The House of *

Howdy! It's a long way from my first glimpse of the Web in the spring of '94 (when it was still a list of text-mostly sites at CERN) to here, my own actual home page! If there's anything the Nineties can feel proud of, it's the creation of this amazing tool for self-expression.

As you may have noticed, this is isn't quite as visually impressive as Rebecca's page. There are several reasons for this-she beats the pants off me when it comes to HTML, and it's going to be her future career, so her home page must demonstrate her talents. I, on the other hand, am a librarian, and so will content myself with organizing this by the good ol' Dewey Decimal System, still the world's most widely used classification system.

• 000s("Zero hundreds")-Generalities

  
  This classification section includes works about knowledge in general, including my field, library and information science. As of July 30th, 1998, I am an alumni of the Simmons College Graduate School of Library and Information Science. BANZAI! I can only compare the experience of going to grad school while holding down a full-time job to chewing on a jumbo roll of tin foil, except without the fresh minty aftertaste.

  One night (well, morning, actually) in the spring of '96, I was writing my term paper for my Organization of Knowledge in Libraries class (read: Cataloging 101). Grappling with the problems of the Library of Congress Subject Headings for Chinese history, I was struck by a blazing library science revelation. That revelation became the Twiddy Library Stratification System, revealed here for the first time to the general public.

  LIS links:

  • American Library Association

  • Special Libraries Association

  • Society of Competitive Intelligence Professionals

    and some people with who I disagree most strenuously:

  • The Family Friendly Libraries Association The world is not "family friendly." Libraries must reflect the world.
  
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• 100s-Philosophy

  
  "Ask Mr. Philosophy Person" has been shelved. I am working-really I am, got bytes on disk and everything-on a brief overview of all the various shelves, cupboards, nooks and crannies of philosophy which I will post here as kind of a guide to what I'm talking about, thus making the actual philosophical pieces more understandable. In the meantime, here's a good link: The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy.

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• 200s-Religion

  
  This, for me, is the most important classification section. I am a Christian, specifically a member of the United Methodist Church. I am a Christian because I feel it is the hypothesis which best explains all I know of humanity and the world. That's the Reader's Digest explanation. In the future, this space will, like the 100s, contain pieces elaborating my thoughts on this and other issues.
  In the meantime:

  The United Methodist Bulletin Board A gathering place for passionate people of all types. I don't agree with all the posters, but I feel that one of the UMC's strengths is that we have members ranging from near-Unitarian to near-KJV Free Will Baptist, all sharing their views and working to give food to the hungry, drink to the thirsty, hospitality to the stranger, clothes to the naked, care to the sick and visits to the imprisoned (ref Matthew 25:34-40). Unfortunately, it's not entirely clear if it will remain that way.

  The Christian ThinkTank Not a think tank in the same sense as the Rand Corporation, but rather one person looking at Christianity from a philosophical point of view. This belongs as much in the 100s as in the 200s. An excellent, thought-provoking site.

  Two views I disagree with:

  
  
  • Scriptural inerrancy, and
    
  • Scriptural overerrancy

  For Lent of 1998, I transcribed the Book of Jonah. I used the Good News Bible translation. It's got some problems, but I like it. Jonah is my favorite prophet; I have also felt like running away from the Lord when He called me to act. But God pulls us back-sometimes through fish, sometimes through less zoological means.

  A message as we leave the 200s: "I am the Lord, and I do not change. And so you, the descendants of Jacob, are not yet *completely* lost." (Malachi 3:6)
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• 300s-Social Sciences

  I don't have any social science links, but I do have a social life (well, kinda). So here are links to people I know:

  Dave Kosak, my junior year roommate, now writes under the nom de plume Fargo for PlanetQuake

  Not so much a home page as a tribute site to Leah Cole This page has been up since 1994, an amazing length of time for the Web.

  Josh Atkins lived with Bec and I in the Allegheny College Writer's House our senior year. His site includes the Freak Home Page, a guide to the culture we and several others established in our years at alleg.edu.
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• 400s-Languages

  Check out the wonders of Esperanto. Esperanto is a good example of the fact that what should work in theory doesn't always work in real life. It's quite an impressive language, and you can in fact get a basic grasp of it in an afternoon, but it's not Necessary.
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• 500s-Pure Science

  Which, in a distinction that would probably not have been made today, is separate from...
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• 600s-Applied Science (technology)

  Glubco.com Worried about civilization collapsing because of the Y2K problem? Make your own backyard heavy weaponry with these free plans from Glubco. Includes a railgun, magnatron, and the "Death Ray Cannon of Doom," which fires a stream of oxygen over a plasma arc with rather incandescent results. The House of * does not recommend under any circumstances that you construct or use any of these devices.
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• 700s-Fine and Decorative Arts

  
  I'll add more on to this one later, but for now we're going to 791: Circuses, Movies and Television.

  Cartoons

  
  Every semester, as the fist of grad school squeezed inexorably around my soft gray brain, I found something to distract me a little, and absorb what minutes of free time I had. My first semester, f'rinstance, it was conspiracies. Spring Semester '98 it was cartoons. The mania subsided shortly before finals, but who am I to deprive you of my findings?

  Daria

  is the best cartoon currently on the air. Daria's a Freak; that's what it comes down to.

  Unfortunately, the nature of Daria fandom is such that the webmasters of the original three major Daria fan sites have quit from disgust, fatigue or both. A good site that absorbed some of the material from Planet Daria and alt.lawndale.com is Outpost Daria.

  South Park

  is good, too. They still haven't quite matched the inspired brilliance of the first broadcast episode ("Cartman Gets an Anal Probe"), but generally the series has maintained a high level of quality that doesn't just depend on fart jokes. At its best, South Park manages to be more stingingly honest that most live-action shows, and the heaping doses of surrealism are frosting on the cake. Also, it really does convey what it's like to be a boy in America today-for good or for ill.
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• 800s-Literature

  
  OK, we finally have one of my stories here. This is a short story I wrote to put in my Electric Christmas Card of 1996, the December after my conspiracy craze (See the 700s, above). There's a disclaimer in the text, but I'll add another right here: despite the fact that some of the characters in this story are real people, the story itself is FICTION. I MADE IT UP. EVERY WORD. I declare right now that it is a parody, and per that case where Jerry Falwell sued Larry Flynt, immune from libel charges.

  A Riticulan Family Christmas

  For my 1998 Electric Christmas Card, I took the heartwarming children's classic "A Charlie Brown Christmas," and recast it using characters from my favorite modern cartoons. "A Charlie Brown Christmas" and the look and feel thereof is the property of Peanuts' creator Charles Schulz and his syndicate and is used only for the purposes of parody. Daria, Zorak, Eric Cartman, Cthulhu, Crow T. Robot, Butthead, Ren, Stimpy, Lisa Simpson, Jem, Optimus Prime, Torg, Princess Leia, Quickdraw McGraw, Mercedes, McDonalds, "In the Hall of the Mountain King", Manimal, The A-Team, Family Ties, Miami Vice, "Groove Is In the Heart" and the Jeffersons are all the copyrighted property of various people, institutions and entities. You know who you are. All are used solely for the purposes of parody.

  David Twiddy's A Charlie Brown Christmas

  I was kinda messed up, back in the fall of '95. Graduating from college, a summer of unemployment, and a new job as a coffee jerk will do that to a person. This very short story, inspired by various habits of Sarah McHattie's cat Nina, demonstrates where my head was at.

  A Cat's Fascination

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• 900s-History and General Geography

  "Whoever is ignorant of what happened before they were born remains always a child"-Marcus Aurelius.

  History, to me, is the soul and heart of humanity, the sum total of the human experience on this earth. As individuals, we understand life through our memories, but our memories are limited. History is the memories of all of us, and can lead us to understanding of ourselves as nations and as a species. Again, I'll get some links up here eventually.
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