Category: long story short

  • What was the Watergate scandal?

    Another in my new series of longwinded Aardvark answers made public, in this case answering a question about U.S. history from a 19 year-old in New York State: “What was the watergate scandal?” Here’s my answer. (How’d I do?*): Watergate is the name of a famous hotel in Washington, D.C. where a lot of political…

  • Why is Dante's poem called the Divine "Comedy"?

    I got this question from Aardvark and gave a speculative answer i’m not sure, but it may go back to the greek definitions of comedy and tragedy, which are different from ours today. for the greeks, a comedy is a drama with a happy ending and a tragedy is a drama with an unhappy ending.…

  • gee and i've only met barlow once

    gee and i’ve only met barlow once Originally uploaded by xian was JP Barlow idly doing the comparisons today, or is this more like secret-admirer spam?

  • Playing around with Utterz

    Posted a thought via mobile that popped into my head driving to work this morning, part of an ongoing imaginary argument: Mobile post sent by xian using Utterz.  Replies.  mp3

  • Testing Anil Dash's text-embed idea

    Anil Dash blogged recently about adapting the embedding method used for rich media on personal / blog / social sites (most common use case: embedding a YouTube video on a MySpace page) to simple text quoting. He has added an embed code to each of his entries and I’m going to paste it in, inside…

  • If I have to appear in Valleywag this is the way to go

    Started off Saturday morning with Kick ’08. Namedropping: Talked to George Kelly, Erin Malone, Anil Dash, Jessamyn West (yay!), Simon Willison, Owen Thomas, Hugh Forrest, Micah Alpern (briefly, passing on the escalator), Janna Hicks DeVylder so far….