew if someone had visited was a comment.

I checked out some of the blogs he's visited.  My first thought was to make a snarky comment about living in Barrow and spare time to live on the internet, but people who live in snow-covered houses should throw . . .

And besides, he's visited a lot of interesting blogs.  Here's a brief sample of snippets:

A lot of the blogs he leaves tracks on have lots of images and I don't want to take others images if I can help it.  But I couldn't help it with this one from  Maxpics: 

borrowed from Maxpics

From Jasmine Tea and Jaozi, a reflection on how English speakers say thank you so much:

A year or so ago my teacher Annie told me that I was doing something that most English-speaking westerners do – which is not usual in China – I was saying ‘thank you” too often.
I didn’t really take much notice of  her remark until recently, when I suddenly became aware that I did seem to be saying ‘xie xie’ rather a lot, and it set me thinking.

[UPDATE Jan 16, 2014 - Here's a follow-up post on the too much thank you theme - this time in southern Sudan.  See also the comments below.]



Here's a very insightful (that means I agree) thought from NotebookM:

"As I have said before in other posts, digital communications – the Internet, apps, etc. – represent wonderful technology but also serve as the biggest con since Ponzi. The con amounts to this: Give us everything we need to effectively and dramatically market you and we will tell you who won the 1976 World Series, the best way to make waffles and the number of Academy Awards won by Robert Di Niro."

Really, people worried about the evil of 1984's tv monitoring every move in their room.  But, hell, that was nothing compared to the iPhones people pay for themselves and voluntarily use to let the world to track their every move.



A View From My Summer House:

On the morning that I had to return the trailer I simply forgot it was there. I put the car into reverse and backed out of our driveway as I had done a million times before to do the morning school run (rushing as usual) except that this time a sickening thud, both felt and heard, stopped me in my tracks. I hardly dared look in my wing mirror but as I did so I could see the jack-knifed trailer nicely embedded in the side of my brand new Suburban.

Ouch.


From Simply Sustainability:

As a matter of fact there is a Dutch research project on this: Playing with Pigs. The project is an outcome of research on “Ethical room for manoeuvre in livestock farming”, a collaboration between the Utrecht School of the Arts, Wageningen University and Wageningen UR Livestock Research. Within the project, a game which allows interaction between pigs and people was developed; see it in a clip on vimeo here. The researchers say one of the things they’ve discovered is how much pigs like to play with light.

You get the picture.   I don't need more distractions, but Dan, thanks for stopping by and leaving your thoughts.  Let me know when you're passing through Anchorage. Maybe we can share a meal together.