the way i see it

Starbucks has gone with their red cups for the holidays, meaning that they are no longer using their "The Way I See It" cups.* Which is too bad, because I just used the form on the Starbucks site earlier today to submit a "Way I See It" idea for their consideration:



I wonder if they would have used it. BTW, no offense intended if you happen to be the "first kind" of sociologist, although you do suck.

Anyway, a friend reminded** me today of this quote about the sociological eclecticist:

"An eclectic is always losing arguments. One lacks the close-mindedness necessary to treat others' positions with the contempt they so easily display for one's own. Of course in interaction I fake this contempt as well as the next academic. But I usually rush to bone up on what I have just been denying. And I have never managed that happy disregard of whole areas of intellectual life--mathematics, say, or history--that so simplifies the lives of some of my colleagues." -- Andrew Abbott, Chaos of Disciplines, p. x.

* Note: I go to Starbucks. I am not anti-Starbucks. I am anti-anti-Starbucks, in fact, and can be quite irascible about it if you get me going. I am, however, anti-coffee, and what I get from Starbucks is hot chocolate.

** That is to say, she sent it to me, and I looked in my own copy of Chaos of Disciplines, and it turned out I had underlined it, although I still have no recollection of having read the sentence or underlined it. So is characterizing it as reminding correct?