The Salt Marsh in Early Autumn

Friday, November 25, 2011

Puppies or Publish or Perish


I’m amazed after less than a week of blogging how many people have read this blog, how many have troubled to write to me, and who you are.

Jimmy my smallest pet gets the most mail. While this blog is not a democracy, I’m going to reward all you fans of my 10-pound friend with another photo of him.



The article that’s stirred the most response was about police power, coming out of the Davis OWS demonstration. One especially thoughtful email came from a friend of mine who’s married to a cop.

People in Europe and especially in Russia are reading this blog, maybe the latter because I’ve mentioned RT, the fascinating Russian TV network that is available for free even here in rural Maine. It takes looking around to locate it, but it’s worth it – yesterday’s programming included provocative interviews with Frances Fox Piven and Vandana Shiva, among others.

The largest block of people came to this blog from a wonderful world-wide coterie of people who, like me, live with the chronic neuromuscular disease, myasthenia gravis.

I’m not going to disappoint the MG people with endless posts about geese and pups – I have a number of articles in the works about myasthenia, living with chronic illness in the midst of the health care debate, err, that’s “debate,” and a number of other health-related topics.

Also coming is some discussion about the moving target of ownership – patents and copyrights - in our fungible digital age (see the Creative Commons License at the bottom of this page). Who owns what is a long-standing concern of mine, dating from my second book, which was about the ownership of life. I co-wrote it with Hope Shand; Bill McKibbon wrote the introduction.

And for that possible majority of you who endure my screed only for pictures of Jimmy, here’s another one taken as he recovered from playing out on the snow: