Linkfest: December 21, 2008

I never made it to church this morning.  I've been lightheaded all day, and I've had to keep my leg elevated because of swelling.  The good news is that my foot is now a normal color, and my ankles are a more normal size. 

I missed Garden Bloggers' Bloom Day this month since that was my surgery day.  I haven't been outside since surgery so here's my floral view:  the wonderful azalea dear husband got me for our anniversary last February.  It's in our bedroom, on my side of the bed, and it's what I wake up to in the morning (along with WCPE).

Here are some fun and/or interesting things I've run across lately:

• One of my daily webpages is Cream of the Crop on Flickr.  These are photos considered to be some of the best on Flickr.  There's always something interesting.  Some of my recent favorites are:  Oranges, One lazy afternoon, Compare and Contrast, Blue Cosmos?, Contrastes, Finding Nemo, Keep Red droplets I, and Mirror Image.

• Top Five Reasons Why Finnish is Cooler Than English: 

...3.  Finnish is elegant and economic. You can say so much more with just one word. For example “epäjärjestelmällistyttämättömyydellänsäkään”. Ok, so that isn’t a word anybody would really ever use, but technically it’s still correct. It means something like, “even with his or her (notice how awkwardly I need to express that) ability to not make others more disorganized”. The downside to this is that if you want to participate in NaNoWriMo in Finnish, you have to produce quite a lot more content.

[Hat tip to 3quarksdaily]

• Austenbook:  If Jane Austen were on Facebook

• This is Where We Live:  Fun video at The Daily Dish.

• The rise of the late baby boomers:  Barack Obama and many of the people he's bringing to Washington came of age after the Vietnam War and the civil rights struggles. Their shared experiences offer insights into how they may govern -  Interesting contrast between the attitudes of the regular baby boomers (not me) and the late baby boomers (me). 

• World's Most Bizarre and Intriguing Water Fountains [Hat tip to The Presurfer]

• Le Jardin Plume:  Beautiful garden photos [Hat tip to Gardening Gone Wild]

• The Popdose 100:  Our Favorite Singles of the last 50 years:  Some of my favorites:  "Superstition" by Stevie Wonder, "(Sittin' on) The Dock of the Bay" by Otis Redding, "Wouldn't it Be Nice" by the Beach Boys, "Sister Golden Hair" by America, "What a Fool Believes" by the Doobie Brothers, and "Rock the Boat" by The Hughes Corporation.  Actually, those are all of my favorites that they list.  I liked some of the others before they were overplayed (:::cough "Bohemian Rhapsody" cough:::).  Any favorites of yours on the list?

• Leaving Literature Behind:  The professionalization of the field is turning students off:

...We're not teaching literature, we're teaching the professional study of literature: What we do is its own subject. Nowadays the academic study of literature has almost nothing to do with the living, breathing world outside. The further along you go in the degree ladder, and the more rarified a college you attend, the less literary studies relates to the world of the reader. The academic study of literature nowadays isn't, by and large, about how literature can help students come to terms with love, and life, and death, and mistakes, and victories, and pettiness, and nobility of spirit, and the million other things that make us human and fill our lives. It's, well, academic, about syllabi and hiring decisions, how works relate to each other, and how the author is oppressing whomever through the work. The literary critic Gerald Graff famously told us to "teach the conflicts": We and our squabbles are what it's all about. That's how we made a discipline, after all...