morgannels blog

With a tip of the hat to Meg, some entries I never got around to writing:

1. Digital media content providers have blown it. Because of their obsession with preventing everyone who hasn’t paid them directly for the privilege from enjoying digital versions of their content (an obsession they didn’t develop to such an exaggerated degree with the analog versions of their content, by the way), they have ceded control of the industry (if not all of the profits… yet) to Apple and Microsoft. There was a chance to come up with some sort of open digital rights management protocol or standard (akin to SSL, for instance) that would have made media file format providers far less central to the industry, but that moment has long passed. At this point, we just have to wait and see if Apple wins and we all join the cult, or if Microsoft wins and we’re all rebooting our home theater systems daily ten years from now. Unless, of course, Yahoo’s disconcertingly rational approach carries the day…

2. From Bruce Arena’s stubborn failure to the atrocious ABC commentators, the United States should be deeply ashamed about its participation in this year’s World Cup.

3. Is faith the antithesis of reason, or the complement of reason? Is it the basis of reason, or the result of reason? Is faith dogma or trust? Could fundamentalists who won’t allow their beliefs to be examined really be said to have faith in those beliefs? Is there a single act in our lives that isn’t enabled or informed by some sort of faith?

4. Ulysses is almost certainly an Irish sutra. When first I read it, just getting my Master’s degree from Yale and trying to figure out how I had changed, it was the key to cultural accomplishment. When next I read it, under the influence of Harold Bloom, it was a most astonishing act of characterization. As I read it now, it is undoubtedly a Western pointing out instruction.

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