The Title is the Title

The beginning of my blog will focus on the beginning of my blog, oddly enough.
I settled on the name It's Turtles All the Way Down (which I could change in literally five seconds through the settings) after lengthy deliberation. Some other front-runners were "Thoughts on the End of the Universe," "To the Ink-On-Paper-Heroes," "Cheers to the Meteor," and "College For Free." These all had to be passed over, however. Mostly because many of the domain names were taken by completely inactive blogs or ones that hadn't been used since 2005. I only hope that the domain name of this blog may someday stop someone from naming their project what they want.
I like this name the best. Thoughts on the End of the Universe was a close second, but I thought that title might imply that I think the universe will definitely end. I don't think that, because no one seems to know very much at all about the definite nature of anything, especially the big things, and that's the reason this title wins.
The more I learn, the more I realize that this entire human-knowledge thing is just a work in progress (as is the universe, for that matter.) No one really knows anything, that's what education has shown me. I love that concept. It means that modern medicine and democracy and recycling are all just about as scientifically sturdy as the world existing on the back of a giant turtle. (I mean, more or less.)

Onto the blog itself. I hope to make this a year-long project. A year seems like a good round number for the kind of thing I want to do, and by the end of it, I'll hopefully have something better to do with my time.
This blog will consist of three regular parts, all of which I hope to update every week. I say hope because, while I am excited about this post-collegiate project now, I may suddenly lose interest and stop updating altogether.
The Parts:
Part one is College For Free. During this section I will write about all the extremely interesting things I learned in college that don't have any practical use in the real world. This will range from the evolution of mankind to how to sneak beer into a dorm room.
Part two is Books. Now that journalism deadlines and studying for tests can't stop me from learning the things I actually want to learn, I hope to be averaging about a book a week for the rest of 2009. Whenever I finish that book, I'll discuss it with whatever intellectual depth I can muster.
Part three is News and Human Rights. Once a week, I want to talk about what's happening in the world in a way that all American new sources, NPR excluded, fail at. This is to say, with some breadth of topic. Granted, our economic situation is not enviable, but at least we're not under the control of a criminal against humanity like Uganda or gearing up for the Rwandan Genocide Part 2 (more on these later.)

However, I won't be doing any of that until May, because in celebration of my completion of college (my last multiple choice test starts in one hour) I will be taking a week off from all forms of work and productivity until May 4.

Until then, I leave you with an excerpt from Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close:
"One of my favorite parts is in the beginning of the first chapter, where Stephen Hawking tells about a famous scientist who was giving a lecture about how the earth orbits the sun, and the sun orbits the solar system, and whatever. Then a woman in the back of the room raised her hand and said, 'What you have told us is rubbish. The world is really a flat plate supported on the back of a giant tortoise.' So the scientist asked her what the tortoise was standing on. And she said, 'But it's turtles all the way down!'
"I love that story, because it shows how ignorant people can be. And also because I love tortoises." - Oskar Schell.

So do I, Oskar. So do I.