…and a fine collection of Dorothy Parker quotes, such as:

Every year, back comes Spring, with nasty little birds yapping their fool heads off and the ground all mucked up with plants.

Lesotho is heavily deforested, marked by dongas and gulleys, and devoid of wild life. We grazed our cattle on whatever grass was left, cut trees down to cook with, and ate the last rabbits and antelope. Nobody can say a word, unless they provide electricity and jobs. Nobody has a right to criticise such a populace for surviving. — Rethabile Mesilo

Thanks to Mike Golby for the link to Mesilo’s sotho blog. For me, Mesilo is a new voice that provides counterpoint and harmony with my friend Mike.

My old buddy Doctor Don writes that his brother-in-law Sam Aronson’s Brookhaven team seems to have been scooped in the quest for dark matter by the folks at NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory.

God’s nose… pick here (Quicktime)

Link whoring will earn you big bucks in the blogging biz…

Lot of Digital ID stuff in the air… David scooping Doc with his anonymity riffs, AKMA all reflective ’bout the good old days… Hamlin is making a career out of it…

I was there in 2024. I had a press pass… not a blogger, just an Isthmus correspondent looking for the people side of tech. And there were the Cluetrainiacs, all in one place. I told David Weinberger that networks were smart and it’s a good thing, and he was gracious about it. I still think that. I agree with Richard Bennett more than I’ll allow him to know. Doc was there and I had just read his OSCON presentation and he disappointed me by giving it again. I remember blogging about my disappointment, but if Doc read it, he ignored it. Elliot Noss was at dinner that night. Others at the table included Esthr and Doc. Everyone was laughing a lot! Esthr made small talk later about monetizing elevator rides. I don’t know if she was joking.

Kevin Dougherty was there. Denise Howell. Chris. AKMA. Phil Windley. Andre Durand. Eric Norlin. That meeting convinced me of the value of showing up. These people are really brilliant, they are gracious, cordial and engaged — and some of them are funny as hell.

Digital ID continues to linger out there on the fringes of standardization. Beth was at a vendor thing in King of Prussia, PA last week and she heard a couple of major geeks talking about how the net outdid brick and mortar last year at christmas time. Could be an exageration… but the fact is that cyber-sales are going vertical, while mall merchandisers continue to struggle for a profit margin and modest increase in revenue, quarter by quarter.

So what about anonymity? Knock yourself out. I can dig-it if you have ideas to share that twist you into such a conflicted space that you’re afraid of the fall-out. Or maybe you simply have a few kinks to work out. Or a schiz-twist that requires you to come on like a young guy with purple spikes when you’re actually 58, fat, bald, and a closet fan of the vocal stylings of the Moron Tab and Apple Choir. Anonymity rulz. But underneath every pseudonym there’s a real person wanting to score a bargain on eBay, and the whole Dig ID thing gets back to transactions, assertion, authentication, security. So those issues will be resolved, including a cyber-cloak of absolute privacy, when an outfit like Visa International steps up and looks the bandwidth vendors straight in the eye and says “Monetize this.” The answer, like petabyte data transport, is really simple and really massive.

Juan Cole speaks out today on the cases of two little girls, victims, one from Colorado slain ten years ago, and one from Iraq, brutalized and killed quite recently by an American soldier. US news coverage continues to call the 14 year old girl that the soldier raped and murdered a woman. US news coverage is effectively blacked out this week with paralyzingly repetitious coverage of the decade old Ramsey case.

The AP reports a couple of firings and an executive resignation at the walled city of AOHell. It’s a good time to be job hunting. A bad time for me to be criticizing Calacanis land. I’m all pumped up over the possibility of writing a little for WeblogsInc. I was looking at the titles of draft posts here at listics… wondering if any will fit:

• Meanness
• Middle finger
• Dog farts
• Thanks Jay Rosen
• Soylent Diesel
• Fundamentalism, forgiveness, and the zeitgeist of pleasure

Those are just a few of the false starts that haven’t found their way forward into listics. I hope there’s a place for them at WeblogsInc! Ahhh… probably not. Ed Sanders never found favor in Parade magazine either.

Speaking of whom:

…as always, thanks to Mark Woods

Elsewhere and else-when I was led to this picture by Ronni Bennett… quite a resemblance I thought.

I wonder if you write for them if you’re allowed to poke fun at them too?

SB, of Watermark, presents this sweet contrivance…

There being few Dickenson’s among us (and perhaps more than few Dickens’) we write to be read. Shelley is on about traffic and audience this morning, noting that her new triple play — Just Shelley, The Bb Gun, and ScriptTeaser: aggregated at Planet Powers — receives less traffic but probably has about the same audience as Burning Bird, her old site. The topic interests me because I moved in April, haven’t posted at the old site since then, have begun to approach but haven’t reached the levels of attention measurement that I had at the old site, and as interestingly perhaps, don’t see the levels falling all that fast at the old site. There are still as many visitors from Google over there as there ever were.

I think I have about the same active readership that I’ve had for the last few years. I think the number of people reading here is slowly growing, and that I retain my core readers because we are part of an active conversational community that shares similar interests. We drop in on each other’s blogs and comment. We point to each other’s work. We behave in other words much like the A-list, a group of people who have developed collegial relationships in the online world since before the web was the medium, people (largely men) who share similar interests and point to each other and have developed reputations due to their good work and who draw traffic because they are lively and consistent writers. In an obscure way they are perhaps gatekeepers, since to be noticed by more than one of them in a given week will certainly spike readership at our less well trafficked (therefore not A-list?) blogs.

deja vu. I feel like I’ve written this post before, and probably I have. If I’m saying anything new or different, it is found in my echo of Shelley’s sense that there are a core group of readers who make up an “audience” for our work, then there are a lot of drop-ins via search engines. Those peope are still dropping in at Sandhill Trek. If anybody cares to add my trickle to the firehose of their aggravator, they can subscribe via Feedlot here. I think it’s Feedlot? Feedburner? Whatever…. mostly people who subscribe probably don’t read, unless they are very selective in the number of subscriptions they manage. The voracious Scoble needs an aggregator of course, like a mainlining junkie needs an IV hook-up. And David Weinberger entered reader rehab over a year ago. My experience with aggregated subscriptions began before people were fooling around with RSS when the Times of London and a couple of other papers offered free online subscriptions by content. The content backed up in my subscription list and for all I know it’s still backing up, like a pile of unread newspapers on the back porch. Or maybe that was some pre-version 1.0/2.0 flavor of RSS. It was a nineties thing, for sure.

I’m grateful for the attention people give my writing, and I play with strategies for broadening that readership. I toy with being mean. I try to steal other people’s good ideas without the theft being too noticeable. In ripping off that last link, I discover that Madame Levy’s dog is sick, which makes my whole post seem even more trivial.

So let me end it on this note… I will probably always read Shelley as long as she is writing. Same goes for other powerful writers I have been fortunate enough to discover here. I will continue to visit with friends who share my interests, tout the poetry of Sweatman, puzzle over the messages from J. Alva, marvel at the working class genius of folks like BMO, struggle to find a way for the avocation to pay for it itself, admire friends like Jeneane who integrate their life and their work… I will continue to link like a mo-fo and hope others link back when they see something worth linking. Sometime soon, I’m going to comb my old blog roll and get it re-displayed here, and I’m going to contact people like Joey deVilla who are on my list and still have me linked at the old blog. Hopefully this will be another expansion of the pebble-in-a-pool ribbling of concentric circles that comprises audience here in the ’sphere. Readership is worth going after, but the way we pursue it is a matter of some delicacy.

Hoping that Bruce at the River takes some time to weigh-in on Alan Dershowitz. Would it be appropriate for Alan to share a cell with Cheney while they wait for adjudication of their war crimes? Or should Alan get a pass since he’s a private citizen writing from academia?

What should be the rules regarding pre-emptive war? Alan Dershowitz says everything is a matter of degree. He wants to re-write international law to permit anything within the context of proportionality… targeted assassination, torture of prisoners, pre-emptive strikes. Says laws against torture are useless, he says… since every country tortures we should legalize it. What a dick. He proposes that we should legalize torture making the President responsible, with the President required to sign a torture warrant, counter-signed by the Chief Justice. He also wants to discriminate between torturing people to death and “rough interrogation.”

Isn’t it obvious that it’s wrong to look toward the Chief Executive as the ultimate authority? I think everyone has to take responsibility for humane actions. Dershowitz denies moral choice at the personal level and assigns it to authority. Proportionality dominates his argument. The old eye-for-an-eye thing is burned deep into his credulous consciousness. He somehow opposed the war in Iraq, but believed the lies about the existence of weapons of mass destruction there. So is he a liar or a fool? You decide, I can’t listen to the jerk anymore. (But, really, he has great respect for the Palestinians…)

Jenny Attiyeh, of Thoughtcast, has a stronger stomach than mine. And she is a great interviewer.

Thanx to Jeneane for the link. She did one of Scoble… I get the Elton John look-alikedness, but Stephen King?

The AIDS thing is over. South African science has come up with an organic cocktail that prevents and cures the disease.

Correcting Shelley, who mentions “…the belief that all we need are mentors: examples of women who have ‘made it’. Given such is supposedly enough to somehow make women feel more comfortable, and thus encourage more to enter the profession.”

What Shelley describes as a “mentor” I am used to thinking of as a “role model.” In order to improve social conditions and economic opportunities, career opportunities, opportunities for self-fulfillment for all, both mentors and role models are needed. A person who has a mentor is fortunate indeed. I wonder how many people actually have someone who plays this role in their life? As a middle-class white male I could have used mentoring, but I never really had any. The counseling program at my high school was a bad joke. As a young person, from adolescence through maturity, I wore my attitude like a suit of armor, daring anyone to get within sword’s reach. If anybody did reach out, I was undoubtedly too obtuse to welcome or even recognize the opportunity.

On the other hand, as a white middle-class male, I couldn’t help but gain some empowerment from my milieu. All of the men with jobs, supporting families in homes they owned, with two cars in the garage, a boat and a trailer in the driveway, a pedigreed cocker spaniel shitting on the nicely mowed lawn… all of these and more opened mental pathways for me, outlined a set of expectations that I sensed were within reach. I knew that I had choices because I had role models that showed me the opportunities that existed for people like me. But I never had a mentor who would explore a wider range of opportunities, open doors, or simply coach me in ways that would help me make good choices, understand the challenges associated with the choices, and help me to address those challenges.

This has been a poor-me post, brought to you by the piece of shit the world revolves around.

Turn to the Contributors page (page 78) of the September, 2024 issue of Details magazine and you’ll see a blurb about Ben Paynter’s article (found on page 198) “Weapons of Mass Distraction.” It’s a story about the distracting influence of internet access on American soldiers in Iraq. No longer does a “Dear John” letter or a foreclosure notice take days and weeks to find its way to the GI at the front. Now the guys just log on and get the news directly as it’s happening back home.

The Details biographical blurb on Ben says,

Paynter writes for the Pitch, a weekly in Kansas City, Missouri. A story of his will appear in Best American Sports Writing 2024, out next month from Houghton Mifflin.

Attention Deficit Theatre? Well no, not that funny. Those boys crank it up for forty minutes before they hit a belly laugh. But LapinGaroux and the Mole? They provide only the finest textuality, deconstruction with a side of the ol’ hermeneutics.

Listen to the first twenty minutes of this (airquote)podcast(/airquote). Tell me that Gillmor and Madge aren’t the same person.

Ronni shares a poignant story.

“There’ll be no peace without a planet…” Ruah Swennerfelt quotes Mary Ann Percy, a Quaker from La Jolla, by way of providing background on her shift fifteen years or so ago from working on peace and social justice issues to ecological awareness and active concern. Ruah and Louis Cox, two people who do their best to support their local economy and to live lightly on the land, are interviewed by Mark Helpsmeet on his weekly Northern Spirit Radio show which originates from WHYS radio in Eau Claire, Wisconsin. Mark has recorded dozens of broadcasts and they’re available as streaming media or for download here.

Another show I heard tonight was an interview with Ina May Gaskin. Ms. Gaskin is a midwife and a prime mover in the home birth movement. She and Steve Gaskin provided a model for living from 1966 forward to today, starting with Steven’s Monday Night Class in San Francisco and continuing through all of her good work with home birthing in her community as well as the lights she lit across the world with her book on the subject. Mark’s interview was wonderful in drawing that out.

Mark has chosen the good people among us for his interview subjects. I’ve met some of these people and their commitment to doing right stuff is totally impressive… George Watson, a world war 2 conscientious objector… Mike Boehm, a Vietnam war veteran who’s been instrumental in establishing peace parks in Vietnam and starting micro-credit loan funds, helping to heal those wounds… Chuck Fager, who runs Quaker House in North Carolina, a place where soldiers with second thoughts about war and peace can find support… J.E. McNeil, a woman who wrote the book on draft counseling.

There’s a lot of food for thought in these podcasts, a lot of wisdom about community, peace, and living rightly on the earth.

Granny, the journey continues.

So tomorrow morning at 6 am I have to go in for another CT scan, and this time I’m going to have to butch up and drink two bottles of the fuckity-fuck chalky shit…

…once again, I send a multitude of heartfelt thanks to everyone who’s been virtually accompanying me on this suckity-suck journey. Thanks for your comments, your stories, your advice, your PayPal contributions, your beams, your good thoughts, your your silent but concerned lurking. You have no idea, because I have no words to express, how much it means to me and how often it’s helped get me through many a crappity-crap ordeal. And knowing you’re all out there cheering for me is the ONLY damn thing on earth that’s going to get me to swallow that banana flavored ass drink tomorrow.