A realization, and a roundup

Another post about myself and the blog, a sure sign of a blog in decline. Will I still be posting next week or will it be hiatus time again?!? Tune in and find out!

Over the past week, I've decided that if all goes well with the new house in Norfolk, I want to move Theo and I to Virginia and vacate this house before the end of August. Paying a month of rent in Newport will be bad news once we have two mortgages in Norfolk.

The realization from the post title: Theo and I need to be in Illinois for two weeks in August, maybe more. So in the past week, we've time-traveled from being over two months from moving, to being three and a half weeks from moving.

Following Paul's Law of Moving, while adding the corollary that "People with toddlers take twice as long as the childless to accomplish any task," I'm pretty much already in hopeless territory. (Confidential to Paul: Let us know you're alive, mmmkay?)

Thus, recreational blogging will pretty much stop until maybe Labor Dayish, unless I really find the need to vent. There are a few loose ends in need of tying around here, so I'm going to make the following series of broad generalizations and unsupported statements:

Tom (and MyMilitaryLife) directed me to this all-too-relevant USA Today Op-Ed from William Kistner, a Navy spouse and father who found himself standing on the pier (or probably tarmac in this case) as his wife was deployed to Africa. I'll recommend it while noting my regret that I can't talk more deeply about the subject right now.

What I'm reading lately: I've recently finished Into Thin Air and Under the Banner of Heaven, both by Jon Krakauer. I recommend them both highly.

I read The Blind Side, by Michael Lewis of Moneyball fame. The story he tells in this book is equally compelling to me, partly because I'm more of a football guy and partly because the story is far from over.

I started to read and failed to finish a memoir that I would love to talk trash about, but I have too much respect for the person's accomplishments to rip on the book. I won't say more about it, but the next time you read a bad memoir, just remember that I warned you not to do it.

I also (finally) read Einstein's Dreams, which was fantastitabulous.

I mentioned it to Tom this morning, but I'll reply to his post here too: Homeownership is scary, but after being goaded into it by my wife, I've found it well worthwhile -- when the situation is right -- and no more risky or stress-inducing than renting. The risks and stress are just different. As long as you put some money down on a place up front, get a fixed-rate loan from a reputable lender like NavyFed or USAA and stay well within your means (don't borrow as much as the banks will loan you, even if you're 100% certain that promotion is coming next year), the current problems in the mortgage market simply won't apply to you.

Finally, the post that's been percolating the longest, my thoughts on this month's Atlantic. Definitely read "What Rumsfeld Got Right" and "Electro-Shock Therapy." The battery problem is the fundamental issue in our current energy crisis -- oil has been our cheap, large-capacity portable energy storage, and now that it's no longer cheap, batteries need to get better fast. I admire what GM is trying to do with the Volt, but because they're GM I have every confidence in the world they will mess it up. I'm just happy I shouldn't have to worry about buying a car for a few more years.

As I've thought it over, my opinion of the cover story, "Is Google making us Stupid?" has evolved from cautious pessimism to outright disdain. It's nothing more than a bunch of controversial statements that have gotten attention because Oooo, they're so contrarian.

Twenty years ago, high-minded Atlantic writers would've been blaming all society's ills (e.g., short attention spans, declining literary culture, USA Today, declining subscriptions at the sorts of high-minded journals that employ Atlantic writers) on that popular pre-Interent boogeyman TELEVISION and its minion the sound bite; if they were talking about politics, they might have thrown in an unkind word for Rush Limbaugh. Fast-forward to today, and Carr tries to claim that the Internet is dumbing down CABLE NEWS, as if CNBMSNBFOX had led us into the golden age of an informed, wise electorate before the Internet reduced us all to quivering mush.

And just like the proper response to scapegoaters of TV has always been "Change the channel or turn it off, moron," someone needs to tell Carr that if he really believes that our pre-Internet brains were superior, he can rejoin the majority of humanity who still lives offline.

The truth is, the culture Carr pines for never had a golden age except in the minds of its partisans. It's never been large or celebrated; exclusive and difficult would be better descriptors. Someone who spends their time jumping from blog to blog or refreshing their RSS feeds shouldn't turn around and cast blame on a fault-tolerant global information network for rewiring their brain. They did it to themselves.

...one more thought. A lot of the "me too-ing" of the Carr article has been fake concern about the "pose" or "tone" of blogging, that blogs by their nature foster an attitude of post-GenX ironic detachment or somesuch. For anyone who thinks that similar "bloggy" pieces of short, witty, self-deprecating writing didn't exist before the Internet, please get yourselves a volume of Montaigne.

Assuming, that is, that you can still read on paper.