Wishing you love and beauty, both within and without.
Author: Daniel Greene
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Happy Valentine’s Day!
I took this photo of holiday lights with a Lensbaby Composer using a heart-shaped wide aperture. The manual focus ring was adjusted to place the lights out of focus and create spectral highlights that appear as heart shapes. -
Blog 2014: Changing taxonomies
A couple of years ago, I split my multi-topic blog into five blogs, and decided to make my main one about Interpreting and Translation. Since those were the only topics, I decided to make my categories Articles, Editorials, Essays, and Vlogs. This year, however, I decided to reel it all back into this one blog. Since once again my blog would be about several topics, I needed to return to a more topical taxonomy. I changed the old categories to tags, and created new categories to fit my topics: American Sign Language & Deaf Culture, Business, Communications & Media Studies, Creative & Performing Arts, Photography, Education, Interpreting, Linguistics, Food, Lifestyle, and Travel. This taxonomy is a work-in-progress (especially Lifestyle).
I looked to the blogosphere to see how other bloggers were naming their categories and tags because I wanted to make it easier for people to find my stuff. One of the sources I found was this Popular Blog Categories infographic:
That got me wondering what other WordPress bloggers were calling their tags and categories, so I went to the WordPress Reader to explore Tags:
Some of these tags are ephemeral, like Blackhistorymonth; however, most of them are perennial words for what I’ve written about under different headings. I compared them with my tags and decided to go with the majority of bloggers on some of them: I changed essays to musings, editorials to opinion, and I split off posts tagged articles to either research or stories.
Taxonomy is a balancing act between what I want to call things and what others want to call things. I like to have my style, but if most people are using different words for the same things, I am willing to use their words so they understand me… within reason. I still won’t say presently for currently, but I like musings, opinion, research, and stories. Thanks, bloggers!
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Why I’m boycotting the 2014 Winter Olympics
I won’t watch the winter Olympics this year because I am disgusted with the Russian government’s homophobia, corruption, and abuse of its citizens. I don’t know what difference my lack of media consumption will make as a political statement, but I don’t even want to watch, I am that turned off.
I admire Olympic athletes, and I can understand why they would compete instead of boycott; they have spent their lives preparing for the games not knowing where they will be hosted, and if they back out now, they forfeit their chance to win. It is unfortunate they are participating in a country that flies in the face of the Olympic sprit, but I wish them luck! I just won’t be watching.
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Google posts Doodle in support of gay Olympians
In support of LGBT athletes at the start of the 2014 Winter Olympics, Google sported a rainbow-colored doodle on their search page and quoted from the Olympic Charter:
The practice of sport is a human right. Every individual must have the possibility of practicing sport, without discrimination of any kind and in the Olympic sprit, which requires mutual understanding with a spirit of friendship, solidarity and fair play.
–Olympic Charter
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Magic Man is a tightly crafted song!
I was listening to a classic rock station just now, and they played Heart’s “Magic Man.” I remember hearing this song many times when it came out– my mom and her boyfriend played the vinyl LP every day for weeks. I never noticed before today, though, how tightly crafted it was. The verse and chorus repeat only once each, with slightly different lyrics and very different meanings each time. In the first chorus, the person quoted is the self-proclaimed Magic Man himself, inviting her to “come on home, girl”; the second time, it is the mother pleading with her to “come on home, girl.” I don’t know what it’s called when songwriters change the meaning behind the same lyrics, but I think it can be brilliant (my favorite example is Tim McGraw’s “Don’t Take the Girl”).
What really impressed me just now was how short “Magic Man” is. Coming out of my car radio, where so many songs are composed mostly of choruses repeated ad nauseum, this tight little composition put the rest to shame.
Daniel Greene 