| Clearing the Browser Tabs – The Linkless Post Monday Edition Posted: 12 Sep 2011 03:10 AM PDT For the first time since I started the Clearing the Browser Tabs posts, I find myself bereft of tidbits to pass along. I admit, once I wrote my two 9/11 posts yesterday, I was pretty much finished with the whole notion of reading the internet for blogging purposes. So…what to do? Hey, I know! How about I do a post, Larry King-style? You remember those columns he mailed in for years made up of bullet-point thoughts like “Say what you will about Dudley Do-Right, but he sure knew how to pick a Horse”. Okay, I won’t do anything like that, but I’ve had a few thoughts that I haven’t turned into blog posts, so let me pull them out of the place where I keep such things and share a few with you. Perhaps, if you like posts like this, I might write one once a month. I’ll leave that to you. And now, links random thoughts! - I’m surprised that Apple hasn’t bundled five or six similarly-themed apps into an “App Pack”. I figure they could sell each bundle for 8$-10$ and do quite well. I’d seriously consider a Productivity Pack, a Podcaster Pack, a Blogger Pack, a Conquer the World Game Pack, or a Zombie Pack.
- The more I learn about social media, the more I’ve come to realize that 1) the biggest problem for companies (and political candidates/parties) that want to do good social media campaigns is fear of the unknown, and 2) most companies (again, this includes political candidates and parties) look in entirely the wrong places for their social media people.
- I am so very excited for hockey season to begin.
- You can’t make everyone happy. No one can. You can, however, make the right people happy. The trick is to find out who those right people are in your life.
- A few underrated movies: Big Trouble in Little China, We Were Soldiers, Major League.
- Young people gravitate toward socialism for two reasons: 1) they haven’t seen enough of life to understand how human nature works, and/or 2) they believe they’ll be one of the people redistributing all that wealth. No one grows up wanting to be just another cog in the socialist utopia machine.
- Autumn is the very best season of all. It has the three best holidays (Hallowe’en, Thanksgiving, and Christmas) and the best sports seasons on television (football and hockey). There’s also a certain “pop” to the world when that first bit of fall crispness hits the air. It’s as if all of nature rushes to act before winter’s slumber settles in.
         
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| Clearing the Browser Tabs – Ten Years Later and I Still Will Not Submit, 9/11 Sunday Edition Posted: 11 Sep 2011 12:31 PM PDT Lan Astaslem, in Arabic, means “I will not submit”. Michelle Malkin has adopted it as a motto for how she lives her life as a citizen of the greatest nation history has ever known. I believe I’ll adopt it myself. I rarely tell my story of 9/11, not because it’s traumatic but because I believe it is trivial. There are thousands of stories of heroism from that day a decade ago (and I link to quite a few of them farther down in this post) and mine is not one of them. I did, however, share some of what happened to me and those around me on September 11, 2001 in the latest episode of Right this Way, recorded to commemorate the day. I do want you to listen to the podcast because the stories my friends Wendy, Kimberly, Andrew, and Ben tell are important, I think, and because I talk a bit about an entire group of people forgotten at the many ceremonies to honor our deserving first responders — the emergency dispatchers of 9/11. I won’t recount what I said here, mostly because it’s a very hard thing for me to discuss and I do it as little as possible, but please listen to that bit of the podcast (toward the end of the first segment) and do what you can to thank those people who sit behind the microphones and bleed a little bit every day inside to keep you and yours safe. Mark Steyn has written what I consider the definitive column on the tenth anniversary of 9/11. It inspired my post on the comparisons to the Tet Offensive earlier today and it may inspire you to commemorate today differently from here on out. Here is his final paragraph. And so we commemorate an act of war as a "tragic event," and we retreat to equivocation, cultural self-loathing, and utterly fraudulent misrepresentation about the events of the day. In the weeks after 9/11, Americans were enjoined to ask, "Why do they hate us?" A better question is: "Why do they despise us?" And the quickest way to figure out the answer is to visit the Peace Quilt and the Wish Tree, the Crescent of Embrace and the Hole of Bureaucratic Inertia.
We have gone wrong when a touching rendition of “America the Beautiful” by a talented Presidential candidate is met with faux outrage and mocking derision. The mockers do not believe in the historical fact that America is and has always been exceptional among all nations. September 11 is their day to push that meme as far into our heads as they can because they desperately need us to believe that we are not special, that we are not the inheritors of a unique tradition, and that we are a massive force for good and right in the world. They, like the Islamists, want us to submit. I, for one, will not. Lan Astaslem. And now, more links from around the blogosphere. - We need a lot more of this: “Newly Published Audio Provides Real-Time View of 9/11 Attacks” (via memeorandum). Also, ABC News posted its live video coverage of 9/11 as it happened, in hour-long blocks. It is hard but necessary viewing.
- I recommend you listen to these three speeches from various memorial ceremonies: President George W. Bush from Shanksville, PA, President Bill Clinton from Shanksville, PA, Vice President Joe Biden from the Pentagon.
- Even after all these years, we learn new stories of heroism. I had not heard of Lt. Heather Penney before today, but I do not believe I’ll forget her now that I have.
- The 9/11 attack was visible from space, and one American astronaut got a picture.
- See-Dubya came back from a three-year blogging hiatus to tell us about a local 7-11 store with a 9/11 connection. If his post makes you a bit irate, that’s good. Our government, as he points out, has done nothing at all to prevent illegal immigration, fraud, and Islamism from coming together again.
- Lance Briggs, linebacker for the Chicago Bears, may well be a big jerk but this week he did the right thing with courage and conviction and got his league to do the same.
- For some, 9/11 won’t ever be anything but a means to grab more political power.
- Ten years ago, Stacy McCain wrote about a big drug story that no one remembers today and Toby Harnden, US Editor of the Daily Telegraph, began a journey that led to his becoming an American citizen. On the other hand, the President proclaimed that today is National Grandparents Day, so we can see just how much the world changed for him.
- Project 2996 remembrances: Kui Fai Kwok, son of immigrants who worked for Cantor Fitzgerald; Robin Kaplan, mother and passenger aboard American Airlines Flight 11, Sharon Carver, civilian Army accountant at the Pentagon and resident of my home town.
- I believe Wendy Sullivan has the best outlook on the day I’ve seen from around the blogosphere. Not all of us can be soldiers or leaders, but all of us can remember the story and teach it to the generations that come after us so that none of us ever forget what was done ten years ago today.
Finally, here are the posts I’ve written to commemorate 9/11 since I started The Sundries Shack in 2004.
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