Fourbear

I just realized that tomorrow is my fourth blogiversary. Looking up the date involved remembering the tagline trio from my first blog (“All times are local” • “Local times may vary” • “Minutes do not expire”) and the subhead of the blog layout before this one, “the sensation of fullness for the whole day.” This reminds me that although I talk a lot in my vocations as preacher and teacher, I’ve been talking all the more online through this blog. You might think that, at a certain point, one just loses any sense of caution about so doing, but I find that I still experience great hesitancy about pushing the “post” button, or (as was the case this afternoon) pushing “send” to submit my lectionary reflections to Dylan.

The positive take on this phenomenon ascribes my reluctance to an acute sense of my fallibility. The negative take, of course, suggests that I’m slow to draw the appropriate conclusion from the fact that my writing seems , on the whole, not to compare unfavorably to Vogon poetry, and even seems to please a number of readers, at least one of whom is not a relative of mine.

Speaking of readers, Gustav of Uppsala just left a comment noting that he’s working on a paper about Linnaeus, and would like to know of any places in the USA (streets, towns, I don’t know, multi-lane bowling alleys) named after Linnaeus. I couldn’t think of any at all; do you know of one?

6 thoughts on “Fourbear

  1. Funny you should ask about places named after Linnaeus just now; while I was lost driving around Cambridge, Mass. just last night, I found myself on “Linnaean Street”, of which I had never heard before. I remember thinking, this must be named after Linnaeus.

    Here’s a map showing where it is.

  2. The brilliantly useful US Gazetteer says that there is not even one place in the US named for Linnaeus. On the other hand, there is no place named for Gregor Mendel, either. Nevertheless, Darwin is well-supplied. Survival of the fittest, indeed.

  3. Recall that Linnaeus was actually a Swede named Carl Linné before the Latinate version of his name began to be used, presumably as a result of his life work in establishing a system of binomial nomenclature — in Latin — for all living things. This expands the possibilities. Here in Chicago, for example, there is a Linné Elementary School which I’m reasonably certain is named after Linnaeus.

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