Professionals

In the past few days, I've run across quite a few people in the blog-o-sphere claiming to be college professors. Are you one? What do you teach? Leave a comment!

Blog Survey!

If you have time to kill, go take this MIT survey on blogs. It's gonna be someone's PhD Thesis. I have to say I expect it'll be a biased sample due to the solicitation method, but it's interesting nonetheless.

the m word

Wow, this's totally bizzare... Read the blog post first.

wind scraps: the m word

His mother seems proud of him. And he's only 6 years old! I don't get why it's a good thing to want to be a martyr - instead of getting their point across, they DIE.

Tired

This's amusing. I decided a day or two ago I was tired of beating my head against "Tina"'s ignorance and deflections and stopped visiting her wonderful site. Then today I went to see if she'd accused me of being a quitter or something, and she's apparently set that page to bump forward to nothing. I guess she got tired of it all too. If you're realy insistent on seeing what she has to say, you can hit the "stop loading" button before it bumps you forward. The grammar of her replies gets increasingly worse as she goes along. Did that all count as a flame war?

Hafta say I agree with her stance on the Runaway Bride's book deal though. Why can't we all just get along? :)

Filthy Rapist Pigs

The racism of some people really riles me. This woman (link removed) compares post-9/11 America as a rape victim merely fighting back at her victimizers, the whole of the Middle East. And she does it with some of the worst vitriol I've ever seen spouted on the net.

We Nuked Japan twice for less! All they did was attack our Navy. No crime in that? Was it their fault we were stupid and placed all our ships in one place. No, it was ours. Its every Nations right to try to expand its way of life. Its ours to protect our way of life. What did we do in WW2? We Vaporized Japanese Civilian cities. We had not problem at all with it, in fact we did it twice.

... As far as the Holy Koran let me remind you that the prophet Abu al-QAsim Muhammad was a Camel thief not a miracle maker. He never performed one miracle. When he died he did so in a tent with his harem. I spit and curse the Koran for its false teachings and absurdity regarding the treatment of women. I rather be dead than be an Arab woman living like a crappy slave.

So I say to middle east thank your oil wells for if it was me running the show. Right now the Fallout heading your way would be more of a concern than the treatment of your demon inspired Koran.

If that ignorant filth pisses you off as much as me, I would like to request that when you flame "Talking Tina," (link removed) you do it with a logical argument rather than curses, otherwise we'll only support her point of view.

Update: I decided I was tired of trying logic on "Tina" only to receive replies changing the topic with increasingly poor grammar and spelling, so I stopped visiting her page for a few days. When I tried again today, she'd set it to bump forward to a blank page, so I take it she's as tired of it all as I am. While I am still as irate about her initial post and strongly disagree with her opinions, I never wanted to encourage censorship, even self-administered. The links have been removed.

Header/Banner

I was talking a while ago about wanting to redesign my blogs. I'm working on spiffying up my main blog, Strange Musings. Check it out. :)

Blogging Life Cycle

Oh man, I'm on Step 3 (going on Step 10)...

To make matters worse, that blog got it from Wasted Days Wasted Nights which/who got it from someone else too, but it traces back to Min Jung Kim whom I *think* is the original source, but we could be mistaken.

Hair Color

Being on the cusp of redying my hair pink (where'd I put the bleach?), I found this post quite relevant. Someone asked Yahoo what people put on their driver's license if they have what I call "inhuman" hair colors. The answer, of course, is *hyuk*. I occasionally fill out surveys online (like MySurvey.com, which lets you earn money for charities), and it's amazing how frequently they ask things like hair color, and then give the choices blonde, light brown, dark brown, black, auburn, red, gray, white, and you know they don't mean firetruck red.

Turtle Blog

Man, this site is adorable! Top entry today is turtle bellies--comparing the sizes of their under-shells, and how to ID male/female. They're so cute. ^_^

(Found via BlogExplosion.)

Bouncing

Unofischal linked this blog on his. It's from a NYC bar/club bouncer, and unlike the stereotype of a brainless thug, the man writes better than myself (snotty as I am). Man, I gotta ask unofischal how he came across it.

Reverberations

I bet the Blogosphere is ringing with the posts about Michael Jackson's acquittal.

Somehow I've avoided (though not intentionally) mentioning the trial until now. From the little I know, I was unconvinced either way of his guilt or innocence, but I didn't feel I'd heard enough to convict him "beyond reason of a doubt." The whole case was less of a hullabaloo for me than the OJ Simpson trial. Maybe I'm more jaded by the media now, or maybe it's my age.

I remember listening to the Simpson trial verdict on a small radio in my HS AP Physics class. I heard simultaneous cheers and boos down the hall from other classrooms. Each room seemed to have either one or the other, but not both. Only the 2000 Subway Series (baseball World Series, Yankees vs. Mets) prompted as much yelling in my near vicinity--I think it was game 1, but I know it was won in the 12th inning, and we could hear the yelling as a distant surf my parents house. The 7-second delay on network TV is what identified it as the game.

I would love to see some graph of Blogosphere growth vs. time, or some indication of how many people posted about those two other events.

Christian "Science"

I haven't yet talked about other blogs here, but here's one. The link above is to a blog that's "reviewing" a comic book about the dinosaurs, creation "science," and Noah's Ark. The actual comic itself is still available online for only $4.95. I'm really SUPER tempted to buy it... I won't say more about the comic or the post, as the post at least is worth reading on your own. Go!

BlogBinders

Speaking of blogs and The Diary of Anne Frank, BlogBinders is apparently a place that'll bind your blog. I guess it's the text only and you can supply a cover image, and choose among various binding styles, and voila!, you shell out some ten to twenty bucks a pop and you've got a book of your blog. Eenteresting, very eenteresting...

Update: BlogBinders doesn't play well with Blogger--you'd have to change your template and go thru a bazillion steps to make it work. I've played with my template enough that I don't want to risk losing it. I _do_ however, want to make my templates even spiffier. Perhaps I'll do that tonight.

Public Diary

I realized the other day that I probably will never write in a physical diary again. I was pondering The Diary of Anne Frank after it came up in a rousing game of Taboo^TM, and wondered what would make it to my posthumous diary. Then I realized that even if I found my childhood diary, I haven't written in it in years, and I don't really have the urge to do so today, despite frequent postings to my blog. Then I realized this is my diary--in the future, will someone bind all these with my paper diary, and a journal of poems I have somewhere too, and publish it all in 20 languages?

Then I started thinking about the concept of a public diary. Do I write different things here from what I would write in a private, paper, diary? I think so, or maybe it's an age issue. I used to write a lot about events that happened to me on a daily basis, as well as my own feelings and reactions to those events. One of the most common topics in my childhood diary would be considered interpersonal relationships. For example, if M*** takes my candy at lunch, does that mean she's my friend? Did A*** notice it when my hand touched his while playing Spit on Bus 7?

Now my life seems less complicated. I am more bold than I once was, and so such issues are no longer issues. I asked T*** out on our first date (and yeah, I'm still proud of it, he's quite the catch). I didn't trust J*** while going climbing with him, so I told him, and then stopped climbing with him when he didn't improve. Those things that used to be so crucial to me are now not.

Today's issues are ... different. I'm not sure how to describe them. Some postings (journal entries) are about politics or current events. News Unfit is specifically an outlet for my humor on the news (and the shitty reporting of it at times). Perhaps a number of my posts are meta-posts--discussing the nature of posting. Hm, maybe I could theme a new blog around that... I don't think so.

Update: Oh wait, this IS that new blog!

Gorgeous Blogs

One of the drawbacks to surfing many other blogs via Blog Explosion is that it points out to me how many beautiful blogs there are out there. And mine ain't one of them! Well, I have a clean design which a number of them dont' have, but I'd say 50% of the blogs on Blog Explosion look like they're individually designed rather than taking a stock layout from Blogger or LiveJournal. I should think about doing that myself, at least using my own css boxes if not images.

But on the good side, Blog Explosion has been increasing my readship slightly--Google AdSense says it's hopped up from the teens to the tens in the past day or two. I've even gotten a comment from a random stranger! Shout-out goes to schuey, who doesn't think I'm lame at all. :-P

I guess Blog Explosion's giving me new first-time readers; now I have to do something to retain them as returners--better content, more frequent updating, prettier layout...

Meta-Blog

Why do we create blogs? Are we so starved for personal contact in this day and age that we'll reach out to complete strangers in any way we can?

Uncle Jack's

(from Strange Musings)

Recently I've been on a kick to drive up readership of my blogs. No real reason, I'm just kinda curious to see how many readers I can get. I signed up for Blog Explosion, which is one of a billion blog cross-promotion webpages, but they have an entertaining credits system you can use to advertise your blog more within their webpages. The way you earn these credits is (predictably) to view other blogs. In the process I came across Uncle Jack's, which must be the lamest blog ever, with a WONDERFUL article about whether ROTH IRAs or traditional retirement plans are better.

Yes, I know I'm driving up his traffic with this post, but it entertains me that someone would post such things in a *personal* blog, and additionally that he'd go and advertise the blog when the subtitle says the blog's for friends and family!

Man, are my blogs this lame?