Drab as a fool, aloof as a bard

Sometimes my muse encourages me to work away at an idea that has entered my head just fleetingly as the combination of two easily dismissed thoughts. Recently, two such thoughts were “How easy is it to create culture, like a song, in Ido?” and “What would Europe’s national anthem be, if it was a single nation?” These both have answers on their own, since music has been written with Ido lyrics (even annoyingly catchy songs), and the Europe Union does have an anthem, that being the theme from the fourth movement of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. In English the theme is known as “Ode to Joy”, and Beethoven’s tune originally had German lyrics to it, but for the purposes of the European Union, there are no words with official status. The fact that the EU is unable to do something as common as having words to its anthem should be a sign of how much “custom sternly divides” it, and the need for a common language. I am very impressed with an effort to express the modern ideals of Europe using the ancient language of Latin, but I still feel that Ido has the sort of modern flexibility and ease of use that make it a better candidate for a means of linguistically uniting us. That is why I have been working passionately, and enjoyably on this task. I unfortunately am not the greatest student of Ido, so I may have to amend this text as I get better, but here it is as it stands currently:

An article from a while back about the threat posed to Free culture and commerce by technological control methods stuck in my mind for two reasons: firstly, the novel idea that some people might just abandon the mainstream online world and create an improved one, and secondly a comment which summed this up:

Maybe it’s time that geeks took their ball and found a new park. Count me in.

The irony, which people pointed out, is that these control methods would create a situation much worse than the one they are trying to prevent (the Internet being uncontrollable). Some have put forward the idea that control of the Internet need only be taken out of the hands of the United States of America, and that for instance Europe must take back the Web, or at least the part of it which contains the citizens of Europe. But the citizens of Europe do not need to be contained, as the right-minded citizens of Europe outnumber and outthink those people in the whole world that would wish to cause damage, and because, uniquely on the Internet, success goes to those with the greatest number and the greatest ability to think. I even apply this principle to the part of the Web I control (mostly this blog), and to deal with the potential damage faced by it, namely spam.