About Joe McClain (Ideation Magazine)

Ideation magazine—in print or on the web—is all about research and scholarship activity at the College of William and Mary. There was more activity going on than I knew about and I knew about more than I had time to investigate. Quite often I ran across an interesting little item that didn’t really merit a story, but would make a perfectly fine blog entry.
1,000 Giddy Arcana

I did recurring blog entries under a headline “1,000 Giddy Arcana.” I borrowed the concept from H.L. Mencken, who wrote about the advantages of his informal education as a young newspaperman on the streets of Baltimore, “getting earfuls and eyefuls of instruction in a hundred giddy arcana, none of them taught in schools.” I wanted to use the Mencken concept (adding an order of magnitude) to share some of the interesting and valuable bits of knowledge, information and maybe even wisdom that are a part of the instruction at this school.