Lá Coille

Happy New Year! In Ireland we call New Year's Day Lá Coille. (Lá means Day and Coille means 'of kalends', in some renderings it's spelt Caille). So, to start the year, a weblog by a fellow Irishman, John Naughton, Professor of the Public Understanding of Technology at the Open University. The blog is called Memex 1.1 and while I'm not techie, it keeps me entertainingly up to speed with that world. I loved his posting yesterday on Powerpoint Karaoke ("It’s simple: you stand up. They cue up a random presentation. You ad-lib it.").

The other outstanding nugget from the Christmas period is Paul Parish's posting about "The Nutcracker and The Family Circle" on Apollinaire Scherr's blog. which offers a rich vein of reflection on the sociology of the family. And, just to play along, I wonder if Drosselmeyer is not so much a figure from the outside as our own shadow-side? And whether the Sugar Plum Fairy and her Cavalier are idealised adults, an intended contrast to Clara’s very fallible elders at the earlier Christmas party?

The Nutcracker works at a visceral level, because it captures something essential about families at Christmas, when emotions are intensely felt, and there is a tension between the imperative to join in and the need to escape, even it can only be into fantasy.

Google reckons that most weblogs have a readership of one. A blog is a little like an electronic hermitage and I've assumed a small readership, perhaps a dozen or so people, for this blog. However, this earlier posting brought an unusual number of responses - some of them deeply unattractive - which I suspect were orchestrated, and I've closed the relevant thread to new comments. But I've left the existing comments stand, as a reminder to myself, as much as anything else, that pluralism and tolerance must continue to be asserted - and never complacently assumed.