Crap Hunting Students fortunate enough (as I was) to have attended the history classes of Dr.Alfred W. Lever (affectionately known as "Dirty Al") at Denison University in the sixties may recall, among many memorable maxims, his definition of an educated person.- Dr. Lever, a talented teacher with a withering wit who died much too young, often observed that a truly educated individual is, above all else, a highly skilled crap hunter. Dr. Lever maintained, with a forcefulness calculated to drive home the point, that a lot of activity which passes for work and intellectual enterprise in academia and other "educated circles" is simply a waste of time and energy which results in the production of ideas and materials which further waste the time and energy of people who are called upon to deal with them, e.g. students and citizens.- He held further that a lot of time and effort could be freed up for useful pursuits, such as enjoying life, if this garbage could be cleared away efficiently, so folks wouldn't have to step around it or sift through it endlessly; hence the value of the discipline of crap hunting and the importance of the crap hunter in society. Most garbage can be easily identified by almost anybody; indeed much of it is clearly labelled or presented without pretense. Crap hunting is not concerned with such obvious trash but is instead the art of quickly recognizing dreck which has been disguised or packaged as treasure.- For example, a co-worker who is attending library school recently asked me a question posed by one of her professors whom she seems to find charismatic; the question dealt with "the seven parallel lineages in information flow," and my crap alarm immediately went berserk. Although Dirty Al probably wouldn't have made this connection, a true talent for crap hunting can be been as the secular flip side of the gift of discernment mentioned in I Corinthians 12:10. In the years since Al Lever held forth at Denison, the information Age has proceed with exponential expansiveness; certainly the development of the internet has contributed to both its blessings and its curses; certainly never before has the need to "cut through the crap" been greater.- We at Whitt's End believe that we have a contribution to be made in this area. World O' Crap return to Whitt's End
Students fortunate enough (as I was) to have attended the history classes of Dr.Alfred W. Lever (affectionately known as "Dirty Al") at Denison University in the sixties may recall, among many memorable maxims, his definition of an educated person.- Dr. Lever, a talented teacher with a withering wit who died much too young, often observed that a truly educated individual is, above all else, a highly skilled crap hunter.
Dr. Lever maintained, with a forcefulness calculated to drive home the point, that a lot of activity which passes for work and intellectual enterprise in academia and other "educated circles" is simply a waste of time and energy which results in the production of ideas and materials which further waste the time and energy of people who are called upon to deal with them, e.g. students and citizens.- He held further that a lot of time and effort could be freed up for useful pursuits, such as enjoying life, if this garbage could be cleared away efficiently, so folks wouldn't have to step around it or sift through it endlessly; hence the value of the discipline of crap hunting and the importance of the crap hunter in society.
Most garbage can be easily identified by almost anybody; indeed much of it is clearly labelled or presented without pretense. Crap hunting is not concerned with such obvious trash but is instead the art of quickly recognizing dreck which has been disguised or packaged as treasure.- For example, a co-worker who is attending library school recently asked me a question posed by one of her professors whom she seems to find charismatic; the question dealt with "the seven parallel lineages in information flow," and my crap alarm immediately went berserk. Although Dirty Al probably wouldn't have made this connection, a true talent for crap hunting can be been as the secular flip side of the gift of discernment mentioned in I Corinthians 12:10.
In the years since Al Lever held forth at Denison, the information Age has proceed with exponential expansiveness; certainly the development of the internet has contributed to both its blessings and its curses; certainly never before has the need to "cut through the crap" been greater.- We at Whitt's End believe that we have a contribution to be made in this area.
World O' Crap return to Whitt's End