How do you deal with what you read and learn in your local newspaper? My household has subscribed to the San Francisco Chronicle for years. For a while, one of my housemates also subscribed to The New York Times -- which I much prefered but found to be too expensive. I typically read The Chronicle over breakfast. If I'm out of the house for breakfast, I don't tend to read the paper that day -- the Chronicle is almost always a morning-only companion for me. I sometimes wonder whether this means that reading the Chronicle is mostly a waste of time -- like channel surfing or mindless web browsing.

Still, I learn stuff when I read the paper. And they certainly provoke various reactions in me.

Articles that make me think that I should watch my bank very closely: Banks defeat privacy bill yet again / Speier vows to put stricter measure on state ballot and Wells dishing out bank data

Article that makes me think that the current administration is really as bad as I have suspected:
E. J. Dionne's Framing the issue and the lastest column by Robert Scheer: "What Did He Know and When Did He Know It?" (no permalink yet)

An article that makes me want to organize a group of friends to go to the Oakland museums: Powerful glimpses of black history in Oakland exhibition

Something that helps me think about what I can do for the many homeless in Berkeley: John Carroll's Well, sure, a house can be a home, about the Berkeley Food and Housing Project

A techno-lust inducing piece: Handspring unveils Treo 600 handheld / Wireless device to be available in the fall

Forcing myself to respond to what I read, I hope, redeems some of my morning time. (But isn't it just enough that I have fun reading the Datebook?)

It's about 10:30pm now and I am dead tired. I will go to bed soon. This is probably the worse time to blog since I am not thinking terribly clearly. Yet I don't want another day to pass with adding something to my personal blog.

When I'm not in front of my computer, my mind races with ideas for my blog. But right now, I'm at a loss as to what to write -- save this self-referential drivel.

Just got the latest issue of The New York Review. Started reading Freeman Dyson's review of James Gleick's new book Isaac Newton. (Quite fitting to have a great physicist review a book about the greatest physicist of all time....) I'm also looking forward to reading Clifford Geertz's second part of his megareview of new books on Islam. Indeed, I might read it in bed tonight. I'll read the review and think about the new books -- though I am getting small hints that what I'm really after will not be found in the books. Not quite sure what I'm looking for though.

I hope that all of you out there are having a great time celebrating Father's Day -- as a father yourself or as someone who has a father. Since I sent my Dad a card a few days ago, it probably hasn't arrived in Toronto yet. It's not the usual type of card I send -- it's actually sillier and more sentimental than usual. But I hope he'll like it.

I'll give him a call in a few hours, wishing him a wonderful Father's Day, hoping that I'll be able to convey even a small part of how much I love him.

So far on raymondyee.net, I have some entries for my blog. Now it's time to think about how to fill out the site with more context. A good resource to help one think through how to do so is Patterns for Personal Web Sites.

The wonderful thing about being part of a great blogging community is that there is so much good material written by friends, eliciting many thoughts and reactions. The bad thing is there is so much to respond to, and I never quite have the energy to do so immediately.

I'm now getting around to thanking Chris for his reflections on his visit to the SF Asian Art Museum. Once I read Chris' observations, I immediately thought, "hey how can I totally miss out on how the building affected the viewing of the collection." We're in agreement that the collection at the SFAAM is fantastic. I've just been wrapped up with the individual objects. Chris has changed the way I now see the relationship among the objects; he articulated what I had not verbalized.

I too am very interested in what electronic media can do for presenting the materials of the SFAAM. A topic for posts to come, I hope.

On a Berkeley Saturday afternoon marked by weather that is the envy of friends who don't live in the Bay Area, I trotted over to my local branch of the Berkeley Public Library to pick up the latest book on hold for me: Complications: A Surgeon's Notes on an Imperfect Science The book first entered my consciousness when I encountered an essay in The New Yorker by Atul Gawande, the book's author. When my friend Grace then emailed me some of her thoughts about Complications, I threw the book on my Berkeley Public Library hold list (a la Netflix), looking forward to reading the popular book whenever it happened to come my way.
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Last night, eight of us went to see Nicholas Ray's King of Kings. As I have written previously, I would not have seen this film save for the fact that it was by a great film maker; I'm a Christian who is prejudiced against Bible films. I write and speak out of ignorance, however, since I have actually seen very few films drawing from Biblical stories (and specifically the life of Jesus). But that hasn't stopped me from writing them off as schlock.
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"But I love Bach."

"You don't love Bach -- you analyze Bach."

In all my blog writing so far, every time I've written "I", I have been speaking for myself. I've also been very careful in what I've written, to be as honest and truthful and accurate as possible -- stating what I do know and don't know.

I'm getting tired to writing in just this way.

So how can I write a poem or a story or a blob of text or drop in a drawing in this space without the "I" literary being "me"? Should I depend on context? Should I use some type of typographic or graphical convention? Should I mark it "story" or "fiction". I hope that if I'm writing a parody (say a parody of myself), that I wouldn't have to explicitly mark it with "Warning: self-parody".

How do others do this? There are probably examples in my own blogging community of such doings -- forgive me for not paying closer attention and missing out. Something I think that Laura might have something in her blog of this nature. Maybe Chris or Lloyd or Catherine. I thought tonight that textism might be what I wanted to study -- but my initial look did not yield what I wanted. Actually, maybe it's Ray Davis who has blogs that address this issue.

Both Lloyd and I wrote about Kenneth Pollack's Threatening Storm some time ago in our blogs as a must-read book in assessing the case for an invasion of Iraq. Pollack's book made me think, "hey maybe there is a sound case to be made for war given how Iraq might become an even more terrible menace to the world". So as I mull the current post-Iraq war situation, as I wonder whether the Bush administration misled the American public about how much it knew about weapons of mass destruction -- indeed wonder what is really true and who I can really believe in such a complex morass of spin -- I've been wondering how Pollack now stands.

Salon.com | Joe Conason's Journal points to a recent NPR interview with Kenneth Pollack. Now is Pollack back-peddling or was he duped or did we misinterpret Pollack? He seemed to one of the more credible analysts on the scene, but I don't know what to think right now.