Items and Issues of Great Interest to Aspiring Minds (and fans of the olden days)

Twitter has inspired a bunch of micro-communication related articles. Big whoop you say? Well dig on this article that discusses 160/140 character epistles of yesteryear.

The Anglo-American Telegraphic Code:

 

And ANOTHER article that attempts to validate social media’s place in high-culture discusses the similarities of John Quincy Adams short diary entries to microblogging:

I found this article in the Commercial Appeal. I still read a hard copy paper here and there – I like how the ink gives me “I change my own oil” hands. 

When I googled the article to find a link to share I found tons and tons of articles about how Adam’s actual diary is going to be tweeted or twitted (I always think of Roald Dahl when I write that) starting today thanks to the Massachusetts Historical Society.

I do love an old fashioned daily-record diary. I am still thinking about a few entries by some frontier women on our recent trip to the Autry Museum and some of the great examples used in The Worst Hard Time. I love how, in contrast to our modern angsty-internal-exposure style writing, diaries used to list the facts: made wheat bread, cleaned gun, Jeb came for dinner.  (Although now that I think about it – when this information comes in the form of a Facebook update it is quite annoying – what is the dif?)

My own interest in JQA’s diary is not necessarily that he would have been a twitter but that he, like me, was an eloquent weather writer:

RECYCLED TOAST: 

Lastly I want to share my favorite toast that I have assimilated from the southerners thanks to Oxford American’s Best of The South Issue:

CONFUSION TO THE ENEMY Sure, the toast was originated by a crazed segregationist but Mark Winegardener argues that he uses the toast because it is too TUFF to retire and to further confuse the people that should be confused.