Happy Holidays! I had a nice Christmas, and I hope you did as well.

Weather: It's been hoar-frost or sunshine since my last entry -- and a quarter-inch of snow has fallen in between.

Wildlife: The wayward Goose has died by the pond -- I'm debating whether to call fish & wildlife to remove it somehow -- if it was diseased, I don't want the Eagles or Magpies eating it.

Charity Alert: I visited the Hunger Site and their associated pages. It's EASY -- do it yourself!

Media Watch: Vegging out with reading and television. Here's a mini project:
I finished a Mentor paperback, copyright 1956 (30th printing) by Robert B. Downs called "16 Books That Changed the World."
He has his rules, but they boil down to "influence on the mid 20th Century." (my paraphrase)
They are all 'social' science or 'straight' science tracts:
Machiavelli's "The Prince," Paine's "Common Sense," Smith's "Wealth of Nations," Malthus' "Essay on...Population," Thoreau's "Civil Disobediance," Stowe's "Uncle Tom's Cabin," Marx's "Kapital," Mahan's "Sea Power," MacKinder's "Pivot of History," Hitler's "Mein Kampf," Copernicus' "Orbium Coelestium," Harvey's "De Mortu Cordis," Newton's "Principia," Darwin's "Origin of Species," Freud's "Interpretation of Dreams," and Einstein's "Relativity..."
Down's quotes other lists from 1935, 1939, and 1945. These lists overlap his somewhat, but also include the Bible, Koran, St. Augustine, Dante, Shakespeare, Plato, etc. He mentions other books that didn't make his own list -- like Parson Weem's "Life of Washington," and Marco Polo's "Travels." (Both of these works consisting of heavy doses of fantasy.)
Downs mentions Thoreau's influence on Gandhi, but Martin Luther King was completely under his radar. He also tells how "Mein Kampf" was almost unread outside of Germany -- because Hitler used international copyright law to PREVENT translations.

Well, it's close enough to a half-century later, and I wonder if another list would shed any light on our times. The gross cynicism of "The Prince" seems to be an ascendant philosophy at the moment, fortified by Malthus, and the worst aspects of Adam Smith. "New American Century" is definitely on this year's list for influence -- it's on the Internet, but "lies" there unchallenged.
My own view, as someone who wasn't even born at the time, was that Hitler's speeches, and their associated spectacles, seduced his audience more than that crappy book.
Today, Dr. King is mostly known for ONE segment from one televised speech -- but it's a beauty.
Whole new ways of communication have come into being the last hundred years, and have "sneaked by" the printed word into whatever passes for public consciousness. How do television, movies, radio, networked computers, and the like, compare with books for establishing ideas and provoking stasis or change in "our" undeniably "global" society?
I'll be making a list, and checking it twice, to see if I can add anything to what might just be a parlor game after all.