The most recent 20 comments posted to Electrolite by Charles Dodgson:

In response to Paul's question,

[E]very time I see a discussion of American politics liberal seems to equate with something the devil would consider too extreme to touch. Why?

I personally think there's a pretty simple answer: three decades of relentless right-wing propaganda, starting from the early 1970s, a time when respectable Republican politicians like the Rockefellers and Massachusetts' governor Sargent proudly called themselves liberals, and the term "conservative" was identified largely with folks like William F. Buckley, then regarded as a wild fringe figure himself because his open support for Jim Crow was not yet forgotten. If it was some kind of long-standing American tradition, it's kind of odd that it was having no effect on the discourse here a scant few decades ago...

Not to denigrate Fafblog! (which is indeed, as advertised, truly the whole world's only source for Fafblog), but there's even more silly stuff in the letter -- like the assertion that we can be sure that the lurkers support us in Falluja because that's what they tell "our psyopers".

I have a bit of fun with that here, albeit in the middle of a much longer post...

Straight HTML doesn't seem to be an easy option in this case -- as already noted, this is a scan of a preexisting document, and low enough in quality that OCR would probably miss large chunks of it. The only way to get the text into HTML would be to retype the whole thing manually -- and then try to duplicate the formatting.

PDF is more of annoyance when the document in question is some kind of court filing -- also commonly made available as scanned PDF, and sometimes of poor quality -- but it's common in that context for pretty much the same reasons.

Let me put in a recommendation for another item from the list: "The Richest Man in Babylon" by Thievery Corporation. These guys are a duo who get put into "electronica" sections in stores because they use synthesizers and the occasional sideman, but the music is lush and melodic, sounding a lot more like The Girl from Ipanema than the uptempo, heavily processed dance tracks that are next to it in the CD bins.

(And, as long as I'm recommending music, I'll plug two local bands, both of which have CDs on their own labels -- The Twinemen, who are the two surviving members of Morphine working with singer and guitarist Laurie Sargent, and the Dresden Dolls, who have been described as "the new (painted) face of Boston rock" even though they're more of an electric, angry, and very smart cabaret act than a rock band. They both sound better live, IMHO, but the records are pretty darn good).

Marna, I'm kind of fond of "Rumbo" as a nickname for him myself...

Well, if the conversation goes on much longer in this vein, I'll have to consider starting up Anonymous Internet Fucktards Anonymous. We could kick the organization off in grand style with a meeting in Cambridge in October, priced at $700 a head to pay for the caviar-freighted buffet tables at the swank receptions manned by dozens of staffers on loan from the Department of Redundancy Department...

Actually, I'm not hostile to Lydia's explanation either. There could easily be truth to both...

An acquaintance of mine once posted to a very large quasi-work-related mailing list, and got back a challenge from one of these challenge-response systems, which had been installed by a subscriber to the list. If a hundred subscribers had installed one of these things, he would have been flooded. The guy who had installed the challenge-response system had absolutely no idea why anyone would consider that to be a problem...

Christopher, the way we can read what you type at home is very simple. It's like the wire telegraph, which, as a noted expert once explained, is a kind of very, very long cat. You pull his tail in New York and his head is meowing in Los Angeles. Do you understand this? And the intenet operates exactly the same way: you send signals here, they receive them there. The only difference is that there is a large herd of cats.

Thanks for the tip -- it doesn't seem to be quite up to date, but it's certainly better than nothing. I guess sometime soon I'll have to see if blogger is letting me update my template this week.

(BTW, regarding go-betweens for DNS, one of the reasons I'm pseudonymous is to limit the damage on the off chance that something like, say, this or this gets freeped, and I wouldn't want any friend of mine to run that risk if I'm not).

It's not quite that easy -- those directions assume both blogger pro, and a hosting arrangement for the blog which is separate from blogspot.

Both of which would be good ideas -- but if I'm going to upgrade at all, I'd prefer to go to some non-blogger-based setup. (And preferably without getting real-world contact information into the WHOIS database, though it's not clear how far it's worth it to pursue that -- setting up a private off-shore corporation for the sole purpose of owning the domain name seems like overkill, though I have seen it done).

FWIW, some of the AIs seem to have interestingly different motives from others -- in particular, the Merovingian and Persephone both act *as if* they were motivated by some pretty basic human drives which you wouldn't expect programs to share, and which the Agents, for example, seem to lack. I sincerely hope that point isn't thrown away in the third film...

I'm surprised no one has yet mentioned Merhan Nasseri, the Iranian exile who has been living out Zizka's vision of hell since 1988, when a mishap involving the loss of his papers left him stranded, stateless, at Charles de Gaulle airport outside of Paris, where he has been living ever since.

He has, I'm compelled to note, been at only the one airport all this time. But if they're all the same, then it hardly matters...

What kills me, even more than the dubious support that Dubya's crew has obtained from powers like Rwanda and Eritrea, is that they're listing Turkey as a "member of the coalition", even though Turkey is in a position to offer real support and has so far declined to do so. They're refusing to allow in ground troops, or allow use of their air bases; the most they have promised is to allow American planes to fly overhead. But as I write, they haven't actually allowed that yet, and are trying to make it conditional on the US allowing their troops into northern Iraq, where the Kurds have a well-founded fear of Turkish atrocities.

You know who else is allowing overflights, and without any restriction? France.

This sticks out so much that even the Moonie Times has noticed...

A Google search on the proper names reveals that this new addition to the Tolkein oeuvre was initially published as the novel "Offshore" under a pseudonym, Penelope Fitzgerald...

http://www.readinggroupguides.com/guides/offshore.asp

The same provisions apply to public library records as well --- including the fairly toxic provision that no one is allowed to disclose any request for a search.

My strategy in dealing with all this: pay cash. But I'm not exactly thrilled with it...

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