notes

Every fortnight, a language falls out of use.

According to The New York Times.

Via Milkfat Blog and Felipe’s shared Google Reader

I just realized the man who had been competing with my online world for top search results for years is not actually alive. The fight has not been fair.

In an obituary in The Independent, he was called “one of the last great polymaths of British Archaeology, in the true Victorian tradition of the word.”

Graham Webster died seven years ago next week.

“Everybody is going to be with Obama,” [James Carville] added, referring to Clinton staff and supporters. “I have an undated check written out for Obama. I’ll send it when this is over.”

From IHT, quoted on Drudge.

Censors appeared to ease their grip on the Internet, mobile phone text messaging and uploading videos to the Internet, allowing information and even rumors to flow freely. One text message insistently making the rounds forecast a quake for Beijing in the early morning.

“It was really all I could do to convince my friends that this isn’t something that will happen,” said Graham Webster, a journalist and blogger on technology issues in the capital.

From Johnson, Tim. “9,000 still buried in China quake debris; toll at 12,000,” McClatchy Newspapers, May 13, 2008

The political theorist Louis Hartz characterized the American Way of Life as “a nationalist articulation of Locke which usually does not know that Locke himself is involved.” ¹⁶

From Perry, Elizabeth J., “Chinese Conceptions of “Rights”: From Mencius to Mao—and Now,” Perspectives on Politics (2008), 6: 37-50 Cambridge University Press

In 76 entries on a query for “graham webster,” four are me. One says I am an intern at Campus Progress, which was never true, but that entry has derived parts of my resume, including the real job I had there. The others remember me as president of a foundation, as a reporter for a place where I really was a (reporter) intern, and as affiliated with the Medill School of Journalism chapter of the U.S. National Press Photographers Assocation. What I wonder is whether this entry will someday cause their bots to make a single profile out of me. When they find gwbstr.com they might have more information, though apparently I don’t list everything a robot can cull from the internet. The other 72 references are someone else. What does ZoomInfo say about you?

A pretty good story about a woman who meets her neighbors, who sound like people she would not necessarily have met before.

This evening 100 meters from my hutong gate, Mr. Liu, the driver of the cab I was in, got a phone call. Normal enough. But he decided he needed to take the call, also normal, and pulled over to talk safely. This was not normal. He paused the meter, but as I was nearly home, I just paid him and went. He seemed relaxed and happy to take his time. After a walk through Jianguomen Wai, Jianguomen Nei, and Wangfujing, it was a relief. The neighbor’s dog was wandering around by the bus stop as I carried my groceries home.

Hal Foster, The Return of the Real: Art and Theory at the End of the Century, p. 183

Again, this ethnographer envy is shared by many critics, especially in cultural studies and new historicism, who assume the role of ethnographer usually in disguised form: the cultural-studies ethnographer dressed down as a fellow fan (for reason of political solidarity, but with great social anxiety); the new-historicist ethnographer dressed up as a master archivist (for reasons of scholarly respectability, but with great professional arrogance).