Building Castles on the Beach

The interwebs sure have changed since I started blogging three and a half years ago. As I attempt to rebuild Building Castles on the Beach after basically bypassing 2013 and the first half of 2014, I notice that many of the sites I read and enjoyed before when I was a full tilt blogger haven't posted anything for months or even years, or have even discontinued their blogs altogether. A recent culling of the blogs I officially follow has shown that at least two of my formerly favorite websites have been co-opted by porn. These are blogs I had direct links to in the margins of my own posts. I would be embarrassed if I thought anyone was actually visiting my own site during the time those links would have been active. The other major difference is the kind of writing that seems to get read on the interwebs. I'm reminded of the commotion in the 90's about the popularity of the "newspaper" (look it up, kids!) called USA Today . It was frequently criticized due to th...

I got no excuses. Except for the plenty of reasons I have to continue to neglect my blog. But it's still October. Two posts for the month ain't bad. To the point, I've been reading a bunch of nonfiction lately. Partly for work. Partly for fun. And I don't say that lightly. I'm not in the habit of reading nonfiction for fun. If I'm looking for fun and can't get to the mini-golf course, I go in for the fiction reading. Which goes to show these must be some extra-superb books, right? Let's begin with a book I haven't even finished yet, but can't wait to explain to people. How Soccer Explains the World: An Unlikely Theory of Globalization by Franklin Foer purports that soccer effects everything from small communities to society at large, from ganglords in war-torn Bosnia to political divisiveness in America. At least those are the two chapters I've read so far. I picked it up and read the last chapter first because it was about the Uni...