OK, we’ve got a great opportunity here. Maybe I’m alone in this but I really don’t like the word Blog and all its permutations: blogger, blogged, blogosphere, blog rolled; they all lack a certain elegance. The word I’m looking for here is what do we call a group of blogs? I’ve always been in awe of the people who came up with a Murder of Crows and an Unkindness of Ravens.

There are a number of blogs out there – such as Power Line and Daily KOS – that have multiple bloggers, but in recent months I’ve begun to see a different kind of beast. These are blogs that are closer to traditional print source in format than the more common, in-line diary blog. Salon’s Daou Report and now Arianna’s The Huffington Report are just two recent examples.

So what do we call these amalgamations? One possibility might be a News of Blogs. Or perhaps a Dose of Blogs. If somebody has already come up with a term that’s in use, then we’ve missed the window. But wouldn’t it be cool if Cleveland bloggers – like Dan Savage and Santorum, google it – could come up with the word, flood the Internet with it and actually see it come into common use?

So let others know that we’re in the hunt, submit the word you think works best and I’ll post the list for people to vote on. The rest, could be History.

My Soundtrack: Live At The W.C. Hand Blues Awards by various.

In My Backpack… Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir In Books by Azar Nafisi; In My Car… Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison; On My Nightstand… In The Box Called Pleasure by Kim Addonizio; On My Computer… Grass by Ruth L. Schwartz; On My Screen… The Shield: Dominoes Falling (**) directed by Scott Brazil, written by Shawn Ryan.

My Soundtrack: Saint Dominic”s Preview by Van Morrison.

[Update: you can’t make this stuff up. I got this from my reader Cailin about 30 seconds after I finished writing this post.]

Every week for a big chunk of my adolescence, I would stand with a group of boys and recite the Boy Scout Oath. The oath begins: On my honor, I will do my best, to do my duty to God and my country… For the past few days I’ve been doing my own wrestling with the concepts of honor and duty.

As is often the case two disparate events came together to put me on the track of my own musings. The first was watching A&E’s Horatio Hornblower: The New Adventures. The second was telling John Ettorre that Bob Greene was at least partially responsible for my lack of a cell phone.

I’ve always been a sucker for swashbuckler stories and movies, and the Horatio Hornblower stories are classics in the genre. As I was watching the A&E episode, titled Duty, I was reminded of a C.S. Forester novel towards the end of Hornblower’s career.

In Hornblower In The West Indies, Forester embroils his hero in a deliberate lie. In order to prevent a rescue mission of the imprisoned Napoleon Bonaparte, Hornblower, on his honor, tells the captain of a ship carrying members of the Napoleon’s Old Guard that the emperor has died.

Hornblower knows that his lie is for the greater good, but because he has broken his honor, he prepares to submit his resignation from the service.

In an email exchange Ettorre asked for my phone number and I gave him my land-line. But I added, that I was one of the last people in Cleveland without a cell phone and mentioned Greene as partially culpable.

Greene’s involvement is another story, but in the ’80s I always enjoyed reading his columns in Esquire and while I remembered the news stories about his firing from the Chicago Tribune for an affair with an 18-year-old, I never knew the details.

As is often the case with me, one thought led to another, and I found myself surfing to discover where Greene was now. The piece that came up was Bill Zehme’s The Confession Of Bob Greene from the April 2003 issue of Esquire. It’s a very good piece of writing.

What struck me were two things. First, that Greene was sorry not because of what he had done, but rather for getting caught. It’s easy to feel sorrow and to repent after you’ve been busted. Second, that Greene was held to a standard that is extraordinary in our 21st century society. He was not guilty of seducing an intern or using his power to gain sex with an employee. His affairs were consensual and legal. His guilt involves matters of duty and honor. The innocents injured are his family.

Hornblower is a fictional character. Greene is not.

My friend Richard Montanari is fond of quoting a line from Thomas De Quincey’s On Murder, Considered As One of the Fine Arts:

For if once a man indulges himself in murder, very soon he comes to think little of robbing; and from robbing he comes next to drinking and Sabbath-breaking, and from that to incivility and procrastination.

While the slide from murder to procrastionation is an easy one, the reverse route, while by no means a certainty, is no less a slide. And duty and honor may be the gates that stop the slide before it can start.

What are the ways that we foster these virtues in our society? Do we teach them when we accept change from a $20 when we paid with a $10? Do our children recieve a lesson in honor when we add five miles-per-hour above the limit to our cruising speed? Do they internalize what duty is when we lie to them about our reasons for not attending their school’s open house?

Perhaps.

I do not think that near-universal failure is a reason for society to abandon a goal. What would it mean if I could rise each morning contemplating how I might be honorable and do my duty? Could I stand to lie down each night and consider where I had fallen short?

I’m not one for sports metaphors, but could any baseball player just quit because he was only hitting .400? Could the same player be satisfied with .100?

I’m still not happy with what I’ve written this morning. I can’t really get my head around it. But I do feel better for at least making the attempt. Maybe tomorrow I’ll do a little better. Maybe that will help me to avoid the end that Greene quotes from William Butler Yeats’:

The Circus Animal’s Desertion

Now that my ladder’s gone,
I must lie down where all the ladders start,
In the foul rag-and-bone shop of the heart.

My Soundtrack: Demons And Wizards by Uriah Heep.

In My Backpack… Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir In Books by Azar Nafisi; In My Car… Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison; On My Nightstand… In The Box Called Pleasure by Kim Addonizio; On My Computer… A History of Modern Poetry by David Lehman; On My Screen… The Shield: Scar Tissue (**) directed by Paris Barclay, written by Kurt Sutter.

My Soundtrack: Winterland (promo EP) by Emma Townshend.

My reader is OK. That’s the word from Y*A*N*G*O*N, the capital of M*y*a*n*m*a*r. Sadly, according to the New York Times, 11 people died and 162 were injured when three bombs detonated in shopping centers in the southeast Asian city. My regular visitors know that I have a reader there. When another reader sent me the NYT’s story my first thought was for the safety of the person in M*y*a*n*m*a*r.

This is the email response to my query:

Thanks for checking in. I’m doing okay, but shops are closed and we’re all hanging out at each other’s houses for comfort: pancake breakfasts, and light conversation to counter balance the grave atmosphere of the streets.

I remember you telling me you had a funny story to tell me via email… I could do with a funny story about now.

Eleven people are dead and 162 are injured and I thought of a person who I barely know and have never met.

This is the essence of human nature. Who knows how many tens (hundreds?) of thousands died from violence around the world yesterday. I don’t. But like the starfish flung back into the sea, I can know, and care about one. Sometimes that has to be enough.

I can’t recall the funny story I was going to send via email and my logs are no help. If you have a funny story you’d like me to pass along, I’ll be more than happy to do so.

My Soundtrack: The Ultimate Collection by The Temptations.

In My Backpack… Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir In Books by Azar Nafisi; In My Car… Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison; On My Nightstand… In The Box Called Pleasure by Kim Addonizio; On My Computer… In the Santa Clarita Valley by Gary Snyder; On My Screen… Homicide: Mercy (**) directed by Alan Taylor, written by Eric Overmyer.

My Soundtrack: Greatest Hits by James Taylor.

Now it’s a challenge situation. Back on 5 April, I lamented that my blog roll was genderly out of ballance with 7 women and 13 men. I scoured the NEO Blog Roll at Brewed Fresh Daily and came up with a list of 35 female NEO bloggers. Readers graciously suggested three more. Over the past month I’ve been reading the list as regularly as I could and I’ve made my picks.

The original plan was to pick three new blogs to add to the blog roll to make it an even 10/10 on the list. Well, best laid plans and all that, the list is now 26-blogs long and 13/13. That is pushing the envelope on the number of blogs that I have time to read so any future additions will demand that someone be removed from the list.

But I still want to keep fine-tuning my list. My next challenge is to find the non-anglo-saxon blogs around Cleveland. So, who do you know that’s out there that I should be reading?

My Soundtrack: Izitso by Cat Stevens.

In My Backpack… Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir In Books by Azar Nafisi; In My Car… Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison; On My Nightstand… In The Box Called Pleasure by Kim Addonizio; On My Computer… The Thirty Favorite Lives: Amager by Jack Gilbert; On My Screen… Homicide: Shaggy Dog, City Goat (**) directed by Kyle Secor, written by Eric Overmyer.

My Soundtrack: Greatest Hits by Cat Stevens.

Personally, I identify more with the the whole Norse or Celtic pantheon.

My Soundtrack: Footsteps In The Dark by Cat Stevens.

Be sure to pop over to Really Bad Cleveland Accent this morning where Christine has posted an excellent piece in her: On Libraries – No Really, Don’t Stop Reading. I think that perhaps the greatest gift my father ever gave to me was the love of reading. He read to me when I was little and I still remember vividly when he brought home the Ballantine editions of The Hobbit and The Lord Of The Rings for us to read together.

I still have those paperbacks, now held together with rubber bands, and I’d rather read them, and remember talking about about Frodo and Gandalf with my dad, than any fancy bound-in-leather editions.

My dad has a great personal library of hard-backed juveniles and classics from his own boyhood and had a fantastic collection of contemporary Science Fiction until he gave it to me several years ago. He still reads a lot: James Bond and the books of Len Deighton are among his favorites.

We moved out of town and into the country when I was in the 4th grade and in the summers I lived for the arrival of the bookmobile. A few years later when I was old enough to be dropped off in town, I haunted the Washington Country Public Library – one of the many Carnegie libraries. Like Francie Nolan, I started at the A’s and worked my way through shelves.

I remember the time a new librarian was at the desk when I plopped my week’s reading (probably 20 books or so) down. She looked down her nose at me and said I couldn’t take out that many books. I started to protest, but was saved by the head librarian who came over to let the newbie know that I would, in fact, read all those books before they were due in two weeks.

It was those books that sent me out of Marietta, Ohio. I had spent so many hours reading about all the stuff out there, I just had to suck it all in for myself.

And so, when I read Christine’s words this morning I was once again taken back to the critical importance of what I like to think of as America’s True Temples: our Libraries. I cannot begin to estimate our rate of return on what is a truly American invention: the public library. Any philistine who thinks the Internet is even a minuscule replacement for this institution has obviously spent way to much time online.

My Soundtrack: Classics, Volume 24 by Cat Stevens.

In My Backpack… Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir In Books by Azar Nafisi; In My Car… Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison; On My Nightstand… In The Box Called Pleasure by Kim Addonizio; On My Computer… Everything in Life is Divided by Cortney Davis; On My Screen… Impromptu (**) directed by James Lapine, written by Sarah Kernochan.

My Soundtrack: Teaser And The Firecat by Cat Stevens.

It’s official. We Cleveland bloggers are banal. It must be true. The pundits at the Cleveland Scene’s First Punch, have said so. I guess that means I’m just too uncool to read the paper. Oh well, I’ll miss The City, but at least I can read Dan Savage’s awesome Savage Love online. Targets for special barbs are Emily, Craig, Shannon, Mike and Adam. I guess I’ll just go eat some worms.

My Soundtrack: Tea For The Tillerman by Cat Stevens.

[Update: Lots of people talking: Ballon Juice is particularly good.]

Are we there yet? Are we there yet? Are we there yet? Are we there yet? Are we there yet? Are we there yet? Are we there yet? Are we there yet? Are we there yet? Are we there yet? Are we there yet? Are we there yet? Are we there yet? Are we there yet? Are we there yet? Are we there yet?

Do these people think that if they repeat their lies often enough that we”ll react like a frustrated parent and just scream: OK! OK! You can teach your superstitions to my children! Just stop bugging me!

That”s the way I feel about the hearings taking place in Kansas today. Steve Abrams, the chairman of the state”s Board of Education who successfully put Kansas”s Board on the loony list six years ago, is at it again. According to Diane Carroll”s Chairman Leading Anti-Evolution Effort in today Kansas City Star:

Beginning today, [Abrams] and two other conservative members of the board will preside over hearings in Topeka on the teaching of evolution.

The three days of testimony this week will provide the largest platform any state board ever has offered to proponents of intelligent design, a theory [actually an unsubstantiated hypothesis, JH] that contends the universe is too complex to be explained by natural causes alone.

Carroll does not note in her story that scientist are boycotting the hearings because they don”t want to lend credibility to the Intelligent Design argument.

For an excellent destruction of this continuing campaign of falsehoods, see PZ Myers’ Ten Questions To Ask Your Biology Teacher. As usual, PZ sets them up and knocks them down like the master he is.

My Soundtrack: Mona Bone Jakon by Cat Stevens.

When I read this on BuzzMachine this morning, my first reaction was: the Lemming Meter is twitching. But, an admittedly cursory run through of Google indicates the Burka Band is real. What seems to be really amazing is that the band, formed by a German record company from a Afghanis who attended a music workshop it sponsored in Kabul, is not new.

A review of the all-woman band in The Asian News indicates they’ve been playing together for nearly two years. Their song, Burka Blue, has become something of a cult hit in Europe, says the news service.

It wasn’t the Peacemaker nor the Trident that brought down the Soviet Union, it was Coca Cola and Levi’s. Will Rock ‘n’ Roll topple the mullahs? Could be.

My Soundtrack: Matthew And Son by Cat Stevens.