WHOOSH vs. WHOMP

My "hobby hat" has me editing a collector club newsletter, running FLICKR and delicious accounts, sporadically blogging, and maintaining a modest web site for the club. Yesterday, a club member called to ask what happened to the club's web site -- whoosh -- it had vanished. Not Good.

I had apparently not been paying attention, and overlooked an announcement from my personal internet service provider / personal web page host. The company moved on & I got left behind.


An overnight scramble got a new "stub" web site set up to maintain the club's web presence. The next step will be to e-mail key club members to for advice on what direction to take the next iteration of the site.

This incident is a "two-by-four_upside_the_head" reminder that the internet realm is "eternal now." The club web site people bookmarked last year, last month, or last week is no more. Even the good folks who tried to preserve historic snapshots of the web at the "wayback machine" were overwhelmed & fell behind.

The Ninth Britannica I noted some while back is a permanent snapshot of the state of knowledge for its time. Every newspaper, book, film, L.P. record, photograph, poster, etc. is a similar permanent "that, there, then." A stack of such items makes a satisfying whomp on the desk or floor when gathered for research.

Last night I caught part of C-SPAN's "White House" series. President George Bush was talking to the interviewer about the White House as home and museum. He said his favorite portraits were two of President Abraham Lincoln. It turns out the images were two versions of the same point in time. Abraham Lincoln, by George P.A. Healy -- which had been owned by Lincoln's son Robert Todd Lincoln -- had been "copied" from The Peacemakers, by George P.A. Healy -- the same President Lincoln sitting in the same chair, frozen in time & unchanging so long as the portraits survive. It will be interesting to see how long the links embedded in this post remain operative.