Wikiwiki and the Bs

Hey I just thought it would be a neat headline. Don't get all worked up.

(But wikis are really cool, aren't they? I put one up here on my home network for a while just to fool around with and took it down because I couldn't figure out much use for it. But Wikimedia has, and you should check it out. Wikimedia is, as we say in New England, wicked cool.

(What brought this to mind was a story in today's NYTimes about some new Mac software called NoteShare - love those studly caps - which is touted as taking collaborative computing to new heights. Better than wikis and message boards and the like, the writer, James Fallows, says, because with those things people aren't necessarily working together in real time.

(Begging the question of what the hell "real time" is to begin with, I always thought that was an advantage of working on a computer - that you didn't have to work together in real time. Not that I mind working with you, you understand, just that I mind working with you if you are in some time zone four or five hours away. So maybe I'm missing something big here but if I am, I say I don't care. I'm too old for new, anyway.)

(Added later: 01/03/06 George Johnson in the New York Times contrasts Encyclopaedia Brittanica with Wikipedia. If this kind of thing keeps up I'll have to start dreaming up some tags besides "Miscellany.")

On a blog called Empire Burlesque, Chris Floyd writes about the Bs better than I ever could. But I've been wondering about this for a long time now: with all the fuss and furor about putting the Ten Commandments on the courthouse lawn, have you ever once read about anybody who wants to put up the Beatitudes? I thought not. A lot of Commie terrorist wimp drivel in those Beatitudes. But still I have to ask, are these Christians Christian or are they not?

Did you know that a lot of the Ten Commandments monuments around the country got put there to promote a movie?

It's 1956. Director Cecil B. DeMille's epic film "The Ten Commandments" opens across the country. Months before the release, DeMille drummed up publicity for the film by working with E.J. Ruegemer, a Minnesota juvenile court judge and member of the Fraternal Order of Eagles.

In the 1940s, Ruegemer launched a nationwide campaign to post copies of the Ten Commandments in juvenile courts across the country. His goal - to provide a moral foundation for troubled youth. When DeMille caught wind of the idea, he suggested to the judge that they work together to erect granite monuments of the Ten Commandments across the nation. DeMille's goal - to plug a new film. A deal was made.

Although there is no official record of how many monuments were erected, numbers range from less than 100 to more than 2,000. The Fraternal Order of Eagles kept the project going long after the film opened, and some monuments didn't get erected until up to 10 years later.

The story's here, from Minnesota NPR.
(And yes, as Dave Barry would say, Wikiwiki and the Bs would be a good name for a rock band. Barry's year in review piece is here, if you missed it.)

Technorati Tags: Miscellany