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I started over the weekend, but only just now finished. I think it was the upcoming movie release that made me do it. I went back to Middle Earth. I wanted to read it again before I saw someone elses version as a movie.

The Lord of the Rings was the first long book I read (well, it's three books, but they are essentially one.) Certainly the first I was completely absorbed in, and the one with the most lasting effect. I'm not sure what year it was, but I remember finishing the last book on the bed where I slept at my grandparents house on Cape Cod. It was a summer afternoon and I could hear everyone sitting in the backyard, down below my window, under a huge old willow tree. I can feel it clear as I sit here. I loved that book. It was the first time I was ever sad upon finishing one, although not the last. I was much puzzled by this result, as I had been desperate to reach the end of the tale. I was quite young, and some of it I didn't understand, but it gave me so much. Hints of a direction when no hints had ever come before.

I haven't read it since. I think I tried once but found it rather tedious, although I can't now remember when that was or why it didn't work out. This time I read with ease and had to force myself to stop when other things needed to be done. I only read the first book, although I plan to read the next two as well. But I wanted to get through The Fellowship of the Ring before the movie comes out. I'll take my time with the rest as other obligations permit.

"What?" cried Gimli, startled out of his silence. "A corslet of Moria-silver? That was a kingly gift!"
- jim 11-15-2001 9:48 pm [link] [add a comment]

Good background on the upcoming Leonids meteor storm.
- jim 11-14-2001 11:12 pm [link] [add a comment]

Always propitious, Tom writes:

If the hot topic of the moment happens to be "Anthrax in violin varnish," then when I type those words, some crawl begins to sniff that thread - first among the bloggers I know and read all the time, then extending out to the great blogging ocean beyond. It does this without my having to tell it to. Then when I want to see what everyone has written about this topic, I click, and a cloud of threads from all the blogs comes captured in a snapshot array, duly attributed with links, inside some page or realm so that it's there, somewhat collated, just as whatever I wrote in my blog on that same topic is sniffable by anyone else.
The thing is, the words "Anthrax in violin varnish" do not constitute a unique identifier. URLs, on the other hand, almost do. That's why daypop and blogdex use URLs as the basis for determining who's talking about the same thing. Words are too fluid. Is "Anthrax on violins" the same as "Anthrax in violin varnish"? Software will be hard pressed to decide. Yet this is what humans do well, and this is why blogs are important: because they harness a mulititude of human linguistic processing units (that's you and me) to work on these very un-binary questions of meaning. Go the other way, towards full automation, and you wind up talking about XML and the semantic web. And then the whole thing dies because writing is too tedious if you have to make it machine processable.

People have to do the work. We have to be the filter. That's blogging. You have to do the crawl yourself. "...first among the bloggers I know and read all the time, then extending out to the great blogging ocean beyond..." This is exactly what happens already, without any additional technology, when you're tuned into blogspace. You're the linguistic engine. By keeping up with your own corner of the world wide web (parts of which keep up with other corners which contain parts that keep up with still other corners, etc...) you are doing the crawl. And there is no better machine to do it. Blog on.
- jim 11-14-2001 4:17 pm [link] [1 comment]

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