Rhode Frog: Pen Porn!

"In celebration of Writing Week..."
Specifically, this is National Novel Writing Week. I don't write fiction, and I'm not a fan of designating weeks or months to celebrate ideas or passions. Every week should be banned book week, or writing week. But it's the perfect excuse for Lifehacker to allow those of us with literary pursuits and stationery fetishes to stop hiding in the library and Staples and Papyrus and show the world our instruments!
This week we are allowed to discuss the finer points of favorite pens and the rules of notebooks (puns totally intended). Personally, I hate the Moleskin and the Mead and in my nearly 30 years I've never had a favorite pen. Notes and rough drafts are best written, but I can't consider a piece done until I've typed it. I compulsively write lists for everything. For diary or journal entries (it doesn't matter what you call it), I never wanted a little book with a cheap lock. I spent my teen years furiously typing my thoughts into a Word document (or, Word Perfect - God, I'm getting old) because I almost type fast enough to keep up with my thoughts. But in the past couple of years that has begun to feel cold and distant. Putting a pen to paper, almost as if the ink is pouring out of your hands, feels more intimate when writing your feelings.
Obviously, I'm a fan of the blog(ger). That's where it ends. No one on Facebook needs to know what I'm doing at any given moment.
I don't tweet. Ever.
My advice to all of you - don't tweet. Write.

Bits & Pieces

Senator Al Franken has proposed a "Pay for War" resolution that would require Congress to raise taxes and/or cut spending before authorizing new acts of war, so that American foreign adventures can't contribute to the national debt.

In "The Long Road Home," historian Ben Shephard tells the neglected story of the refugee crisis the Allies faced when, at war's end, millions of displaced persons -- among them prisoners of war, slave laborers and survivors of concentration camps -- had to be repatriated to their homelands or resettled somewhere else.

For most of the last century, talk of secession, nullification and the rest of the extreme states-rights lexicon were relegated to the fringiest parts of the political fringe. But since Barack Obama entered the White House in January 2009, mainstream Republican rhetoric and proposed legislation at the state level have both warmed to the hoary idea that state governments can take their relationship with the federal government on what amounts to an a la carte basis or perhaps abandon it altogether.

Is the tantalizing dream of a universal library dead? Some scholars and librarians across the country fear it may be, now that a federal judge in New York has derailed Google’s bold plan to build the world’s largest digital library and bookstore.

...the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office... finds that a large part of the supposed savings from spending cuts would go, not to reduce the deficit, but to pay for tax cuts. In fact, the budget office finds that over the next decade the plan would lead to bigger deficits and more debt than current law.

...Republicans in Mississippi are divided over a wholly different wedlock issue: interracial marriage.

Nobel-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz writes in this month's Vanity Fair about the corrosive, self-reinforcing wealth concentration that has hijacked American politics, in which the America's future is sacrificed to give ever more money to an ever-smaller group of oligarchs.

Pen Porn!

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