This would be the point to say that MT-Blacklist has got their bugs fixed now. I would recommend upgrading to MT 3.0 and MT Blacklist 2.0 ASAP. You'll be much happier.
Patrick, not only do I agree with your analysis, but it nicely dovetails with an article I came across recently by John Perry Barlow. Money quote:
I felt as if I were watching the best minds of the next several generations blowing themselves into starry oblivions as deep as the desert night, pushing the envelope of strangeness into near-psychosis at a time when the world beyond The Playa seems to have gone quite mad enough already.
If someone like Karl Rove had wanted to neutralize the most creative, intelligent, and passionate members of his opposition, he'd have a hard time coming up with a better tool than Burning Man. Exile them to the wilderness, give them a culture in which alpha status requires months of focus and resource-consumptive preparation, provide them with metric tons of psychotropic confusicants, and then . . . ignore them. It's a pretty safe bet that they won't be out registering voters, or doing anything that might actually threaten electoral change, when they have an art car to build.
Indeed, Burning Man strikes me as only one of many reality distortion fields within which the counter-culture, myself totally included, has sought self-ghettoizing refuge. On reflection, I realized that I felt much the same about the massive protest marches that failed to impede in any way the Administration's unprovoked assault on Iraq. We all had a grand time gathering ourselves by the millions, but we were up against opponents far more practical and smart than Dick Nixon or Spiro Agnew. The current Dick knows that the best way to deal with dissent is give it a spectacle to exhaust its energies on. He knows that we're suckers for a good show, especially one where we get a starring role, so he gives us unmolested stages upon which to mount our extravaganzas and goes on about his corporate affairs.
Also, as I watched the enormously inventive and sweet-hearted burners duct-taping together their creations, I felt a sinking sense of ineffectiveness. We're up against an opposition that can get their machines to fly twice the speed of sound and do so reliably. Granted they do stupid and terrible things with those machines, but at least they get them to work. And yes, ours would probably work too with that kind of funding, but with our disdain for both wealth and the tedious processes of democracy, we have conceded those resources to the thin-lipped monotheists.
The longer I hang around a certain class of long time fan, the more I think it applies to them as well.
The text search capability was one of the most popular functions of the late lamented BiblioBytes, and we had under a thousand books to work with. It's going to be wildly popular with 120,000 titles.
Focusing on this geek stuff is the intellectual equivalent of Ricardo's Law of Comparative Advantage. (If you don't know it, a good explanation is at http://www.calus.org/articles/economics/0027.htm )
Jeremy, check http://www.newsday.com. There. You have no excuse now.
Just wait until the movie comes out...
Lenny (and anybody else): one of the best things you can do in the big drive to sanity is maintain the integrity of the ballot boxes. Right now, there's potential for serious mischief there. Otherwise, you're just going to get this sinking feeling that people are really stealing the elections out from under you.
Seeing the Forst has been doing the most on this:
http://seetheforest.blogspot.com/
God knows I don't trust the electronic ballot boxes at all.
You can also transpose the melodies of "Gilligan's Island" and "Amazing Grace".
I also got the strangest look from Jeanne Robinson when Spider started playing "Blackbird" and I started singing "Yesterday".
My personal favorite is singing "Jabberwocky" to the William Tell Overture-- because doing that language at speed is a challenge.
(And, to no one's surprise, I'm the guy at the ball games who sings both "The Star Spangled Banner" and "Take Me Out To The Ball Game" a word or two ahead of the actual notes...)
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| 2002 | 1 |
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