Moving

The Long-Suffering Trad has a new home.

Please come over to www.longsufferingtrad.com and take a look around.

I will soon have an info page with some stuff on it.  Probably later tonight.

I'm not sure if anonymous posting is working yet, but I'll make it happen.  Or you can register.

Please do come by.

lw

Trad Lifestyle Blogging - Ladies' Magazines

One of the facts of married life is that you will frequently find yourself stuck in a situation, usually in the bathroom, where there is nothing to read but one of your wife's magazines.  After 22 years of marriage, I am now able to look back at some of the magazines that I've gotten to read as a result of that joyful union.

As always, the early years were golden.  Back then there was always a Vogue or an Elle around.  I never had much use for Vogue, but those were the early days of Elle magazine and it wasn't bad at all.  Of course there were the lovely pictures to marvel at, but I remember that they had some of the best movie, book and pop music reviewers around.  Pop culture has always been my culture and Elle filled the bill. They had good travel articles as well.

I sometimes wondered if my wife ever read it though. More than once I would suggest a move, something like "My Dinner with Andre" - that kind of thing.  My wife would say "Never heard of it." "Oh? There was a great review in Elle."  "Must have missed it." The early years of marriage have their rocky moments, and in those times I had visions of custody battles over the Elle magazine subscription.

Fast forward ten years and the magazine is now Martha Stewart Living.  Say what you want about Martha Stewart, the girl is nothing if not practical.  You could learn a lot from Martha Stewart Living.  I like food, and I've been known to pick up the spatula from time to time so being stuck with Martha wasn't a terrible proposition.  Hell, I once even read an article where Martha was telling me how  to wash my car.  Can you imagine?  Martha out there all hung over on a Saturday morning washing her car?  I always felt that underneath her pretty veneer there was a man.  Martha was no Elle, but she was far from bad.

Fast forward another ten years and what have we got?  Oprah.  These are the dark days, my friends.  You're better off staring at a wall than looking at an Oprah magazine.  There is nothing worth looking at in Oprah.  Even when they're talking to someone good, Oprah makes them talk about stupid stuff.  And that Dr. Phil guy gives me the creeps.  I don't buy his crap for a second.  Thank god Brooks Brothers sends me a new catalog every week, and it can usually be found lying around the bathroom.

Wikis, searches and blogs

I've been thinking about wikis the last couple of days. I bought a book about a week ago called Web 2.0 Blog. It's basically an introduction to blogging. And a pretty good book. Toward the end of the book is a chapter about wikis. While going over this chapter it became apparent to me that a wiki would make an excellent group trad project. The project would be, of course, creating The Encyclopedia of Trad. Having now spent some time thinking about this, I've reached a couple of conclusions:

1. Wikis really are a great tool for creating The Encyclopedia of Trad.
   
2. I'm not the right person to head up that project.
   

It is, I think, a great job for anyone who has the time, the leadership skills and the desire to make a mark on the trad. It's just not going to be me. I'm already busy. I hope someone will do it though.

So while I'm thinking about this, I create a site, trad.wikidot.com . You can go there. It's pretty empty. Once I get it created I'm naturally looking for ways to create classes, categories, the proper containers that information needs. But guess what, you can't do that. Wikis defy my need to create outlines, table of contents, structure. This actually induces panic. What? How can information exist without structure? So this gets me thinking even more.

People who created wikis are smart I figure. Maybe they're onto something. What if all this structure is extraneous. A manmade artifice that we have needed in order to try to understand the chaotic universe. Take for example the taxonomy of living things. One could persuasively argue, I think, that phylums, classes, orders, genus, and species are things that really don't exist. The are basically BS. But they have been very useful BS because they have been our gateway into the understanding of critters. And the understanding eventually transcended the BS structure that we used to get there.

But now, maybe all that is history. Maybe now we are able to treat all this chaotic information not in some artificial structural way, but as the chaotic web of interrelated things that it really is. Understanding chaos as chaos. And perhaps the thing that has allowed us to do this is the search. The search is now our gateway into information. Is this true? Hell, I don't know, but the search is clearly the way into a wiki.

Let's say I search "Mercer" at the not yet extant Encyclopedia of Trad. I start off learning something about David Mercer and his company, but then I'm following links off to oxford cloth, OCBDs, collar rolls and collar lining. From there, who knows where I will end up (I never do).

I guess some of you guys, if anyone is still reading, are saying, "duh, so what?" But I'm a little slow and to me this represents a pretty significant departure in the way we relate to information. At least the way I relate to information. And it's something I've never given much thought to before. It's not occurred to me until now that the search is a pretty big deal.

So what about blogs? Blogs are pretty conventional compared to wikis and searches. But they are backwards which takes a bit of getting used to. Reading this blog top to bottom you first get me thanking Chops for a weird and wonderful post. Then you get Chops's weird and wonderful post. Then you get me introducing Chops. But they say that time doesn't really exist either so maybe that too is for the best.

Thanks again for reading, if anyone did. Tomorrow is Trad Lifestyle Blogging and I have no idea what I'm writing about. Could be a disaster. Stay tuned.

Update: This made sense while I was writing it. 6 hours later and even I can't follow it. I'll try to fix it tonight.