Part of the value of staying aware of what other bloggers are doing lies in the good feeling you get from the connections. Here’s a connection: a year or two ago Ben Paynter told me about a blogger named Chris Spinks who was an AKMA fan… an exegetical dude, seeking the meaning of meaning and all that. So tonight I see that Chris has hit the big time. I followed a comment he left at AKMA’s Random Thoughts back to his blog, katagrapho. Congratulations on the PhD Chris! Good luck in academia.
I just blew away a comment from Pamela Anderson. I mistakenly thought it was spam. It was a comment on this post and the content was:
pamela anderson
pamela anderson
You will be reincarnated as a toad; and you will be much happier.
I think now that this was not spam but rather an opportunity for me to increase the strength and power of my Google rankings. I have therefore recreated it in this post. Right now I am studying up on Brazilian soccer players.
Learn more about Pamela Anderson here.
Ed Batista has a YouTube conversation with Tom Munnecke of Uplift Academy. Tom notices the snake eating it’s tail thing of attention aggregators aggregating attention of other attention aggregators… I think I’ll see if I can install the aggregator on my Firefox browser.
U.S. President and modern day crusader George W. Bush dropped in on Iraq’s Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki unannounced today in blatant disregard of diplomatic courtesy and protocol. One billion muslims world-wide were offended by his cavalier bullshit. The paranoid leader of what was formerly known as the free world explained that if he made his movements known ahead of time he would have to deal with his deeply felt insecurities and an irrational fear that drove him to desert the military as a young man and begin a life of drunken dissolution and drug addiction that ended several years ago when he hit bottom and found Jesus. The president, who will turn sixty next month, claims not to have used drugs since his early forties. He claims to have been arrest free since his last arrest for drunken driving in 1976, almost thirty years ago. (His prior arrests for theft and for disorderly conduct occurred before then). The Voice of America reported today,
Prime Minister Maliki learned the president was in Baghdad just five minutes before they met in the U.S. diplomatic compound. He told Mr. Bush that Iraqis are determined to succeed.
Speaking in Arabic, the prime minister said Iraq will stay united and it will stay strong. He spoke of his appreciation for U.S. efforts in Iraq, and expressed the hope American troops will … go home soon. God willing, he said, all the suffering will be over and all the soldiers will … return to their countries.
We don’t know what else the Prime Minister said, because - face it - how many of us speak Arabic? But one assumes he addressed the secret service directly. One can almost hear him saying, “Somebody get this pathetic dry-drunk motherfucker a drink and get his ass back on the plane. None of us are safe with him around and he’s boring me silly.”
In other news today it was announced that Karl Rove, direct mail marketeer and the crusading President’s top political adviser, won’t face criminal charges in a three-year investigation into the leak of a CIA agent’s name. This explains why Bush had to “get out of Dodge,” since he is known for his inability to control that shit-eating grin when he has pulled a fast one.
Gillian writes about burn-out and points to a pay-for-view Scientific American Mind article.
Larry collapsed right outside the door to his apartment, with a terrible headache, a racing heart and vertigo. “At first I thought I had had a stroke,” he recalls now, a year later. But the doctor’s diagnosis was different: burnout syndrome. The consultant was sick from years of excessive toil.
In other, more upbeat, Gillianic News, the Thunder Panties - a team dedicated to racing in their scanties to raise money for cancer research - is in the top ten fund raisers so far. Gillian says,
I promise, should I meet my donation goal, that I will:
1. Run in underwear on the race day (God, I hope the weather’s nice), and
2. Post tasteful photo(s) of myself in said underwear on my blog.
How’s that for incentive? Thanks for whatever donation you can give.
Give early, give often. We’re looking forward to the pictures!
This shouldn’t be or at least doesn’t have to be a partisan issue. It’s more like a monopolists versus open access issue.
Reading Scoble’s blog about his departure from MS, I realize how pissy my ho-humming it in the previous post might seem. Robert’s earnest integrity, his unselfconscious self-absorbtion, his position as avatar of tech bloggers everywhere - all point to a more serious and credible context for this “one man leaves corporate gig for a well funded job with a small company” story. So for anybody who is heavy into Scobleism as a faith or a political practice, I can only apologize for my small and perhaps demeaning sense of the story.
As for Liz Lawley, I wish her nothing but the best!
Jon Husband, co-founder of Qumana, is one of those people who hangs out there in the world of the internecks doing great work and making me feel guilty for not having his energy and focus. A website, an effort of Jon’s that’s not getting enough of my attention, is Thermo[SAT]. A year or so ago David Weinberger made the general comment to all of us that he is not reading our blogs. I knew what he meant, and while of course I was pissed that he wasn’t hanging on my every word, that he wasn’t concerned about my cat or what I had for breakfast, I could dig it. There are scores and scores of blogs by brilliant and creative people making an effort to annotate their own lives online. Who has time for all of them? Besides Scoble, of course. I think my New Year’s resolution (on June 11th this year) will have to be to pay more attention to the Wirearchy blog and Thermo[SAT].
In the ho-hum department, Robert Scoble’s changing jobs. I took the long way around for this news… Scoble, I’ve heard, is a wonderful guy, but basically his auto-human-aggregator schtick never interested me much so I seldom visit his blog. So I was at Thermo[SAT] for the update on Net Neutrality, not satisfied with what Doc Searls had provided by way of reflection, and I saw that the highly selective Thermo[SAT] “blogliste” contains a link to Terry Heaton, so I clicked through and there was the news about Scoble. Clicking back to get the links for this post, I saw that Jon had already covered it, so okee dokee… Scoble is leaving Redmond and headed for the Bay Area. That’s nice, I guess. The bloggers and vloggers are tootling this news from the rooftops. This shift reminds me of that scene in that movie where the guy says,
Gozer the Traveller will come in one of the pre-chosen forms. During the rectification of the Vuldronaii the Traveller came as a very large and moving Torb. Then of course in the third reconciliation of the last of the Meketrex supplicants they chose a new form for him, that of a Sloar. Many Shubs and Zuuls knew what it was to be roasted in the depths of the Sloar that day I can tell you.
No offense Robert. Good luck!
Pixels tidily cast in lucite, pages served from somewhere deep in the bat-cave, Suck (”a fish, a barrel, and a smoking gun”), the once mighty webPub and meme-machine-’zine emerged this morning through clickage associated with a hunt for David Foster Wallace. Nick Maniatis’ Howling Fantods, an extended DFW bibliography, has the top Google rank for David Foster Wallace 2024, but just guess which little blog o’ mine stands second behind it.
When you drop the “2006″ qualifier, Listics falls to number 19 in the race for fame through critical appreciation or just mean spirited criticism of the Infinite Jester, a placement well above - I competitively must add - the notorious Languagehat who nitpicks DFW to death in a lengthy diatribe here. (Notice: any satiric intent inferred or imputed to any content on the Listics blog should consider first the profound and more recent influence of TOM Swift, and only then the marginally interesting stylings of the DEAN.)
Languagehat’s essay calls for a response, and respond I may. I have tucked away a draft post titled “The Reconstruction of David Foster Wallace.” I’ll work on that after I have finished my current, more critical blog-in-prog: “Soylent Diesel; an examination of alternatives for resolving the emergent petrochemical problem.”
Jeneane celebrated quietly at home, while Tony - well, you know…
Now is the time on “listics” when we pretend that what our readers think matters to us. If you are someone who gets a periodic dose fed straight from an aggregator, I encourage you to drop by and respond to the content poll in the right sidebar. What would you most like to see more of here? Anti-intellectual thuggery? Lefty politics? Drop by and vote. Heck, leave a comment telling us you voted.
I looked at the word “advocate” this morning and flashed on the contextual issues… the pronunciation shifts from long A to short A depending on whether it is being used as a verb or a noun. If you hear the spoken word you will know whether it is a noun or a verb. If you see it on a page or in pixels, context will drive your understanding. But if you are a Texas boy, bred to privilege and unspoiled by instruction, you will need to clarificate the situation with your speech writers. Specifically, there is no reason for a nuanced vowel shift in the use of a perfectly good word. What are we, Chinese? No. What’s called for here is a mid-Texas chopped A, a long vowel, but not drawn out as if a person’s people were some kinda scandinavians. “Advocate” is a power word - three syllables! - that someone might stick in a speech and you’d have to pronunciate it while you were deliverin’. It is a verb and there is no room for subtle distinction or shading of meaning based on pronunciation and context. The verb is “advocate” (ad-v&-kAt). The noun is “advocator” (ad-v&-kA-t&r). There’s no room for nancy nuance here… “advaKATE - advaKATER,” that’s just how it is. And don’t confuse me with yer liberal health food advocados.
“Free storage and bandwidth forever” sounds too good to be true, but….
Not enough attention or credit has been given to JD Lasica’s OurMedia project. Opening today, the Learning Center:
The Learning Center is an ongoing project with a simple aim: to help people engage in the participatory media movement by showing them how to create videoblogs, podcasts, screencasts, digital stories and other emerging media forms.
There are sections on Video, Audio, Multimedia, Images and Text. In addition, we have what will undoubtedly become a deep Topics section. We’re starting out with the subjects of Personal media - Getting started, Citizen journalism, and Copyright & the law.
We have a lot of needs in fillng out these sections, so if you’d like to write a tutorial, share an article, or create a screencast, video or podcast that would be helpful to people, see our guidelines. This is media training of the people by the people.
My ineptly pseudonymized friend “Kerr Mudgeon” has been whacking away at the gay marriage issue all week at his blog on the contrary.
He opens the series on a serious note with an essay titled “The Case for Gay Marriage.” His follow-on essay asks “What next? Are we going to have to let them marry their dogs?”
The curmudgeon is a bit of a prude for all his objective observation and risque language. He believes in love and commitment and I think even in moderation. In his final essay on the topic, “Heather has Lots of Families,” he observes,
Most first marriages in America end up in divorce. Many couples are in second or subsequent marriages. The median length of an American marriage is now a mere 8 years. So much for the idea that marriage is a lifelong commitment.
Over 1 million children each year have parents who have just divorced.
Like me, the curmudgeon is offended by the self righteousness and the hypocrisy at the roots of the right-wing so-called “christian” opposition to the formal commitment of marriage between same gender people.
The morality of an act is a function of the state of the system at the time it is performed.
Declan McCullough writes about yesterday’s House rejection of net neutrality. He quotes Representative Markey, whose amendment offered the best hope for maintaining an IP commodity market unpolluted by monopolistic practices:
“The future Sergey Brins, the future Marc Andreessens, of Netscape and Google…are going to have to pay taxes” to broadband providers, said Rep. Ed Markey, the Massachusetts Democrat behind the Net neutrality amendment.
This matter, the shifting of tax burden from payments to government to assure decent public services in fair markets to payments to corporations to fund infrastructure “adjustments” that are best for the stockholders, deserves a closer look.
John Palfrey will lead the “making money” discussion at BloggerCon. Looking at the cursed power law, there would seem to be three subsets to examine: the asymptotic risers - those few who aggregate attention in a mass media modality; the inflectioneers - people with blogs to be found around the inflection point of that cursed power curve; and the waggers - numerically huge, enormously influential for a variety of reasons, residents of what has been labelled the long tail and then largely ignored or misinterpreted. The power law presents a two dimensional view that obscures much of what is important about the last decade’s revolution in publishing.
Among the attributes obscured: community, medium, intention, and influence. To which community or communities does a particular web presence contribute? List a few communities… the legal, the journo, the technoid, the telecom, the literati, the eeleomosynary, the political left, the polictical right, educators, librarians, age peers. The list goes on and there are certainly sub groups among each of these. The web empowers each of us, it offers emerging communications tools that we integrate into our daily lives. No longer are we confined to the alpenhorn and yodeling to be heard across great distances. No longer does our yodeling impose on the ears of the disinterested, because choice dominates clickage.
This may be one of those “posts in progress,” because I have a meeting. Maybe it just ends here because I have ADD. For further reading pleasure, just go here…
she: cousin… la….. bla bla detail… met him at a barmitzva in boulder…. detail detail he had his colleague call me… detail detail detail… and he said i’m handicapped too i’m in a chair i’ve lost 2 legs… detail detail detail…
me (perking up): what? what? wait, Stop. the guy has no legs? HOW did he bring this up? what was the lead up?
she: well, i was telling him about my friend, I Forget who, who started a pbs show about cooking with the blind…
me: oh my god. no. what’s it called this show?
she: cooking without looking.
me: no, no… ( here i laugh, really laugh, for a good full two minutes. i realize i haven’t laughed like that in a while. driving all laughs into one. we are at my level. it has come to this struck me funny.)
(The above excerpt is not entirely without intention. It perhaps illustrates two things: one, that personal creative choices will lead us to vocational opportunities that are unique and personal, viz “Cooking Without Looking;” and, two, that this thing called blogging is its own reward, comprising readers and writers, linkage and thinkage… and sometimes - yes - stinkage, but not today, neither in this post’s origins nor in the novel in progress that I’ve linked here… we have an opportunity to help each other carry the canoe on that long portage, and sometimes there will be blueberries and sometimes there will be biting insects, but all in all, when the loon calls and the sun sets on the lake beyond, there are no simple answers, rather there are all these complicated relationships and quel domage that we find so many of them parsed into fifty minute segments with an IRC back channel).
“While my guitar gently weeps…”
Amazing. Thanks to Mark Woods for the link (via Craig, via Andrea).
How long has it been since I visited Craig’s Book Notes, one of the longest running blogs in outer space? Too long.
I think this is important. I’ll be interested to see what the Happy Tutor has to say about it.
One of Soros’ most interesting points in the top level presentation relates to markets. “You can’t leave everything to markets,” he says. Markets are very good at allocating resources among competing private needs, but they do not address common needs.
Ms. Congdon has four “extra interview clips” augmenting her daily RocketBoom presentation. I’m heading back there to check them out.
Yesterday, according to sources at savetheinternet.com, the House Rules Committee voted to allow two attempts to add meaningful Network Neutrality rules the Barton-Rush COPE Act. One proposed amendment, by Representatives Markey, Boucher, Eschoo and Inslee, is, apparently, sufficiently strong. Another, by Lamar Smith, is much weaker.
Text of the two amendments — Markey, Smith.
Please call your Representative today. Ask him/her to support the Markey Network Neutrality Amendment to the COPE Act.
Find your Representative and his/her phone number here. Today is the critical day to call.
“It was a substantial-looking farm. In the stables, over the top of the open doors, one could see great cart-horses quietly feeding from new racks. Right along the outbuildings extended a large dunghill, from which manure liquid oozed, while amidst fowls and turkeys, five or six peacocks, a luxury in Chauchois farmyards, were foraging on the top of it.”
I went out tonight to the garage, a blue plastic 40 gallon garbage can in hand, empty from the road where the Waste Management corporation had left it. As I walked by the shade beds, bathed by the breeze in the scent of mock orange, I thought there were worse things than being alive on a sunny evening in June. I came out from beneath the shrubs and the trees into the graveled parking area before the garage and there high above the tobacco shed the moon was tethered, just another element of the view, and not close or particularly accessible, but mine at that moment, as much mine as the shed and the parking lot, the walnut or the pines, as much mine as the Philadelphus coronarius that shades the drive and soaks the June air with a scent that is almost psychedelic.
Madame Levy, all mountain dewey and shit. Ain’t jumped the roomba yet. Capsule review: getting a grip.
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