Blogipity

TortoiseSVN

I beleive I’ve only covered half of City Search’s list of 10 Things to Do in Columbus Before You Die. Maybe I’ll hit the rest when I’m home over the Winter holidays.

Eric Meyer posted a nice list of Ten Things To Do In Cleveland Before You’re Dead last week. Being a Columbus native, I had to give Cleveland an obligatory jab.

The post reminded me of a few nice quotes about Columbus. Actually, they’re not nice at all, since they make fun of Ohio’s capitol city.

Anyway, here are a some that I could track down on the web.

• In chapter9 of Vineland by Thomas Pynchon. (Summarized by John Diebold and Michael Goodwin)
  

  It seems that Wayvone and the Mafia try to hire her to put the deadly, delayed-action Vibrating Palm ninja move on Vond (who is threatening their drug dealing), but despite her hatred of Vond for seducing and subverting Frenesi, DL is afraid of getting involved with the Mafia. She flees to Columbus, Ohio, where she tries to hide in the Clark Kent guise of a mild-mannered file clerk.

• One from Columbus native James Thurber.
  

  Nobody from Columbus has ever made a first-rate wanderer in the Conradean tradition. Some of them have been fairly good at disappearing for a few days to turn up in a hotel in Louisville with a bad headache and no recollection of how they got there, but they always scurry back.

• Now for a longer, more detailed view of my birthplace. Bill Roorbach, who may or may not like Columbus, notes in his piece, Scioto Blues, that:
  

  If you move to Columbus, Ohio, from Farmington, Maine (as I did three years ago to take a job at Ohio State), you will not be impressed by the landscape. It’s flat there–as I write I’m back in Maine, escaped from Ohio for a third summer straight–and the prairie rivers move sluggish and brown. In Maine you pick out the height of flood on, say, the Sandy River by the damage to tree trunks and the spookily exact plane made by ice and roaring current tearing off the lowest branches of riverside trees. In Columbus you pick out the height of flood on the Olentangy or Scioto Rivers by the consistent plane attained by 10,000 pieces of garbage, mostly plastic bags, caught in tree branches…

  I mean, the river is a junkfest.

  That’s the Olentangy before it gets to campus, and before it gets to the large skyscraper downtown of Columbus. And Columbus is big–bigger than you think, an Emerald City that pops up on the prairie. It’s the biggest city in Ohio, population about 1.25 million inside the Greater Columbus loop of 1-270. The city’s official slogan should be It’s Not That Bad, since that’s what people tell you, over and over. I think the actual civic slogan is More Than You Dreamed…

  On the northeast bank of the river is Blowjob Park, as one of my students called it in a paper, which I found because it is at the very end of the bike path. The path ends at a parking lot where lonely and harmless-looking men sit in cars gazing at each other and waiting for liaisons. The city sometimes arrests these men in courageless raids, not a homophobic act, says a spokesperson, for the men are said not to be gay exactly, but married guys looking for action of any kind, loitering and littering and certainly dangerous so close to the impound lot and the defunct sewage-treatment plant.

Molecular Cancer 2004, 3:23 contains a nice article by Paul J. Chiao and Christian Schmidt, Open Access gains attention in scholarly communication, outlining some of the many benefits of Open Acces to Scholarly Communication. The authors conclude that:

Open Access has following broad benefits for science and the general public:

• All articles become freely and universally accessible online; so an author’s work
  can be read by anyone at no cost.
• The authors hold copyright for their work and grant anyone the right to
  reproduce and disseminate the article, provided that it is correctly cited.
• A copy of the full text of each Open Access article is permanently archived in an
  online repository separate from the journal, such as PubMed Central, the US
  National Library of Medicine’s full-text repository of life science literature, the
  repositories at the University of Potsdam in Germany, at INIST in France and in
  e-Depot, the National Library of the Netherlands’ digital archive of all electronic
  publications.
• Authors are assured that their work is disseminated to the widest possible
  audience. This is accentuated by the authors being free to reproduce and
  distribute their work, for example by placing it on their institution’s website. It
  has been suggested that free online articles are more highly cited because of
  their easier availability.
• The information available to researchers will not be limited by their library’s
  budget, and the widespread availability of articles will enhance literature
  searching.
• The results of publicly funded research will be accessible to all interested
  readers and not just those with access to a library with a subscription. As such,
  Open Access could help to increase public interest in, and support of, research.
  Please note that this public accessibility may become a legal requirement in the
  USA if the proposed Public Access to Science Act is made law
• A country’s economy will not influence its scientists’ ability to access articles
  because resource-poor countries (and institutions) will be able to read the same
  material as wealthier ones, although creating access to the internet is another
  matter.

Amy Gahran is putting out a series titled, Blogging Style: The Basic Posting Formats.