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Now tell me this isn’t cool. I’m glad we have reached a point as a society where we can search a limitless trove of knowledge before we’ve even finished a word. Why aren’t we all Atlanteans yet?

A slightly-less funereal version of the Aunt Mickey post is my latest WBFO listener commentary, which will be aired on Tuesday AM at 6 and 8:30. Further updates as events warrant.

Here’s a snippet from His Autobiography by Benjamin Franklin.

There are croakers in every country, always boding its ruin. Such a one then lived in Philadelphia…. This gentleman, a stranger to me, stopt one day at my door, and asked me if I was the young man who had lately opened a new printing-house. Being answered in the affirmative, he said he was sorry for me, because it was an expensive undertaking, and the expense would be lost; for Philadelphia was a sinking place, the people already half-bankrupts, or near being so; all appearances to the contrary, such as new buildings and the rise of rents, being to his certain knowledge fallacious; for they were, in fact, among the things that would soon ruin us…. Had I known him before I engaged in this business, probably I never should have done it.

This man continued to live in this decaying place, and to declaim in the same strain, refusing for many years to buy a house there, because all was going to destruction; and at last I had the pleasure of seeing him give five times as much for one as he might have bought it for when he first began his croaking.

Sound like any towns you know?

A bit more link-love for you tonight.

Stumbled across Wordcount recently, a little app that list words by usage. And yes, I did contact the creator to see if his tool could be used to trend data for use in my continuing offensive against the word “iconic” (sorry Eric), but he replied in the negative. #47267, FYI.

reCAPTCHA is awesome. Take one of the more annoying aspects of modern life and use it for the advancement of mankind’s great work.

A few videos for the lot of you.

If you haven’t been over to The Humanist yet, you should really watch this. A bit more impassioned than the approach I would take, but then isn’t that always the case? The passage of proposition 8 in CA is yet another blot of the record of America, proving once again how far we have fallen from the immutable ideals laid out by our forefathers. For shame, California.

The complete Mysterious Explorations of Jasper Morello has been posted in excellent quality.

And most importantly, turn it up, man!

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P.S. — I just ran across an old favorite. I’ve watched about four minutes of West Wing in my viewing life, and this just happened to be a few of them.

Looks like Obama beat me to the punch in becoming the first internet president. Change.gov sounds like a fine plan for doing what the nets were built for — getting info from one person to another. I’m all for it. Also, seems like a fine way to tag people who might try anything untoward. And then, of course, it’s only a matter of time before people start getting arrested for things they email to the President-Elect. And once some evil overlords take over, an extensive digital record of people’s opinons can easily be scoured for dissenters. We’ll have ourselves an old-timey central-government-fueled witch-hunt based on these emails.

Or blog posts…. dang it! Well, I’ve assumed since age seventeen that once the new order of hyper-christian dictators begins I’ll be among the first on the block.

Coughing one’s way through the book-paper dust of an inherited library is a fine way to spend an evening, surely. When my father’s Aunt Mickey decided to pack up the essentials and relocate to a home with fewer staircases, I did not — could not — understand how many books I was about to glean from her collection. The currency with which the elderly trade is bifold; possessions and the memories attached to them, and my wife Jess’s and my reward for muscling Mickey along in her move is books.

Not all of them, not by the longest of shots. Aunt Mickey is a highly clever woman, the acuity of her speech never giving away her eighty-five years, and it would appear that the fountain of her continued youth is reading. As my wife tells it after days spent packing a life’s worth of possessions into cardboard with the deftness only an Army-brat upbringing can teach, she owns at least ten times as many books as we do, and has read them all. Imagine that! Actually reading all the volumes in one’s personal library.

I flicked through the boxes of books Aunt Mickey sent Jess home with every day, searching for arcane ISBN numbers in order to log them in my own unachievable task list and wondering what rubric she used to determine which would go to us and which to the “donate” pile. Why, exactly, did she feel that I specifically needed ‘Robert’s Rules of Order’? Why so many 70’s-and-80’s woman-power paperbacks? The musty pile surrounding me on the couch certainly represented the prism through which Aunt Mickey views us, and sleuthing out the whys made for a lusciously narcissistic diversion.

Corners of paper stick out from many of the books. Aunt Mickey did not just read her library, but continually annotated it. Scraps of notes in the horrific handwriting to which all in my family are heir can be found in a large percentage of the collection. Newspaper clippings have been folded into to the covers with the care of a film preservationist. Would you like to know the answer to Carroll’s raven-and-writing-desk riddle? I’ve got it, tucked into the leaves of an annotated Alice. Images of Mickey sitting in her casually mod living room, gasping with interest at an article and describing it to my uncle as she tries to remember just where precisely that one book got to are now among my favorite non-participant memories.

Time spent with these books has given me an archaeological taste of my aunt’s life and those of her family. One of my cousins went through a youthful period of UFO obsession in the sixties, for example. Somebody in the family studied more than a little French. A better argument for dating one’s books cannot be made; a reading life like Mickey’s could be measured in the tree-rings of the inside covers.

And what of when I am eighty-five? How will some great-nephew know my life? Through a pile of video games and check stubs? At the very least I can hope that my new acquisitions will provide a feeling of connection to family history and that my own library — and life — will be as worthy of interest.

Allow me to channel a little Humanist with some Saturday Site-Love for artofmanliness.com.

We all know that manliness has suffered greatly over the last 40 years. The causes of this descent into effeminacy are multifarious, but lingering on them brings us no closer to revivifying the near-dead corpus of Man. This site champions our cause. Want to learn how to shave like your grandfather? Take a little trip.

Turn on the TV for fifteen minutes and you’ll see how much modern US society hates men. Every commercial and most shows depicts us as fat, slothful fools. It is our own fault — as traditional gender roles were destroyed in the previous decades, instead of doing the correct thing and simply eliminating bias against women we unmanned ourselves, incorrectly associating our strengths with the evils of our forefathers.

The rising popularity of gentlemanly items like cuff-links is indicative of the fact that men yearn to return to the days when the positive aspects of our nature were encouraged and revered. So, man up.