Category: Miscellany

  • Selective demagoguery update

    I see lots of kvetching over at Instapundit today about details of the looting, convoluted meta-arguments about WMD, and the strange idea that Tim Robbins and Michael Moore have claimed that they’ve been repressed “by the system” while straw-liberals the world around have ignored Castro’s crimes. (Has anyone compared Hollywood union techs and baseball hagiography…

  • Democracy, Whisky, Sexy!

    I’ve noticed that many people found the declaration by an Iraqi quoted in the New York Times a few weeks ago to be a great slogan for western values of freedom and the pursuit of happiness. I prefer my spelling, in the title above, to the more typical “Whiskey” spelling. Why? Because it echoes the…

  • YA meme tracker page

    What’s Happening is yet another page that comprises a good list of sites that tell you what’s popular now on the interwebnet. [via Anil‘s sidebar links]

  • I'll be the guy with the sunglasses and the straw hat

    I thought this Anil Dash weblog entry looked familiar: I’m off to SF for O’Reilly Emerging Technology Conference on Tuesday. I’m going against the grain this year by taking my laptop along, “blogging” in “realtime”, and taking digital photos of people. If there’s a box, I am out of it. If you’re attending as well,…

  • The jpeg war

    Levi Asher wrote this action poem, “What’s Bothering Me,” about our just-concluded (?) media war. Hey, and I just noticed that his novel, Summer of the Mets is finally out.

  • Towards participatory online democracy

    Paul Ford thinks the Senate should have an RSS feed, and the House, and the Supreme Court, and the White House. I think he’s right, and I like his approach to raising the subject.

  • Earl King, R.I.P.

    Speaking of New Orleans, I was sad to read this obituary for the legendary Earl King. (Times userid: mediajunkie, password: mediajunkie) Most famous outside of N.O. (and best compensated for) Jimi Hendrix’s cover (as “Let the Good Times Roll”) of his “Come On,” and for the Mardi Gras standard “Big Chief,” especially the Professor Longhair…

  • Synchronicity, synecdoche, Schenectady. So I

    Synchronicity, synecdoche, Schenectady. So I make this new category for my last entry (“Television”) and what should come up in my iTunes rotation? now playing: “Little Johnny Jewel” by Television [The Blow Up]

  • Synchronicity, synecdoche, Schenectady

    So I make this new category in my X-POLLEN blog for an entry (“television”) and what should come up in my iTunes rotation? now playing: "Little Johnny Jewel" by Television [The Blow Up]

  • Mr. Kott-air?

    Jeff Green wonders what we were laughing at, when we were laughing at the Sweat Hogs. All I know is that there was a time “sport shirt on the iceburg” chanted to the beat of a conga line could crack up me and my sibs without fail. Around this time we were equally susceptible to…

  • Packing for New Orleans

    Just checked the weather report for New Orleans today, sunny and dry. B and I have been to Jazz Fest something like eight times in the last decade, and I think we’ve made it there for the last five or six in a row (it gets hard to keep track after a while). We’ve been…

  • Did U.S. troops encourage the looting?

    This site published an allegation that the occupying troops declared open season on looting. Was this a propaganda effort (look! freedom!) that got out of hand? When you couple it with reports that much of the museum looting was “professional” in nature, it looks pretty ugly. (Not as ugly as maimed human beings, but centuries…

  • MFA Mixer in Oakland (April 21)

    a note from Watchword: Please join us this Monday, April 21, for the Second Annual MFA Mixer. Students from 7 Bay Area MFA programs (CCAC, SF State, Mills College, St. Mary’s, New College, USF, Cal State Hayward) are invited to participate in our Happy Hour, Open Mic, and Literary Exchange. The public is welcome to…

  • A narrator in search of a job

    While he’s far from the the smartest man I’ve ever met, and nobody would call him an absolute genius, any blogger who is willing to say that “Scott Baio is my personal hero” deserves some credit. Dan Benjamin is looking for a job.

  • A day without blogging

    Since I started Radio Free Blogistan last July I’d managed to post at least one entry every day, until yesterday. Since I use RFB to aggregate blog posts to a number of different sites, this means that RFB had a continuous calendar running back to its first day. I was kinda proud of this although…

  • Last-minute tax panic

    So I had my federal and state taxes all worked out this weekend and was just doublechecking the figures and adding a few bits of trivia (my EIN, for example) and getting ready to file electronically tonight. Turns out my copy of TurboTax did not have one current form (8880 – related to 401k tax…

  • Saddam hussy?

    This Yahoo entertainment news and gossip article (Saddam Starred in Gay Porn Films!) reads like an Onion article or some disinformation, but who knows? Say, wasn’t Salam Pax reported to be a closeted gay man (I think I read that in the New Yorker) from a well connected family?

  • Enlarge your coalition!!

    —begin forwarded text— ENLARGE YOUR COALITION! GUARANTEED!! (cont’d) … (thanks, MZ!)

  • Do you remember President Nixon?

    The rhetoric gets a little overwrought, but this writer in the Hartford Advocate is starting to miss Richard Nixon.

  • Appointment in Samarra

    I was thrilled to hear that seven of our U.S. prisoners of war were rescued near Tikrit. I had been dreading the worst for them. (NY Times login: mediajunkie, password: mediajunkie)

  • Weird cold

    Well, the stress of gearing up for the conference and then running through the whole thing on not enough sleep and too much drinking has left me with a nasty little cold. Like so many it started out with a sore throat but now this one has gotten kind of especially unpleasant. For some reason…