“Basically, if Tumblr were a city of 42 million,” Ms. Bennett said, referring to the number of Tumblr blogs that exist, “I’m trying to figure out how we cover the ideas, themes and people who live in it.”

Journalists covering online communities – a novel idea.

She thought about it for a minute and then told me a remarkable story about her relationship with technology during the last 40 years living up the mountain a bit east of where we stood. She did not exactly answer my question, but made a point nonetheless.

“I pretty much stayed on the mountain. There are no phone lines. There is no electricity,” she said. “I have my iPhone and I can get 3G and I can get what I want and I have a little solar panel and propane and candles. I’ve been off the grid forever. Now, I have the small solar panel and I can turn on the light and charge my cell phone. I’m not used to it. My daughter tells me, ‘You can plug things in!’ And I say, ‘I don’t have anything to plug in.’ Blow out the lights, not turn out the lights, is my thing.”

Her boss, the chef Michael Jones, filled in the rest of Liz’s story on his blog (punctuation all his). “Liz lives in a trailer on the mountain with no power and no water…two horses, a goat and two dogs. Cats don’t count. She carries water in plastic buckets to the critters….and to her own self,” he wrote. “She pays child support to a scumbag in Missouri or one of those other M states or square states…..Her daughter that I know is an honor student at Davis…….Because she has no power or water, Liz hangs with us after working her 10 hr shift at The Store. We are her TV.”

I’ve ridden my bike out past Cachagua Road and I can attest to the beauty and isolation of the area. It was very near Jamesburg that, climbing a long hill, I passed a man in a cowboy hat and boots, his back to me, urinating. The two cyclists coming down the hill had a much better view and the man made no attempt to stand behind cover.

This particular excerpt reminds me of the photos I’ve seen and the stories I’ve heard about my mother-in-law’s family when they lived in the mountains above Big Sur – a kind of lifestyle that seems almost extinct.

Don Cornelius checked himself out, it would appear.

See him here — doin’ it to death — with Mary Wilson in the Soul Train line dance.

(via marginal revolution)

Carole Corlew.

She was skinny, quick-witted, disarmingly unprofessional, alternating between stand-up patter, bardic intonations, and the hypnotic emotional sway of a chanteuse, and she was sexy in an androgynous way I hadn’t encountered before. The elements cohered convincingly; she seemed both entirely new and somehow long-anticipated. For me at nineteen, the show was an epiphany.

Luc Sante on Patti Smith.

Springtime 1976, I was living in the cinderblock building on the glorified median strip there where they split Highway 13, and one day I went over to this one girl’s apartment, she lived right by the guy who dealt me speed, and she said, “Hey, you know who you remind me of? You remind me of Patti Smith!”

Gave her a possum grin I’m still grinning.

Related to stuff we’re talking about.

It’s a Girl! is a documentary about the systematic killing and suppression of girls in South Asia and around the world.

In India, China and many other parts of the world today, girls are killed, aborted and abandoned simply because they are girls. The United Nations estimates as many as 200 million girls are missing in the world today because of this so-called “gendercide”.

Girls who survive infancy are often subject to neglect, and many grow up to face extreme violence and even death at the hands of their own husbands or other family members.

The war against girls is rooted in centuries-old tradition and sustained by deeply ingrained cultural dynamics which, in combination with government policies, accelerate the elimination of girls.

Speechless.

(via kottke)

They looked so young, the four college students who sat down and ordered coffee at the Woolworth’s lunch counter in Greensboro, N.C., on Feb. 1, 1960.

Legal challenges and demonstrations were cracking the foundations of segregation, but a black person still couldn’t sit down and eat a hamburger or a piece of pie in a store that was all too willing to take his money for a tube of toothpaste.

Those four freshmen at North Carolina A&T College — Joseph McNeil, Franklin McCain, Ezell Blair Jr. and David Richmond — sat until the store closed, but they still didn’t get their coffee.

But that day helped spark other sit-in protests — led by young people like themselves — that spread throughout the South in 1960, energizing the civil rights movement. And the Greensboro Woolworth desegregated its lunch counter later that year.

It wasn’t the first time that food, or the lack thereof, figured large in the movement.