Wildlife have made a comeback over the years in my affluent little town. This is both good and bad. Wild turkeys aren’t a problem; coyotes are. Here’s a deer chillin’ in my neighbor’s yard at dusk:
Note the dirty snow from yesterday’s annoying snowstorm. I once saw half a dozen deer thundering incongruously through the basketball court across the street from us. Wish I’d had a camera for that.
Oprah Winfrey has been chosen as the speaker at this year’s Harvard commencement. This has raised a small ruckus. Here is Harry Lewis, a Harvard professor and former dean of the college, in a bit of a snit:
I am sure she is an inspiration, though I can’t quite get out of my mind the image of her with the wheelbarrow full of fat. The car giveaways and so on. She has given away a ton of money for good causes, to be sure.
And I suppose we will again have some noble, courageous, self-sacrificing folks also receiving honorary degrees as they sit listening in polite silence to the self-promoting, wealthy television celebrity.
Is that what the stage once occupied by Winston Churchill, George Marshall, Ralph Ellison, John F. Kennedy, U Thant, Vaclav Havel, Alan Paton, Benazir Bhutto, Mary Robinson, and David Souter is going to be used for in the future?
But in a later post he makes a more substantive point, noting that Oprah is a major purveyor of pseudo-science and quackery:
It seems very odd for Harvard to honor such a high profile popularizer of the irrational. I can’t square this in my mind, at a time when political and religious nonsense so imperil the rule of reason in this allegedly enlightened democracy and around the world.
He also provides a link to a list of past commencement day speakers. Perusing this list, I started wondering why the heck Harvard has a commencement speaker at all. At lesser institutions the speaker probably gives the school a bit of publicity, but Harvard doesn’t need publicity. Sometimes I suppose an institution gives the speaking slot to a top contributor, but Harvard clearly doesn’t do that. So why do they bother? It’s not like anyone cares about what Oprah or Fareed Zakaria (last year’s speaker, also a dubious choice) or Ellen Sirleaf (president of Liberia and the speaker two years ago) has to say. Certainly not when all anyone wants to do is get out of the heat and go party.
And it’s also not like Harvard’s choices have been uniformly good in the past. Lewis admits he cherry-picked that list of his, with Churchill and Marshall and Kennedy on it. The complete list is filled with the names of forgotten politicians and diplomats and industrialists. Harvard seems particularly fond of bringing in presidents and chancellors of Germany. What’s up with that? My year we listened to the immortal Roy Harris Jenkins, who is described as “former deputy leader of Britain’s Labor Party.” I’m sure if I hadn’t been hung over I’d have remembered every word he said.
Harvard should just get rid of the commencement speaker altogether. Then it can say that no one meets its high standards. Which would probably be true.
Looks like two feet of snow fell in my little town. The world has turned gray and white. My bushes are not happy:
Lots of branches down in the backyard:
No reason to hurry with the shoveling because the streets aren’t plowed. So let’s just take pictures!
The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2012 annual report for this blog. It’s a lot more detailed than my state of the blog address. So click the link at the bottom if you’re interested. I just want to add that WordPress runs a very impressive operation. Happy New Year, everyone — and thanks for stopping by!
Here’s an excerpt:
600 people reached the top of Mt. Everest in 2012. This blog got about 7,500 views in 2012. If every person who reached the top of Mt. Everest viewed this blog, it would have taken 13 years to get that many views.
Here‘s another annoyingly talented photographer (and WordPress blogger) I work with. (See yesterday’s post for some photos from the first guy.) Here is a stunning image of foxtails:
And here is a haunting view of some foggy trees:
Finally, a little cascade at a brook:
You’ll notice that these photos are all copyrighted, so Mr. Whelan is probably going to come after me for reproducing them. Oh, well. In the meantime, the least you can do is visit his blog.
Following up on my resolution to add more pictures to this stupid blog, I’m going to steal a couple from the guy who sits next to me at work. (There are a lot of very annoyingly talented people where I work.) This photo is called Shadowscape:
And here’s one called Winter Water.
He also takes creepy photographs with weird filters and such, if you’re into that sort of thing. Check them out at the link! His site is in my blogroll, under “Images to Turn the Mind”, so it’s always available for your viewing pleasure.
This blog is one year old today. So happy birthday, blog! Some bloggy statistics, courtesy of WordPress:
The blog has fulfilled my initial purpose for it, which was to get me onto the first page of Google hits for “Richard Bowker,” past all the other undoubtedly very fine Richard Bowkers that the world has produced. This is supposed to make it easier for folks to find my books. My other, related goal was to get all my books out in ebook format. I have one left, Marlborough Street, which is pretty much ready to go in January.
Here are some resolutions for my second year of blogging:
Anyway, thanks to everyone who has stopped by! Now I need to shut up before your attention wanders.
That previous photo had kind of a bleak midwinter vibe. This is cheerier.
This is as white as it’s going to get in my little town.
Here is the food being organized for Christmas distribution from the Food Pantry in my little (and very affluent) town.
These are just the perishables; canned foods and the like were organized in another part of my little church. Lots of volunteers helped out, from five-year-olds to ninety-year-olds.
Even with the economy improving, many people need help just to stay afloat.
Richard Bowker 