Flutterby™! : Ashcroft assault

Ashcroft assault

2004-04-08 16:22:37.075926+00 by Dan Lyke 1 comments

This morning Daze had a rundown of weblog coverage of the coming Ashcroft war on porn after linking to a Baltimore Sun article on the Justice Department spending copious dollars trying to prosecute "obscenity" on Tuesday. Today Debra mentions it, and suggests that everyone read The Government Versus Erotica: The Seige of Adam & Eve(previously mentioned on Flutterby), advice that I second.

But at least as insidious, Cobb had a link to The Strange Case of the Hanover High Shocker, in which a high school principal attempts to edit the memories to be stored in a yearbook.

comments in ascending chronological order (reverse):

#Comment Re: made: 2004-04-08 16:32:36.89912+00 by: Dan Lyke

I was moved to write something in Cobb's comments:

A few years ago I ran across Classmates.com, and that took me back to the high school yearbook.

I'm not sure if there was anything back then worth remembering, but I sure would have preferred to have a document which looked at how we really were, rather than some glossy attempt to cast us in the same smiling light that every other stupid yearbook has.

My girlfriend/partner recently asked her dad if he had any pictures of when she had braces on her legs. He said "I don't think we wanted to remember those times". We recently went through hundreds of slides, and found a lot of memories, but because of that subconscious editing, a lot of the memories she was looking to explore weren't there.

Make the yearbook a record of what was, not an attempt to stuff faces into a generic layout that will have no meaning in two decades. Give those four years some value, otherwise we may as well just publish a single yearbook for everybody that we can sell in Wal*Mart whenever people get to feeling nostalgic.