Ten years after

One would think that after ten years blogging and flogging I would have improved. One would think. Sadly, the last three years barely count. I’ve cranked out the obligatory post or four most every month but I’ve wasted an awful lot of online time in the so-called social web, twitter and Facebook and so forth. Partly my dissatisfaction stems from an inability to chart a steady course through the sea of online (self) publishing. This week I’m ditching one WordPress theme for another and I’m beginning a series of tweaks to this website that may provide a consistent look and feel for the foreseeable future. or not. Let’s just see how it goes.

In the middle of the front lawn is an enormous pile of oak leaves recently raked from the flower bed at the west end of the round-about. The lannon stone wall has suffered from frost heave and root pressure of a fierce encroachment of hollyhocks and mulberry seedlings. There’s some work to do out there to get it all back into shape for spring.

The white trim on the house needs repainting and the woodlot needs to be cleaned up.

There’s a machine shed full of small internal combustion engines and the machines they power just waiting for annual maintenance, and–in the case of the larger tiller and the brush cutter–major repair.

I have a couple of GB of memory I need to install on the older Dell in the office. I’ve successfully procrastinated around this simple task for almost a year. Work on the farm is never done!

So this blog has suffered while I’ve watched streaming Netflix–you can devour an entire season of MI5 in an evening if you put your mind to it–and read trash novels, good novels, and minor treasures of fun writing like the books of Sarah Vowell. What do I mean by “this blog has suffered?” Well, the writing around here hasn’t improved much, and the coverage of exciting political events fell off, and fewer cat pictures have been published, and the list goes on. I’ve finally fixed the RSS feed though. You can again subscribe to Listics and/or to Listics’ comments and feel assured that what’s being posted will find its way into your feed reader. So let’s see what happens next.

Damn Sure Right


Intention is the core of all conscious life. It is our intentions that create karma, our intentions that help others, our intentions that lead us away from the delusions of individuality toward the immutable verities of enlightened awareness. Conscious intention colors and moves everything.
– Hsing Yun

From 2024 until her death in the spring of 2024, Michelle Goodrich used her blog to teach some of us about design. Recently a visitor came here to Listics from the web archive, where Mandarin Meg’s blog lives on.

Michelle enjoyed serendipity. She was amused by coincidence. She liked it when we shared things we found bubbling up around the web, things that seemed somehow synchronous, or things that tickled our sense of deja vu. Here are a few of those things that happen to be stuck in my browser right now, today.

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Meg Pokrass, a new Facebook friend and a flash fiction writer made this…

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Elsewhere, Ashleigh Burrows, a Tucson “elder blogger,” was seriously wounded in the Arizona massacre this weekend. Here is her daughter’s update.
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I’ve been a fan of Paul Ford since the nineties. Paul’s a techie and a fine writer and editor. He’s metro-textual. His most recent piece, “Why Wasn’t I Consulted,” tickles me eight ways from Sunday. It’s worth reading just to get context for his neologism, “the Gutenbourgeois.” Read it here. Learn and laugh!

Somehow related to Paul Ford’s understanding of the web and the persistence of Mandarin Meg’s work, is this New York Times article about a so-called “digital library race.” Oddly, the information is presented in the Business section. Fortunately, not everyone subscribes to the bizarre American ritualistic competitive model. Though the Times laments a “digital library divide,” most of us can simply be grateful for the work that’s being done, take advantage of the collections at Google books or theeuropeanlibrary.org, browse the Library of Congress 16 million item “American Memory” collection, and bear in mind that while old business models for electronic publishing (see JSTOR) hold us back from full participation in this amazing global sharing of the fruits of our cultures, ever more work is available via open access.

Walt Whitman's Cardboard Butterfly from the Library of Congress

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Meanwhile, back in the kitchen… it remains my good intention to mix up my very first batch of English muffins or crumpets today. There’s a first time for everything, but sometimes inertia is hard to overcome and I find myself reading the cookbook instead of cooking. For example, here are some of interesting food bloggers that I’ve been following (instead of baking): Mango and Tomato, One Bite at a Time, Florida Girl in DC.
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And really, there is a lot of other cool stuff on the Interwebz… take for example:

But for now, play her off keyboard cat!

Riding on the crazy train to nowhere

Ronni Bennett posted what follows in the voice of her duly appointed ranter, the Crabby Old Lady. I decided to steal it, edit it a little, and re-post it here. Everyone with a blog ought to steal it. She can’t sue all of us! Ronni’s post is titled “Stupid, Venal, Crackpot Politics.” Here goes…

Crabby says:

The United States is on a crazy train to doom. There is only one thing that matters right now, JOBS. But you wouldn’t know that from the news nor from elected officials who are the only people who have the power to effect change on the large scale the country needs. Instead, they are dealing in stupid, venal, crackpot politics that is harming our country and destroying the lives of the people. Crabby wants them to stop telling the country that rich people’s tax cuts create jobs. It is a lie. Those tax cuts have been around for eight years and look where it got us – millions of permanently lost jobs and 10 percent “official” unemployment that is actually much higher.

To rich people and their sycophant politicians: stop attacking Social Security. No cutting benefits. No privatization. No raising the age of eligibility without an exclusion for people who do heavy labor. And Joe Miller in Alaska? Social Security is not unconstitutional. It is a lie to say that.

To politicians, candidates and rich people: stop attacking Medicare. Expand it to everyone in the U.S. which Congress and President Obama should have done the first time around. A smart 11-year-old can see that would make health care affordable for everyone.

Politicians and corporations: stop sending jobs overseas. Just yesterday, the Senate GOP shot down a bill that would end tax credits to corporations that outsource jobs to other countries. Huh? Why did they have tax credits for that in the first place?

To rich people and political parties: stop funding sleazy, nutter candidates. The country does not need a man who repeatedly emails pornography. It doesn’t need a senator who is ignorant of evolution voting on science-related legislation. It doesn’t need anyone at all in office who believes the president is a Muslim or not born in the U.S.

To cable news media: stop filling 90 percent of your air time with fact-free talking heads flapping their gums in total ignorance of everything. Pay some trained reporters, instead, to do some real journalism. A whole lot of them are out of work and they’ll do the job for less money than your “star” bloviators.

To the American public: stop wearing tricorn hats; you look like idiots in them. Stop listening to Sarah Palin; she’s an opportunistic quitter who can’t speak in intelligible sentences. Turn off Glenn Beck; he’s an ignorant, raving lunatic.

And to rank-and-file tea partiers: you are batshit crazy to believe you are not being manipulated by the Koch brothers and other rich tyrants who want to steal your Social Security, cancel your Medicare and leave you to eat cat food until you die from lack of medical care.

Here’s what mystifies the Crabby old Lady: all the existing and proposed policies of right wingers, their candidates and followers lead inexorably to impoverishment of 95 percent of the population. When fewer and fewer people are employed at subsistence wages, no one will be left to buy the widgets companies make. And if they can’t sell their merchandise, their companies will go under and they will become poorer.

Even Henry Ford, [editor's note: narcissistic, antisemitic, profiteer that he was], knew that. A hundred years ago, he took a lot of grief from other rich corporatists for paying his auto workers the then-magnificent salary of $5 a day. He did so, he said, because he wanted to sell more Model Ts and to do that, more people had to be able to afford them.

It worked so well, his naysayers followed his lead. What has happened to their sense of self-preservation since then?

The Crabby Old Lady let fly because she is deeply frightened for her country. [So am I.] Politicians have always been corrupt, but in the past [in our lifetime] many also cared about the well-being of their constituents and their country, were well educated enough to discuss the Constitution and the ideals of liberty with intelligence, and managed to cooperate with one another to get important legislation done to improve the country.

There was a time when most Republicans and Democrats identified with the middle of the political spectrum, left or right a bit from the center point, because they knew that extremism is dangerous. Now, the few existent centrists are all pretty much behind in the polls for this election.

Our country is in serious trouble on all fronts, but nothing will begin to improve until the people can get back to work.

Never have we needed intelligent leadership more. But what do we have? Candidates who are porn distributors, tax cheats, barely concealed racists, panderers, religious zealots, liars, nihilists and handmaidens to corporations.

No good will come of this.

RSS feed

There comes a time every year or two when I screw up my feed settings terribly. In fairness to myself I must add that sometimes it’s Feedburner’s fault. Sometimes their instructions are opaque, and in one instance while they were being digested by the Google borg they actually hosed up my feed themselves. Really.

So this is an annoying test post to see if I’ve reset my 2024 feed options for listics properly. The only way I’ll know is if this post shows up in the feed.

If you’re a subscriber and it doesn’t, well… this is one of those “please let me know if you don’t get this message” kind of things. Seriously… subscribers? I’ve probably goofed everything up again.

Invitation to visit a new blog of mine

“It is important to bear in mind that political campaigns are designed by the same people who sell toothpaste and cars.” — Noam Chomsky

Thus begins a new blog with the preposterous and passé name Class War. The author? Yours truly, of course. Who else would hurl a dead skunk into the marketing meeting then chain the door shut?

Class War is a blog where I can post my perhaps outré but passionately held political opinions. This blog (Listics) isn’t going away. It will remain an eclectic collection of links to good blogs, good food, journalistic criticism, the Interwebs tech community, and basically anything I want to share. But from now on I’ll be banging the drum for progressive politics and meaningful social change at Class War. I’m just tuning up over there, finding my voice, finalizing formats and layout, that sort of thing. Drop in. Leave a comment. Subscribe.

The Republicans are growing ever more strident in their opposition to Health Care Reform. Many have already begun to hold their breath until they turn blue. Palin is speaking at the NRA convention. The lines are being drawn… there’s a lot to write about as the 2024 political season gets underway.

Cathy Erway

Cathy Erway, the author of The Art of Eating In is in Madison this week preparing meals with friends and spreading the word that we can benefit from getting in touch with where our food comes from and how it’s prepared. Cathy’s blog Not Eating Out in New York sports the tag line “Consuming Less, Eating More.” Sunday she’ll be cooking dinner with Madison’s Underground Food Collective and Monday night she’ll be the guest chef at the UW-Madison’s Slow Food Chapter.

A freelance writer, Cathy also blogs at the Huffington Post which this week is promoting “a week of eating in.” I met her this afternoon at a book signing at Rainbow Bookstore. Confession: in addition to buying an autographed copy of Cathy’s book, I also picked up Michael Pollan’s In Defense of Food, An Eater’s Manifesto and Who Rules America, Power Politics and Social Change by G. William Domhoff. The latter will of course provide food for thought.

Twas Bileg

‘Twas brillig and the slithy tothes, Did gyre and gimble in the wabe; All mimsy were the borogoves, And the mome raths outgrabe.
–Lewis Carroll
Goo goo g’ joob…
–John Lennon

(Has anyone else noticed that “Slithey tothe” is sort of a slant rhyme with “slimy toad?” Of course, toads aren’t slimy but verisimilitude be damned…)

A troll appeared in the comments at Joho the Blog this month. Twas “Bileg,” a slithey tothe if ever I’ve seen one. The guy is giving ad hominem argumentum a bad name. Bileg’s critique to date includes: a) an expression of dissatisfaction with the Joho colors; b) a yawn and a slur regarding David’s epistemological Work In Progress; c) a gratuitous insult or two around a really funny video of Nathan W. eating a carrot; and d) (my favorite, a sartorial insight of the first water) “If this web site is any indication I bet Weinberger is the kind of guy who wears baggy Dockers.”

I think it was the baggy Dockers comment that led me to take a closer look at the troll. I was probably wearing baggy Dockers when I read it. My interest in the troll’s identity was piqued. Does he, I wondered, have some specific ax to grind with DW or with Berkman or Levi Strauss or what? Some desultory googling yielded nothing so his identity remains cloaked in webby anonymity. I hope he appears again. As a student of ad hominem arguments, I think I can pick up some pointers on how not to do it. (Baggy Dockers!)

nobody knows, nobody really cares

Read more about trolls and how to deal with them in this post by Maria Niles at Blogher.