blogging YOU

Elected officials launch the first Cultural Caucus in the Massachusetts Legislature to harness the assets of Massachusetts $4 billion cultural sector and help the states economy recover from recession. Anita Walker of the Massachusetts Cultural Council talks to Rep. John Keenan of Salem, along with Caucus Co-Chairs Senator Sonia Chang-Díaz of Boston and Rep. Smitty Pignatelli of Lenox.

The McGuffey Readers, published between 1836 and 1960, sold 122 million copies, ranking it near the top for any book ever published. Since 1961 it is said they sell at a rate of some 30,000 copies per year.

McGuffey, William Holmes, 1800-1873 is credited with the following quotation:

“The christian religion, is the religion of our country. From it are derived our prevalent notions of the character of God, the great moral governor of the universe. On its doctrines are founded the peculiarities of our free institutions.”

It is no surprise, then, that the early volumes were full of Calvinist sentiments, that of replacing civil law with religious law, the tendency of a significant voting block today¹.

Nonetheless, the book is well done and instructive, and the Calvinist tendencies disappeared from later volumes.

View McGuffey’s Primer online, a real delight!

¹ For more information, read Republican Gomorrah from Nation Books.

We are using MySQL, help save it

Please copy and paste either the text and link above, or the button image and link, into your own blog and social networks.

Here’s a snip from the link, written by Michael “Monty” Widenius, the creator of MySQL. Please read the whole story on his blog (i.e., the link above):

“I have spent the last 27 years creating and working on MySQL and I hope, together with my team of MySQL core developers, to work on it for many more years.

“Oracle is trying to buy Sun, and since Sun bought MySQL last year, Oracle would then own MySQL. With your support, there is a good chance that the EC (from which Oracle needs approval) could prevent this from happening or demand Oracle to change the terms for MySQL or give other guarantees to the users. Without your support, it might not. The EC is our last big hope now because the US government approved the deal while Europe is still worried about the effects.

“Instead of just working out this with the EC and agree on appropriate remedies to correct the situation, Oracle has instead contacted hundreds of their big customers and asked them to write to the EC and require unconditional acceptance of the deal. According to what I been told, Oracle has promised to the customers, among other things, that “they will put more money into MySQL development than what Sun did” and that “if they would ever abandon MYSQL, a fork will appear and take care of things”.

“However just putting money into development is not proof that anything useful will ever be delivered or that MySQL will continue to be a competitive force in the market as it’s now.”

Please distribute widely. This could have big implications for the future of the WWW.