What Do I Know?

From Dublin to Dorset

My daughter went to Dublin and all I got was this blog post.

Sounds like she had a good time. I'm taking them to Dorset today. Lots of interesting stuff to see there.

We've been so busy that yesterday I forgot an important occasion. We have a bit of a competition each year to see which one of us will eventually remember our anniversary. Last night, while watching Gran Torino, I got a little misty eyed when Clint Eastwood was explaining how he convinced the "best woman in the world" to marry him. Then suddenly it hit me: "Happy anniversary!" I shouted to my husband, who was also watching the same scene.

Guess that answers my question. I am not the best woman in the world.

Certainly not the best blogger.

A Very Disturbing Post at TPM

I find this TPM post very disturbing:

I was out of the office and offline for most of the day at a graduation event. So I'm just coming on now. But for those of you following the Pelosi story, over at TPMmuckraker Zack Roth has a series of posts raising more and more questions about whether Nancy Pelosi was really told any of this stuff.

No, not the Pelosi story—that's pretty much a tempest in a teapot. I'm talking about Josh Marshall, one of the best known and most widely read political bloggers (read so widely that newspaper columnists occasionally quote him accidentally) who feels the need to explain why he's been "out of the office" and "offline" all day. Apparently it's such an unusual occurrance that it has discombobulated him to some degree.

Recently Josh took a vacation, the first in about a decade, I recall him saying at the time. He was worried about how he'd deal with the off-time.

I'm more worried about how those we read for commentary on world events are getting increasingly insulated from the lives of ordinary people, who think nothing of going to a graduation and missing breaking news on some minor political scandal.

I like Josh Marshall, I really do. I read him almost every day. But I wish he'd get out more, not less. I wish he'd spend some time among people who aren't so enthralled by partisan battles, in order to get some perspective. We all need a reality check occasionally. I know when I've been spending too much time on the Internet I am often surprised when the real people who populate my daily life aren't as upset about some big to-do as I have become. This is when I appreciate my nieces' Facebook updates, which are usually along the lines of "BORED at work!"

See? The kids are alright. No tempest, only boredom. Somehow I think civilization will survive that.

The Demise of Blogging, Mr. Rogers, and Lengthy Thoughts

Does anyone else get the feeling that blogs are so 2004? Or maybe 2005. Increasingly, Twitter is becoming the social medium of choice for me. I'd rather say it in 140 characters and be done with it than expand it into a blog post. I'm also not reading blogs as much either. My blog friends are now all on Facebook or Twitter, and I learn what they're up to that way. FB and Twitter are sort of like friendlier RSS feeds, which I never really got into.

As blogs have become money makers for their owners, the quality has gone down. Today's blog posts and titles are all about SEO. (Search engine optimization, for those of you who still think blogs are about sharing a slice of your life.)

I remember the good old days, when my post about Bonnie Franklin, star of One Day at a Time, generated hundreds of Google hits from searchers looking for "Bonnie Franklin nude". (Dude, get some counseling. Valerie Bertinelli, I could see. Even Mackenzie Phillips. But Bonnie? Mom? That's the sort of perversion that used to get you on daytime talk shows.)

Yeah, the good old days, when blogging was exciting and new. I'd wake up every morning, mind buzzing with trivial thoughts I figured I could string together into a blog post. It was a brave new world, all of us meeting in cyberspace and journeying together like a modern Beat Generation, riffing off each other's thoughts and posts link by link. The writing was good. Punctuation mattered.

Now we just desultorily RT@ and update our Facebook status. Why bother to flesh out a thought that can be completed in 140 characters? There's even Twitpic, so much faster than TypePad for images.

But is all this harmful? It is the duty of a blog post to examine such things, after all, so here goes:

Back in the last century, I remember grousing to other moms of tots about the dangers of Sesame Street. I believed it shortened our children's attention spans, with its constant jumping from skit to skit, Big Bird to Cookie Monster to catchy maths tunes. Mr Rogers was more my speed, with his long, slow sentences and coherent 30-minute explorations of a single theme.

Fast forward to now, when different media rule our screens. My Twitter page takes me from the Final Four to breaking political news to someone's breakfast, with the occasional plea for coffee, all on one screen. My mind is flung from one topic to another like Elmo on amphetamines. Twitter is to blogging what Sesame Street was to Mr. Rogers. There are no stories on Twitter; no slice of life. Only snippets of snark. Random thoughts. Links. RTs.

My mind shudders. I type, "Must cut out caffeine" into Twitter and try to concentrate on a Facebook quiz.

One day Twitter, referred to by the Ancients as "microblogging", will be replaced by some sort of "nano-blogging". Words will be replaced by character clumps. The equivalent of keyboard grunts, as our collective consciousness perceives meaning from fewer and fewer strokes.

In the future, those of us blogging pioneers, who at the turn of the century embraced the new media with our keyboards blazing, will be called upon to tell our stories. We will, of course, be warned to keep them under 140 characters.

Tea Rations

I've rationed my internet use. I can only browse websites while I'm drinking tea. When the tea runs out, I have to get up and do more important stuff.

So now I'm up to 5 cups of green tea a day. I will never get cancer, probably.

The Problem With TypePad's New Compose Window Is That It Sucks*

Which type of blog post is this?

It's number one: Something is terribly wrong in the blog world, and if I write about it maybe the folks at TypePad who are ruining the blogging experience will do something about it. Or at least I'll get more pageviews.

A couple of weeks ago they rolled out a new Compose Window, as they like to call it. I beta-tested the new feature earlier in the year, and it was so buggy that after a couple of posts I demanded to be un-beta-ed. (And as I just discovered, when I try to access those posts now, I get this. Damn you TypePad to Hell!)

Then with no warning it reappeared, complete with all the same bugs. It's so sluggish in FireFox you could make popcorn in the time it takes for a line of text to show up after you've typed it. So I switched to Safari, and encountered a new bunch of problems. 

See those spaces between the paragraphs? They used to be slim, neat, aesthetically in keeping with most online text paragraph spaces. Now they're fat and ugly, despite my best efforts to HTML them into shape. 

Posting photos, which used to take a mere few clicks of the mouse, is now a laborious process which involves customizing each image insert. Default settings don't save, no matter how many times I click "save these default settings." 

And when I do manage to post a photo, suddenly I can't select a line of text and make it bold—that "B" button becomes unresponsive—thus, no bold captions unless I manually HTML it. (Long time readers will be aware that I don't understand HTML. At all.) And sometimes there's a line underneath my photo. Why? I have no need, as the British say, to "draw a line under it". I prefer bold captions.

This is just the minor stuff. Try cutting and pasting, from either Word or another webpage. Ouch! I've seen high school yearbooks that looked better. No more 13-point Ariel. But trying to select and edit lines of text is impossible. It's easier to retype. (Scratch that—I'm not gonna retype. I just won't post it, Damn you TypePad to Hell.)

There are other bugs: My categories reverted to all those generic categories TypePad provides you with: Games, Music, Sports (have you ever seen a sports-related post here? Not. Gonna. Happen.).

In a post I made for another blog I maintain, I tried cutting and pasting from Word, only using the HTML mode as they suggested when they answered my Help ticket. I ended up with a bunch of question mark symbols after every line. Yeah. My thoughts exactly. 

I'm not the only one who's angry.  And in the spirit of "Being Upset" you'll see that I've linked (which is now a three-step process) to other users who are upset too. 

But hey, at least I found a bunch of great new blogs to read. 

*Because I got so many new readers when I titled this post similarly. Consider this a place where you feel comfortable ranting. DYTPTH=Damn You TypePad To Hell.

Some Bloggers Are Better Than Me

Perhaps waiting a few hours and getting a good night's sleep enlivens one's perspective. Regardless, here is Josh Marshall on the same topic I was fuming over last night:

What she's doing is not securing her the nomination. Rather, she's gunning up a lot of her supporters to believe that the nomination was stolen from her -- a belief many won't soon abandon. And that on the basis of rationales and arguments there's every reason to think she doesn't even believe in.

I guess that's why they give him the big bucks.

China

This is the kind of post I've been wanting to read on China, and the earthquake, but I didn't know that until I read it. James Fallows, the Atlantic writer currently living in China, provides photographic evidence:

The masses in China are overwhelming; the people in them are vividly and irrepressibly individual.

Every person killed in China was an individual, someone's daughter or son. James Fallows makes a point of the obvious, and tragic. Too often that is forgotten in the rush for raw numbers.

Hoops, Not Hope

I'll be out most of the day (off to see this pile), but for you political junkies who can't get enough, here's a video that made my day.

It's not about hope. It's about hoops. And troops.

Go ahead, watch it. It made me smile.

If that's not enough, go check out the sidebar on the left. There's plenty of reading there.

I hope your weather's better than mine.

Brought To You By The Letter E

I'm so excited! I just got home from class and read that I've been awarded an E for Excellent blog award by Anke!

That's an extremely exhilarating endorsement, in fact, I'm even tempted to use two exclamation marks!! (The editor in me does not embrace that, however.)

Aren't you envious? (Hopefully I can be excused for my enthusiasm.)

I guess I have to give the award to someone now. (Is that how it works?) I admit, I've been way behind on my blog reading. But there's one blog that has been instrumental in keeping me in the forefront of hip. That's Chris Delladevoda: Ravings of an American Expat in Oxford (soon to be in Australia, sadly). His is a mix of photos, music, and one of my favorite topics, genetics. And politics—naturally, a smart guy like that is supporting Obama.

I'll miss him when he's gone, even though I never actually met him. But every time I go to Oxford, I think, oh, maybe that guy over there is Chris. So far, none of them have answered when I yelled out "Hey Chris!"

So, thanks Anke, for the E rating. And now I will encourage everyone to examine Chris's blog for more entertainment.

The Mutating Meme

What better way to jump back into blogging after a sojourn across the pond than to respond to a meme? Okay, I could actually write a decent post, but that would take brain cells that are currently sleep deprived, and if you read Science Times in the NYTimes yesterday, which I had plenty of time to read as I was in airports or airplanes for 24 hours straight, you'll know that adequate sleep is necessary for blogging.

Anyway, PSOTD meme'd me. It's a very complicated meme, involving numerous DNA strands; a mutating meme, as it were (not mutating gene; that's a topic for another post). Pharyngula started it, and how is it that biology professors have time to start memes anyway? Shouldn't they be teaching our children, at those prices we pay? (Just got back from Family Weekend, remember.)

It's very Sci-Fi centric, and I don't do Sci-Fi, but that's where the mutating bit comes in:

The Rules:

There are a set of questions below that are all of the form, “The best [subgenre] [medium] in [genre] is…”. Copy the questions, and before answering them, you may modify them in a limited way, carrying out no more than two of these operations:

•You can leave them exactly as is.
•You can delete any one question.
•You can mutate either the genre, medium, or subgenre of any one question. For instance, you could change “The best time travel novel in SF/Fantasy is…” to “The best time travel novel in Westerns is…”, or “The best time travel movie in SF/Fantasy is…”, or “The best romance novel in SF/Fantasy is…”.
•You can add a completely new question of your choice to the end of the list, as long as it is still in the form “The best [subgenre] [medium] in [genre] is…”.
•You must have at least one question in your set, or you’ve gone extinct, and you must be able to answer it yourself, or you’re not viable.

Then answer your possibly mutant set of questions. Please do include a link back to the blog you got them from, to simplify tracing the ancestry, and include these instructions.

The Path:

My great-great-great-great-great-great-grandparent is Pharyngula.
My great-great-great-great-great-grandparent Metamagician and the Hellfire Club.
My great-great-great-great-grandparent is Flying Trilobite.
My great-great-great-grandparent is A Blog Around the Clock.
My great-great-grandparent is archy.
My great-grandparent is Why Now?
My grand-parent is Rook's Rants.
My parent is PSOTD.

The Questions:

The best alien invasion song in SF/Fantasy is: We'll Make Great Pets by Porno for Pyros.

The best “bad” movie in SF/Fantasy is: All of them! Umm, okay, let's change that one. The best "bad" movie in chick flicks is: Ever After.

The best non-pop song in pop is: The Emperor's New Clothes by Sinead O'Connor. (Well, at least the one I've heard most recently. Western Mass has a really great radio station, I discovered.)

The best flavor filling in PopTarts is: Chocolate Fudge by Kelloggs (Yes, that's the same answer as PSOTD. Meme evolutionary theory says that memes that are beloved by pregnant mothers don't mutate.)

The Victims:

As always, if your name is Kathy or any form thereof, you're tagged. But I don't want to leave out the guys, so I think I'll tag Chris in Oxford, who has an affinity for genes as well as music.

Proof That There Is Too Much Stuff on the Internet

There's this Google game, where you search for "Your first name looks like" and see what happens. The problem is, everyone's done it, posted it, and now you get results of everyone else's post, especially if you have the world's most popular name, which is Kathy.

But here's what I found anyway, plus my comments on the accuracy of the observation:

Kathy looks like a dowdy, ashen housefrau who could use some color on her cheeks. (True. Most people think it's because I'm a pale, sickly vegan though.)

Kathy looks like a good candidate for the 4th Annual Sonja Award. (No, but I'd be a great candidate for the 4th Annual Kathy Award.)

Kathy looks like an old british nanny. (Have you seen British nannies these days? I wish!)

Kathy looks like the leader of the Chozo from Metroid Prime. (I have not yet named my alternate universe, but that sounds good to me.)

Kathy looks like a drunk and so does her husband. (Was that you at my window last night?!)

Kathy looks like a rich suburban transvestite, happily living out her golden years wearing tacky clothing and riding around on *****-shaped floats. (Transvestites have way more fun than I do. That must have been another Kathy.)

And little Kathy looks like believable Dixie offspring. (Well, yeah, I am. Born and raised in Louisiana.)

Kathy looks like a housewife who has grown tired of taking care of 3 kids and is out partying in this photo! (It was 2 kids, but yes, I did go partying the other day.)

Kathy looks like she was manufactured in a different country than her step-father. (Nope, unless Yoknapatawpha County counts.)

Kathy looks like she's trying to hold back tears. (Yes, that was me at Heathrow the other day.)

Damn, Kathy looks like a pissed off highschool English teacher. (I told you about the proper use of it's!)

Kathy looks like a bowl of saran wrap that has been pulled too tight from all the botox. (Close. Wax paper.)

The Kathy looks like a Burger-built hull-and will probably stand up to the ice if they saw it loose a couple of times over the winter to keep the ice from twisting the hull. (No, but I had a nightmare about this once.)

That last one includes a pretty shot of a boat, stuck in ice.

So I guess that was worth 10 minutes.

Someone needs to close down the internet so I can get some real work done.

(For those of you wondering, this is what I really look like.)

How to Detect and Deflect a Spammer

I've had an outbreak of spam comments at WDIK? lately. There was a string of obvious spam about musical instruments for sale, so I added the word "yamaha" to the banned word list. Promptly after that I was besieged by unscrupulous plumbers so I had to do the same thing with "faucet." (In TypePad go to Control Panel then Site Access to ban words.) That put an end to most of it, but I suspect I'll have to continue to ban certain words on a regular basis. (Meanwhile, anyone who mentions "yamaha" or "faucet" in a comment will be flagged. Apologies to motorcycle enthusiasts and my kindergarten teacher, Mrs. Faucet.)

This morning, a more insidious spam method showed its ugly face. Someone named "jackee" posted a comment on a recipe for Three Mushroom Risotto. She supposedly tried it and liked it, but used red wine instead of white. I immediately posted an encouraging reply, as I tend to do, then thought "hmmm...." I checked the link attached to the name: Yep, a website that sells wine. But still: jackee could be a real person who tried the recipe and just happened to sell wine. (Yes, I know, one of us is born every minute.)

So I checked my stats at Sitemeter, and discovered someone from an IP address in Karachi had Googled the string: "Name required  + typepad.com + blogs + white wine". Obviously someone, in this case some marginal English-speaking computer-wielding Pakistani, had been hired to spam blog posts that mentioned wine. (Teresa has a few comments that thoroughly suss this poorly paid occupation.)

I decided to see if anyone else had been spammed using the same Google search, and sure enough, at Chez Pim I found "jackee" had left two comments. Seems she did a lot of cooking last night, with, what else, white wine. There was also a comment at another site, proclaiming the joys of white wine and high tech gadgetry. (I prefer red wine with my high tech gadgetry, but what do I know?)

I deleted "jackee's" comment and my reply, regretting I'd been taken in for even a second by an evil, albeit underpaid, spammer.

I don't want to get ugly, and start moderating comments, or requiring a TypeKey account. I hate sites that make me remember my Blogger account, since I signed up long ago and can never remember which of my creative names and passwords I used. (And I know they use Google now, but that's even worse, since I have several Google accounts associated with other ventures.)

From now on, anyone who posts a comment linking to a site that sells something, unless it's someone I know and something I endorse, will be considered a spammer, and not only will I delete your comment, but I'll also put a curse on you and your nether regions that will make you wish you'd never learned to type. (I can do this, you know. Just ask Tony in Chicago.)

Caught! Image Rustlers!

Usually when bloggers post one of my images on their sites, I notice it via incoming traffic, as they are good enough to at least link the image to its original location at WDIK. (For instance here, where you may recognize The Dog.)

But not always. I happened to see a familiar image when I perused a Google image search for "oreo cows" but it didn't direct to my site.

Recognize anything in this blog post from the appropriately named "Nobody Asked" blog?

Look hard. Photo number three is from here. The other two are stolen from other sites as well. The least the guy could have done was post a link, but nope. No link, no acknowledgment, just an outright image theft.

I guess blog etiquette is just so 2005. (By the way, digital cameras have come down in price since I bought mine in 2005. It still works, though it's held together by tape. Most bloggers I know have one, and use it to enhance their posts with their own photos.)

Note: others have asked to use my photos, particularly of Oreo cows, for their various projects, and I've always agreed. I'm really not a meanie. If you have a school project, heck, I'll probably offer to write your paper for you, I'm that nice.

You Thought I'd Never Ask!

Two people responded with requests for interviews from the interview meme. (BTW, I think we should call this the I Thought You'd Never Ask! meme.) Meryl has the blog My Bit of Earth, where she can post her answers, and Stacey is not a blogger, (but may soon be an expat!), so she'll answer in comments.

Meryl’s questions:

1. If you were to write your memoir, where would you start?

2. Which country or area would you most like to visit, and why?

3. I see you’ve started a photo blog. What is your favorite photo you’ve taken?

4. You seem like an avid gardener. What got you started gardening? What do you find easiest to grow in your climate?

5. You’re also obviously a dog lover. How did you come to have the two dogs you have now, and do you find it difficult to raise two dogs at once?

UPDATE: Meryl's answers are here.

Stacey’s questions:

1. Up first: Where do you live now, and how do you like it? (You don't have to be too specific; region of the country is fine.) And why do you want to move?

2. How long have you been reading blogs, and do you ever plan to get a blog of your own?

3. What country or area do you most want to visit, and why?

4. Do you prefer living in the city or country?

5. Do you have any pets? If so, will they be moving with you?

Hit and Run Blogging

No time today for anything more than drive-by linking.

First up, the dog and cat diaries. You've probably read this, but just in case, go here and see what your dogs and cats are really thinking.

A while ago, there was a brouhaha over the PETA State of the Union video, which featured—cover your eyes, kids—a naked woman. Watch the rather serious explanation for why they resort to such tactics. But be sure to watch the middle bit, for priceless footage of GWB shortly before he took office in 2000. It's better than the naked bits.

Since I've run out of ways of saying support the troops, I'll let eRobin say it for me.

The Ethical Man's Top Ten Tips for ethical living. (Thank god I don't have to deal with the nappies business; raising a teenager is difficult enough to do ethically, since stuffing them in the crawl space isn't ethical.)

That's all from me. Senioritis again. Awards ceremony today. Why do they encourage them? Cut them off at the knees, I say. When they're toddlers. Give them custodial jobs in daycare, put them on the dole in kindergarten, anything but encourage them to stay in school, and god forbid, apply to college.

I Read the News Today

I've spent the last couple of hours diving back into the political waters, which I'd pretty much ignored the last week or so. Now I want to go crawl back under a rock.

Over at Political Animal I read this especially disturbing news:  the bill to bring Army and Navy battalions back to the status they were in before the invasion of Iraq: $50 to $100 billion.

Andrew Tobias reminds us the national debt will be $10 trillion by the time Bush leaves the White House—eight trillion of which was amassed by three presidents: Reagan, Bush, and Bush. He also reminds us that "annual interest on the debt already amounts to 40% of all the personal income taxes we pay."

And I see one of the Bush twins had her purse stolen. Now she knows how we feel.

Oh, and our carbon emissions are rising, which means there's a really good chance we'll all burn in hell sometime during my lifetime.

I turned to CNN.com, and realize I should probably be upset about Pamela Anderson's divorce, except I didn't even know she and Kid Rock were married.

Meanwhile, America continues to shop.

Understanding Web 2.0, or How to Increase Your Blog Traffic

What I don't understand about Web 2.0: If Technorati Tags are universally held to be a Great Thing, why don't they ever work for me? (And why doesn't TypePad know how to spell Technorati?)

What I have come to understand after reading lots of blog posts on how to increase your blog traffic: Titling a post "How to increase your blog traffic" or "Six tips to increase your blog traffic" will increase your blog traffic.

Another thing I've gleaned: Using the term "Web 2.0" means you're one of the cool kids, and all those Web 1.0 users will eventually be overcome by a superior force from a world beyond. The remnants of their culture will one day be examined by anthropologists aboard the USS Enterprise.

At least the Neanderthals' DNA survived.

Can You Spot the Sexism?

Can anyone identify what's wrong with this post about top bloggers' favorite posts? Took me about 5 seconds; see if you can beat that.

PS: Extra points if you also notice that all the posts sound really boring and navel gazy. I mean, would you waste time reading a post about SixApart buying LiveJournal? Or about a camera store's bait and switch policy? I thought not. My discerning readers want to read about chocolate and politics. Which wouldn't be a bad name for a blog, come to think of it.

UPDATE: Here's the reply:

Projecting whatever evil you see in the world (racism, sexism, homophobia, wars) on me/ this post is certainly an easier option than facing real issues. I'm only afraid it won't help anyone.

In other words, the issues faced by women and girls who constantly find themselves unrepresented/underrepresented when these "lists" are made are "unreal". I'd like to hear the post author say that to his wife or daughter.

UPDATE II: Shelly Powers has more, from the perspective of a techie blogger, where this sort of thing has been going on since, well, ever since long before Kevin Drum uttered the immortal words: Where are all the women bloggers. She'll be writing a post in a couple of weeks that answers that question once again.

Links, With Commentary

•Apparently there are no women capable of speaking on the issue of "What to do in Iraq?" Or maybe the roundtable just wasn't big enough after they found six men to sit at it. Those heads, after all, need lots of room.

•I'm late to this link (via), but here's what the British really think about Americans. (BTW, you'll notice in the language of the poll itself and in the comments that here the U.S. is generally referred to as "America," ignoring completely the the existence of nine other countries in North America alone.)

•A good map will help to understand the current Mid-East crisis. BBC colour-codes the strikes: blue outlines for Israeli strikes, green for Hezbollah. Can you count them? (I feel like I'm talking to four-year-olds; is foreign policy really this simple? Yes; see above.)

Drive-by Linking

What's the matter with Kansas Republicans? (via W&P) Looks like Bush's legacy will be similar to Reagan's, who supposedly convinced Democrats to turn into Republicans.

And via Avedon, check out this new blog, Apikoros, whose first post is excellent:

I have had it with discussions of immigration. I cannot believe that every time the subject is brought up that the response isn't "Yes, the economy is in the toilet, isn't it?"

Finally, my idea to raise sheep as exotic pets wasn't so crazy after all. This rescued lamb thinks it's a dog.