This is a weird time of year. Here in Berkeley it's a gorgeous day, sunny, though chilly. The magnolias are already blooming. It's not spring yet, not even winter. The looming New Year makes a guy think about transitions, the passage of time, new stuff—the usual. The numeral 2005 sounds new—shiny and pristine, just out of the box, wheareas 2004 sounds (already), old, scratched, a little battered, like my camera cellphone (which I bought in 2004). This blog is one of the transitions for the new year. I've started it This is a weird time of year. Here in Berkeley it's a gorgeous day, sunny, though chilly. The magnolias are already blooming. It's not spring yet, not even winter. The looming New Year makes a guy think about transitions, the passage of time, new stuff—the usual. The numeral 2005 sounds new—shiny and pristine, just out of the box, wheareas 2004 sounds (already), old, scratched, a little battered, like my camera cellphone (which I bought in 2004). This blog is one This is a weird time of year. Here in Berkeley it's a gorgeous day, sunny, though chilly. The magnolias are already blooming. It's not spring yet, not even winter. The looming New Year makes a guy think about transitions, the passage of time, new stuff—the usual. The numeral 2005 sounds new—shiny and pristine, just out of the box, wheareas 2004 sounds (already), old, scratched, a little battered, like my camera This is a weird time of year. Here in Berkeley it's a gorgeous day, sunny, though chilly. The magnolias are already blooming. It's not spring yet, not even winter. The looming New Year makes a guy think about transitions, the passage of time, new stuff—the usual. The numeral 2005 sounds new—shiny and pristine, just out of the box, wheareas 2004

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Fog

1:37 PM Monday, July 18, 2005

[Playing tag in the 21st Century]

For those of you unfamiliar with the climate of the Northern California coast, summer is the foggy season. Mark Twain reportedly said that the coldest winter he ever endured was a summer in San Francisco.

Well, the fog is back. Not all day, not every day, but much of the time. Combined with sunsets at 8:30 PM it makes for weird weather and weird moods. Part of the weirdness appears to be the illusion of a loss of creative power. It's not just me--a Flickr buddy recently posted a photo series on the apparent loss of her own creative power.

A consequence of the fogginess, external and internal, as it were, is that I am writing a weblog item which does not fit into any of my declared categories (Gods & Myths, Cafes, Arts, etc.) in the navigation bars.

So where is this going? One problem with fog is that it makes it harder to know where you are going. But I see a vague shape looming out of the fog, and that is the shape of epistemological fog: worry over the difficulty with being able to plug things into convenient categories, as well as a broader philosophical concern over what we know and how we know it.

But if we can know what we know rather than just thinking that we know it, what kind of knowledge is most worth having? (I'll answer that later.)

No, not everything fits into convenient categories, or even inconvenient categories. That's why the gods created tags. No, tags didn't start with Technorati or even html. Nor did they begin with those things you attach to your luggage. Internet gurus refer to folksonomies, tags created by just plain folks. What, then, about tags such as righteous versus iniquitous, tags credited to the single-payer gods of monotheistic cults? I'm tempted to call then theonomies, but tags are tags. And long before monotheism, there were other tags. Does my cat M. know about tags? She acts like she does. If she doesn't think about them she sure feels them (for example full and empty as tags for the cat food bowl).

OK. Now I know what category to use for this foggy weblog entity: "Gods and Myths," of course. Any given tag can be a god to some, a myth to others. And I'm going to use the Technorati tags righteous and iniquitous: if no one else has done that, it's high time to start.

Oh, yeah. What kind of knowledge is most worth having? Back when I was a college student, that was the title of a high-falutin' intercampus conference. An announcement was posted on the main bulletin board of the Student Union, and on that announcement, an unknown genius had scrawled the following unforgettable (inquitous in the eyes of some) quote:

"Carnal knowledge is the kind of knowledge most worth having."

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