Land of the Freaks and Home of the Babes

1. Commercial. Hype. Too Busy (with a lot of graphics and text; too crowded in) You know the ones I mean. Formulaic. Navbar on left, text in middle, ads on right. Standard and boring and too complicated to bother trying to search through unless you're looking for something very specific.
2. Commercial. But clean.
3. Non-commercial (educational, non-profit, govt., etc). But standard nonetheless. Boring.
4. Non-commercial. Unique, or plain (in the positive sense, ala the Amish).
5. Completely unique. An inability to classify. One of a kind, or one of only several of a kind.
6. Amateur. Unique or plain.
7. Amateur. Bad, but providing, nevertheless, insight into the personality of their creators.

Examples of: #6 - Batish

Is it progress if a cannibal uses a fork?

 

Stanislaw J. Lec

From: TimR [timr@sprint.ca]
Subject: The 10 Commandments of Email
• Thou shalt include a clear and specific subject line.
• Thou shalt edit any quoted text down to the minimum thou needest.
• Thou shalt read thine own message thrice before thou sendest it.
• Thou shalt ponder how thy recipient might react to thy message.
• Thou shalt check thy spelling and thy grammar.
• Thou shalt not curse, flame, spam or USE ALL CAPS.
• Thou shalt not forward any chain letter.
• Thou shalt not use e-mail for any illegal or unethical purpose.
• Thou shalt not rely on the privacy of e-mail, especially from work.
• When in doubt, save thy message overnight and reread it in the light of the dawn.

And, here's the "Golden Rule" of E-Mail:

• That which thou findest hateful to receive, sendest thou not unto others.

• Jesse Jackson uses hyperbole to stir up a heated debate on the problem of police brutality, and everyone takes him literally, which is exactly what he wants. [I do this same thing.]
• I've heard a lot of bad things about Louis Farrakhan and consequently developed a lot of negative ideas about who he is and what he's up to, but every time I've listened to him speak, I never heard a thing I disagreed with. What they say about him in the media seems to be mischaracterizations, negative innuendo, and character assassination. [I have been victimized by this sort of thing all my life.] People hate him because of what he stands for: equality of the races, an ideal that everyone else seems to want only in a token way.
• The Ashcroft/Rumsfeld comparison, con't:
1. Both men are tough, but Ashcroft is intolerant, whereas Rumsfeld is not.
2. Ashcroft says information gathered by asking millions of Americans to report the suspicious activity of neighbors will not result in a Big Brother government. The problem is, who believes him? Now if Rumsfeld had said it... But Rumsfeld knows better.
ASHCROFT: TIPS IS NO ORWELLIAN NIGHTMARE
Attorney General John Ashcroft said Thursday a program that would ask millions of Americans to report suspicious activity will not create an Orwellian government database that could be used against innocent Americans
[CNN article]
3. How do I measure up to Rumsfeld's example without becoming a hawk? How do I avoid the weasely demeanor of Ashcroft? This is a matter that warrants continued study.

• Did Traficant do it? Probably. Is he nevertheless being set up? Probably. One doesn't exclude the other. They are out to get him, because they hate that he exposes their rule bending. And the fact that he bends and stretches the rules himself doesn't help him any. The problem is that they all bend and stretch the rules. This could be the next big media event: corrupt senators and congress people.

  [I always empathize with rogues and scapegoats. I see myself in them.]

• Torricelli's the next scapegoat. He's being questioned about accusations that he took illegal cash and gifts for political help. [Wash. Times article] [Yahoo news article] His compatriots are looking for vulnerable people that they can project their foibles onto, to deflect the blame away from themselves--because they all do the same thing. It's just that some of them do it in smarter, and maybe even in legal ways.
• I saw on the Discovery Channel tonight that omega males in wolf packs serve as the scapegoats for higher males, the alphas of course doing most of the scapegoating and receiving none of it. In our efforts to rise to the top of the hierarchy, we (animals and their human counterparts) take out our aggressions (which in human form tends to be more mental than physical, thus enabling projection of unacceptable and insufferable, and thus repressed, behaviors) on others. Traficant and Torricelli, for whatever reason, have become the omega males of congress. Traficant tried to escape the embarrassment by making a bid for rogue male instead. But it was lame attempt. In order to become rogue, you have to opt out of the system. Traficant remained a part of it too long. [I myself am highly versed in this strategy. This is my life script, so I easily recognize it when I see it.]
• When Clinton was in office, he was accused of "waffling." How come no one is accusing Bush of this. His foreign policy is full of this kind of behavior, especially when it comes to the Palestinians. And now he's done a reversal re Iran. [Wash. Post article]
Half the fun of having a club is keeping other people out.
{Dennis the Menace}
They are entitled to set up their own rules the way they want them.
(Tiger Woods, on the subject of no women
members at Augusta National golf club.)
• Women are criticizing Tiger for this statement? Not only do they believe that private clubs should be prohibited from being exclusively male, but they believe that Tiger shouldn't even be allowed to express his own view on the subject--or worse, that he should maintain a different view, their view. This is the problem with pc activists; if everyone doesn't believe as they do, it's a mortal sin. They need to take a lesson in patient forbearance and tolerance from Rumsfeld.
Cuba is a place I've wanted to visit most of my life, probably because most of my life my government has told me I can't go there. I've never understood that: to promote freedom, the government takes away my right to travel.
Arlo and Janis Cartoonist Jimmy Johnson
• Who is the U.S. government, anyway, to tell me where in the world I can and cannot go. I can understand and accept other governments telling me I cannot visit their country. That's their right. It's their country. And I can accept the fact that the U.S. has the right to tell others they can't come here. But who the fuck are they to tell me I can't go there? This is just another example of abuse of power, the heavy weight of a power structure bearing down on citizens unnecessarily.
• Business pundits on the "news" shows want you to believe that the number of businesses that have been "cooking the books" is a very small fraction of the total number of businesses in America (and the world) and not representative at all of the general business situation.
  
  I'm just starting keeping a list these businesses, to see how many we end up with:
  

  • Xerox
  • Enron
  • Arthur Andersen
  • ImClone
  • WorldCom
  • AOL Time Warner??
  • Johnson & Johnson???
  • Citigroup
  • HPL Technologies
  • Adelphia
  • Qwest
  • Salomon Smith Barney
  • Homestore
  • Tyco
  • Providian
  • Halliburton
  • Global Crossings

  
  
  The problem is that companies like this have been in the news off and on for a long time. We tend to forget about them after a few months have passed. It's only because there have been so many of them recently all at once, in the aftermath of the big one, Enron, that we're now so attentive to them. But we'll forget about these too. But that doesn't mean that the problem will have gone away. It's always been a problem, and it always will be as long as government and big business are in bed together.
  
  My point is, if this many companies have been up to illegal or questionable accounting practice, then how are we to believe that others like them are not? Surely, of course, some very large proportion is not. But how many? And which companies? We can't know, until it's too late. So logic and good sense dictates that we stay away from investing in all of them. If people start investing again (and there's every sign that they will), they'll prove that they are just as stupid as they've ever been and always will be. The market is really no different than it was before the establishment of the SEC. It's just more sophisticated. The big guys will get the small guys' money, and the small guys will get shafted. A fool and his money... I keep my money in secure investments. I may not get the big returns, but neither do I get periodically wiped out.

  They're just not ever going to learn. After leaving office, Clinton, like most presidents in the past, has pretty much kept his mouth shut while the Republicans have been blaming him for the economy. But if they thought he was going to lie down and take it, they were wrong. He's speaking up and defending himself quite well (and so is Hillary, it seems. And wasn't it cute that they were holding hands at the Iowa State Fair--or wherever it was they were. And you could just tell that it wasn't all for publicity purposes. It really seemed like she's forgiven him. Maybe he's learned his lesson. Hmm. I kind of doubt it.). Anyway, if the Republicans keep it up, they're going to provoke the Bill back into a political mode, and then watch out. There's no way they can outdo him. They ought to have learned that lesson by now. They're shooting themselves in their collective foot. And the administration is starting to self-destruct anyway. Probably at the prompting of Ashcroft and his crew, they're trying to link terrorism to the drug "problem." By bringing all of their right-wing agendas together, they're polarizing the situation, and it's going to backfire on them as voters begin to see exactly what they're up to in their grab for power and control.

  KAYAKER FOUND IN 'MIRACLE' RESCUE
  In what the Coast Guard called a "pretty big miracle," searchers Tuesday found a man in a small red kayak 120 miles off the Hawaiian coast -- two days after he was lost at sea.

  [CNN]

  Everything these days is a miracle. We must be having a great resurgence of spirituality worldwide. Even so levelheaded a media dignitary as Geraldo uses the term to describe the rescue of the nine miners here in Somerset, PA (less than an hour's drive away from my home). Now, I like Geraldo. I always have. I respect his opinion and appreciate his style. But, dude, the rescue was not a miracle, unless by the term you mean the miracle of modern science and technology and the dedicated efforts of determined people. But I don't believe in the religion of modern science any more than I believe in the traditional stuff. Miracles are supposed to be events that are unexplainable by known causes, and everything in the mining disaster is perfectly explainable, as is everything in the Kayaker incident. Everybody wants divine intervention, but no one seems willing to accept that most often, maybe always, things go on just the way they do by ordinary means. Besides, calling things like the Quecreek mine rescue a miracle is an insult to the rescuers, who used their very human abilities to pull it off.

  A man kidnapped two teenage girls at gunpoint early Thursday from a lovers' lane in a remote area, authorities said. Tamera Brooks, 16, and Jaqueline Marris, 17, were sitting in separate cars with male friends when the gunman approached them shortly after 1 a.m.

  [MSNBC]

  It's unfortunate, even truly tragic (as opposed to the pathetic use of that word by the media these days), that these two young women were in the wrong place at the wrong time--but hey, that's life. And I could understand it if they might want to avoid having their names not be associated with a crime like rape, reputation being taken as seriously as it is.
  

  But the fact is that news is news, and censorship is disgusting, for whatever "noble" reason. I don't believe that media should make a story out of little or nothing, but neither do I believe they should avoid it when it happens. This happened, to these two girls. This is what their lives, now, are all about. This is what they must face up to.
  

  Whatever happens to you is what your life is all about, until you can summon the resolve to overcome it. The media might decide to play it down, to give it minimal coverage, ala the thousands of newsworthy events they all but ignore daily in favor of the more sensational ones that they overplay, but to arbitrarily refuse to release information while covering the story mainstream is to edit the news in a way that is disinformative.
  

  The young ladies must face up to what happened to them, and to try to protect their reputation by keeping their identities out of the public eye is the first step in a long series of repressive tactics that may come to haunt them later on. We all live with our reputations, and how we deal with public opinion about what has occurred in our lives determines our character.
  

  Besides, any fool who would think less of a woman for having been raped is someone who should be given wide berth anyway. Keep those kinds of people out of your lives and you will be the better for it. Personally, I admire a woman who, having been the victim of a rape, fully discloses the details of the event in the hopes that she can influence public opinion in a positive way, and her own psychology besides.
  

  [The day after I wrote this, Jaqueline Marris did an extensive interview with CNN. She seems straightforward and levelheaded. However, the boyfriend of one of the girls (I didn't catch which one) also did an interview. This wasn't one of the guys who was in the car with the girl at "lover's lane." All I can I say about that is "Wake up, dude."]
  

  There's a big advantage of the early sexual "liberation" of "children" (teenagers): Obviously, by the way they responded to the abduction, by the fact that they were abducted from a lovers' lane, and from their subsequent interviews on tv, the two teenage girls were sexually experienced, in a way commensurate with their teen sub-culture (the overriding culture still assumes that its teens are far more innocent than they really are). And so they were not so traumatized by the rapes as innocent children would have been.

2. from the I-Design newsletter:

I'm a purist in that I believe all blog entries should contain at least one link. After all, blog is short for "Weblog," which is a log of interesting sites the blogger discovers in the course of surfing the Net. I don't consider the self-serving online diaries to be true blogs, but rather just an exercise in journaling. Neither do I consider corporate news updates as blogs.

The problem seems to be in the confusion between format and medium. Hence, any online content which can be easily updated on a regular basis is labeled a blog. News updates and journal entries may use Blogger-style technology, but that does not make them blogs.

Mary Ihla
Lifewriting Professional
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/memoir/join

4. The older I get, the more girls there are in the world, and the less women there are--because, by my definitions, a girl is any female person who is younger than I am and a woman is any female who is older. I think I'm going to have to revise these definitions, otherwise there will be very few women left. But maybe I won't make this revision, because having a world with mostly girls and few women in it may not be so bad a thing. A lady, of course, can be any age, because a lady is any girl or woman who behaves properly. There aren't so many ladies in the world as there used to be, and that has very little to do with my age. (To be fair, there aren't so many gentlemen either. Maybe one provokes the other. But the problem is, which? Most probably, there is a third cause that determines both effects.)