Amber Taylor has an interesting pseudo-hypothetical question:

An Indian artifact belonging to the museum needs to be conserved, but according to the members of the tribe that created the item, this artifact is a "male object" and may only be handled by men.

Is it legal, under currently existing antidiscrimination law, to prohibit female employees from conserving the object and to transfer you to another museum for one week in exchange for a male conservation employee from that museum?

The Gershwin estate and the terms of Gershwin's will specify that English-speaking countries may only produce Porgy and Bess with all-black casts.

Compare and Contrast:
Spencer Ackerman et. al., in TNR:

July 7 ... This spring, the administration significantly increased its pressure on Pakistan to kill or capture Osama bin Laden, his deputy, Ayman Al Zawahiri, or the Taliban's Mullah Mohammed Omar, all of whom are believed to be hiding in the lawless tribal areas of Pakistan. ... a White House aide told ul-Haq last spring that "it would be best if the arrest or killing of [any] HVT were announced on twenty-six, twenty-seven, or twenty-eight July"--the first three days of the Democratic National Convention in Boston.

Thursday, July 29 ... Pakistan has arrested a senior al Qaeda figure with a bounty of up to $25 million on his head, Interior Minister Makhdoom Faisal Saleh Hayat told CNN television Thursday. ... Al Arabiya said the suspect may be Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani...

Francis Crick is dead. For co-blogger Sudeep's recent thoughts on Crick's book accusing him of sexxing up the unsexy, go here.

Let's keep the back-and-forth going just one post longer (at least).

Jeremy, below (responding to my claim that blogs bring people together and let you "meet" people):

(T)hat's not just blogs, it's the whole darn Internet.

Will, directly below, on why blogs are unique and different: "The thing about blogging that I find devilish difficult to explain to non-bloggers is not just how one can meet somebody through blogging, but how one can know someone through blogging... this sort of being-friends-with-people-you've-never-seen thing."

But that's not just blogs, it's the whole darn Internet -- blogs facilitate it really really nicely, but before I blogged, I'd occasionally get an e-mail from a friend of a friend with regard to something and we'd correspond for a while back and forth and become friends having never met; I'd guess people in newsgroups and chatrooms and discussion boards feel like they're making friends they haven't met. Blogs are better for this than e-mail because you can reach more people and people can find you out there... but, like Will says, whether blogs are innovations or not really isn't that important... but I did feel like Teachout's original post might have been overstating things a bit.

Below, Jeremy disagrees with my original "notes on blogging" and directs readers to this post by Ezra Klein.

(I get to watch Jeremy's draft posts as they sit in the Crescat-queue, so I've been expecting this.)

Klein writes:

The only thing new about blogs is their appearance on your computer screen and the funny word that refers to them. Beyond that, they were 'zines 15 years ago, newsletters before that, pamphlets before that, and, reaching all the way back, guy grunting about unfair distribution of bison meat.

I can't be sure, but I suspect that Jeremy means to direct this in contrast Teachout's comment that "It’s almost impossible to explain what a blog is to someone who’s never seen one. That's the mark of a true innovation," and my concurrence: ("uh, how did you meet? ... You met on the ... internet?").

As is oh-so-often-the-case, there's a certain amount of talking-past-one-another here. When Klein suggests that blogs are zines are pamphlets, he's clearly referring to a certain subset of blogs, namely those that espouse politics in the same manner that zines and pamphlets and bison-grumblers did. (Klein seems to recognize this, as he limits himself to talking about "political blogs").

Yglesias's point is quite right: blogs are a format, not a topic. Thus, a large number of blogs are a little harder to pin down. Yglesias's blog is something like a political pamphlet. Terry Teachout's is something like a cross between a diary, a newspaper column on the arts. Lileks's is ... something else. My contributions to Crescat bear more than a passing resemblance to what my email account used to look like before I discovered blogging (and in fact, what it still looks like).

So far, so good-- but I haven't explained why I think Teachout's right, that there is something about blogs that makes them tough to explain to, say, my roommates. Blogs seem to have a great deal of personality-- were zine-crushes and pampleteer-parties the norm in their heydays? To some extent these things existed, I'm sure, but either not as widely, or they weren't as widely understood. The thing about blogging that I find devilish difficult to explain to non-bloggers is not just how one can meet somebody through blogging, but how one can know someone through blogging. And indeed, I count among my friends plenty of folks who I've never met save for the hundreds of thousands words we've traded on the internet.

Perhaps I'm wrong, and this sort of being-friends-with-people-you've-never-seen thing is not at all new; epistolary romances and journalistic alliances surely existed, after all. But there does seem to be a difference in quantity-- Thomas Jefferson wrote some 20,000 letters during his Monticello years, and he wrote like a maniac. I've written well over 20,000 emails merely since the start of college. Maybe that makes a noticeable difference; maybe not.

All I really want to say (another thing blogging has over pampleteering or zine-ing-- the ability to ramble on and on at no cost to anybody but the reader!), is that whether blogs are "innovations" or not is really sort of beside the point. But explaining how this community works-- indeed, even explaining that it is in all important respects a community, with real relationships and all the rest-- is very very difficult to do to people who are totally outside of it.

A few weeks ago, Will posted a link to Terry Teachout's discussion of what a blog is and what a blog isn't. I started to write a post disagreeing with some of the points, wanting to make an argument that blogs really aren't something special in and of themselves, but just a vehicle for writing and reaching an audience -- but I wasn't happy with anything I was writing and left it in draft mode.

I just read a post on Pandagon, which, incidentally, has some really solid Democratic convention coverage that I've been enjoying a lot, linking to and commenting on a Matthew Yglesias post, that says basically what I was trying to say, but says it better than I did.

Last week, TNR Online had a piece about how the blinding influence of money and class led sportswriters to wrongly conclude that Kobe Bryant was a team player and Shaq a selfish hog-- concusions that now seem to go the other way.

Now Shaq suggests that the influence of money is part of what will make him popular with his new teammates:

"We're gonna be straight," O'Neal said. "I was down here the other day working out with the kid from Vanderbilt we got (second-round pick Matt Freije), and I told him, 'I'm gonna come across the block, and if I get doubled, I'm gonna pass the ball to you and you're gonna have a wide-open jumper, or (forward) Udonis Haslem is gonna come down the lane and he's gonna get a dunk, and you're all gonna get big contracts.' He said, 'What do you mean?' I said, 'Just look at the history. Travis Knight. Horace Grant. A.C. Green.' He said, 'Shaq, you're one of the coolest guys I've met.' "

When I was in 10th grade, I had a fabulous English teacher named Chris Edwards. His fabulousness manifested itself in many ways, among them the vocabulary lists he gave us each week. Every week he gave us ten words we had to know by the end of the week, when we'd be tested over twelve words at random (from the accumulation of all of our vocab words to date).

That year was the first (and last) time I ever received vocabulary words in school where there was more than one word a week I didn't know. A few of the words, I knew. Sometimes I'd heard the word before, in a few obscure contexts, but couldn't summon up a coherent definition. Other times, we were sent grappling to the dictionaries in the back of the class (and occasionally even those defeated us).

Even better: Mr. Edwards' words were mostly not of the hyper-technical or hyper-long variety. These were short, punchy words or slightly archaic ones which packed lots of meaning and power (having not yet been diluted by overuse). This is where I discovered "vagary," "mawkish," "fatuous," "moxie," "aplomb," and so much more. Senior year, those who had passed through Mr. Edwards class could still recognize one another through those words, as if by some secret signal, while everybody else was stuck learning "circuitous" and "canine" and similar claptrap.

So, here are a few nice words folks have been emailing me with, or that I've come across in my recent reading. Feel free to send along more, but remember that I'm more likely to post them if they're A: somehow relevant to the rest of your email, or to life B: short, or relatively non-complex grammatically. (Ultion, below, is perfect. Anacoluthic less so.)

Gelid: Ice-cold.

Ultion: Vengeance, avengement.

Irenic: Pacific, non-polemic.

Anacoluthic: Lacking grammatical sequence.

Pablum: Writing or speech that is insipid, simplistic, or bland.