At Cocke Hall on the grounds of the prestigious and stogy University of Virginia I created a strange ending for my January 12th page. A zeal to create lists occasionally saves me from ignorance. It provides a window to a bigger picture even when the list items are, as in this case, obvious.
Nathan VanHooser came by my house to pick up a disk I'd made for him. He and I talked about the flaws in conventional education, where the stupid and unruly make class into an excercise in totalitarianism and slow things down such that the intelligent can only watch the clock and waste their time. This is not education. Learning doesn't happen in schools. We're kidding ourselves. I'd been primed for this discussion by an interesting article in an old issue of Wired magazine where the point had been made that "I talk, you listen, you learn, I test" education is an archaic legacy of the monastaries.
One thing that strikes me about old issues of Wired is that there are no references at all to the World Wide Web as late as mid-1993. I'd always just assumed that I'd come into this Web thing late, which is true. But not too late. And I'd say I'm pretty much up to speed now...
The day has been uneventful. While checking the logs on Atlas today, as I always do, I saw that someone was going through my site almost robotically, systematically, taking it all in. It was eerie. Then I received an e-mail from my old Oberlin friend Kevin Bundy (the quick story is: he met a former Oberlin student, Katy Allen, in 1988, they married, she funded his education with her trust fund (1992), they moved to Northern California, they divorced). I'd tried many times to contact Oberlin chums via the Internet, but few or none of my old friends have any apparent Internet identities.
Today's girlfriend: Cathy. Ain't she a hotty? For you guys who might want to try and get her away from Anthony, I'm pleased to recommend the Girlfriend Stealers' Homepage.