I was disappointed by the crop of ads this time. Aside from the mortgage and registrar ads, everyone was timid.
Just finished Going Postal, the first Discworld I've ever read, and not the last. As a survivor of two failed dot.coms, it hit home.
2/3rd of the way through through Charlie Stross' new fantasy.
Cynthia found a copy of Bridge of Birds at a used book store in Maui where I had stopped to borrow a cup of Internet. That's next in the queue.
I know zilch about religious history in the US but wanted to correct a misconception about the state of physics in M's comment above:
While there are a few cosmologists such as Tipler and Morris who have embraced theist ideas in explaining the origins of the universe, there are as many or more who are looking at more exotic approaches. For an introduction for laypeople, I'd look at the later chapters of Three Roads to Quantum Gravity
Sorry for the slight veer off-topic.
Marilee, as Larry Wall keeps reminding Perl hackers, an apocalypse is just a revelation, so maybe that crank is warning us that Bush will reveal what he really is when he accepts the nomination.
I think the tarping of the roofs is brilliant, and will remind all the Party Faithful that New Yorkers don't appreciate people trying to cash in on their dead.
Erik, Heresiarch:
We have this amazing thing called representative democracy. You vote in people whose interests and policies align with yours, and they have staff to help sort through all the legislation and vote on it.
It's great.
That way you don't have some rich jerk from Orange County spoof the system by paying for ads selling the "Don't Hurt Puppies and Kittens Initiative" which has nothing to do with puppies, or kittens, but does involve him getting a large, public subsidy.
Oh, and because of the initiative system, our state legislature has no power over the budget. It's all been allocated by various puppies and kittens propositions.
And since the legislature has little power over the budget, it's demonized, so another group of rich opportunists hire a bunch of hippies (no, really, they swarm outside of Whole Foods, you have to use a machete to get through them) to get signatures for term limits. That passes, and any expertise in the state house gets 'termed out' and the only group with expertise are the lobbyists.
But wait. It gets better. Since there's been a brain drain in Sac, and the group remaining have no authority over most of the budget, the Austrian Strongman proposes that even more power is signed over to the Executive Branch.
This now guarantees that whomever has the largest pile of cash to burn on TV ads (in which the opposition is accused of doing unspeakable things to puppies and kittens) runs the state.
Don't talk to me about Democracy. I'm living through the result of it.
Erik: the problem was that the Knight Amendment was not a product of the legislature. It was a so-called ballot initiative.
The legislature would not had passed that law, so the thugs behind it hired people to collect signatures and put it on the ballot.
Add southern Californian evangelicals to the mullet-heads and you have an electoral majority.
The initiative and recall system destroyed California.
Net News Wire did the 'show differences' thing when you went to excerpts, but that was a side effect of changing the RSS feed on the previously existing posts.
Just so you know, you're not limited to choosing either full feeds or excerpts. You can have multiple syndication templates in Moveable Type.
And to gently disagree with Rick Heller above, I've decided, on reflection, that I prefer full feeds. I used to feel the opposite way, but I don't think full feeds 'clog' my aggregator. I'm using Net News Wire, so my feed view is like a good newsreader or mail client.
Now, if you're using Radio as an aggregator, I can see where full feeds will clobber that page (and broken markup will hurt it too, like a Live Journal friends' page after someone posts a poorly designed quiz result.)
However, in my opinion, Radio's a better publishing tool than aggregator.
What scares me about this is that it's indicative of the sort of flailing about that this, along with the announcement of putting Air Marshals on US bound flights, appears to be going on in DHS. They're working hard at reassuring us. And you could read that as meaning that DHS is scared.
"No, really folks, we're on top of things. Our best men are on the case. (And we hope the public won't call for our heads the next time the bad guys get lucky.)"
It's been my tradition, since I moved out West, to go see the San Francisco Mime Troupe's first show of the year at Mission Dolores Park on the 4th. Poltical theater's always appropriate for the holiday.
And to paraphrase Tom Becker, their politics, like KPFA's make me feel like a moderate again.
PG, The correct answer is:
E. Starting the 2004 Presidential Election Campaign
Not only does it not suck, but you become the envy of friends and acquaintances.
So when is _Newton's Wake_ coming out?
Western Wisconsin shares the same 'out of place' feeling that Erik describes in parts of Illinois. There's a state park in Southwestern Wisconsin, the name escapes me, close to the Iowa border, where you're looking out into the Mississippi River valley from a high limestone cliff.
Driving between Madison and Minneapolis on I90, you pass through some wonderfuly disturbed terrain left by the meanderings of the Mississippi and Wisconsin rivers. And there's Pie, Spike Parsons is your go-to person on that matter. But go East of I90, and all the history has been ground flat by the last glaciation.
Hope Corflu was good for you, but you and Teresa should come back out to WisCon soon.
Thanks to you and Maureen, that image is the desktop photo on my iBook. I'm going to London for the first time at the end of the month. Thanks for a topical find!
I heard Thompson's cover of "Oops" on Terry Gross' show last year. The man could probably find the hidden gold in Lee Greenwood's "God Bless the USA".
I dunno Patrick, my first impression of those photos -- with the HVAC entrails dripping from the ceilings, the large halls, and the over-the-top architecture -- was that the 7th had made a wrong turn somewhere and had shelled the Aladdin in Las Vegas.
I kept expecting to see the wreckage of Pai Gao Poker tables and slot machines in there.
Perhaps the Autarch, Saddam, and Steve Winn are the same person?
Having spent the 1960's as a child, I have no idea if the current schism is as bad or worse. One thing, it's easier for people to be incivil.
I think we're all familiar with the attacks on al Jazeera's site after they aired the US POW footage.
Today, one of the web hosts I use was the recipient of a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack that took several sites off the air. I would guess that several of those sites hosted on that server did not express an opinion on the war, Bush, nor Blair. But someone decided that an opinion expressed on of the sites hosted on that server warranted the collective punishment of everyone using that server.
Kip, if Soros' has his wallet open, maybe he can buy back our country first. :)
On the Official Secrets Act arrest: that would go a ways towards confirming the Observer's reporter's hypothesis that the leak came from outside the US, but within the "Echelon Quartet" (UK, US, AU and NZ) who share intercepts.
Nothing to add on the torture businsess, but to say that two days away from news and email, spent cross-country skiing and eating great food, does wonders for one's mood.
On the Official Secrets Act arrest: that would go a ways towards confirming the Observer's reporter's hypothesis that the leak came from outside the US, but within the "Echelon Quartet" (UK, US, AU and NZ) who share intercepts.
Nothing to add on the torture businsess, but to say that two days away from news and email, spent cross-country skiing and eating great food, does wonders for one's mood.
| Year | Number of comments posted |
|---|---|
| 2005 | 2 |
| 2004 | 7 |
| 2003 | 18 |
| 2002 | 4 |
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