Just within the last two days, I've received:
"You have transcended the barrier separating protected commentary from libel. I urge you to retract. "
And my favorite, an email with no words, just a picture of myself, and my address posted in the subject line.
I'm going to step out of character here and be exceptionally charitable, and suggest a radical hypothesis.
a) Mark Mitchell is actually the most insightful writer on the interweb, with a reputation that will be recognized by posterity, and
b) If a list of all the people he "plagiarized" were compiled, we'd have a list of all the bloggers who now possess access to a time machine. Or will have had future access to a time machine.
My god, people. It's Sunday morning! We're supposed to be preparing for reverent worship of the deity of our choice, and you undermine all that with this hellish proof that god does not exist.
Although, I must say that the participants in that video all look like they're having a good time. I wonder if they'll be as cheerful when they're shimmying IN HELL.
If you think that article was funny, you ought to check out the author's weblog. He takes a trip to Russia, and comes back with a bride. For real.
As someone who has just turned 49 himself, all I can say is...
Wow.
Fifty is really old.
Anyway, welcome to the second half of your first century!
Oh, I don't know. It's an OK ruling for some of us, and I had mixed feelings about the whole issue going into it. Although I'm strongly against endorsement of religion by any agent of the government, I also think it's reasonable for communities to express religious sentiment. In some cases, compromise is a good solution.
I know, I'm a god-hating bastard, but I really don't mind if others have religious beliefs.
The beta technorati doesn't help, because now the only technorati is the beta technorati.
I noticed when they switched over that it stopped my old plugin that used the technorati api from ever showing me anything new -- the same sites now seem to be permanently listed on my page. And my technorati rss is doing the same thing Teresa describes, with the same last few sites shuffling up and down.
Of course, maybe its because every weblogger suddenly discovered who I really am, and now I'm being shunned as a pariah. I don't know, because Technorati won't help me find out where I was outed.
Yes -- tetrapods in most postures have to oppose the force of gravity pulling their heads down, so the ligaments running along the back have to be stronger and thicker. Fall down and die, and the passive tension generated by dessicating muscle and connective tissue distorts the posture...and it's those thicker ligaments along the back that win.
Yeah, I found that idea fascinating, too. I also found the author's webpage and couldn't resist -- I ordered a copy. He also has a graphic novel on SF and Christianity, illustrating The Day the Earth Stood Still from a biblical perspective...shee-yah, as if. A guy named Mr Carpenter comes down from the heavens to bring mankind a gift of peace, is killed for it, and is resurrected? I didn't see no giant robots in that there Bible. He should stick to the verifiable scientific facts.
As one of those relatively rare non-MT bloggers, another issue is the growing blogware monoculture. One of the things that makes life easier for spammers is that they only have to target MovableType to slam the majority of sites. Not that MT is in any other way inferior, but I'm running one site that gets a fair amount of traffic on Expression Engine, and another with lesser traffic on MT...guess which one is a daily chore to prune out the crap? MT-Blacklist is a big help, but having a site with no familiar hooks for the spammers is even better.
I've got happy plans in mind. Election day I'm going to be hittin' the town, helping to drive voters to the polls.
Election night, I'm either going to be dancing in the streets, or making my travel plans. I've got a stash of dead rats stockpiled in the lab freezer. Either way, I've got a purpose.
I just spent some time with relatives, some of whom are planning to vote for Bush. These were not rich people, nor were they in management, but they aspired to it -- and they were the kind who gullibly swallowed down that inspirational twaddle wholesale. What's scary is that you don't have to be a PHB to buy into the Bush myth; all you have to do is envy the PHB.
The next terrifying thing to think about is that they aren't going to learn. If Bush loses, or if Bush wins the election and continues to fall flat on his face in everything else he tries, his faith-based cheerleaders aren't going to blame him: they're going to blame us. Everyone who points out his flaws and brings up that annoying 'reality' stuff are traitors who have been building obstacles to his rightful triumph. We aren't team players. We don't have the can-do spirit. If the will to win is sufficient to win, then failure must be a consequence of a failure of our will, not a bad or impractical plan.
In my history, we have moved from Seattle to Indiana to Seattle to Oregon to Utah to Pennsylvania to Minnesota, with a number of local moves in between. One of the virtues of making multiple grand cross-country moves is that you learn that the first thing to find is a large dumpster. A couple of truckloads go there, first, and then you load up the bare essentials for traveling, and finally, you use shovels to deposit everything left behind in the dumpster as well.
It's also a good idea, in my case, to find a used bookstore that will take the small accumulated mountain of books that I am sadly abandoning.
But now I have tenure and I hope I never ever have to move again. The weird thing about that is that I realize this may be the house I someday drop dead in...
The things one learns on Making Light. I have a website, too...and in it I state that I'm a biologist at a university. I had no idea that that instantly made me a member of a cabal.
My domain name registry lists my university address for contact, also. That's more a matter of habit: we live in a very small town, no one ever locks their doors, etc., and we've been surprised a few times that when packages are delivered, the UPS/FedEx/USMail people will just walk in the door and leave it on the living room table. It was a little freaky at first, and we just started using my more secure university address.
I've never published with Tor, which isn't too surprising, since I don't write fiction, period. I have published with J Comp Neurol, Development, J Comp Assist Microscopy, etc, and once long ago with Nature. I don't coddle up to the editors of those journals because they don't provide a comfortable place to sit down in a squooshy chair and listen to a bunch of chatty writers. And that, really, is the only reason you find this convergence of people here--it's where the salon is. No conspiracies. Not because we're all schemers trying to get an edge on publication.
Although it is revealing that you would suggest such darker motivations among the gang of regulars here, Mr Projection.
About the comment that there are better written, more tightly plotted, less repetitive fantasy books out there -- I entirely agree. I've read all of the Potter books just to keep up with my kids, but the last couple have been a hard slog. The structure of each book is pretty much the same, so despite all the inventive details I feel like I know what's going to happen anyway.
However, that seems to be part of the appeal. My kids ate these books up, and my daughter is now hooked on some other godawful schlocky interminable fantasy series with eleventy-seven books and the author's name set in much bigger type than the title on the cover. I took a look at one of those, and boy-howdy, but Rowling is Homer and Shakespeare all rolled into one compared to that author. But what I think my daughter wants is an opportunity to be immersed in a fantasy world, one that isn't going to end when she reaches page 180, and that has some homey familiarity along with the weird new surprising stuff.
Archetypes are good. Repetition is comforting. Expectation of a prolonged experience is much desired. Rowling hit the sweet spot.
Where you lose me is in that last paragraph: give him 3 years free tuition? Why? Getting an education is a privilege and a pleasure, and you're saying he should be rewarded with a gift of 3 years of it for cheating.
We had an interesting example of something similarly ironic on our university faculty e-mail list. We had a creationist giving a talk on campus, and I had sent out some scathing information on the guy to my fellow faculty. Another faculty member, a vocal creationist himself (yes, they do exist on college faculty. He was a coach, of course.) fired off an impassioned defense.
Another faculty member was suspicious and gave the e-mail the google test. You guessed it -- it was plagiarized.
I see this horrible stuff going on in Abu Ghraib, and I am appalled. But something else appalls me, too.
Why are we sitting here beating our breasts?
Why aren't we all pouring out into the streets and screaming our rage at the US administration that has botched this war and has allowed and apparently even encouraged this kind of thing?
Why aren't mobs marching on Washington to take these contemptible neocons by the scruff of the neck and throw them in jail?
Why aren't our representatives in congress preparing to impeach Bush and Cheney and the whole scumsucking crowd?
The rationale for this war and the conduct of this war are things that contradict everything we're taught about the virtues of America--I would think that conservatives, who often seemed to be schooled in bedrock pro-Americanism, would be even more outraged than a lefty liberal like me...and I'm pretty damned outraged.
What can we do? Why aren't we doing it?
Yes, please, share the joke. We promise to disseminate it quickly and widely, so that Bush/Cheney will have to shut down this entire Intarweb thingumbob to extirpate it, thereby sparing nielsenhayden.com from their exclusive wrath.
| Year | Number of comments posted |
|---|---|
| 2007 | 4 |
| 2006 | 2 |
| 2005 | 4 |
| 2004 | 18 |
| 2003 | 3 |
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