imagined-community

It’s not too late to help a blogger raise money for a good cause as they slog through 24 hours of constant blogging for Blogathon 2007!

Don’t want to scroll through the long list of bloggers to find someone to sponsor? (Or you can use this surfing frame to click through the home pages of all the participating blogs.) For an international charity, consider the Purple Corner where Jogany is blogging for the SOS Children’s Village in Madagascar. The site is in French though there is an addictive chat going on right now that is mostly English. The Purple Corner also has some great podcasts.

More about Blogathon from the Chronicle of Philanthropy:

Bleary-Eyed Blogging for Charity

More than 500 bloggers from around the world have signed up to participate in a 24-hour Blogathon to raise money for charity starting at 6 a.m. Pacific time on Saturday.

The participants will raise money for a charity of their choice, promising donors they will update their blogs every 30 minutes during the 24-hour period.

The annual event was started in 2001 by Cat Connor, a blogger in Portland, Ore. That year, more than 100 bloggers raised more than $20,000 for 77 charities, according to the Blogathon’s Web site. Participation has gone up and down since then. This year, more than $70,000 has been pledged so far, it says.
The rules for bloggers are strict. “Don’t use an update script or other trick so you can go to bed and still blog,” the site warns. “You must be awake and participating in person.”

It offers helpful tips for staying awake: take quick, cold showers; chat with other Blogathan participants; dance or play computer games; or create a “themed blog.”

All money goes directly to the charities through online donations.

The bloggers still have many hours to go…

Comments(6)

I love this plaque. When I read the sifting and winnowing statement for the first time as a freshman at the UW, I felt a bracing thrill of determination. A thrill I still feel every time I read it. And even though I am far from Wisconsin, I carry with me a commitment to the statement’s ideals.

Historically, the quote is associated with academic freedom. Back in 1894, UW Economics Professor Richard Ely was teaching communist and socialist economic theories to his economics classes. When the State Superintendent of Public Instruction got wind of Professor Ely’s subversive curriculum, he demanded that Ely be dismissed. Responding to the hailstorm of criticism stirred up by the State Superintendent, the university regents investigated Ely. The sifting and winnowing statement is part of the regents’ official announcement to retain Ely. Since then, the statement is carted out every time an academic freedom debate erupts on campus.

For me, the statement speaks to more than academic freedom. The sifting and winnowing statement beautifully and succinctly suggests a way to be in the world and clearly marks the perimeters of that path. Though I don’t think that the truth is out there like some perfectly cut gem waiting to be picked up compact, whole, and shiny. My sifting and winnowing has uncovered truths that are nothing like diamonds. Truth is multifaceted but it also pretty grimy. Truth is noisy and truth is big. Very big. Maybe that is why we have to be fearless. You think you are going to get a little gold nugget after all that sifting and winnowing, but instead you get this huge crazy mixed-up thing that you are pretty sure you can’t hold let alone carry, cuz it is just too big, but somehow after falling over a couple of million times learning how to handle the weight and the strange shape, and after planting your feet firmly on the ground and taking several very deep breaths, you do. Gosh I love the truth!

Comments(1)

Cafe Rustica, Somerville

Six weeks till I board a plane for a 3-week trip to France. It’s been four years since I last visited Europe and I am definitely starting to feel joy. Earlier this evening I was reading “Almost French.” As I read the author’s description of her daily morning ritual at a Paris café, I couldn’t help but reflect on my own love of French cafes. There are plenty of good cafes in the Boston, Cambridge, Somerville area (my favorite is probable 1369 in Inman Square ), yet nothing in the States is quite the same as a café in France. They are just plain different. The last time I was in France I was living in Aix-en-Provence, where I immediately developed my own morning café ritual. Each morning I would walk three blocks to the city center, buy a copy of Libération from a kiosque, and then meander across the street to “my” café by the fountain, usually sitting outdoors at a small metal table. Then I would slowly drink two espressos (well, I AM an American coffee addict) close to peoples of various sizes, sexes, and ages, who were also leisurely greeting the whole being awake / doing the day thing. There is something about a French café, je ne sais quoi, that is at once intimate, social, inclusive, and respectful of the existential solitude (how French of me) of the individual. I can’t wait to go to France!

Comments(1)