Apparently, Americans consume a whole bunch of it.

In the spirit of end-of-the-semester blog-posting, check this out.

So, Americans drink more bottled water than beer, are more likely to get whacked by a wheelchair than run over by a lawnmowers, and are only slightly more likely to get into an accident with a bicycle than with a bed...

Hmm. That bed one makes me suspicious.

But! Still more: "Adolescents and adults now spend, on average, more than 64 days a year watching television, 41 days listening to the radio and a little over a week using the Internet. Among adults, 97 million Internet users sought news online last year, 92 million bought a product, 91 million made a travel reservation, 16 million used a social or professional networking site and 13 million created a blog."

So I've been contemplating setting up my own blog. It's exceedingly un-me to do so - or at least, me prior to this semester. But I've enjoyed getting my word vomit out on something that other people might actually read. It's somehow satisfying in a way that a private journal would not be.
Problem is, I don't know what I'd blog about. The best blogs seem to have themes - parenting blogs, political blogs, celebrity blogs, technology blogs.
What could I write about, besides "Boring college blog"?
Do any of you have your own blogs, outside of this one? What do you write about?

It's amusing to me, as well, the volume of posts that have recently hit this site. Not that I'm one to point fingers. It feels almost like we've spammed the blog. Now, I'm not saying that our posts are irrelevant advertisements for penis enlargement. I'm thinking it's more along the lines of there are so many posts, with so many creative and possibly concealing names, that you can't possibly go through and read all the new ones. It's just like when your email box gets a zillion new messages and you give up on trying to sort through them.

It's kind of like when Magoo was posting his fiction on the blog. That stuff was really interesting, but the volume at which it came overwhelmed the rest of the blog posts and made reading anything but it somewhat of a search.

This question of this post arose from looking at two other recent posts: a bird’s post on how long we’re planning to leave our final projects up online; and zoey’s on what the blog would look like if it was less structured. Just kind of a free-for-all. Length of posts, amount of posts, content of posts, all completely open.

While the matter of leaving our projects up or taking them down is a matter of our own choosing, KF has told us that both the blog and wiki will continue to remain up and running after the semester’s close. I suppose that will be something of an opportunity to see what would have happened had this blogging assignment been a more or less optional “free-for-all.”

Okay. So I posted about not knowing what happened with the Cassie stalker thing and pseudo anonymity. I got the response from Natwwal that pseudo a. knew the identity, and is to be approached in person to find out the secret. I say nay, class, we shall rise up against this secretive tyranny! Tell us who Cassie is! You sparked my interest with your project - you can't go all MIA on us now, P.!

That is the sound my computer is making as of late. Ruh, ruh, ruh, zing. But more animated, like in the title of the post. It gets all slow and confused and then explorer.exe starts taking up the entire CPU and it makes that noise.

Not that I expect any of you to be able to fix it, as this thing is going on 4 years old and is probably about to hit the pasture, but wouldn't it be cool if things could be fixed by the sounds still?

Like back in the day, when the people o' yore would take their automobile into the shop and be like, "Doc (they were always Doc), the car's got a problem."
"What sound's it making?"

Have any of you seen this before? Night Owl’s post on the slick new version of iTunes reminded me that I’d come across this application a little while ago and meant to blog about it. Basically, it’s a flash-based player with an interface designed to look just like one of the pretty new video iPods (you get to choose whether you want the black or the white model), and it offers an amazingly extensive library of FREE streaming content -- I was seriously impressed by how many of my requests it was able to come up with.

I just woke up from a dream in which my professors, instead of responding to my emails with straightforward, text responses, sent links into hypertexts. So to find the answer to my query I had to click through a maze of hypertextual links that looked like doorways, and the answer would vary depending on how I navigated the hypertext. It was stressful, to say the least, and the perfect note on which to begin a day of blogging.

As if we needed even more technology to mediate the world for us, someone has come up with the ambient walkman. Basically, the product is a pair of headphones which sample ambient noise and turn it into some form of music. Its creator prefers to style it "The Ambient Addition," which frankly I find insufferable. The idea that we need even more mediation seems ridiculous to me. I suppose that the technology represents a somewhat cool achievement, but I'm at a loss to understand why anyone would want to listen to an approximation of music created by the birds, the bees, and those jackhammers down the street (although I suppose that combination would be pretty wild).

I haven't really been following the Ian McEwan plagiarism ordeal, but I happened upon (i.e. Google News pointed me toward) this article in the UK's Daily Telegraph. McEwan has been accused of plagiarizing multiple portions of a WWII nurse's memoir for his 2002 book Atonement.

Plagiarism is obviously a rich issue, but the main point I want to raise here is about its relationship to advancing technology. It's easy to imagine a future in which plagiarism (at least of the physical, word-for-word kind) would be impossible to get away with, for any amount of time. Not only will there be more people accessing and commenting upon written works, but, as more and more is digitized, there seems the opportunity for immediate, thorough and computerized cross-referencing. Will we then search more vigorously for writers to ostracize for plagiarism of ideas?