21st of November 2000

     Winter arrived in the Appalachians. Temps barely got out of the twenties, the wind howled all day from the telltale norwesterly direction that signals a Canadian air mass invasion, and we enjoyed our first snow fall of the season. The mountains are white, cities with still too much stored up heat to surrender. I'm fond of the seasonal changes my home offers, but get tired of cold very fast. This snap is supposed to last all week. Time to hunker down.

     Many of my online friends hail from midwestern locales that face much tougher winter weather. Kitty has lived most of her adult life near Milwaukee. Joe calls the Chicagoland area home. Ellen sits near the heart of the country in Omaha. I've often wondered the constitutional makeup of Minnesotans and Dakotans and, of course, the Canadians who endure considerably more severe winter weather than ever occurs here. Perhaps they will occasionally share a blow by blow account of what it's like to live in the cold belt.

20th of November 2000

     Scottish jurist and historian, Sir Alex Fraser Tytler (1742-1813), was widely known in his time. He was professor of Universal History at Edinburgh University in the late 18th century. This quotation is from the 1801 collection of his lectures.

     "A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves largess from the public treasury. From that time on the majority always votes for the candidates promising the most benefits from the public treasury, with the results that a democracy always collapses over loose fiscal policy, always followed by a dictatorship. The average age of the world's great civilizations has been 200 years. These nations have progressed through this sequence:

from bondage to spiritual faith;
from spiritual faith to great courage;
from courage to liberty;
from liberty to abundance;
from abundance to selfishness;
from selfishness to complacency;
from complacency to apathy;
from apathy to dependency;
from dependency back again to bondage."

19th of November 2000

     Time for Bluzz of the Week. Bloggerville was dominated by news of the American presidential election, of course, as well as tit-for-tat belching about the mythical blogging A-list. Rather than bore you with more, this week I reached for an essay in the Upside Today ezine. If you find a true treasure you'd like to nominate for future Bluzz of the Week, even if you wrote it yourself, please let me know.

     Sent to me by Míc Miller, a recruit of former Indiana basketball coach Bob Knight in the 1970's, Dear Coach suggests a new career for the illustrious Mr. Knight. Penned by David Bunnell, here are a few excerpts:

     "Seriously, Bobby, you should forget basketball. There are potentially more exciting things in your future than trying to mold a small group of dumb farm boys into finely tuned, disciplined athletes who obey your every demand, no matter how petty or ridiculous ... I believe you could be a very successful CEO in high-stakes Internet turnarounds. There's nobody in the world who can handle stress like you do and still deal with the everyday bull crap. You could be the one to clean house and get these companies on their feet! ... Bobby, you are the king, the absolute best. Once you fix your first company, you can move on over to the next and the next, each time pocketing tens of millions of stock options until you are a billionaire. And then, if you feel vengeful enough, you can buy the whole stupid state of Indiana, fire the administration and create your own basketball university, Bobby Knight U." — David Bunnell

Entirely Other Day
Zeldman Presents
Swallowing Tacks
The Head Lemur
The EGR Weblog
Speech Therapy
LanceLog2000
Random Notes
Weblogs.com
ctrl-alt-ego
Harrumph!
She Says
spitfire
Blogstart
KittyKitty
Forty-two
Doc Searls
m3tacubed
webmistress
JimFormation
Bloggin' at You
First Principles
Virulent Memes
Biz Stone, Genius
sweet aspirations
jenett's webstream