As a buzurg, i.e., someone who has been around in the infancy of what is now know generically as "blogging" - my first "post" was over at Diaryland, on 2001-10-10 @ 18:37; Blogger then was still an independent startup in beta; I also have a year's worth of Dairyland archives on Blogger but I think it is best not to release such self-conscious, mostly angst-y, yet much more hopeful jottings/droppings upon the world - I was wondering if I should throw my hat into the ring for Zigzackly's contest for the first Indian blogger?

This, however, brings up a fundamental question for Zigzackly: how to decide if something in the dark ages is a "blog"? Does it have to be paginated, and have the dated log format popularized by Blogger? What if someone then, instead of bothering to mimic a dairy, simply kept a webpage based on themes (or what we now know as tags)? Will it qualify as a blog?

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As a skeptic, I am doubtful of fads & revolutions, including this blogging revolution (while I admit on this issue, my views are more tempered and qualified) that seem to periodically show up, mainly because for me the point hinges on quality. And on that measure, most blogs, including this one, are makeshift at best. This is what I was trying to discuss with a very literate friend - he sees little or no value in reading blogs compared to reading a book - a few weeks ago.

I proposed to him that he might see the value of blogs if he viewed them a collective ongoing gossipy conversation. While blogs may or perhaps don't care to discuss ideas at the depth as a book does or can (A statistical aside: what is the average length/word count of a blog post? I suspect it is around 200-500 words, i.e., roughly half a typed page), they are neverthless very useful in the hyper textual sense, i.e., they enable us to discover and form mental maps; mental maps that can be thought of as snapshots of the collective golbal mind. Of course, it did help that we now have some very superlative literary blogs (eg: The Middle Stage) to which I was able to point him to to examine their value for himself. Since he wants morph into a writer, I also told him that yakking imperfectly on a blog is as good as asking a circle of semi-strangers (who usually become friends) to read and critique his work.

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Blog celebrity, and the correspondih envy, is another recent (in most part, main stream media generated) odious phenomenon - I am all for serious hobbyists for whom play remains play. And thanks to programs such as Google's Ad-sense, some of these celebrity bloggers can now make a living off their blogging. Aside: I for one prefer to call is Ad-Nonsense; I semi-loathe blogs that feature this brand of textual clutter floating around, and like Doc. Sarvis in Edward Abbey's "The Monkey Wrench Gang", I feel like taking a blowtorch to them - maybe this would be a worthy Firefox add-in; one that serves up webpages sans Ad-nonsense.

Why you ask? I feel such commercial concerns take away from the feeling of community (even though Wendelly Berry would mock me for using the word community to refer to 'people' so geographically dispersed) that can be engendered by blogs. I don't mind people receiving financial benefits if they produce something that other people find value in but I rather not see them getting these benifits from an faceless corporation. So what kind of reward model do I want to see in place? That, kind reader, is a topic for another rambling post :)

happy with our latest arms supplier, Israel, for "effing" up in Lebanon with the same advanced "battle-tested" airforce systems they had sold us for a couple of billion dollars, if this Reuters analysis on the Israeli arms market is true. To quote:

"We are talking about the holy grail of future combat, and Israel did a great job of building sophisticated, world-leading systems based on the understanding they were born in battle," said Robert Hewson, editor of Jane's Air-Launched Weapons. "This is certainly going to make people question the salesmen a bit more, because it appears that in the hour of need this stuff is not working as advertised," he said.

Barbara Opall-Rome of the Defense News journal predicted upsets to Israel's major export deals, including a recent multibillion-dollar package ordered by its top client, India. She described Israel as one of a club of militarily advanced countries whose air forces take pride of place in war planning. "Air power enthusiasts will be licking their wounds and they will surely have to go back and revise their arguments," she said. "I'm sure there will be a lot more humility now."

Does Israel, like the retail stores, have a returns policy? Oy Ehud et al., pliss be taking all of these weapons-shemapons back, and be sending some of the agro technology you got to Vidharbha.

Chickpea, in her latest post, points to this CNN story of four MIT kids driving an old jalopy from London to Ulaan Baatar, Mongolia (just gotta to love a place that has a name like that). This actually bought back memomries of one of my all time heros, Richard Feynman's Tuvan saga.

As the story, told in Ralph Leighton's book "Tuva or Bust" goes, Feynman who was an avid stamp collector, had colleceted stamps from in Tuva for their odd ballness; they came in odd shapes (triangles, diamonds, etc.) showing odd scenes (men on camels racing trains, men on horseback hunting with airplanes above them, etc.). In 1977, at a dinner Feynman asked, "Whatever happened to Tannu Tuva?" And when they looked Tuva up in the atlas, they saw that the capital was named Kyzyl. They decided that any place with a name like that must be interesting; Kyzyl- a place without a vowel in it. They soon discovered that a monument near Kyzyl claimed to be the center of Asia, and Tuvan throat singing.

And being the madcaps they were, they decided that they had to go and check out Kyzyl for themselves. The only hitch: Kyzyl was then inside Soviet Union, and those comrades weren't going to allow two madcap American scientists to just take a walkabout in their backyard, even if one of them had already won the Nobel Prize for Physics. By the time the Soviet paperwork came through, Feynman had succumbed to stomach cancer, and Leighton had to go on the trip by himself.

While my Tuvan oddesy is still very much incomplete - a day will come when I will post here from Kyzyl - I was very, very happy when I attended a workshop as well as a concert on throat singing, even if it was the Tuvan cousin, the Mongolian variety, few years ago at the Silkroad Festival in Washington DC (Attention Chicagoians: Silkroad is coming to your city in 2006!). For those of you who must hear throat singing, do watch the wonderful film Genghis Blues. Meanwhile here are some samples for you to check out:

Rekha Alash Artyy Saiyr Feynman Drumming over Throat Singing

Also before you even think of knocking this music, remember it is damn hard!