dietsch ::

Floods and festivities

The New York Times | Arts | Frank Rich: Washington's New Year War Cry: Party On!

Washington's next celebration will be the inauguration. Roosevelt decreed that the usual gaiety be set aside at his wartime inaugural in January 1945. There will be no such restraint in the $40 million, four-day extravaganza planned this time, with its top ticket package priced at $250,000. The official theme of the show is "Celebrating Freedom, Honoring Service." That's no guarantee that the troops in Iraq will get armor, but Washington will, at least, give home-front military personnel free admission to one of the nine inaugural balls and let them eat cake.

[emphasis added] New York Times | Editorial | Are We Stingy? Yes

The American aid figure for the current disaster is now $35 million, and we applaud Mr. Bush's turnaround. But $35 million remains a miserly drop in the bucket, and is in keeping with the pitiful amount of the United States budget that we allocate for nonmilitary foreign aid. According to a poll, most Americans believe the United States spends 24 percent of its budget on aid to poor countries; it actually spends well under a quarter of 1 percent.

[emphasis added]

Priorities

Low Culture examines our priorities and reaches the only logical conclusion: Fuck you, America.

Electrocution?

Note to Gothamist, rest of world: Electrocution does not mean injury by electrical shock. It means death by electrical shock. If you don't die, you haven't been electrocuted. This may seem like pedantry, but if bloggers want to claim to be journalists, they need to be able to distinguish clearly between death and non-death. Allowing readers to believe that dogs have been killed when they've merely been injured is inaccurate reporting.

Swag and shit

Busy busy busy. Flew to Alabama on the 17th; Jen's bro Jeff was graduating from college, so we went to Birmingham to surprise him. Spent a couple days with her family and flew back on the 19th. Was plied with good food, gift cards, a bottle of cologne, cookies, and sundries. Jen's family is very generous and hospitable. Spent Christmas Eve volunteering at the Church of St. Francis Xavier, probably the first time... Continue reading "Swag and shit"

Bloody Mary

2 oz. (¼ cup) vodka 4 oz. (½ cup) tomato juice dash Tobasco 1½ tsp. horseradish 1 tsp. Worcestershire sauce dash lemon juice ½ tsp. salt 4 twists pepper Shake together. Pour over olives and ice. Sprinkle a pinch of ground celery seed on the surface.

Oh, look...

...it's the fugliest thing ever: Teleflora's motto is Send flowers and show someone you care. My motto is, if you buy Thomas Kinkade "art," please slice off your genitals.

Baptist pastor denounces Religious Right

I Am A Conservative Christian, And The Religious Right Scares Me, Too "[N]o longer does the Religious Right represent conservative, Christian values....Are we heading for a modern day religious inquisition, this one led not by the Catholic Church but by the Religious Right? Are we witnessing the type of marriage between Church and State that America's founders originally feared?"

Random iPod first-line poetry

You are light-tasting Open up your ribcage I was born in Dixie in a boomer shack Her head is in a bitter way Past three o'clock Standing on the corner with the low-down blues Oceans lay between us and the things we think we need The ragman draws circles up and down the block The worms crawl in Well my time went so quickly The island it is silent now His heart organ was where it should be Waiting for the big fall Don't you worry about me There's a man going 'round taking names

Spam, TypeKey, etc.

Bloggers Ben Hammersley and Reid Stott discuss another side to the comment-spam problem: that of the web providers that host blogs. It seems many web-hosting companies are facing such a server load, as spammers bomb weblogs with comment spam, that they are opting to stop supporting and hosting MT sites altogether. Reid Stott makes another observation that echoes many of my complaints, but let me back up for a minute before I address Stott's observation. One potential solution to the comment-spam problem is to set up TypeKey authentication for commenting. This basically forces a potential commenter to register on your site before they can comment there. Stott points out how hard it is to find Six Apart's TypeKey documentation. You've heard me blag on about how frustrating it is to install or fix MT problems when the documentation is so hard to find and understand, and I'm happy to see someone echo this frustration. It is encouraging to hear from Anil Dash that 6A is working on the problem, but I suspect that whatever fix 6A implements will just get "broken" again by spammers as the war escalates. Sigh. I can't decide who's worse--the jackass spammers or the dumbasses who buy from them, thus encouraging them to spam all the more.

your heart is ripshit

Jen and I saw the Pixies last night, at Hammerstein Ballroom, and I don't know what to say that won't sound like a cliché, but I will say this: There's still no band like the Pixies. The Datsuns opened for them, and despite how much the hipster kids love that band, they sounded anemic and dead in comparison. I also thought the Pixies just looked funny when they came out. Kim Deal in her blue sweater, looking just like the cutest mom in the neighborhood. David Lovering and Charles Thompson like your weird uncles. Most surprising, though, was Joey Santiago--slim, handsome, and rocking that shaved head. He was hotter than all the string-haired Datsuns combined. I don't go to many shows, and I've only been to shows in small clubs lately, so I'd forgotten the power of a huge sound system blasting your body so hard you can feel the sonic. The Pixies were in my body as much as they were my head. If you want a more coherent review, you might try this morning's New York Times.

Bush meets with anti-gay censor

Guardian Unlimited | Arts features | 'We have to protect people'

What should we do with US classics like Cat on a Hot Tin Roof or The Color Purple? "Dig a hole," Gerald Allen recommends, "and dump them in it." Don't laugh. Gerald Allen's book-burying opinions are not a joke.

Earlier this week, Allen got a call from Washington. He will be meeting with President Bush on Monday. I asked him if this was his first invitation to the White House. "Oh no," he laughs. "It's my fifth meeting with Mr Bush."

So this is how Mr. Bush is exercising his "clear mandate" from the American people. Fuck you, America.

The End?

Okay, I've just about had enough. Jen's site got bombed yesterday with over 300 comment spams from the same bottom dweller. While we were literally in the middle of fixing that, the server on which Jen's website resides went belly up. At first, visiting Jenblossom.com got you a message saying that no such website existed, and then, the site displayed a page of ads for a fly-by-night "financial services" company. I got on the Technical Support site for Jen's web provider (the same company hosts this site), and also filed a help ticket. As I waited, I saw a number of people, who had accounts on the same server that failed, come in with the same problem--their sites were either offline entirely or pointed to the fly-by-night "services" company. This went on for hours as Jennifer's provider tried to fix the problem. Unfortunately, when they finally did solve that issue, another major problem cropped up--for some reason, they had to reset Jen's username, which wound up lousing up a number of settings in both Movable Type and Gallery. I was able to fix the problems in Movable Type by going into her configuration settings and updating her mtconfig file. Or at least I hope I fixed them all. Hours after I fixed one problem, another popped up. And then another. So I don't really know whether they're all nailed down. But Gallery is still fucked, which means Jen can't edit or update her photo pages. And I'm at a loss, because although I use Gallery, I don't really understand it, nor do I like it all that much. I burned up probably three hours this weekend, trying to fix this. Which isn't much, but when you're not having fun and you had planned to spend those hours doing something else, it's a pain in the ass. I used to enjoy troubleshooting web stuff, but now I find it all a major irritation. Bloggers want the world to believe they're journalists and pundits; they talk about a "blogosphere" as if there's a world of young publishers all interacting in some New Age, hand-holding, Up with People kind of way. But I don't know how it's ever going to happen if our tools continue to be so fragile and hard to fix. I don't need to debug the code that runs Microsoft Word in order to edit a file, and I shouldn't need to hassle with PHP when our web provider renames Jen's user accounts.

Comment spam, part whatever

I've taken a couple of steps that I hope will cut down on comment spam. Only one is actually noticeable--when you click the Comments link, you'll no longer see a popup window for the comment. Let's hope these steps help.

materteral

Sometimes it seems like every college-degreed person in America, but me, is madly in love with this David Sedaris, who, frankly, I can't stand. But that's neither here nor there. Today's Manhattan User's Guide uses the word materteral, which--as is clear from the context below--is the "aunt" equivalent of "avuncular."

In the old days, the voice of the holidays was the avuncular Burl Ives. Now, it's the more materteral David Sedaris, which is progress in our book.

[The Mavens, on "materteral"]

Books are bad, says Alabama lawmaker

Gay book ban goal of state lawmaker [via Bookslut blog]

MONTGOMERY - An Alabama lawmaker who sought to ban gay marriages now wants to ban novels with gay characters from public libraries, including university libraries. [Emphasis added.]

A bill by Rep. Gerald Allen, R-Cottondale, would prohibit the use of public funds for "the purchase of textbooks or library materials that recognize or promote homosexuality as an acceptable lifestyle." Allen said he filed the bill to protect children from the "homosexual agenda."

...

The bill also would ban materials that recognize or promote a lifestyle or actions prohibited by the sodomy and sexual misconduct laws of Alabama. Allen said that meant books with heterosexual couples committing those acts likely would be banned, too.

From Alabama's statutes regarding sexual misconduct:

A person commits the crime of sexual misconduct if...[h]e or she engages in deviate sexual intercourse with another person under circumstances other than those covered by sections 13A-6-63 and 13A-6-64. Consent is no defense to a prosecution under this subdivision. [Emphasis added; source.]

Deviate sexual intercourse: "Any act of sexual gratification between persons not married to each other involving the sex organs of one person and the mouth or anus of another." [source]

But forget the focus on specific sex acts. I bring that up only to show that Allen would also ban books featuring or even implying sexual relations between unmarried heterosexuals. What's important is how broadly this law might be applied. Would Allen's law prevent Alabama's public universities from offering books discussing the sexuality of Alexander the Great? Would it prevent college teachers from distributing syllabi in which "deviant" conduct is mentioned? (From the article: "His bill also would prohibit a teacher from handing out materials or bringing in a classroom speaker who suggested homosexuality was OK, he said.") Searching the University of Alabama website turns up a broad set of courses in Human Sexuality, but if "handing out materials" is banned, how can an instructor create a syllabus or place articles on reserve in the university's library? Also, how would such a law affect medical education? Oops! I'm sorry. AIDS and other STDs are now officially off the curriculum. I can't imagine this will pass. The universities will lobby hard against it. Even interpreted narrowly, it will interfere with the ability of the state's colleges from educating its citizens. Moreover, Alabama's universities will become less competitive at attracting out-of-state students. Good work, Mr. Allen. You've demonstrated a tremendous disrespect for Alabama's entire system of education.