"It is not the critic who counts: not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles or where the doer of deeds could have done better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly, who errs and comes up short again and again, because there is no effort without error or shortcoming, but who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions, who spends himself for a worthy cause; who, at the best, knows, in the end, the triumph of high achievement, and who, at the worst, if he fails, at least he fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who knew neither victory nor defeat."

Teddy Roosevelt - "Citizenship in a Republic"
April 23, 1910, Sorbonne, Paris.

Mike Atherton, Ex-England Cricket Captain, used to carry this in his wallet, to remind him what was most important.

Here's a little more background on how Albrecht Durer came to draw the Rhino...

In 1515, Sultan Muzafar II of Gujarat, in Western India sent a gift of a rhinoceros to King Emmanuel of Portugal. The king quickly decided he was not in need of the rhinoceros and keeping in mind the old adage, "it is better to give than receive", he shipped the unusual gift by boat to Pope Leo X. As luck would have it the boat sank, the rhino drowned, and washed up on shore. A passing German tourist, fascinated with the rhinoceros, made a sketch of the waterlogged and recently deceased beast and sent it along to his friend, Albrecht Durer.

Durer, is the German Renaissance's genius draftsman whose skill many believe, is only second to Leonardo's. Although he had never seen a rhinoceros (dead or alive) he developed his masterful image from the sketch and a description that had been sent to him from Lisbon. The original drawing survives in the British Museum, but that one-of-a-kind drawing is not what makes the story interesting. From the drawing Durer made a woodcut from which multiple prints of the unusual animal could be produced--no one knows for sure how many prints, but many. So Durer's image of the rhinoceros spread across Europe aided greatly by the speed and quality of the Gutenberg press. Durer's rhino was a hit and to a certain extent a pop icon!

Had Durer's masterpiece been made before the advent of Gutenberg's press and inexpensive mass produced paper, it might have hung in some nobleman's castle and had a limited audience. If it had been made a hundred years later it would have been just one of many massed produced images.

(This from Fred Ayer Associates Inc., Portland, Maine, who uses it as his logo... must be a good bloke)

As a quick addendum to the last post (hear that bugle playing in the background?).

Is the blog just a cheap and cathartic way of expressing yourself? A way to save money on psychiatric fees? A place to self express and satisfy your cravings (well, you Americans, anyway) to be heard talking, talking, talking....

In Blogdom, can anyone hear you scream?

So to get inspired about what I might post into the ether, I have been reading the most recent blog postings on the Blogger homepage.

And what a sad and sorry mix of crappy adolescent angst and techie mumbo-jumbo they are. I guess nobody much reads them except one's school-friends or web-mates but, boy, is there ever a low standard of just about everything - grammar, spelling, lack of a central idea or reason for communication, message etc. In fact, the only thing that people seem to spend some real time and attention on is the visual look & feel of their site. Strange, but perhaps not unexpected from the MTV generation.

Perhaps (again) it's just that I'm not attuned to the semiotics (pretentious university word!) of the medium, and maybe the whole language needs to include better recognition by myself on the value of the style, rather than harping on the lack of substance?

Maybe the whole way of reading on the web / in a blog is changing or indeed changed, and I'm still back in the frightened past, where paper was a scarce resource and not to be wasted, so you'd better think of somehting intelligent to say, if you're going to shout into posterity. (What if they translated the Rosetta Stone and it turned out to be equivalent to some of the self-indulgent crap that people blog? Then again, maybe that's not a well-made point, since I don't know whether the actual substance of the Rosetta Stone's text was anything monumental. I guess, thought, the Stone's real value was in the same messages being spelled out in different languages - again a "Durer's Rhino" moment - the text ain't half as important as the rest of it all. Thus the Egyptologysts could crack the code of Heiroglyphics).

I've just looked up the British Museum Site - What does the Rosetta Stone say? :

The inscription begins with praise of Ptolemy, and then includes an account of the siege of the city of Lycopolis (a town in the Delta, not identified with certainty), and the good deeds done by the king for the temples. The final part of the text describes the decree's overriding purpose, the establishment of the cult of the king. For example, it stipulates how the priests shall maintain the cult of the king ('...the priests shall pay homage three times a day...'), how the king's shrine is to be set up ('...there shall be set upon the shrine the ten gold crowns of the king...'), and days when certain festivals, such as the king's birthday, shall be celebrated. It ends by saying that it is to be made known that all the men of Egypt should magnify and honour Ptolemy V, and that the text should be set up in hard stone in the three scripts which the Rosetta Stone still bears today (hieroglyphic, Demotic, and Greek

So... are blogs the ultimate democtatic form - a Rosetta Stone for the masses? Would Ptolemy have blogged? You bet your ass he would have! But carving in stone seems to have been a good way of avoiding data loss or corruption.

Stay tuned, whilst I talk myself to death exploring these ideas.