Listics

A week or so ago I gave myself the assignment of conducting a survey for the IT Kitchen:  "Why do you blog?" I asked.  I like easy answers, and by asking others perhaps I hoped to find the easy answers for myself.  Certainly, I thought, it would be valuable to compile insights from some of the articulate digital self publishers known as "bloggers."  Little did I know it would turn into a hobby.  Here are reflections from thirty-five bloggers, an even three dozen if you count me.

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A friend who works for one of  the schools at our local university wants NOT to use [Mutant] news for free publicity…  I’m anonymizing his email.  Your good advice is requested:

Dear Wise Friends,  The School has a series of heartwarming
videos which we are eager to broadcast  as a public relations arm of
a fundraising project.  [ComCo] has generously partnered with the
School to achieve a large audience.   One of the venues which
[ComCo] said was a match with our "demographic" is [Mutant] News and,
particularly, The Lying Liar Show.   Several of us here do not want
to advertise the School with [Mutant] News and The Lying Liar Show and
we need input regarding convincing reasons to avoid these venues.
One thing, that was specifically mentioned, was any University or
State guidelines  as reasons to choose or reject (in this case
reject) a particular media venue as appropriate or inappropriate to
present the public face of a State/University entity such as the School.

Can any of you help with rationale to put forward that might impact
the decision to use [Mutant] News/Lying Liar as a vehicle to raise
awareness of the School????

Clocks, weather, sounds, links, photos… Laszlo offers standard XML tools to dress up your sidebar.

How did I get here?

A tweeker will steal your stuff and then help you look for it

Madame Levy and her dictionaire urbaine.  Her bane.  Err been.  Able was I ere I left Elba.  Napoleon siad that.  That’s what led me to it.

what fails is every bit as interesting as what succeeds

Found this link at Crooked Timber.   Not only does the OCLC have a top 1000 list, but it also has this dramatically deep ISBN listing that’s fun to surf.   Say you were scrolling through the list and you stopped at number  50 which happens to be Shakespeare’s "The Tempest."    You plug in your zip code to get a list of the several nearby libraries that have it available for you.  Fine, but "The Tempest" has about eleven dozen editions and the OCLC has a tidy ISBN listing that’s a grab-bag of surprises.  Clicking through the ISBNs you run across a lot of critical commentary and then SURPRISE!  Here’s a recording by a lot of Redgraves!  I mean — it’s not a poodcast or something… you still have to check it out of the library, but how cool is this?  Very.  No doubt.

Steeped in a tradition of neologistic originality, the CBO reached deep and pulled up "hairbrainism" as a categorical signifier for the intellectual heirs of Emerson.  Ralph Waldo was an American original for sure, but he lacked the essence of American originality.  Like Condoleeza Rice, he was a person "educated beyond his understanding."  he was, in short, a bit of a turkey.  Today few of us care to look back toward Emerson as we dyspeptically assess our American roots.  No - from the jack-pine savages shooting each other in the north-woods deer-hunts of Wisconsin, to the wash-board scratching, accordion playing cajuns of the Lousiana bayou we honor our country-fried roots.  And if Ben Franklin’s noble bird found favor at the pestilential feasts of the first Thanksgiving, well today we have Turducken.   Turkey stuffed with duck stuffed with chicken… it’s not just a holiday novelty!  It’s good all year round.

Thanks for the asynchronous feedback on this.   I’d hate to think I have to buy a Mac in order to test the undoubtedly hyper-compliant Safari browser before I make sloppy changes to my blog design, but this may be the case.  Great marketing strategy!  Anyway, does it render properly now I wonder?

I’ve had a Safari problem.  Over the last few weeks I’ve made some template changes, and they seemed to work from where I sit.  I checked them in Mozilla, I checked them in Firefox, I checked them in the highly deprecated MSIE.  But I didn’t check them in Safari because I don’t have a Macintosh to check with.  I wonder if the last little change I threw in this morning cleans things up for Safari users.  I did everything but kill a chicken and arrange the entrails on a plate.  I don’t know what to do next. 

Hellooooo Safari users.  Can you read me now?