Blogs Worth a Click

 
Some people just can't help themselves. They just have to go just a little bit farther than the rest of us. Take this letter to a utility company, for example:

Hartford, February 12, 1891

Dear Sirs:

Some day you will move me almost to the verge of irritation by your chuckle-headed Goddamned fashion of shutting your Goddamned gas off without giving any notice to your Goddamned parishioners. Several times you have come within an ace of smothering half of this household in their beds and blowing up the other half by this idiotic, not to say criminal, custom of yours. And it has happened again to-day. Haven’t you a telephone?

Ys

S.L Clemens

 
Whee, I got Blogrolling going! I put in some of the blogs that I had on yellow stickies, and will start transferring others from my links soon. Big bloggers will have their own lists. I also cloned the blog template in "regular" HTML and will use that as an annex with a different host.

Regarding the election results:

I forget who in the last administration it was, but when he got caught in some fundraising indiscretion, he solemnly averred that he had no regrets over what he had done, because it was done to prevent the right-wing takeover of Congress. In other words, he was saying and may have believed that his noble ends justified his sordid means. My sympathies are with the Republicans, for the most part, but please, winners and losers alike, bear in mind that what this man was trying to prevent was the orderly rotation of power following a regular election. This is our most precious national inheritance, and it goes all the way back to Washington's refusal of a crown. Win or lose, this is far more important than who controls what at one time or another. Remember, in most of the world, people leave power feet first.

 
Well, that was productive. Sort of. I sneaked a JavaScript into the Blogger template that creates a "mailto:" without actually leaving it out in the open for the spam bots to harvest, so I won't see a big increase in spam from putting my e-mail on view. If you don't have a clue what I'm talking about, relax, it's just something a geek would care about. If you do, you can click "view source" to see it. The original script is at The JavaScript Source. It was written by Rod Murgatroyd, whose primary interest seems to be a New Zealand variant of N-scale model trains. The script can be adapted to your own use -- just be prepared for a session of wrestling with Blogger's dialect of HTML.

 
Online music sales plummet -- Recording industry blames file-sharing. Jeez, that's terrible. In general, I support property rights as an essential guarantor of freedom. Intellectual property rights, the exclusive right to profit from one's own efforts and inspiration, are particularly sacred.

A friend recently described my musical tastes as bipolar. I don't think that covers it. The CD case I have in my briefcase has works by Sibelius, Beethoven, the Ramones, Al Green, Frank Zappa, Aretha Franklin, Rancid, the Velvet Underground, Mozart, and Sam and Dave. The Sam of this last group is Sam Moore. He had a rather unpleasant experience when he retired. He found he could not do it -- he has to keep working. Here is a link to the article in the LA Times about the lawsuit he and other former stars have filed against these same people who are so upset about being ripped off by KaZaA. Turns out that these defenders of intellectual property have (1) screwed the artists by not paying the required amounts, or often anything, into the AFTRA pension plan, and (2) screwed them again by not paying them royalties. Now AFTRA, which is a separate legal entity from the AFTRA pension plan, is shocked -- SHOCKED -- to find out this injustice has occurred, and is joining the artists in the part of the suit targeting the pension plan (as I mentioned, it is a SEPARATE LEGAL ENTITY, despite the similarity of the names). Did I forget to mention that AFTRA is in the middle of an election to continue to represent the artists? Oopsie, my bad.

 
Election day is Tuesday, which means this is one of those rare times I'll be looking forward to a Wednesday. The stereotype in US politics is that Democrats think Republicans are mean, and Republicans think Democrats are stupid. To combat this, here in Massachusetts we have the Republican candidate for governor, Mitt Romney, looking stupid and Shannon O'Brien, Democrat, being mean.

The ads from the New Hampshire senate race are on our TV channels, too. Shaheen is going with the Social Security scare. One of her ads features an old woman saying "What will I do without my Social Security?" Oh, please. The consultant who thought that one up should have his severed head mounted above the Hooksett toll booth as a warning to others.

Reading:

Bill Bryson, The Lost Continent -- Travels in Small-Town America

After "A Walk in the Woods," "Notes from a Small Island," "I'm a Stranger Here Myself," and "In a Sunburned Country," I wish I had quit reading this guy while I was ahead. This was his first travel book and it shows. At the time he wrote this, he was also writing for the Independent in the UK, which is sort of the party organ for Old Labour. He flatters his core readership by confirming what they already know: Americans are fat vulgarians, they litter their breathtaking vistas with strip malls and trailer parks, and the food is bad. Sigh. Maybe we should let the Brussels bunch instruct us in how we should manage our affairs -- at least they are paying proper attention to regulating sausages and cheese.

Insight: See above. Also, 15,000 miles in a Chevette is probably not as good an idea as it sounds (the book was published in 1989, so there were some still running).

Quote: "I come from Des Moines. Somebody had to." This should have stopped me.

I haven't been blogging, I know. I've been putting another site together, graphics and all, which you can access through this site.