Essay Jukebox

Boingboing's current guestblogger Paul Spinrad is currently Projects Editor for MAKE magazine and the author of The VJ Book and The Re/Search Guide to Bodily Fluids. He lives in San Francisco.

I have just a few days left of guestblogging and more ideas than I can fit, so here's a list of some. For all of them, I'm thinking super-short here, just a few paragraphs each, outlining the "and here's why…" part. If you want to read any of these, please post in the Comments, and I'll write them up. Just one reader's expression of interest is enough to put me to work, and if no one cares, I'll pick myself.

A) What is a crackpot?

B) My cynical Public Service Announcement campaign idea to get more people to major in Science and Engineering.

C) Was Jesus a comedian?

D) Guys need a coming-of-age ritual that has some teeth, like exist in other cultures.

E) We need a communications language standard for networked devices, and why this is more of a social/political problem than a technical problem.

F) Control vs. Love: breadth-first, top-down vs. depth-first, bottom up search strategies that work in opposition.

G) Some countries "get" rock 'n' roll better than others.

H) Poetry will become popular again.

I) "Method" acting changed the role of celebrity in all cultural disciplines, starting in the late 1940's.

J) The 6th-8th Century Iconoclast Controversy in Eastern Europe has fantastic dramatic potential.

K) Where there is vice, there is connoisseurship.

L) Laughter and crying serve to carve new cognitive pathways in a hurry.

M) Styles of dress follow people's differing views of human perfectability.