Links
Archives
Sunday, August 22, 2004
SNAPSHOTS FROM HOME
A ***New*** University Diaries Feature UD has forgotten on which site she found it, but she recently printed out for herself someone's list of the elements characteristic of good blogs. Here's one of them: "Personal. I tend to enjoy a blog with a bit of a personality. I want to 'get to know' to a certain degree the person behind the site." UD has already blogged a bit about her setting - a small, hundred year old, self-governing town which is a Nuclear Free Zone and an arboretum, and which sits next door to Bethesda, Maryland, in Montgomery County. Snapshots From Home will try to make this sort of information a regular feature of University Diaries. Criteria for inclusion will be amusement and irrelevance. So, for instance, here's a close-to-home couple of sentences UD read from the review of a book titled The Status Syndrome: How Social Standing Affects Our Health and Longevity in today's New York Times: A numbing arsenal of facts and figures serves to show that it is social rank - and not suspiciously similar-sounding factors like income or education - that makes the crucial difference. There's the study of Oscar winners that found they live four years longer than their co-stars and fellow nominees, and the fact that with each mile along the subway line from downtown Washington to suburban Montgomery County, Md., life expectancy increases by a year and a half. |