What's New and Points of Interest at the Moonspeaker. http://www.moonspeaker.ca/ 2010-07-12: My ambition is to make sure the website is updated regularly as opposed to giant globs over the next year or so. Let's see how it goes! http://www.moonspeaker.ca/ 2009-04-19: Way back in 2004, one more in a long string of annual undergraduate archaeology conferences was held at the University of Calgary. Some conference topics are more interesting than others, but this one was designed as a follow up on a conference that generated one of the most cited proceeding volumes in the conference's history. The original conference was held in 1989, and its title was "The Archaeology of Gender." http://www.moonspeaker.ca/Amazons/Essays/genderedtimeinthearkyrecord.html 2009-01-11: The currently active project in 'Found Subjects.' There have been a number of annotated versions of 'Alice in Wonderland', of which Martin Gardner's is an acknowledged classic. However, classic as it is, it follows an approach that missed out on discussions of all sorts of interesting things, by necessity. http://www.moonspeaker.ca/FoundSubjects/AliceBooks/aaw1.html 2009-01-11: The first part of this essay discussed advertising and argued that it has converged with propaganda to become a type of anti-information. Advertising is not the only medium to have passed through this type of convergence; newspapers that were not necessarily conceived specifically as propaganda instruments have been on the convergence path at least as long as advertising has. The convergence stretches beyond the model of consent manufacture developed and successfully applied by Noam Chomsky and Edward S. Herman, because newspapers have effectively been colonized, and are now being overrun, by advertising. http://www.moonspeaker.ca/Amazons/Essays/forheavenssake2.html 2008-11-16: I saw a video podcast recently that made reference to a book all about 'information overload' that evidently had quite a discussion of advertising and ad pollution. The quote from the book referred to ads as a type of 'information smog.' If the author's point is that advertising is not information, then we may not be so far apart. My position is that advertising is fundamentally anti-information. In other words, advertising is one of the dubious technological gifts of the second world war; it is propaganda. http://www.moonspeaker.ca/Amazons/Essays/forheavenssake.html 2008-11-16: If you've been following the Moonspeaker at all over the past few years, thank you for all your support. I realize it took a horribly long time for things to go back into update mode. Real life is proving a bit more conducive to writing, and my ambition is to update every week. In the meantime, to make life a bit easier, I have added an RSS feed to announce updates by. http://www.moonspeaker.ca/