Three Beautiful Things 02/17/15: Twitter Links to Learning, Portage Not Snapshot! :), Dude: Hey! Commit!

1.  Twitter is becoming a source of expanding my understanding of how a wide variety of thinkers see and understand the USA.  I follow quite a few academics, both men and women, involved in the large tent of African American Studies (this enterprise goes by many different names) and I see myself making up for reading and study I didn't do before I retired.  Today was a great day for such reading. I learned more about slave ships, different perspectives on the recent NYTs book review of Lynching as Racial Terrorism; I read a long statement a black Mississipi federal judge made to three white men who killed a black man in Jackson, in what the Atlanta Black Star described as "the unconscionably brutal 2011 lynching of James Craig Anderson during a 'nigger hunt'"; I read about students at the U of Oregon doing research on the Warm Springs Reservation, following the research protocols structured by indigenous scholar Eva Marie Garroute's concept of "Radical Indigenism":

By asking scholars to enter (rather than merely study) tribal philosophies, Radical Indigenism asks them to abandon any notion that mainstream academic philosophies, interpretations, and approaches based upon them are, in principle, superior. … Entering tribal relations implies maintaining respect for community values in the search for knowledge. This respect is much more than an attitude, it requires real commitments and real sacrifices on the part of those who practice it.

Today, I read much more than I've listed above and this has been true for me for a while now.  For many months, I've used Twitter as a way to get reports on traffic in the DMV area, find articles on sports, to access links to the BBC, NYTs, and other news outlets.  I've expanded this and the links I am finding to different kinds of research and opinion pieces is giving me ways to understand all kinds of things about the USA, the area where I live, debates going on among all kinds of thinkers and writers, and approaches to research and education and teaching that are eye-opening for me.

2.  Well, I took a break from reading articles and debates and got the Subaru out from under the 4-6 inches of snow that fell last night and made my way to the Co-op to buy the Deke some porter.  I decided to see how New Belgium's Portage would work.  The problem is, well, instead of pulling Portage off the shelf, I pulled off New Belgium's wheat ale, Snapshot.  The Deke said she'd give the Snapshot a go, but it didn't work for her.  I decided, what the hell, I'll go back and I picked up the Portage on trip #2, in addition to a few other things we needed, and the Deke was very grateful for my efforts.

3.  All I have right now is five 8 x 10 frames, but you'd think I had 105 given all the work I'm doing trying to figure out what pictures I want to have printed to fill those frames -- and a couple of 5 x 7s. I received these frames as gifts on Christmas Day 2013 and, still, to this day, I can't seem to make up my mind.  I've enjoyed looking at the thousands of pictures I've taken over the last several years, but, c'mon, man, I tell myself, commit, dude.