Happy Thanksgiving to all my Canadian compatriots! In this Monday’s Link Roundup, be sure to check out Top 10 ways to Ditch Your Clutter and Digitally Organize Your Life. It provides some pretty interesting ways to reduce the mound of stuff squirreled away in our boxes and filing cabinets. And on a similar theme, you might want to avail yourself of the services of PeggyBank.com. You can read about them in Bringing Your Old-Media Memories Into the Digital Age.
- Banished Words. “As it has every year since 1976, Lake Superior State University has released its latest “List of Words Banished from the Queen’s English for Misuse, Overuse, and General Uselessness.” The annual list, the impish brainchild of LSSU’s Public Relations Office, contains the twelve most nominated words among the thousands sent mostly by folks from the United States and Canada. The 2012 list of unfriended words includes the following: amazing (the most nominated), baby bump (a close second), shared sacrifice, occupy, blowback, man cave, the new normal, pet parent, win the future, trickeration, ginormous, and thank you in advance.”
- The 10 Greatest Biographical Poems (Part 1). “My work documenting lives on video always has me on the lookout for enduring biography in other formats, like great biographical poems. I can’t claim to have boiled the ocean, but here are the first five of my personal faves.”
- The Neurochemistry of Empathy, Storytelling, and the Dramatic Arc, Animated. “Paul Zak [is] director of the Center for Neuroeconomic Studies and author of The Moral Molecule: The Source of Love and Prosperity. In this short film on empathy, neurochemistry, and the dramatic arc, directed and edited by my friend Kirby Ferguson and animated by Henrique Barone, Zak takes us inside his lab, where he studies how people respond to stories.”
- Bringing Your Old-Media Memories Into the Digital Age. “Lots of people have memories locked away on old, deteriorating media: home movies, audio and video tapes, printed photos, negatives and slides…Now, a small company in Omaha, Neb., called PeggyBank.com, is offering a service where you send in all your old media (it will even provide the boxes) and the company will convert all of these items, for a fee, into digital formats and upload them to a free online “vault,” usable from any computer with Web access.”
- Is It Worth Converting an Old Book Into an eBook? “Although ebooks are exploding in popularity, the tools we have to create them favor straight text books like novels, memoirs and literary nonfiction. With complex books that include all three kinds of content, we’re still a long way away from being able to easily and inexpensively re-launch the books of the past.”
- Top 10 ways to Ditch Your Clutter and Digitally Organize Your Life. “We’ve all got a few cabinets, drawers, and shelves filled with clutter that seems outdated: CDs, paper, photo albums, DVDs, and books take up a lot of space. Here are 10 ways you can take the plunge into a digital, clutter-free life.”
- Fall fashion – women in veils 1880s-1930s. “Looking through the new fall fashion magazines this weekend, I noticed hats, but few veils. Women have been wearing veils since at least the 13th century B.C. in Assyria. Classical Greek & Hellenistic statues sometimes depict Greek women with both their head & face covered by a veil. Statues of Persian elite women from Persepolis show examples of some women wearing veils & some without. Here are a few from the 19th & early 20th century, which I find fascinating.”
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This past week I’ve been reminded how much our treasured possessions are a window into the stories of our life. My frail, ninety-one year old mother has started to go through her modest collection of jewelry. She’s carefully trying to match each piece with a relative or friend she thinks would appreciate having it after she has died. As I was sitting with her, she began telling me the stories behind each piece. There are the art deco black-and-white earrings she bought to go with a very fashionable dress my father got her shortly after they were married. A silver bracelet brought back by my dad from Pakistan during WWII is tarnished but her memories of my dad’s war experiences remain vivid. Each piece unlocks a story in my mother’s life.
