Cats are cute, but Which cat is cuter? And would they be cuter if you piled random stuff on them while they were sleeping?
The world will never know.
Update, Thursday: I forgot Cats in Sinks. Now we have a complete collection of ridiculous cat pictures. Because no blog is complete without pictures of cats.
Notes from a refugee from New Orleans:
As we approached the bridge, armed Gretna sheriffs formed a line across the
foot of the bridge. Before we were close enough to speak, they began firing
their weapons over our heads. This sent the crowd fleeing in various
directions. As the crowd scattered and dissipated, a few of us inched
forward and managed to engage some of the sheriffs in conversation. We told them of our conversation with the police commander and of the commander’s assurances. The sheriffs informed us there were no buses waiting. The commander had lied to us to get us to move.We questioned why we couldn’t cross the bridge anyway, especially as there
was little traffic on the 6-lane highway. They responded that the West Bank
was not going to become New Orleans and there would be no Superdomes in their City. These were code words for if you are poor and black, you are not
crossing the Mississippi River and you were not getting out of New Orleans.
Maybe content is king, and maybe it is merely a courtier. But whatever it is, everyone will tell you it should be done right, which means doing it their way.
One of the people giving advice is Gerry McGovern, who will tell you that the key metric of content quality is sales generation per page. That’s how we know that J. K. Rowling is a good writer: the books sell, therefore they are good! To maximize the quality of your website, according to Gerry, you need to focus on the pages that have the broadest audience, and delete the unpopular filler pages surrounding them.
His Harry Potter example is really an odd choice given that those books tend to be about 20-50% too long, populated largely by rehash and filler. You could tell “The Half-Blood Prince” in half the pagecount, save years of writing and pounds of shipping, and still charge thirty bucks for the hardcover. In contrast, the article can’t be made much shorter. Don’t get me wrong: it’s 600 words, 590 of which are unnecessary, but if you cut it below 500, you don’t get paid for it, so you need to keep that filler in there. Even in Harry Potter, the filler serves a crucial function: it keeps the kids quiet for several additional hours. Each page is another few minutes of silence that parents will pay dearly for.
In other words, you may not like filler, but the good bits depend on it like a jewel needs a setting.
I’ve been listening to Songs Ohia again: “Just be simple.”
You never hear me talk about one day getting out
Why put a new address on the same old loneliness
Continue reading “Songs Ohia”
Hurrah! A new Fantasy Cocktail League from Toothpaste For Dinner.
I already knew this country was being run by shitbirds, but this weekend I did learn something much closer to home. I found out why my cats didn’t like the catnip I had grown for them: it has tomatoes growing out of it. My cats are no more nippy than they were, but on the plus side, I will soon have some cherry tomatoes.
This afternoon I am doing tech-review on an introductory computer textbook. One of the pictures illustrates the word processing concept of “fonts” by showing Comic Sans. My comment for this section is going to be “you should not use Comic Sans. Ever.” If I can stop young students from abusing fonts, I have in some small way made the world a better place. Even if I can’t tell a catnip sprout from a tomato seedling.
It makes me incredibly sad to think that there are people in the world in need of a device to mutilate anyone who tries to rape them. I mean… just… living in fear. Ugh.
Like living in New Orleans, near a levee that everyone knows needs repairs, and knowing that evacuation orders mean “if you have a car, get out now.” The people in charge apparently regarded this evacuation as more orderly than the last one. They also apparently expected the poor to walk to Texas or something.
No, they didn’t. They expected the poor to drown.
Although there’s good news too: people with boats are doing their own search and rescue thing.
I know that there’s a limited amount of money, and we’ve got a war on, but still… FEMA is broken, mistakes were made, heads will roll.
Give til it hurts seems to be all we can do.
Once, back in the day, Joe decided that he would name his variables after whatever song was on the radio. This was later determined to be a Bad Idea.
Also in the pantheon of bad ideas, monkeys with guns.
Sometimes, I make the mistake of reading Harper’s. Incisive writing, good editing, excellent research, funny little snippets of popular and unpopular culture. It’s a brilliant magazine, I can’t deny it. But things like excerpts from the wedding vows of a pretentious lit-crit couple make me cringe. And the article None Dare Call it Stolen, an analysis of what really happened in Ohio in November 2004, makes me so angry I can’t sleep.
There doesn’t seem to be much I can do to encourage my leaders to get off their butts and impeach the president (and besides, what do I want, Cheney in charge? He’d be worse.) And there doesn’t seem to be much I can do to stop people from writing their own self-indulgent wedding vows, either.
I mean, people deeply involved in politics or weddings or divorces or disputes with roommates enter these weird alternate universes where it totally makes sense to rig an election, write incredibly tacky vows, force bridesmaids to buy expensive and hideous dresses, or pour dye into someone else’s laundry detergent. And I can’t do anything about any of that.
I can’t stop the war, or the hurricane. I can’t stop people believing in Intelligent Design. I can’t even persuade people to use my company’s software, even when they totally acknowledge I’m right. I’m just standing here, railing against the power of things greater than I am and all I can do is wait for something to go wrong and say “I told you so.” And that doesn’t really help. It doesn’t help me and it doesn’t help anyone else.
I told you that election was going to be stolen. I told you that building a city below sea level would make you subject to horrible storms. I told you that going to war in the middle east with too few soldiers was a terrible idea. I told you that writing postmodern wedding vows was tacky. Did you listen? Of course not.
And you won’t listen next time. I mean, the election system hasn’t been fixed for ’08. People are going to rebuild on the shores of the floodplains. The east african plains ape is all about ignoring prudent advice and doing crazy shit like this, migrating across land-bridges and hunting mastodons and building things in floodplains and digging for gold. Of course they get hurt, and of course they get back up and do it again, and nobody can stop all of them from doing crazy stupid shit. And ultimately, that’s what’s good about people, too: their ability to keep doing apparently absurd things and surviving in one way or another, and creating amazing things in the process.
I just… I sometimes wish I was in charge. At least I’d be able to mandate non-tacky wedding vows.
Some days I have trouble deciding. How many pairs of shoes should a man have? Is it OK to spend all my money on dangerous toys? Is it worth the airfare and registration fees to go to Euro OSCON? Should I get an incredibly creepy tattoo? Is it cloudy enough to warrant bringing the umbrella? How often should I go to the Waltham office instead of the Cambridge office?
Sadly, nobody can answer these questions but me.
Secretly Ironic 
