December 02, 2005

Quotable Quote Of Today

Ken Wheaton:

[The] irony in all these death-penalty stories: A media that typically sees Born-Again Christians as suspect suddenly finds the Born-Again Christian a nobel [sic?] figure. Listen, I have no truck with Born-Agains and I hold them suspect as well, but I find this odd: Having blood on your hands is a forgivable offense; trying to hang the Ten Commandments in a public school makes you a threat to society.

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November 29, 2005

If i Had A Blog

by annika b.

If i had a blog i would write about only shiny things
like my hair, or your nose

If i had a blog i would post naked pictures all the time
but of you

i would also post drink recipes,
and then drink them while blogging

If you had a blog you would name it after my cat, if i had a cat

If i had a blog i would write stupid free verse while listening
to my professor, and the boy with slightly wavy hair
who only raises his hand when he has something funny to say

Having a blog would be like being a superhero
but without the costume or the cool powers
i would wear boots and my underwear would be on the outside.

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November 22, 2005

Shout Outs To The New Lawyers In The Blogosphere

Congratulations are also in order for Law Fairy, The Angry Clam, Chris Cross, and GirlGoneMil, who passed the California Bar Exam. And i should also mention that my roommate Megan is the smartest, sexiest and most relieved new lawyer in the Golden State. And on Saturday, she was the most hungover too.

i know it's bad form to mention it, but good luck to those of you who didn't pass. i know you'll get em next time.

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November 11, 2005

Happy Veteran's Day

vets.jpg

A Happy Veteran's Day thank you to all veterans! And a belated Happy Birthday to the U.S.M.C.!

Check out Blackfive today. Uncle Jimbo has a great post. And contribute to Project Valour IT.

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November 10, 2005

Comments Problems

i have been frustrated with the comments being down, too. For some reason, the whole of Munuviana has been hit hard recently. Pixy is on it, as he always is, but as you know he's only one man. Superhuman yes, but still only one man. Here's some interesting facts that might shed light on things or at least help us all to be patient:

We got 1.3 million trackbacks over the past 30 days, and 550,000 comments. About 99.8% of trackbacks and over 90% of comments were spam. Over 99% of the spam got blocked, but that still left a lot of cleaning up.

. . .

Massive amounts of comment spam coming in right now - several thousand a minute. Busy upgrading Fluffy's armament. Back soon.

Ugh. Seriously ugh. We're talking over a hundred comments a second here.

Update: New super doom-Fluffy installed. We'll see how we go with that.

Update update: 75,000 80,000 85,000 spams from a single source in under 90 minutes. It would have been more than that except that the server ground to a halt under the load. It's sped up significantly now that it's all being blocked immediately.

Update update update: Out of 90,000 95,000 spams, four actually got through. Congrats to Ted, Linda, Daniel and Lawren, who won the prize.

Update^4: 100,000! It's now 104 minutes since the flood started

Update^5: Looks like it's leveled off at a steady 1500 spams a minute. I wonder how long they'll keep up this futile exercise?

Update^6: Just past the two hour mark and it seems to have stopped. 123,111 spam attempts, four of which got through, for a success rate of 0.00324%. I shall now delete those four spams... And done.

. . .

We have to move off Movable Type; we have no choice in the matter. However, no-one will be forced off MT before they're ready. The new servers will be able to cope with the existing users just fine; the problem is that further growth will bring serious problems. We're already the largest MT installation in the world, and worse, we are stuck on version 2.6 due to licensing issues.


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Money Quote Of The Day

Or, yesterday, rather:

For several years, these people have been testing the water, trying to gauge the size of the lies they can get away with. Unsurprisingly, they’ve come to realize that, if they all simply insist on the “truthfulness” of a given lie of their own creation and marketing, that little piece of the greater war narrative will, with the help of a compliant media, slowly ossify into “fact”—or at the very least, will dig beneath the skin of settled history and fester there, constantly picked at by the conspiracy theorists and fantasists who stroke their own egos by pretending to know more than the surface reveals.
Yes. Yessssss!

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November 09, 2005

U.S. Marine Corps Stamps

JCrue has pictures of the new distinguished Marines stamps. Nice.

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November 08, 2005

Essential Riot Reading

i know everybody's been pimping the 2002 Thomas Dalrymple article on the Parisian suburbs. i found it via A Nation Of Riflemen. If you haven't yet read it, believe the hype. It's one of the most interesting things i've read all year.

Kevin Kim links to it too. But Kevin has much more on the riots, including English translations of some French sources i had seen elsewhere. Not knowing French, i'm thankful to Kevin for doing the work. Just keep scrolling down on his blog. He'll like that.

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Cotillion Ball

Stacy at Not A Desperate Housewife did a beautiful job on today's Veteran's day theme Cotillion Ball. Please go check it out.

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November 05, 2005

Project Valour-IT








Allow me to quote Beth from My Vast Right Wing Conspiracy regarding this worthy fundraising effort:

I'm writing to ask for your support for a project sponsored by Soldiers' Angels (click for more information on SA, if you aren't familiar with them) called Project Valour-IT. This project is designed to provide voice-enabled laptops for severely wounded military members. From the Project Valour-IT website:

'Project Valour-IT, in memory of SFC William V. Ziegenfuss, provides voice-controlled software and laptop computers to wounded Soldiers, Sailors, Airmen and Marines recovering from hand and arm injuries or amputations at major military medical centers. Operating laptops by speaking into a microphone, our wounded heroes are able to send and receive messages from friends and loved ones, surf the 'Net, and communicate with buddies still in the field without having to press a key or move a mouse. The experience of CPT Charles "Chuck" Ziegenfuss, a partner in the project who suffered hand wounds while serving in Iraq, illustrates how important this voice-controlled software can be to a wounded servicemember's recovery.'

Right now there is a major fundraising effort ongoing among blogs, with certain blogs assigned to different service branches, to make it a sort of friendly competition. . . .

In previous generations and wars, all Americans were asked to sacrifice for the overall war effort, but during this war on terror where we are ALL affected, we haven't had to shoulder the burden that our military (active, reservists, and their families) have. May I ask you to sacrifice just a bit for the good of our troops?
i've selected the Army team. Please help out, for those who have given so much for us.

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November 03, 2005

Attention McGoohan Fans

Regarding this crazy secret CIA prison story, Varifrank reaches for the obscure "Village" reference first. Damn, i should have done that. [i'm such a sci-fi geek, i love that show. Best episode, The Schizoid Man.]

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November 01, 2005

Cotillion Ball

i've neglected to link the Cotillion Ball in a few weeks, so let me remedy that right now. This week's ball is over at Portia Rediscovered, a fellow Munuvian. i like all the pictures, way cool.

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October 31, 2005

Take The Hewitt Poll

Take the Hugh Hewitt poll on Judge Alito.

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October 30, 2005

My Blog Is Worth...

Any takers?


My blog is worth $305,980.68.
How much is your blog worth?




It must be my Sacramento location.

Via Old Skool at Stop the Bleating.

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October 05, 2005

Lying Is A Nasty Habit

One of the central characteristics of the left is the ease with which they lie. A website whose purpose is to direct trolls to right wing blogs had this to say about me:

Annika’s Journal - This lovely lady says Al Gore is “fat” and “tacky” Possibly her body is thin, but her brain spews nothing but vile bile. I’m confident that she is as tacky as it gets.
i once called Gore a "fashion disaster," but i never called him tacky. If you do a search using the search function at the bottom of my sidebar, you will easily find that the word "tacky" has never appeared on this blog before today.

Why lie, when the truth is so easy to find out? Because lefties know that most people won't go to the trouble to research things. This "tacky" lie is just a small example, but if you've been listening to the news lately you'll find many more examples of lefty lies that are much more disturbing.

It's also funny that my blog has been pigeonholed as a "right wing" blog. Sure i'm proudly conservative, but i don't blog about politics exclusively. Lately, i don't even think politics makes up half of what i write about. And how many right wing bloggers can say that they have turned over their blogs to left wing guest bloggers for a whole week, as i have. Twice.

You may also notice that it takes a heck of a lot for me to ban any troll, or to interfere in the comments section at all. Sometimes i think i should be more strict, but i truly believe in Ronald Reagan's precious ideal, "the marketplace of ideas." It's ironic that the one website which exhorts lefty trolls to go forth and comment, does not itself allow comments.

i like to think i do things differently here, but you wouldn't know it by reading what that lefty troll clearing-house blog says about me.

Hat tip to Six Meat Buffet.

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September 22, 2005

It Was Only A Matter Of Time...

... before somebody spoofed Bob Dylan's classic "Hurricane." Check out Mister Snitch's version. It's crazy good.

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September 20, 2005

The Cotillion Dolls

This week's Cotillion Ball is hosted by Beth at My VRWC, Sadie at Fistful of Fortnights, Soldier's Angel Holly Aho, SondraK at Knowledge Is Power and Jody at Steal the Bandwagon. There are many pictures, go to it!

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September 19, 2005

When A Blogger Feels Like She's Down For The Count

aliliston.jpg

When a blogger feels like she's down for the count, she should:

a) pick herself up, dust herself off, start all over again;

b) finally edit and post that Kill Bill 2 symposium she's been sitting on for-fucking-ever;

c) recycle old posts;

d) realize that she'll never be quite so charming, funny and cynical all at the same time as her idols Ginger, Candace or Dawn, then give up;

or

e) two words: sex blogging.

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September 14, 2005

Light Posting

i took on a project at school that will me keep me very busy over the next several weeks, so posting will be sporadic. If you're hungry for poetry i'd suggest visiting the following fellow poetry lovers: Sarah or Sheila or Dymphna and the Baron (Get well soon, Dymphna) or CBass (The Mark Russell of the Blogosphere) or my buddy Matt or Jeff's Protein Wisdom, none of whom have any poetry posted today. However, you can always count on Hugo for great poems on Thursday. If you're coming here for a gun nut update, i should have one soon, but you might want to check out this gun quiz at Risawn's blog. (i recognized the BHP.)

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September 10, 2005

Just One More Reason i'm Glad To Be A Munuvian

Blogger has instituted a quasi-censorship program.

When a person visiting a blog clicks the "Flag?" button in the Blogger Navbar, it means they believe the content of the blog may be potentially offensive or illegal. We track the number of times a blog has been flagged as objectionable and use this information to determine what action is needed. This feature allows the blogging community as a whole to identify content they deem objectionable.
This disturbing development is totally separate from their policy regarding spam blogs. This is much more big brotherish.

Blogger excuses this quasi-censorship by referring to the "Wisdom of Crowds" concept. That's complete bullshit. They might have an argument if they gave readers the option to designate a blog as "unobjectionable." But even that would be problematic, because it's always more likely that a offended person would be motivated to click on a flag than someone who's not offended by content. You're going to see a situation where hypersensitive people or those with intolerant political viewpoints will have a kind of "hecklers veto" on blog content.

This is a bad idea, and totally goes against what i thought was Blogger's most important asset, the total freedom it gave to its users. It's also an unnecessary idea. Blog readers have always had a remedy for objectionable content they might happen upon. It's called the back button. Blogger's "Flag Button" is the blogging equivalent of yelling "Mom!" everytime your brother calls you a ninny.

If someone doesn't like what i write for instance, they can always leave a comment, or email me, and then never visit again. If i want to post a picture of my left tit, i'm glad i have the freedom to do so without becoming some kind of second class blog-citizen.

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