Year: 2005

  • Lots of little MT admin issues

    I’ve been trying to refine my Movable Type setup lately and I have run into a number of little problems for which I can’t find easy solutions online. For example, there appears to be a bug in MT 3.2 that permits junked trackbacks and/or comments to show up on a blog. The workaround seems to…

  • Why do we buy that Bush Administration torture is intended to extract the truth?

    We read now about an Al Qaeda prisoner whom we sent to Egypt to be tortured. He eventually came up with a fabricated story that Saddam Hussein had trained Al Qaeda members in chemical and germ warfare. This testimony became a favorite piece of smoking-gun evidence, cited repeatedly by top officials in favor of their…

  • Pinter writes for Bush

    My friend EB sent me a note quoting Pinter, sure to enrage the jingoes: > On the chance that you haven’t seen it already, here’s an excerpt from Harold Pinter’s Nobel Prize acceptance speech: > > I know that President Bush has many extremely competent speech writers, but I would like to volunteer for the…

  • Yahoo acquires Delicious

    Sheesh! What Web 2.0 startup or blog fad *won’t* Yahoo acquire? del.icio.us: y.ah.oo! Yes, this is envy speaking. Jeremy Zawodny comments on potential synergies between Delicious (I stopped typing the dots a while ago) and MyWeb 2.0.

  • About.com switching from MT to WordPress

    Matt Mullenweg announces that

  • Could anyone have foreseen this? –Just about.

    Washington Post Without ever using the words “mistake” or “error,” Bush said the administration miscalculated by clearing insurgents out of a city and then moving onto another assignment, only to allow enemy forces to retake control. DKo: Could anyone have foreseen this? Just about anyone. However, it is never fair to criticize Mr. Bush for…

  • I was saying “Boo-urns”

    Abramoff scandal spreads to the Senate: Now A Republican Senator Tied Up In Abramoff Scandal… | The Huffington Post

  • Blogging a book chapter

    Suzanne Stefanac is writing a book for Peachpit / New Riders’ “Voices that Matter” series, called Dispatches from Blogistan. She is interviewing a number of bloggers (including yours truly) and of course blogging the process of writing the book. Now she has posted an entire chapter in her blog:

  • The music genie's out of the bottle

    When Napster hit it big a lot of people pointed to the success of the Grateful Dead despite having almost no hit records and ascribed it to their liberal tape-trading policies. Part-time Dead lyricist and EFF co-founder John Perry Barlow spread the gospel of music sharing and how a liberal intellectual property regime had fueled…

  • Jack and the Greenstalk

    It’s funny how shit keeps a bubblin’ up. The Bush administration is like a plumbing disaster these days. And all those leaky pipes are connected to each other. Which brings me to indicted former lobbyist Jack Abramoff. Back before his name was coffee break conversation, in the beginning of Senator McCain’s not-yet-newsworthy Indian Affairs Committee…

  • MIT blog survey now three months overdue

    What up, fellas? MIT Weblog Survey

  • National Novel Editing Month

    “Enough with the Grateful Dead already,” writes so-called Bill. “What happened to Cecilia?” Well, I didn’t get into the 50,000-words-in-November winners circle. (Some people hit that number in the first week! I on the other hand, have a life.) I did, however, hit my personal goal of 30,000 words by Nov 29 and I took…

  • When you go to California….

    A friend on a mailing list, writing to another friend who’s contemplating a move, passed along this wonderful quotation: Someone had mentioned an analogy that had begun to prey on my mind. Going to California, he had said, was like entering a swimming-pool. It was pleasant, you swam a few laps, and before you knew…

  • 16 lies

    Mary McCarthy once famously declared that every word Lillian Hellman wrote was a lie, including “and” and “the.” I don’t bring this up to get into the feud between two acclaimed writers. Rather, it came to mind when I was thinking about President Bush’s now famous “16 words” in the January 2003 State of the…

  • Too Mean to Miss

    Washington Post A tearful [Ohio governor] Taft pleaded no contest Aug. 18 to misdemeanor charges. After vowing earlier not to tolerate ethics violations in his administration, he said he had failed to live up to his own standards and public expectations. “I am disappointed in myself,” said Taft, the son and grandson of U.S. senators…

  • Boing Boing publishes hearsay

    Over at Uncle John’s blog we’ve been covering the recent Deadhead controversy in a teapot concerning the removal (or rather, prevention of downloading) of 2300 Grateful Dead shows from the Live Music Archive. There are many theories and suppositions floating out there about what motivated the change in policy, as well as a fair amount…

  • December 18? I'll take it

    Warning… adult content.

  • Woodward’s pucecake

    Or, a tale of a sneakily different color….the testimony of Bob Woodward, purveyor of deep cover journalism, in which he reveals his conversation with “Cheney’s Cheney” I. Lewis Libby on June 23, 2003 about an 18-page list of questions he wanted Cheney’s Cheney’s Cheney to answer, including one about “yellowcake.” I too, would like to…

  • Immaculately Conceived Torture

    Immaculate Conception is different from the Virgin Birth. Mary gave birth as a virgin, which precluded Original Sin from being transmitted from Joseph. But what about Original Sin being transmitted from Mary? Well, Mary, though not herself the offspring of a Virgin Birth, was also free from sin, because she was produced by Immaculate Conception.…

  • Blogging from New Orleans

    My friends Steve and Elizabeth are blogging the reconstruction of New Orleans from within the city: Inside the Bowl. We stay with them when we go to Jazz Fest (nearly every year), and we were very worried about them when the flood and hurricane hit. They evacuated successfully and their house wasn’t harmed, and they’ve…

  • Strange blog-spam problem

    Movable Type is doing something bizarre here. I’ve got this entry, Blogging a yoga conference @ Radio Free Blogistan and it shows 19 spam comments in the counter and on the individual archive page. The spam comments are also showing up in my list of recent comments in the sidebar of RFB. Ironically, they’ve all…