About Joe McClain

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.