Woo hoo! First post!

I can't promise I'm going to update this with any sort of frequency, but it can't hurt to write something up and throw it into the blogosphere. I was just talking with my friend Cougar today about how much information I take in from heterogeneous sources and subsequently incorporate into my world view. The internet in general has been one of those biggest heterogeneous sources, and Wikipedia has become a great source for instant gratification of curiosity.

By writing up this blog I'm hoping to illustrate how the free and open flow of knowledge and information can lead to exciting new viewpoints of the intellectual landscape. The ability to crawl along a web of knowledge like a synthesizing spider is so exciting!

Today I had a pretty tame Wiki experience...I read about the origins of the word "Frak" that is used as an expletive replacement for "fuck" from the show Battlestar Galactica. Apparently the new "re-imagined" series actually took it from the original series. I don't remember hearing it as a kid at all; weird. Anyway, it lead me to learn about Thomas Bowlder, whose name has been made famous for prudishly censoring literature. He created an edition of both Shakespeare and Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire that he considered fit for women and children.

Interesting that women back then needed some jerk to censor their literature for them. I guess that both the dispositions and the intellects of the fairer sex have come a long way since the early nineteenth century. It's also amusing that Shakespeare was censored for kids, considering that the first time I read Romeo and Juliet was when I was in 8th grade English class.

Growing up as I did, with one unusually liberal minded and one unusually conservative parent, I was frequently aware of censorship. Somehow, however, I'm still often surprised by it, just as I am frequently surprised to hear that women still make consistently less in the workplace than their male counterparts. Is it myopic of me to be surprised? I shouldn't be surprised; Lord of the Flies was required reading for me in 8th grade, and yet just a short time (by history's standards) ago it was considered unfit. Still, I'm consistently boggled when confronted with censorship. I don't think that most people are aware of the breadth and ubiquity of it. The American Library Association has a Banned Books Week that it uses to highlight the issues of censorship, and when I checked it out I was amazed at some of the books that are currently being challenged!

Harry Potter is a perennially challenged series. A book about gay penguins is being challenged. Books by Toni Morrison are being challenged. Notably absent this year are Of Mice and Men, The Adventures of Huck Finn, and Catcher in the Rye. I just want to shake these people. How can they think that the world would be better without this literature? How can they think that their children's lives would be better off without these pieces? I posit to you that if someone is truly going to be swayed by a piece of literature, they would do far worse by reading the Bible. How many times in the Old Testament did a man lie with a woman outside of wedlock, or did God tell his people to go forth and commit genocide? At least Steinbeck gave insight into the characters and motivations that led to bad things happening in Mice and Men, whereas in the Bible it's just horrific things happening for no reason.

Wow, this first post turned out to be a lot longer than I intended. I promise in the future to keep them shorter. It's not my place to tell you what to think, and not my intention. What I'd like to do with this blog is just to demonstrate a direction that a mind can end up going in when presented with a nearly infinite fount of knowledge. Have a great day and I'll see you next time the inspiration takes me.