Jason Griffey

A man was beheaded in a frenzied and prolonged axe attack in a London street today.

The axeman, smartly-dressed and in his thirties, felled his victim with one blow and then struck repeatedly “as if he was chopping wood”.

When asked why he had done it, he told officers: “It’s complicated. It’s private.”

Officers didn’t report on the bizarre electrical storm that surely followed the beheading.

One of the wierder sections of Betsy’s contract with The University of the South is that as a tenure track professor she has a right to a plot in the University Cemetery. It’s a very old cemetery for this part of the country, with gravesites dating to before the Civil War. The photo is one of the plot markers that dot the ground among the graves.

In going through my photos and choosing which to put up on Flickr, I came across a few that I had forgotten I took. This was my favorite of that bunch, a shot of Betsy’s neice Kelsi at the Chattanooga Aquarium.

Via the power of the camera phone, email, Flicker, Travis, and the general coolness of teh Intarweb, I present: Betsy on vacation in Chapel Hill. Looks like she’s on the way to lunch at Elmo’s Diner. Meanwhile, I’m at home in TN with the new puppy and a bunch of horror films. Let the weekend commence!

Take a look…an amazing snippet of a news piece from the CBC from 1967 about the Hippie movement in Yorkville. Why should you watch this? Because the hippie that is interviewed at the beginning of the piece, Bill, is now better known as William Gibson, one of the founders of the cyberpunk movement of sci-fi and the writer of the book after which this blog is named.

Really a great window into the world of 1967, but it is incredible to look at that 19 year old and see and hear in him the author that would come to be.

There’s a new wordpress plugin called Structured Blogging that I’m checking out, and that might be interesting to a few of you out there (esp. the librarians). The basic concept is explained on the site Structured Blogging…here’s an excerpt:

Using structured blogging means it’s easy to create, edit, and maintain these different kinds of posts. In fact, for most purposes, structured blogging won’t really seem like a big deal at all – it’s just another edit form on your blog. The difference is that the structure will let you add specific styles to each type, add links and pictures for reviews, and so on.

Once structured blogging is in place, you can start building applications on top of it. Because it’s an XML format and embedded in both the HTML blog and the syndicated feed, applications can run in web browsers (like a firefox plugin for comparison shopping which reads product reviews); aggregators (like an aggregator that adds your friend’s calendar entries to your datebook); or web services (like a feed for everyone who’s attending the same conference as you).

So, effectively, it’s a way of wrapping XML Metadata around the content of blog posts in specific ways that relate to the content of the posts. Review posts will have fields that are common to reviews, and can then be manipulated in specific ways by aggregators/datamining that wouldn’t be possible previously. It’s a really interesting idea, and I’d been searching for ways to incorporate something like this in my blog. Rather than having a “currently reading” sidebar, including my current reads inline with the rest of the blog, thus maintaining the calendar of my reading for myself, and putting it into the metadata of my blog for future perusal.

I’m gonna try a “Review” post next just to see what it looks like, but this could be a great, great tool for specific types of blogs (Jackson has been doing a series of reviews on his blog…this would be perfect for that).