Merry Christmas, with Mariah even...

The Holidays are a time for peace and reflection.  Taking this time to be with my wives family in Germany is special as much as it is relaxing.  We share this time together, but there is also a lot of time for individual thought -- even if Mariah Carey's Christmas album is playing on the hi-fi and it is right now.  :)

I am currently reading Robert Fisks latest work -- a collection of essays he has published and the more I read it, the more I am reminded of my father and myself.  Fisk is a man of his own will and nature-- and the declarations he makes when he isn't reporting are spot on with the theories I have grown up to know, but without the sometimes cynical approach that comes with realizing that things in our lives are the way they are for a very specific reason, even though it doesn't appear that way.

The latest essays that I have been reading focus directly on the written words-- the power of them and the power of their destruction-- namely the laptop that I am writing all of this on-- the fear by Fisk-- and I do take this with a grain of salt, is that something is really lost in the lack of writing things out-- and having a copy of those materials-- when this laptop becomes the mainstay of our communications, it does simplify things, but that in turn, complicates things.  Without having those handwritten notes about certain things, we leave the archieves of our work up to the machine-- so much of my writing is on this site-- what if they simply ran out of capital and closed up shop?  What if their server room caught on fire?  Where would my words be then?

Also, as I am writing this, you, the reader, will read it as soon as I click that little orange button-- this is an amazing power-- the power to instantly send information out to the masses, but there has been a huge cost for all of this information overload-- this distribution of thought and opinion is killing off the gatekeepers of information, the press-- and that is never, ever going to be a good thing-- especially given the tough times that are right around the corner.

Luckily, I have thought of this and I do have backups of my data here on the site-- it has been copied down long ago-- just in case.

But the point remains the same, writing and communication is suffering because of the overload of communication that we get from a variety of sources throughout our daily lives.

So, on this Christmas day, I want to thank you, the reader, for taking time to listen to me ramble on in this wonderfully dreadful medium of communications...