Brains!

Found: the following review of the Bilbo Baggins Restaurant in Alexandria, VA:

We’ve always enjoyed Bilbo Baggins and have gone there for years. But if guns are now to be allowed in Virginia restaurants, this and a couple of other favorites will drop off our restaurant list.

Take that, Virginia! There’s one couple (or threesome or more — who am I to judge?) who will be taking their dining out business to a state where only the criminals can bring guns into a restaurant. I hope you’ve learned your lesson!

This is awesome — a blogger takes down an oh-so-genteel sneering book review in the Wall Street Journal, the writer of which is simply shocked that someone who was in (gasp!) computer science has been allowed to write his own version of The Odyssey. Note to the staff at the WSJ: only insecure, shallow people make culture into a matter of cliques and status marking. Anyway, read the whole thing. (Via Photon Courier.)

Update: I’m back on the laptop, as the cheap batteries in my desktop’s wireless keyboard just died, and I don’t have any more that size (AAA — not counting the one that rolled under my sofa, and I think when I finally get it out from under there I’ll throw it out). I think I’ll be purchasing a regular plug-in keyboard for the desktop for situations just such as this.

…Sarah Palin used crib notes she wrote on her hand during a post speech question/answer session at some place.

WE. ARE. SO. DOOMED.

Seriously, if you had any doubt that the United States has become a permanent high school in which we are all perpetually trapped, this should be the final proof. I haven’t seen people so upset about inked hands since… well, since I was in high school and some kid got caught looking at the test answers that he’d Bic’d onto his knees in Geometry I. I mean, I write stuff to jog my memory all the time onto the palm of my hand, though I have been informed that that is sloppy and I should carry around a pack of index cards at all times. Index cards that I can drop or forget. One thing about your own hand, it usually remains attached to your body.

Really, I can’t believe that people are freaking out at this. There is just something about Sarah that sends people off into the stratosphere that I just don’t get. Reagan apparently had the same thing. I recall at the time (when I was much, much more liberal than I am now) he sort of mildly irritated me and I still don’t get the adulation but I thought that many of the jokes at his expense (not to mention the masks and the puppets and so on) were in bad taste. There’s just something about people taking politics so personally that I don’t get. Somewhere someone is developing a fine case of acid reflux because they can’t stand the way Palin parts her hair. Anyway, if you want to get the full flavor of “Sarah Palin is going to lead us into DOOOOOOOM” paranoia, feel free to visit the Fark and Huffington Post threads. (Yeah, this all comes from those RELIABLE two sources.) And here is my tribute to palm-of-the-hand note-takers everywhere.

Update on another yet somehow related (as I am too lazy to write a new post) topic: get a load of the compassionate and concerned lefty side of the blogosphere as they basically accuse Jim Treacher, who is still being treated for his broken knee, of lying about what happened when he was hit by a van driven by a government employee. Yes, I really want my future in the hands of people like these.

Oh look — as if I needed one, another reason not to join Facebook. Call me the last holdout if you like, but I’m an antisocial misanthrope (as opposed to the kind who like to hang out with people just so they can torture themselves with all the stupid things humans do), so why would I join yet another social networking site, especially one as overrun with sheer stupidity as Facebook? WTF are those “games”? I don’t even game. I play Solitaire, or the Mahjongg game my Ubuntu setup comes with. And I haven’t had a computer virus in years, and I don’t want one.

Facebook and other sites like it have nothing for me. I do like Tumblr, mostly because it has a simple interface and lots of nice themes, and the social networking stuff isn’t too intrusive — but at the same time it’s becoming something of a headache. For one thing, there are too many Obama fans (but I might as well say that about life, and I can at least tweak the Tumblr folk with one of my obnoxious posts — I can’t do anything about the real life ones except roll my eyes at their bumper stickers) and the Doctor Who fans on Tumblr all seem to be the young type who just got into Tennant’s Doctor and they’re all Doctor ‘n’ Rose shippers, barf.

But that leads me to my next topic. I’m getting less and less pleased with Wordpress. Not that it’s a horrible program — it’s not — but it’s getting more and more complex as it gets more and more popular. I’d say it’s about as popular now as Movable Type was a few years ago, and it’s getting more and more commercial in its focus. I don’t have anything against a commercial focus in general, just not for me and my site. A few years ago I briefly experimented with ads on my blog, but I decided to dump them. Ads just aren’t for me, no matter how skint I am. All there will ever be is a Paypal link at most, and you see that I have even taken that off the front page and put it over into a page titled “Coffee Fund.” Anyway, Wordpress is very complex and heavy these days, and it just does more than I want a blog program to do. Here’s what I want: a simple interface where I can post, a simple way to set up the site theme, a way to control comments so you can weed out spam and trolls, and… that’s it. The only extras I can think of that I’d also like would be a way to add static pages, but they aren’t absolutely necessary. Even configurable side menus for links and latest entry lists and so on aren’t absolutely necessary, though some kind of archive listing is good for people who want to read your back catalogue. Most of the Tumblr setups do this sort of bare bones thing, and their interface is easy as pie for adding posts. They also have split posting types into different things: regular text entries, videos, audio files, links, and chats. They also have this reblogging thing which is nice but it’s internal to Tumblr blogs. I don’t entirely like the setup but it is easy to use and uncluttered. I’m sick of clutter.

Anyway, I’ve been trying out different blogging programs, some of them in their infancy or at least toddlerhood, and I will be reviewing them here over the next few posts. If I find one that comes closest to what I want I may do the site over. We’ll see.

I’ve been getting some really stupid spam lately — not the usual “grow your penis!” and “I am the widow of Major General Nesesesese Seko Ubambi and I have a million dollars I need to deposit into your account” and “(Cyrillic gibble garble)” offerings but things like “I really like your site! Good article! I am a two-toed sloth — can you write an entry entirely composed of mashed cassava mixed with drool?” Here is the latest thing I got. For some reason it struck me as especially hilariously braindead:

I really like what you wrote here – it’s very good. Thanks for posting this. I’ve been trying out with WordPress lately. Do you use WordPress? Any tips for me? Click here if you’d like to check out my site. Have a fun week!

There was a link to some website but for some reason I’ve neglected to include it in my quote. How careless of me. Anyway, enter your reader tips in the comments for this hapless person and/or cyborg, who or which apparently is unable to read the footer at the bottom of my blog where it says “Powered by Wordpress.” Hm — I guess that’s my first “tip” for my mysterious correspondent: if you want to know what software powers a blog, it often says so right on that same blog, right there on the front page! Crazy, I know.

Do not comment here using an email address you got at one of those “disposable” email address websites. Those go straight into Akismet’s spam queue, and no matter how coherent or on-topic the comment is I will delete it permanently just like I delete all the other spam. You must use a real, permanent email address. It can be a secondary one that you rarely use, but it has to be real.

I would give up my right to vote if it meant keeping morons like this woman out of the voting booth. It’s not the fact that she admits that she voted for Obama based on how good it would make her feel, it’s the way she still obviously has baby shit for brains, because she still thinks there isn’t anything wrong with this statement:

Before John McCain unwittingly picked a tabloid-magazine cover girl for his running mate, I was leaning toward going Republican this time around. I did the second time Bush was on the ballot and I very nearly did the first time, too. But as soon as Palin climbed out of her igloo and onto the national scene, well, there was no turning back for me.

Jill you ignorant slut, that “tabloid-magazine cover girl” was the governor of Alaska, a state, incidentally, where most people live in houses and apartment, just like they do here in the “real America.” Your family of “reds” (which, ho ho ho, now means the opposite of what it used to mean — though I wonder if Jill even knows what it used to mean to call someone a “red”) obviously didn’t box your ears enough as a child. I’d say this particular member of my sex really is only fit to be barefoot, pregnant, and in the kitchen — except I’ll bet you like most “emancipated” females she’s probably a lousy cook.

There, I think I’ve covered all the politically incorrect bases. (Via Kathy Shaidle.)

It looks like Charles Johnson of Little Green Footballs is back in the news — in the New York Times, no less. And as many around the Blog-O-Verse have pointed out (and as he himself has realized) the article doesn’t exactly show him and his site in the greatest of lights.

Leaving that aside, one thing I have noticed: a lot of former LGF fans are now saying that they never thought of him as a “rightwinger.” That could be true, especially if you were aware of his site before 9/11, when it was mostly devoted to non-political web geekery and Mac stuff. But he sure did do a good imitation of one, as this old post from 2003 illustrates. (If he decides to delete the post because I’ve pointed it out — hi, LGF sniffer bot! — here are a couple of screen grabs.)

Anyway, some have asked why do people keep talking about this fellow when he’s become nothing more than a troll? Well, for one thing, there’s the train-wreck-full-of-naked-old-people truism: you don’t want to look, but you just have to. Another thing is that there have been other “prominent warbloggers” who have reversed some or all of their stances, political leanings, and/or attitudes in the period from 9/11/2001 until now (Andrew Sullivan is the one everyone uses as an example but some others that come to my mind are Damian Penny, who seems to have at least partially abandoned most of his “conservative” leanings lately, as demonstrated by this post from 2008; and John Cole at Balloon Juice, who flipped over to the “other side” some years ago, I can’t remember over exactly what) but none of them have gone so far into ripe, they’re-all-against-me paranoid behavior as the bike-riding “gentle giant” West coast jazz geek. The reason so many people have speculated “wildly” about why he did such an apparent about-face is not so much because of his current obsessions (for some reason he thinks Creationists are one of the greatest threats to mankind since the cholera) but are mostly due to his behavior against anyone who disagrees with him even a little bit. The banning of commenters is one thing — I have nothing against that, and in fact am firmly in favor of banning anyone from commenting on one’s own website for any reason whatsoever no matter how whimsical — but the blocking of others from even viewing his site, and the weird monitoring of what others say about him, and the bizarre anathematizing of people who have done things like comment on sites he disapproves of or gone to conferences where people he disapproves of also appeared (the banning of the entire planet of Earth from Charles’ website and “gated community” will commence any minute now) I believe is what they call “freaky.” In other words, pass the popcorn — this is going to be better than a mashup of American Idol meets Survivor vs. Predator.

Further commentary:

He’s already jumped on Ann Althouse with his characteristic restraint and aplomb.
Dennis the Peasant has some advice for Johnson’s associate on their new venture.
Patterico comments.

I may add more as I come across them but maybe not as I’m really tired of editing this thing. Wordpress, why have you become so bloated?

Okay, this, this is why–

Wait.

Look, the only thing preventing me from running around my apartment waving an ax right now is the fact that this isn’t my apartment but a friend’s apartment and me running around with an ax might upset him. I am nothing if not considerate. HOWEVER. I am feeling just a little bit like KILLING someone right now, because of shit like this:

ARGH

(Click for somewhat bigger and louder.)

And I had to read on a site I read sometimes that since I am on the “other side” from Obama supporters that means I am so because he is “the wrong skin color” and he doesn’t have an “American-sounding name.”

FFFFFFFFFFFFFFFUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUU…………

I can’t even. Really. I have had it. I am so sick of this. I mean — I can’t even think of anything to write about it. This is how it’s gonna be. You oppose anything Obama says or dare to make even the most mild criticism and you’re a racist. That’s it. Game over. Accept your destiny, you racist you! So fine. I’m a racist. I don’t like people of any skin color but mine. That means really pale people too without blemishes, acne, and freckles. If you don’t have old blemish scars, acne, zits, and freckles you are NOT MY KIND and possibly not a REAL AMERICAN and you have to have the last name of HARRIS or else you’re not AMERICAN and you are INFERIOR and efghjklkjkhjghdtrytukyuiyutydhfgfcvhbghjgftyruytuyiuoipo……

[Ummm. Hello there. Is this thing on? Oh -- I see. Thanks. Anyway-- this is Xena. You may have read something about me on the internet courtesy of the human who usually posts on this site. Yeah, that's my human. I'm the cat. I usually let her have her way, do what she wants, sit and stare at this stupid glowing thing and tap around on it, etc., because it seemed to keep her calm or at least in the same room in case I needed her for something important -- but now I see I should have chewed through the thing's tendons, or veins, or whatever that blue cord is that plugs into the back of it (she fiddles with it constantly so I think it must keep the glowing box alive). Anyway, the human has had some sort of... episode, and she may not be staring at this thing and tapping on it and whatever; in fact, when I pushed it towards her right now where she is curled up in the corner, she just whimpered and curled up into an even smaller ball. So anyway. At least I've figured out how to get the food out of the bag... Anyway, smell ya later! Not. You humans aren't exactly a bed of catnip, IYKWIMAITTYD.]

UPDAYTE: HA HA HA. THAT IS SO RAYCIST.

You may have noticed a dearth of serious blogging here lately, though I did briefly rise to the surface to say something about the bizarre booklist the Obamalamadingdongs are planning to push on the nation’s kids. But mostly I’ve been fooling around on my Tumblr, and every time I see something about the current doings in DC — say, oh, something like the head of the EPA dismissing the Climategate emails with a disdainful sniff, because as far as she is concerned the science is settled and we will be going back to the nice, clean 12th century thank you, which leaves me with nothing but the hope that I survive the coming plagues and famines long enough to see her and her compatriots’ dismay as they realize that the civilization they destroyed is where they live too… Anyway, as I was saying, whenever I read something like that, a haze of exhaustion overtakes my mind, and I find myself thinking of anything else — bubblegum, navel lint, television shows — than the state of the world and what to do about it. When I see what these people are getting up to on the taxpayer dime as if the United States of America is their own private Disney World I can’t even think up any clever ripostes anymore. My last nerve has been breached. I’m plumb wore out. It’s official: Obama has broken my brain.

So I hope you enjoy a lot of babble about snow, my cat, housework, um — stories I’m trying to write (I’m trying at least to keep track of all the plots I’m coming up with; I’ve got another scifi percolating as well as the current one), and Doctor Who silliness over at the Tumblr thing. (Oh yeah, and I’m having a fundraiser, so, erm, you know.)

(Via the Anchoress, from Twitter.)