Month: July 2002

  • *looks down*


    It sure seems like I touched something down there.


    Hey, wait a minute, I'm looking down below at my last post, not at ...my feet.


    *looks left*


    Wow!  My 600th subscriber snuck up on me.  That's awesome!  Happy Trails to all of you!


    *gets idea*


    Speaking of subscribers, what if I created a few dozen new blogs, making them my own email-type subscribers and assigned them at signup with the addresses of the President, selected members of Congress, members of the Cabinet, foreign dignitaries, the Pope, my favorite actresses, Ozzie Osbourne, etc.  I know most of them don't have the time to keep up with me by browsing everyday, so why not just automate my blogs into their email boxes?   LOL 


    So you think I'm kidding?

  • Well, it appears that the NYC Asian PropKids have seized control of the Featured Content list.  LOL


     


    Make no mistake: the NYC first and then the Hawaiian chapters of the (largely) Asian PropKids are by far the most sizeable  demographically self-defined contingents here on Xanga.  How “self-defined”?  Blogrings.  Blogrings characterized by either their ethnicity or regionality or both.


     


    Top five blogrings by size in the "Friends" category:


    ..::NyC PeOpLe::..  (819 weblogs)
    All the New Yorkers gotta stick together rite?? Doesn't matter wat race, ethicity or religion u are..If u live in
    New York
    , be proud and JOIN!! =D

    * aSiAnz to da phuLLezt *  (
    680 weblogs)
    wdup f
    0
    oz x] join if u a troo asian n u aint fucken ashamed to b wun..sOo join alreadi!! x]

    Da 808 Krew!  (500 weblogs)
    This is for all you local peeps from
    Hawaii! Jus' join and help represent that one 'n only 808 state! You know how we roll!

    >|| PnOy)::..::|F |L |I |P *sTyLeS::..:(:PnAy ||<  (461 weblogs)
    ThIs BLOG RING isH Fo All MaH FeLloW FILi-PiN-oZ !! AzN PrYDe...!! ((*mUaH*))...ThIs RiNg Ish JUsS a WaY FeR AlL yA'll to ExPrEsS YeR mIndZ..AnD a wAy FeR AlL ThA aZn XANGA members ToOh CoMe ToGeThEr..!! aIigHt..TANx..!! MuCh Luv .. I'M oUt..

    *-NyCz 7i8 aZnz xP- *  (452 weblogs)
    *~fer alla da aznz reppin' da 7i8 area xD ~*
    (or f0e' any ppl dat w0nna juss j0in ur welcum to =])
    if yoo b joinin...leav me a comment n e propz or somedinq aiiz?... hehe denxx wun luff ehn enj0y <3
    damnz...wuhz wid alla deze fuqin nikketz...joqin da name of mai rinq ehn tryna rock it ehz??..pyshhh s'all gud tho xP


     


    And the top 7 blogrings by size in the "States" category:


     


    New York City Asians  (719 weblogs)
    A place for all NYC Asians to sit down and have a cup of coffee while thuggin it.

    Hawaii peeps!  (600
    weblogs)
    aLohA! iF u LiVe In
    HaWaIi cOmE jOiN tHiS rInG. cOmE oN pPlZ! wE gOtTa ReP dA 808
    StAtE!

    .:: NyC KrN/Chink AsiaN ::.  (246
    weblogs)
    i want this blog ring to let all nyc asians to make new friends and know more people who live around them or close to them

    *~mHs, hAwAii~*  (226
    weblogs)
    mililani high school

    808Stright thuggin' in PearlCity(Livin' LARGE)  (176 weblogs)
    For all in the 808 state..!! Represent!! Well..for all types, from sk8ers, slackers, BG's, to thugs pimps and ho's...from the dorks. to the mr cools, and all the average joe's, and anything beyond and in between!!!

    NyC *718* Queens  (167 weblogs)
    Ppl who live in queens basically..u guys know who you are or anyone else who wants to join.

    New Jersey Asian-Americans  (138 weblogs)
    According to Census 2000,
    New Jersey has the second largest APA population behind California. With so many Jersey Asians, this ring serves to unite fellow yellows in solidarity to share their individual experiences. So come, grab a seat, unbuckle that belt, and share your stories of laughter, your stories of pain, your stories of angst, your stories of gain. Unleash your stories through humor, wit, anger, sorrow, or just ramble. However you choose, go naked!


     


    Don’t get me wrong: I love the PropKids.  They are good kids.  My guess is that they’re staying out of trouble by scribbling cyberly rather than marking gang signs with urban graffiti.  And they’re so enriching, too!  Just listen to some of names they have invented for their most coveted eProp:


     


    propz, epills, pr0pz, ePoopiez, epropssssssss, epOppies, eprOppz, ePillz, e`p`i`l`l`z, epOps, propzz, 2pills, epRoPiEz, e`pillllllz, pilllz, …and more!


     


    But I’m a bit concerned, nonetheless, that the PropKids in their overwhelming numbers are diluting the traditional sometimes excellence of content in the Featured Content by their manic, fun, but oftentimes mindless groping for the propz.   Many of the posts making it into Featured Content anymore are just blatant half-literate pleas for propz, epills, pr0pz, ePoopiez, epropssssssss, epOppies, eprOppz, ePillz, e`p`i`l`l`z, epOps, propzz, 2pills, epRoPiEz, e`pillllllz, pilllz, …with a promise to “hit ya back” with the same. 


     


    Oh, it’s great fun—I’m sure.  Yet I have a proposal for letting them have their fun while, to some degree, still preserving the possibility for featuring literary quality:  Create a new, separate but equal, “Tortured Content” list.  This list would consist of the twenty most popular posts in a 24-hour period which contain at least 20% misspellings.  Plain and simple.  Xanga would just need to devise an autocheck for spelling upon submission and route the content accordingly.


     


    itall be niethr dat mi hoodies or i stylish to be just woa wid the nyc and emo crue.  beqqin a hit me wid da proppeez and i’s all fittin in an takin my font down 2:  so dat i can fill less meanin in too sumtin moe effacinq. cause I lubb propz and will qo pops if da need 2. park here an will hit ya back <3

  • The local weather report says its 91 F. and feels like 100 F.  What’s that supposed to mean?  I just ran my own 10K without a water break and, to me, it felt like about 117 F.  Yep.  And it’s not like I’ve never run in torrid heat and am merely conjecturing about the sensation.  I ran one time for about 20 or 25 minutes  on an airbase near Phoenix  in 120-125 F. summer noonday sun.  That was probably the hottest.  The coldest jaunt I ever made running out was – 15 to - 17 F. in a northern Ohio winter.  That constitutes about a 135 to 142 degree range.  I wouldn’t mind the opportunity to expand the range a bit.  Say, take it up to about 130 F. and down to about -20 F.  But I’m not about to thrill seek in order to establish such.  I’ll just take the opportunity if the occasion ever presents itself. 


    Of course, I ran for many years nearly daily for hours in 100% humidity and 85-92 F. in the *jungles* of Panama.  I called such running excursions my “intelligence gathering missions” since they connected my body’s wisdom with that of the rain forest and non-forest terrain.  There, too, I always ran without water and as a rule would never stop until completing my loop back to my point of origin.

    Yet...One time, while running dirt roads in the interior of Panama, I found an *oasis* in a single solitary cloud passing overhead on an otherwise clear, hot (“too hot”?), scorching day.  As it passed over me, tens of miles away from my destination and waterless, I found a 15 to 20 degree drop in the temp underneath its soothing shadow.  It was an oasis!  It was like an Angel of the Refreshing was taking me under its protective wing!  But then, as it moved off in a direction other than my initially intended destination, I had to decide: stay with the angel, the oasis, and run into the unknown or scorch back unprotected to the origin of my foray?  Needless to say—since I am here today—I rejoined the sun.

    Anyway, today immediately after getting  back home, I teased myself by turning on the garden hose and letting it run for 5 minutes while I paced the perimeter of my driveway up and down, around and around, panting like a big cat trying to cool off.  Then I succumbed: drenching my head in a hose-fed Niagara of coolness and intermittently swallowing gratifying gulps of that same sweet sea.  Ah—if only the alleviation of all torment in life could be so readily self-redeemed!

  • Stage-blogging: are you guilty?


    Stage-blogging: Attempting to impress others and aggrandize one's own ego by blogging in an animated, theatrical manner. 


    Are you guilty?


    Some of you are as guilty as sin.  Wait: technically, a sin isn't guilty; it's the sinner that's guilty. 


    Me?  I've held so much back from Xanga about myself out of a necessity for secrecy that if I were to come all out now you'd definitely think I was a stage-blogger!  Ha!


    (Or maybe I'm just a hollow man inventing stories about secrecy to impress a sense of mystery?  Stage-blogger!)


    Here's a related high-tech phenomenon:


    Some mobile users tend to make a virtue of the lack of privacy, enjoying and exploiting the presence of third parties as a unique opportunity to put something of themselves on display by stage-phoning. On a train, for example, a mobile can be used as a way of broadcasting a great deal of information to a pretty much captive audience. . . . Calls can be invented for the purpose, in which case the mobile can communicate even when it is not in use. On the elevated train in Chicago, a young man talks on a mobile in some style. He's discussing an important deal and at the same time trying to impress a group of girls in the same part of the train. It all goes well until disaster strikes: his phone goes off and interrupts him in mid-sentence, and his fictional deal is exposed.

    —Sadie Plant, "On the mobile: The effects of mobile telephones on social and individual life," Motorola Inc, October 28, 2001

  • Do you want reality TV?


     



     


    House Hunters








    House Hunters is the first reality-based television series to focus on the emotional experience of finding and purchasing a new home. The show takes viewers behind the scenes as individuals, couples and families learn what to look for and decide whether or not a home is meant for them. Hosted by Suzanne Whang, each half-hour episode follows a prospective buyer and real estate agent through the home-buying process, from start to finish.




     


    I'll give you reality TV:


     



     









    Plot Hunters



    Plot Hunters is the first reality-based  television series to focus on the emotional experience of finding and purchasing a new grave plot. The show takes viewers behind the scenes as individuals, couples and families learn what to look for and decide whether or not a particular graveyard and plot is meant for them. Hosted by notforprophet, each half-hour episode follows a prospective buyer and angel of death through the plot-buying process, from start to wake and beyond.


     

  • Xanga Personals: The Real FUQ


    (Frequently Uttered Questions)


    Why won’t they let you use your Xanga username as your Personals’ “profile nickname” too?


    Well, they want to make money!  If you could find your ideal match by browsing the Personals, and then simply refer by the “profile nickname” you’ve located back to the matching Xanga username, you could bypass buying credits and just get in touch directly without paying the middleman. 


    Indeed, I recognized one Xangan by an alias she also uses (in addition to her regular Xanga username) and  was able to have some fun contacting her on her blog instead of through buying the “credits”.


    How can you arrange to use your favorite Xanga username, i.e. xxreaderxx, as your Personal’s “profile nickname” also—so they match?


    1) First, your current favorite Xanga username—xxreaderxx—must still remain available in the entire 1 million member Spring Street Personals database.  If you’re username’s been taken already, you’re out of luck.
    2) You must create/already have a different Xanga username—not-xxreaderxx—to log into Xanga with.  Then go to the Personals, log in with this other alias, and use the “Create Profile” button to create your preferred Xanga username—xxreaderxx—profile.


    So I’ve created a notforprophet Personals “profile nickname” while logging in under a different Xanga alias ( I knew someday they’d come in handy!).  I did this mainly so that some other ruthless Xanga bastard wouldn’t co-opt my Xanga username and deceive some poor, beautiful, but gullible girl out there into believing that he (or she) was me!


    Though currently hidden from view (i.e., I’m not advertising my profile in the Personals), if I were ever to go publicly Personal, the “notforprophet” you’d see would be the “notforprophet” I am here in my blog!  So you’d have the opportunity then to either contact me directly and save buying their “credits” or say “Fuck that.  That’s the same fucking guy as on the blog.  Fuck him!”  mwuahahaha


    How can you search the Personals just for other Xangans and not through Spring Streets’ whole 30-plus site database?


    There is a way!


    1) Go to Personals and log in.
    2) Go towards the bottom of the page and click on “Advanced Search”.
    3) Go all the way to the bottom of the Advanced Search (unless you want also to filter for other criteria along the way) and click/check on the “Search only—users of:” box.
    4) Right below the above box, there is a drop-down menu with the default of “all”.  Change that to read “Xanga.com”.
    5) Click the “Find My Match” button at the bottom and you’ll be able to see only those who registered Personals with Xanga accounts (though remember almost all “profile nicknames” will not match the Xanga username most users go by (see first item at top of page for explanation).


    How much profit will Xanga make from this?


    Well, each credit costs between $.80 and $.42 cents depending on which “credit package” you buy (cheaper with volume).  Since you need 1 credit to respond to a single Personal and between 2 and 3 credits to chat (send an “Instant Gratifier”), you might spend anywhere from $.80($.42), $1.60($.84), or $2.40($1.26) per inquiry/online chat.


    Since Xanga splits the money 50-50 with Spring Street, well, that’s enough math!  But the eventual potential is a lot.


    How much profit will notforprophet make from this?


    See those $$million$$ dollar bills in my background?  LMAO

  • Here’s more info that I’ve dug up on the new-fangled Xanga Personals:


    Xanga has partnered with Spring Street, one of Fortune’s “Cool Companies of 2002”.  It is a nine-month-old, 14-person company that spawned from the sex-crazed Nerve.com


    It is the online dating software of choice for more than 30 Websites, including Jane magazine, Time Out New York, Salon.com, and the seer of sarcasm, the Onion.  Here’s a full list:








    ·  Boston Globe: Boston.com


    ·  BlueEar


    ·  Bust.com


    ·  Calgary Straight


    ·  Disinfo.com


    ·  fuckedcompany.com


    ·  HOT.it


    ·  IrishAbroad.com


    ·  JANE Magazine


    ·  Lions Gate Entertainment


    ·  LostBrain.com


    ·  Media Bistro


    ·  Modern Humorist


    ·  Nerve.com


    ·  New Times
         - Cleveland Scene
         - Dallas Observer
         - New Times Broward-Palm Beach
         - New Times Los Angeles
         - New Times Miami


    ·  Philadelphia CityPaper


    ·  Portland Mercury


    ·  Salon.com


    ·  Siberalem


    ·  The Georgia Straight


    ·  The Island Ear


    ·  The Onion


    ·  The Stranger (Seattle)


    ·  The Weekly Dig (Boston)


    ·  TimeOut New York


    ·  UGO.com


    ·  Village Voice Media
         - Minneapolis City Pages


    ·  Women.com


        Xanga.com


    With a database of about one million personal profiles strong, Spring Street works like a Cyrano de Bergerac for the Information Age. Daters think that Xanga.com performs the heroics when it's Spring Street that coughs up potential matches. . . . Each time a dater sets up a profile, it's fed into Spring Street's shared network. Then a user of Xanga.com, say, can access an ad that was originally placed on theonion.com (and vice versa) for less than $1. (Cheap date, no?) Spring Street and Xanga split the revenue.


    One of the ultimate arbiters of cool, Entertainment Weekly, recently named The Onion's personals (a Spring Street partner) as "in," while Match.com's were "out."  Hence, by sharing in the same database, Xanga’s personals would also be “in.”


    Although the URL (personals.xanga.com) suggests a Xanga server, it is indeed, as claimed, conducted entirely upon non-Xanga servers (IP of 64.15.237.155 whereas Xanga uses the 208.215.141.xxx subnet). Hence, it appears that it will not create any additional load on Xanga.


    It will be very difficult for one Xangan to sort other Xangans out of the thirty+ sites' million member database.  There is a “profile nickname” search but since Spring Street requires your “profile nickname” to be different from your username (which is your Xanga username), you’ll have to choose a different alias for representing yourself in the personals.


    My advice: Now that Xanga has partnered with Personals, I’d suggest that they stock up the newly-created Xanga Store with plenty of Xanga eProp Condoms (“Tops because they Prop”) and Xanga SIR (Sex-Is-Real) sex-toys because *xang-ing*’s about to acquire a whole new reputation.


    And some further advice: If you want to reserve your regular Xanga username --xxreaderxx-- as your Personal's "profile nickname", you'll have to log into Xanga under a different Xanga alias and then register it since (Xanga username) and the associated (Personal's profile nickname) cannot match!  Confusing, huh?!


    note: Cherried-up text taken directly from Fortune

  • John ponders: Is Xanga too addictive?  


    My response:


    Well, Xanga is no where near as addictive as it could be.  It's more like a clove cigarette than real tobaccy.  And even at that, many, many peeps just put the *clove cigarette* in their mouths and don't bother lighting it anymore. 


    Granted, in the short-term, the initial rush, the first puff, of being on Xanga can addictive-like.   But down the road, while it is very attractive to many, and mildly pseudo-addictive to some, it is probably crippling to a very few who would likely, in any case, substitute some other addiction if blogging failed to fix their craving.


    Granted, the eProp has its *Golden Calf* enthusiasts, especially visible with the latest fad of "propz me till I drop" Featured Content posts.  They claim they will hold themselves hostage and not post again until a certain number of eProps are awarded--LOL.  So the eProp, clearly, has served, for some, as more than just a symbol of good will.  It has attained, for these, the status of the ultimate icon: an accumulating possession, a material reification of popularity, a count building towards some nebulous critical mass.  Yes, "counts" can be somewhat addictive to certain personality types.  Especially when the counts are comparative and thus potentially competitive and a susceptible-type finds him/herself in the running. (So thanks for dispensing with the "accumulative total eProps count"--it was driving me crazy. LMAO)  So, in my opinion, anything to hype-up the eProp would definitely make Xanga "more addictive" for some .


    Another feature that I bet would make Xanga more addictive to some, in conjunction with your current Premium music sponsoring, would be to provide "music radio" to a site so that a blogger could keep returning to their and others' sites to find out what the "latest tune" is that's playing on them.  This would clearly drive some music freaks nuts with constant fascination.


    Yet another ploy to make Xanga more addictive would be to turn it into a "lottery" where random sequenced posts (Premium only ?!) throughout the day could win token merchandise.  So if the 10th post after 3 AM wins a Xanga T-shirt, hell, I'd be there!  Or if the first post after midnight wins an assortment of press-on eProp tattoos--cool!


    As you may know, I've done some experimenting with chatrooms, cams, and live audio over Xanga.  In my opinion, a sponsored incorporation of any of these would make Xanga significantly more attractive to many, more pseudo-addictive to some, and cripplingly addictive for the very few (who would otherwise probably be doing something else more harmful!)  Of course, there is currently the *bandwidth issue* in considering any of these.  But with the fairly recent innovation of Dense Wave Division Multiplexing (DWDM) potentially increasing the previous estimated throughput of the internet backbone's fiber optics 1000-fold, down the road, nearly unlimited bandwidth should become dirt cheap (providing that real supply/demand, and not oligopoly, is allowed to set the price).


    You want addictive ?  I'd give you more addictive... but I don't have the time: I need to get to work NOW and I won't let Xanga make me late AGAIN! 








  • Here's a clarifying comment by the XangaTeam's Monsur, now made an indispensible preface to this post:


    Ack!  This was NEVER supposed to be the case!  I'll take the fall, I inadvertently introduced a bug when rolling out this premium background feature.  This feature wasn't supposed to replace the ability to add backgrounds to your site, it was just supposed to make things easier for Premium members.  Anyway, backgrounds should be back to normal, sorry for the inconvenience...

    Posted 7/24/2002 at 10:51 pm by monsur - delete
    And here's the post that prompted Monsur's comment:


    Note to the Possibly Perplexed:


    Apparently, Xanga has decided that the ability to add a background image to your blog is now a Premium Feature only (*imagines the screams from the non-Premies*).  If you have Premium, you can restore your image at the bottom of the "Look and Feel" module.  If you don't have Premium, I guess the message is: "Do without--or Get It."  But, hey, remember, I'm just the messenger--I didn't devise the message!


    Additionally, it appears that Premium members can now easily add music to the blog, again, at the bottom of the "Look and Feel" module. 


    So What's the Strategy?  Well, I once taught a course in Economics at Graduate level in college. So let me, with a trained but now rusty outlook, attempt a metaphorically foreshortened economic analysis of this services realignment as I think that the BlogTeam may see it :


    Only Premium can do backgrounds anymore. By this, we at Xanga are sending a message:

    We don't value Free subscribers as much anymore.  If losing your background wants to make you quit, we'll miss you, but Godspeed. 


    Non-converting Free membership was increasing exponentially and the resulting inordinately ever-higher ratio of Free/Premium membership was becoming financially and technically unsustainable anyway. 


    By making Free less attractive (and Premium, by comparison, more attractive) we hope to induce your conversion to Premium, and expect some to make this conversion, thus helping to secure the ongoing finances needed to sustain and expand our community. 


    If you do not opt for Premium and decide to stay with diminished options, that's OK with us.  If you instead decide to leave (or never join), as we expect some will, that's fine, too, since you thereby reduce the ratio of Free/Premium membership thus making this operation more cost effective. 


    Basically, there's only so much to share of this ever-more popular cyber-pie and we decided by this readjustment to better assure that our paying subscribers are not negatively impacted by a strain from comparatively too-attractive , tumultuously-growing Free subscriptions.


    Remember: With a free lunch you don't always get desert.  And as the number of free-lunchers rapidly grows, while the growth of the cyber-pie continues but slower, you should expect the scarcer deserts to first go to the paying diners. But don't feel bad: We're still giving you one helluva free lunch, if that's all you want.

  • Shameless Marketing Ploy of the Day:  I just received another AOL 7.0 CD proclaiming that it’s “NEW”.  Well, version 7.0 isn’t exactly new, so what is it that their claiming as “NEW”?  Aha!  They are now offering 1025 hours “free” for 45 days instead of the old, stingy 1000 hours “free” for 45 days.  Well, seeing that 45 days only has 1080 hours to begin with, that leaves only 55 hours over 45 days when I can’t be online.  Whoopee!  So instead of the previous tightfisted average of  22.22 hours per day I can now spend a much more openhanded 22.78 hours per day on AOL during my free trial period!  Ain’t that a cat’s meow?!


    Minor Pet Peeve:  The Xanga “Search” function is broken again.  It seems that this function is about as reliable as an old used car whose spark plugs are constantly fouling due to piston wear failure so that unless you pull, clean, and reset them every couple of days, you’re bound to grovel with predictable dysfunction.


    Yet the real shame is that there’s no fallback to other established search engines such as Google to peruse one’s pages either.  Sure, Google provides a lot of hits for “Xanga” and for specific blog-names, too.  But the contents of one’s blog seem to go unspidered and thus remain part of the “Dark Internet”, i.e., information and pages on the internet that cannot be searched or located by any public domain search engines.   That’s fine if you prefer more privacy (but then why do you blog publicly to begin with?), but a drawback if you’re seeking to popularize your ideas. 

    So you could originate an idea or coin a term here on Xanga that someone else could “borrow” and popularize in the “Light” (i.e., public domain searchable) Internet, and others searching for the originator/creator of the idea or term could end up crediting the “borrower” rather than you here on “Dark” Xanga. 

    I suppose one way around this would be to “mirror” one’s posts on a searchable/regularly-spidered domain.  I’m not sure right now if having one’s own domain (such as fairestc’s  www.christydawn.com) sponsored through Xanga brings it into the Light or not.  I shall begin an investigation forthwith!


    More than a thought:  It’s estimated that there are about 1 million words in the English language.  In your venerated estimation, is such a surfeit inducing gratuitous loquaciousness or a dearth hampering the potential for further perspicuity ?

  • Is guillotining the most humane form of execution?  That could depend on whether you have a love or fear of flying (dying?)...


    A particularly detailed report comes from Dr Beaurieux who, under perfect circumstances, experimented with the head of the murderer Languille, guillotined at 5:30 am on 28 June, 1905. (From A History of the Guillotine by Alister Kershaw. His source is Archives d'Anthropologie Criminelle, 1905):

    "Here, then, is what I was able to note immediately after the decapitation: the eyelids and lips of the guillotined man worked in irregularly rhythmic contractions for about five or six seconds . . . I waited for several seconds. The spasmodic movements ceased. The face relaxed, the lids half closed on the eyeballs, leaving only the white of the conjunctiva visible, exactly as in the dying whom we have occasion to see every day in the exercise of our profession, or as in those just dead.

    "It was then that I called in a strong, sharp voice: 'Languille!' I saw the eyelids slowly lift up, without any spasmodic contractions . . . Next Languille's eyes very definitely fixed themselves on mine and the pupils focused themselves . . . After several seconds, the eyelids closed again, slowly and evenly, and the head took on the same appearance as it had had before I called out.

    "It was at that point that I called out again and, once more, without any spasm, slowly, the eyelids lifted and undeniably living eyes fixed themselves on mine with perhaps even more penetration than the first time. Then there was a further closing of the eyelids, but now less complete. I attempted the effect of a third call; there was no further movement and the eyes took on the glazed look which they have in the dead.

    "I have just recounted to you with rigorous exactness what I was able to observe. The whole thing had lasted twenty-five to thirty seconds."

    ...because the first sky pilots were not the Wright brothers:


    Dr Livingstone wrote that Africans he encountered were aware that consciousness is not lost immediately. He recounts how they bent a springy sapling and tied cords from it under the ears of a man to be decapitated so that his last few moments of awareness would be of flying through the air.


    Graped-up from Thunk!

  • What’s shaking in my world?


    During lunch yesterday, I had a “ring-side seat” as I watched two men engage in bare-handed battle on the corner of a busy downtown street.  Actually, I was just walking past them as the fight erupted and I needed to make space or I would have become involved in the melee.  It seems they were locked in apparent mortal combat over a little blonde sweetie with a baby nearby who kept yelling “Stop it.  Stop it.”   As both landed hard blows to each others’ face, the fighting abruptly stopped, but not because the outcome had been decided.  Rather, both combatants happened to notice a police squad car around the corner taking a great interest in the contest.  Thereupon, both not wishing to go to jail, they hugged each other, giving high fives and jiving, pretending that it was just a playful scuffle involving benign aggression.  LOL.  As the spectacle subsided, I walked past the squad car and said to the driver, “You know, they weren’t just having fun.”  The cop just nodded in acknowledgement with a dismayed grin on his face.


    This morning I freed a captive sparrow from a stairwell in a garage by propping open the rooftop door and chasing the bird up three flights of stairs to freedom.  Then I wondered somewhat existentially: Will there someday be someone to chase me up the stairway to heaven to the precipe of my portal to freedom?!


    Last night I realized that there is a whole, though small, genre of individuals still secreted sexually away in our cultural closet.  They are so concealed and obscure that until this very moment they have not even been acknowledged with a name.  Perhaps in so naming them now, I can chase their bird up the three flights of stairs to freedom, to “outing”, too?!  They are…


    The Suisexuals : men and women who have the capability to perform oral on themselves and engage in and prefer that most intensely over anything or anybody else.  Although having some of the trappings of both masturbation and lesbian/homosexual relations, I believe that this genre is psychologically unique in reifying true narcissism at its primal core.   Like Narcissus, they have fallen in love with their own image and have no need of the fading Echoes of others for their sexual fulfillment.  Can you imagine a yoga regime or surgical intervention whose aim would be to make Suisex available on demand?!  Damn.  For the right Yogi or the right Doctor, this specialty might prove as popular and lucrative as breast implants.


    Now I need to know:  Is or is not a *tickle* the next best thing to an *orgasm* which is the next best thing to a *kiss*  ??

  • And you think blogging is easy?!


     


    What if there were a free online encyclopedia that you could not only access readily but which you could help edit, create, and publish at will without even logging in?


     


    Wikipedia, “The Free Encyclopedia”,  is precisely such an animal and the notion is one of a truly collective, communistic enterprise.  WikiWiki is a Hawaian word meaning “quick” and all “wiki” online projects (1,420,000 Google hits) are open collaborations easily accessible by all.


     


    By comparison: If a blog were a glass shack with a locked door where you could create your own visible display within but upon the outer walls of which passerbys were welcomed to graffiti comments, then a wiki is an open commune with no doors where anyone can just walk in off the street and rearrange the furniture as seems more befitting to their values, tastes, and outlook (and they could even  but are not supposed to destroy the furniture).  


     


    Hrm…let me try some shameless self-promotion... here (current) and here (history).  Now I wonder how long "they"  (us? who? we!)  will continue to let that stand?


     


    update:  a Wiki-editor named Malcolm Fraser seems to keep "un-editing" my edits (ruddy stodgy old censoring socialist that he probably is !)  That would account for any differences between (current) and (history) above.


     


    Yes, my edits (still getting deleted) are/were "humorous", but the Wiki page does so invite: "You can even edit the page you are reading right now: just click "Edit this page" to the right! It really works! See, you're editing it!"  Nonetheless, there is this point to my madness : Wiki (wherever it is found) reeks of actual and potential censorship and that's why, though more open than blogging, it is and will forever remain an inferior form of communication to blogging. 


     


    For instance, I could have written an article that claimed that the Castro was behind the assassination of JFK.  And my good, fascist friend Malcolm out there could follow-up my "free, open" exchange by changing all references to "Castro" to "the CIA".   With blogging, however, I write my article and he can challenge me in a comment of his own  or on his own blog, but he can't act as my self-appointed censor.  


     


    The Defense Rests: Vive La Blog!

  • The Short Confession of  a Xanga Stalker


    I admit it.  I stalk newbies.  I often sit on the Most Recently Updated page and wait for the fresh ones to stumble in with their auto-botted *1 eProp, 1 comment* courtesy of the XangaTeam


    Oh, how I know that they’ll never be more vulnerable than that first post as they await their first, real de-virgining comment and props from amidst our burgeoning community.


    Ah!  The freshness and excitement of it all!   And then, with my warped, incisive, satirical humor, I swoop down, seeking out their sensitivity, and have my way with them. 


    For many, it is their first and last blog


    I am so evil.

  • may my heart always be open to little
    birds who are the secrets of living
    whatever they sing is better than to know
    and if men should not hear them men are old


    may my mind stroll about hungry
    and fearless and thirsty and supple
    and even if it's sunday may i be wrong
    for whenever men are right they are not young


    and may myself do nothing usefully
    and love yourself so more than truly
    there's never been quite such a fool who could fail
    pulling all the sky over him with one smile


         e.e.cummings



    It’s a splendid summer Saturday here in the Midwest.  And my thoughts and outlook attained  pristine clarity just moments ago while running in the midday sun.  And I grew stronger as I ran.  At such times, I begin to feel like a king.  And it’s good to be king—as long as you remain strong.


    Yet today this king has his BattleMode :ON .


    I sense a new attack coming.  The mounting trembling of it occurs as a sighting of tsunamis upon a psychic ocean, my psychic ocean, which to me is akin to the web of a spider transmitting reverberations back to it of things beyond its immediate reach.  And though I also now find myself as sentimentally parched as if I’ve just run a marathon in an affecting desert, the appeal of an imminent tsunami to quench my emotional dehydration is absurd.  So these emotional urges, normally serving as life-enhancing, are hereby discarded as dysfunctional.


    Such forebodings in my life have seldom been meritless.  And this feeling now has resounded in my psyche for the last day and a half.  BattleMode :D OUBLE ON .


    All heretofore trusts are henceforth, at least temporarily, relegated to :SUSPEND .
    Only allies, engaged as such upon the battlefield, will find my trust.


    It is said that one should never raise a sword unless one is prepared to use it.  I have now unsheathed my foil.  And my bow is newly racked with razor-tipped arrows.  Allies be assured.  Enemies be warned.


    note: I am not sensing all this as another "attack" on Xanga, it is possibly something more personal and yet also so impersonal as confer upon Satan himself amnesia.

  • It seems that the DOS (Denial of Service) attack against Xanga of which John speaks has, for the moment, rendered propping and commenting ineffectual (Update: take that back--comments are working again!) .  Unfortunately, a DOS attack can only be detected and countered at the targeted server, so there is nothing as subscribers that we can do except wait and see.  In fact, during such an attack, every legitimate subscriber request tends to further strain the servers and enhance the DOS attack.


    Still , I'm curious and would like to know more about this paticular attack.  Typically, DOS attacks come in three flavors:



    • consumption of scarce, limited, or non-renewable resources
    • destruction or alteration of configuration information
    • physical destruction or alteration of network components

    The first of these is the most difficult for even competent network administrators to deflect and I would bet that this attack is of that nature.  So how can scarce, limited, or non-renewable resources be consumed?  There are four proven ways to achieve such consumption: 


    1) The simplest and a completely indefensible manner to effect this would be to convince one million new users to flock to Xanga all at once.  For example, if some miscreant could find a way to direct every porn-seeking slob on the internet to deluge Xanga with the belief that Xanga has the best looking girls and they are all porn stars doing naughty things for free, this would constitute a Bandwidth Consumption attack:


    An intruder may also be able to consume all the available bandwidth on your network by generating a large number of packets directed to your network. Typically, these packets are ICMP ECHO packets, but in principle they may be anything. Further, the intruder need not be operating from a single machine; he may be able to coordinate or co-opt several machines on different networks to achieve the same effect.


    2) A hacker can use network servers to attack themselves:


    In this attack, the intruder uses forged UDP packets to connect the echo service on one machine to the chargen service on another machine. The result is that the two services consume all available network bandwidth between them. Thus, the network connectivity for all machines on the same networks as either of the targeted machines may be affected.


    3) Network Connectivity attacks often involve *SYN Floods*:


    In this type of attack, the attacker begins the process of establishing a connection to the victim machine, but does it in such a way as to prevent the ultimate completion of the connection. In the meantime, the victim machine has reserved one of a limited number of data structures required to complete the impending connection. The result is that legitimate connections are denied while the victim machine is waiting to complete bogus "half-open" connections.



    You should note that this type of attack does not depend on the attacker being able to consume your network bandwidth. In this case, the intruder is consuming kernel data structures involved in establishing a network connection. The implication is that an intruder can execute this attack from a dial-up connection against a machine on a very fast network. (This is a good example of an asymmetric attack.)


    4) Other miscellaneous attacks:


    In general, anything that allows data to be written to disk can be used to execute a denial-of-service attack if there are no bounds on the amount of data that can be written. For instance, generating excessive numbers of mail messages, intentionally generating errors that must be logged , or writing programs to consume scarce server *processes*.


    ***All GRAPED-UP information is courtesy of CERT


    So Welcome


     


                      To Machine.


    Important: Even if you can't comment, please scan the blog below.  SuperSonicSunny aka LonelyLittleChic appears to be very much alive.

  • Death is Weird, But Life is Weirder
    (a remote, wireless blog by laptop/satellite)


    I'm in the *Bing* at the moment.   The *Bing* is the dance bar where my friend Sunny used to work.  And I have just received from mutliple reliable witnesses some immensely relieving yet still troublesome news: Sunny aka LonelyLittleChic  is still alive.  She was, in fact, in this very bar last night with a guy named John (The Tattoo) Artist.  So unless John is tattooing corpses or zombies, Sunny walks alive amongst us.  Somewhere.


    Here's the eulogy I left on my blog following the unconfirmed report from Your_Conscience that Sunny had died in a tragic traffic accident while moving to Buffalo:


    She would always shout “Fire in the Hole!”


     


    Loud above the crowd


     


    To set another shot up.  Cuervo. Tequila.


     


    “Fire in the Hole”, always as a reverberating expectation.


     


     Fire in the Soul.


     


    My most memorable time with Sunny was spent on the afternoon of 911 as we sorted out new visions for America in a bar she called “the Bing”.  Youthful and fiery always, she matched my spirit of warrior defiance on that most tragic day.


     


    Now comes a report from Your_Conscience that Sunny , aka LonelyLittleChic is gone.



    May she be blessed forever.


     So what can be said about all of this? 


    After Your_Conscience announced her death (he spammed widely around Xanga on July 10th with a comment similar to: "As one of lonelylittlechic's readers and friends, I'm sure you need to read my post." And, in the post referenced, he said he had spoken with Sonny's mother and that she had told him that Sunny had died July 7th.), I wrote him requesting more details.  But never got a reply.  I was cautious.  I reported her death as "a report" from the before-named.  It was the "best information" I had available.  At the time.  I pondered saying nothing.  But realized that if it were true, and I failed to come promptly manifest, that I would be but a small darkling creature huddling immobile in the shadow of a responsibility that I was afraid to assume. 


    Yet personally tortured to know more, I returned to the dance bar to ask her former co-workers if they had any more details.  They knew nothing as they heard "the news" from me for the first time.   They would, however, "inquire around" in a fashion that only a fuzzy part of some underworld be's and wannabe's might be familiar with.


    Well, they were all in for a shock as Sunny walked in last night with a "report of my death is greatly exagerated" pronouncement.  Brandy. the bargirl, and fiance of the owner's son, and Carson, the table girl, both attested to her ongoing blogworthiness (vitality).


    So who is the deceiver?  Your_Conscience (Real name: Jason) in some psycho love-revenge ploy to hurt or damage his ex-fiance?  Sunny's mother in leading Your_Conscience, by his report, into believing she had died?  Or did someone's online persona(s) just devise a conspiratorial deceit to take flight into the night?


    I have no idea.


    But the girls here tonight are delicious. 


    And I have but one thing to say:


    "Hey, Brandy, I'll have one more."

  • One year ago: an idea...Have I made my first $1M yet?! 


    Are you  a serious blogger trying to establish readership but fearful that if you miss a daily post your readers will vanish into thin air?  (It’s happened before!)


    Are you overwhelmed by the tens of thousands of daily updates (and growing) of fellow bloggers and oppressed by your own inability to keep up with your own “Sites I Read”??


    Do you sometimes crave to articulate your heart, to blog forever under the stars, but find yourself on occasion too ill or expressively lackluster to push the pearl that’s your beauty into blogform???


    Is that’s what’s bothering you, Bunky?


    Well, then be bothered no more because Blog Underwriting Leave’em and Love’em (president, yours truly) is here to help you cruise the fast lane to the finish line. Yes, for a nominal fee, you can now blog freely and happily without being concerned should you go on hiatus, take a vacation, have an unexpected blog-debilitating accident, or be taken hostage by the thought-police.


    True to our motto of “Blogging where nobody’s blogged before!”, we are prepared to draw upon myriad resources to provide you with quality material designed to fit the style and mood of expression that you desire.


    For a spot token fee of only $1 per post ($1 additionally for an appropriate graphic), we can keep your blog throttling forward with the unshakeable resolve of a Sherman tank treading through a desert storm.  We will keep you on track!  And your tracks will make an unmistakable impression in this Xangan landscape which, though poppled with peeps, may become a veritable desert in extent should the blowing sands of daily demands distract and detour you from your blogging passion. Yes!


    And don’t worry about comments for your benefactors anymore either.  For another measly dollar you can get:


    30 blithe comments   or
    10 pithy comments    or
    5 brilliant comments


    left wherever and when, according to your pre-planned arrangements!


    And if you don’t care to be encumbered by piecemeal temporary pricing schemes, we now offer Blog Insurance!  Yes!  For only $50 semi-annually we will monitor your blog and cover your absence in all instances except death. 


    And even death cannot stop you now!!!   If you include us in your will,  for a heavenly fee of only $300 a year in perpetuity, we will continue to blog on your behalf into and beyond the grave.  Correct: we are now offering you Virtual Blogging Immortality!


    You might ask how are we able to do all this at such ridiculously low prices?  Well due to a breakthrough in the design of the HAL 10000 autoblogger, combined with Xanga’s ability to post via email and certain custom autoresponder email agents (I've personally already posted future blogs for the next 50 years!), we can promise you TIMELESS CONTENT like never before! 


    We are so proud of our CONTENT and we so stand behind our CONTENT that if you’re not fully 100% content with our CONTENT, we’ll accept payment in ordinary eProps (terms, should such an unlikely occurrence ever arise, to be arranged by a binding arbitrator).  Yes!  We are the first bona fide business to make eProps more than just a goodwill currency!!!


    So take the fear and uncertainty out of blogging!!!  Let Blog Underwriting help you Leave’em and Love’em today!



    Independent Endorsement:


    "Blog Underwriting: Leave?em and Love?em. Notorious Xanga blogger Notforprophet has developed an ingenius new service, 'For only $50 semi-annually we will monitor your blog and cover your absence in all instances except death.' Go sign up!"


       --Biz Stone, Genius and former Artistic Director of Xanga and author of the upcoming book Blogging

  • A long, long time ago...


    I can still remember how
    That blogging used to make me smile.


    And I knew if I could get the drop,
    That I could make those people prop,
    And maybe they'd be happy for a while…


    But this July has made me quiver,
    With every blog that I've delivered,
    Bad news on the submit...
    I couldn't get one more hit.


    I can't remember if I cried
    When Xanga stopped in middle stride,
    But something touched me deep inside
    The day the blogging died.


    So...


    Bye-bye this weblog’s stuck on retry,
    Stripped my site down to bare min to see if I could squeek by,
    While them XangaTeam boys were tweaking timeouts awry,
    Confessing “Blame us if you need some fall guys,
    Blame us if you need some fall guys.”



    Did you write the Blog that Glows,
    And can you trust those “ah’s” and “oh’s”
    If the readers’ feedback tells you so?
     
    Now do you see that rabbit's hole?
    Can Alice help you lose control?
    And can you show me how to grow small real slow?


    Well, I know that you write on the whim
    And when you post it’s either sink or swim,
    You’re mind’s just something to lose…
    But how you take those eProps in twos!


    I was never just your average blogging shmuck,
    I made Featured Content and I didn’t suck,
    But I knew that I was out of luck
    The day the blogging died.
     
    I started screaming...

    Bye-bye this weblog’s stuck on retry,
    Stripped my site down to bare min to see if I could squeek by,
    While them XangaTeam boys were tweaking timeouts awry,
    Confessing “Blame us if you need some fall guys,
    Blame us if you need some fall guys.”

  • *Xanga sucks!  Xanga sucks!*



    er.. the Server's back up?  Really?


    Never mind.


    Perspicacious Update:


    Being an outstanding troublemaker, I mean, troubleshooter , I've isolated the source of the message that I and some of you were getting on our webpages this morning:


    Microsoft OLE DB Provider for SQL Server error '80040e31'

    Timeout expired

    E:XANGAWWWROOTBLOGRINGS../Includes/include_blogrings.asp, line 171


    The pinpoint source is not all Blogring Groups--just the larger ones like Music Blogrings (1022 rings) and Friends Blogrings (1841). 


    In other words, *BIG THINGS* on Xanga serve as ticking timebombs.  When the servers are running fast, the *BIG THINGS* get away with getting bigger and still have time to load before a timeout limitation.  But when the servers get slower because they are challenged with an ever growing load of more page views from more users, the *BIG THINGS* like BIG Blogring groups or a 100-entry Featured Content List (BIG compared to the now diminished 20-entry Featured Content List--small) cannot load before exceeding a stipulated timeout, so CRUNCH~!


    So is Xanga getting too big for its britches??



    Or does it need bigger britches?!

  • Early this morning, though my site here “appeared”, my blogs had “vanished” and were effectively inaccessible--even to me.  


     


    Overload!  Xanga was listing and my site was impacted.  But what?



    I tried everything to reinvorgate my site: eliminating all *Header* material, all *Website Stat* material, all *More Stuff* and all graphics. I even eliminated over 360 entries from my SIR list (long overdue, yet with over 280 entries still remaining) but still was blogless. Those were rough waters that I was sailing in .


     


    It appeared the error was a Server timeout involving loading the Blogring module.  For the moment, the Blogring module is gone—and my blogs have returned.  I’m glad that the Xanga techs figured that out promptly.

    Still, it's triage time at Xanga. It looks like: 1) the *Newly Updated* list is gone, 2) the *Featured Content* list is curtailed from 100 entries to 20, 3) the *Blogrings* module is gone, and 4) though they returned the *Stats Box* to the Premium customers (is that the problem?), they eliminated the cumulative stats for everyone that accrue over your Xanga lifetime (as previously viewable in your Public Profile) and now just have relativistic week-to-week resetting stats.  I was closing in on 600 subscribers, but getting a read on that crossing is somewhat problematic now—unless matters emerge from this barrage of triage and return to normalcy.

  • I just awoke from an amazing night of lucid dreaming where I found the tunnel at the end of the light.  Therein, in rapid, curious sequences, one after another all accompanied by popular rock tunes, I was a doctor, a parasitologist, fighting  an alien aquatic parasite that could range from cat-sized down to the microscopic.  Anyone who swam or bathed in natural waters was subject to either biting predation or a subdermal invasion, and it was my life’s mission to battle this menace.   When I finally awoke, I was assisting survivors who were “running in the shadows” (The Chain, Fleetwood Mac).


     


    The upstart from all of this is that I sit here blogging  now aglow with a residual fascination for the field of parsitology.  I studied it awhile ago in college when I lived in Panama, and have decided now, in some form, to resume my study.  O yeah: if you want to motivate me, program my dreams.

  • I’m tired of lightweight:


     


    Taint no  fucking challenge.


     


    Take blogging, for instance.   Highly eProped Featured Content blogs ain’t shit.


     


    If that’s all that seethes,


     


    I’d rather run moon-stricken at midnight


     


    Anonymous with no acknowledgement

    And breathe


     


    Than churn within the numb froth of blamelessness.


     


    Cause I’m not innocent.


     


    I’m a nightmare’s dark fantasy.


     


    Look: dare take a see—


     


    Even Death discards me.

  • BlairWitch2001 has a drug problem.  And she's actually offering to compensate anyone who can help her figure it out.   Here's your chance to actually help a fellow Xangan and get something in return.  But if I'm right , it's already too late and she won't be needing your help after all.

  • Yea!  Purdy colored flags above making this blog truly international!  Ah!  But only for a trial period of a week.  Thereafter, I'd have to dish out big bucks to buy the post-trial service.  And that, my friends, without a huge change of fortune, is less likely to happen than an asteroid hitting me square on the head.


    It is interesting, nonetheless, to see Xanga translated into another language--albeit a machine translation that is incomplete and certainly not perfect in any case.  For me, the Chinese translation is especially prophetic since I believe that someday when a greater degree of personal freedom permeates Communist China that China will become Blog Central.  My reasoning is that most of the Chinese will then be newcomers to the internet and as such will be more openly enthusiastic to embrace the latest internet innovations such as blogging rather than a regress to the older *homepage* type technology.


    (note: the translated redirect may take a few moments or more to appear)

  • 'Forget all the rules. Forget about being published.
    Write for yourself and celebrate writing.'



    Melinda
    Haynes

  • Reductionism: The Net by unarranged complicity is rifely guilty of the most blatant reductionism.  You’ve seen those “What-kind-of-something-are-you?” tests?  Of course.  They are everywhere.  You know, those online quizzes that tell you which industrial solvent, Hummel figurine, or brand of scooping cat litter you are?


     


    The problem I have with most of them, not all, but most, is not that I mind imagining myself, for example, as a genre of faerie, sex position, or scooping kitty poop, but that more often than not the category in which I should fall is non-existent as of the moment. 


     


    For instance: Faerie-wise, I am the Anti-Philosophy Faerie who makes peeps lose deep, penuriously ponderous thoughts by dart-blowing ancient Chinese glyph-holographs deep into their cerebrums while tickling their eardrums.  Sex-position-wise, I am the Crooked Arrow Position who runs nekkid and fully erect at full speed for purposes of coupling with his consenting partner who is tied to a tree—miss or hit, anguish or ecstasy.  Cat-litter-wise, I am Weightless Clumping Cat Litter in which every granule is enmeshed in a fine wandable net to catch cat peep and do-do evacuated during space flights intended to colonize other worlds. 


     


    You see?!  I don’t usually fit into a quaint test slot.  And I’d bet a lot of you don’t either.  If the extant culture were entirely capable of fully typifying us, stagnation would ensue.  There would be no need for innovation or expansion or creative elaboration since, at core, we would remain the forever pigeon-holed “What-kind-of-who are-you”  yous.  Acquiescing to the lame categorizations of most of these tests reduces us, imprisons me.


     


    So…xxreaderxx, ”What kind of insurgent upstart blogger are you?”


     


    Shh!  And practice your Chinese!

  • It appears that my soul is so miniscule, my ego so minor, and my mind so minute that the the hiatus taken this morning for revamping, remodeling, and renovating, respectively, has already been completed! 


    Besides, I just addicted myself to my own Xangatration game (dammit, that wasn't supposed to happen--I create these things to trap you , not me!) and am having too much fun to let go...

  • I'm revamping my soul, remodeling my ego, and renovating my mind.  This will require a brief hiatus--probably no more than a thousand years.  In the interim, an encouraging thought from one of our sponsors (XangaJohn):


    Last April, Stanford University student Adam Mathes played a joke on his friend Andy Pressman. Mathes' goal: Make Pressman's Web site the No. 1 Google search result for "talentless hack." The method: Encourage as many people with Web sites as possible to link to Pressman's site using those words. (Like this: Andy "talentless hack" Pressman.) The prank worked. A year later, Pressman's Web site is still Google's No.1 search result for the phrase. Mathes even invented a name for his joke: "Google Bombing."


    Since Mathes planted that first Google Bomb, the practice has spread throughout the blogging community. Here are four types of Google Bombs whose fuses have already been lit:



    1. Humor Bombs. Mathes' original Google Bomb remains the classic of this genre. It's pretty funny to see your friend come up in Google as the No. 1 talentless hackin the whole world. Successful humor bombs, like most Google Bombs, require search key words that don't get a lot of traffic.


    2. Ego Bombs. Many bloggers want to be the top search result for their first name or full name. Free-lance writer David Gallagher posted this plea on his site: I've decided that I want to be the most famous David Gallagher on the Internet, and if you have a Web site, you can help. How? Link to this site like so: David Gallagher. As of March 22, he's ranked No. 3 in Google.


    3. Money Bombs. So far, no one's paying bloggers to set off Google Bombs, but the practice is probably inevitable. Last month, Weblogger Brig Eaton floated the idea, saying that her father would be willing to pay to get his site Google Bombed into the No.1 search result for Santa Cruz real estate. A week and a few (free) links later, www.santacruzrealty.net had moved from the No. 189 Google result to No. 39.


    ...4. Justice Bombs. Angry Webloggers can mete out vigilante justice by Google Bombing sites that violate the bloggers' standards for Internet ethics. 


    ...For now, Google isn't worried. "We love the Weblog community," said Google's Peter Norvig. "We don't see any problems with Google Bombs yet. You would need a concerted effort to abuse Google. What we're seeing now is independent nodes acting alone."


    He's right. So far, most Google Bombs have come from individual blogs, each creating Ego Bombs to capture the No. 1 slot for their first name. And that's just fine with Google. "We like to keep things fun," Norvig explains. "Besides, if your first name is Madonna, you're going to have a hard time."


          —John Hiler, "Google Time Bomb," Slate Magazine, March 25, 2002

  • She would always shout “Fire in the Hole!”


     


    Loud above the crowd


     


    To set another shot up.  Cuervo. Tequila.


     


    “Fire in the Hole”, always as a reverberating expectation.


     


     Fire in the Soul.


     


    My most memorable time with Sunny was spent on the afternoon of 911 as we sorted out new visions for America in a bar she called “the Bing”.  Youthful and fiery always, she matched my spirit of warrior defiance on that most tragic day.


     


    Now comes a report from Your_Conscience that Sunny , aka LonelyLittleChic is gone.



    May she be blessed forever.

  • Breaking News...


     


    Today, President George Bush in a higly-awaited speech will extend his War on Terror and terrorists to include a newly-recognized, insidiously indigenous homeland threat...



    terrorvestors
     


     


    terrorvestors  (n.)  Multinational corporate CEOs who mangle/cook/deconstruct  the entire cumulative corporate portfolio to such an extant as to create considerable economic terror in the investment markets (as defined by the SEC) when their graft is eventually uncovered.


     


     Usage :  "Though the foreign-born 911 terrorists through a demonstration of horrendousity itself managed to shock our nation into an awareness of a mortal threat from without, the homebred, highly-incomed, upper-echelon, corporate terrorvestors accomplished the truly inconceivable:  causing the American economy to implodingly plummet even as Major League Baseball players yet played in Enron Field and the investing masses gossiped about the incipient Armageddon on MCI/Worldcom phonesets themselves."



    Related Term : CEOnista, as first spotted in this breaking news story on Alice'e blog ...


    REMAINING U.S. CEOs MAKE A BREAK FOR IT


    Band of Roving Chief Executives Spotted Miles from Mexican Border


    San Antonio, Texas - Unwilling to wait for their eventual indictments, the 10,000 remaining CEOs of public U.S. companies made a break for it yesterday, heading for the Mexican border, plundering towns and villages along the way, and writing the entire rampage off as a marketing expense.


    CEOnista Martha Stewart (Martha Stewart Omnimedia) was one of the few executives captured. Her mask is made from recycled Christmas paper wrapping.


    "They came into my home,  made me pay for my own TV, then double-booked the revenues," said Rachel Sanchez of Las Cruces, just north of El Paso. "Right in front of my daughters."


    Calling themselves the CEOnistas, the chief executives were first spotted last night along the Rio Grande River near Quemado, where they bought each of the town's 320 residents by borrowing against pension fund gains. By late this morning, the CEOnistas had arbitrarily inflated Quemado's population to 960, and declared a 200 percent profit for the fiscal second quarter.


    This morning, the outlaws bought the city of Waco, transferred its under performing areas to a private partnership, and sent a bill to California for $4.5 billion.


    Law enforcement officials and disgruntled shareholders riding posse were noticeably frustrated.


    "First of all, they're very hard to find because they always stand behind their numbers, and the numbers keep shifting," said posse spokesman Dean Levitt. "And every time we yell 'Stop in the name of the shareholders!', they refer us to investor relations. I've been on the phone all damn morning."


    "YOU'LL NEVER AUDIT ME ALIVE!"


    The pursuers said they have had some success, however, by preying on a common executive weakness. "Last night we caught about 24 of them by disguising one of our female officers as a CNBC anchor," said U.S. Border Patrol spokesperson Janet Lewis. "It was like moths to a flame."


    Also, teams of agents have been using high-powered listening devices to scan the plains for telltale sounds of the CEOnistas. "Most of the time we just hear leaves rustling or cattle flicking their tails," said Lewis, "but occasionally we'll pick up someone saying, 'I was totally out of the loop on that.'"


    Among former and current CEOs apprehended with this method were Computer Associates' Sanjay Kumar, Adelphia's John Rigas, Enron's Ken Lay, Joseph Nacchio of Qwest, Joseph Berardino of Arthur Andersen, and every Global Crossing CEO since 1997. ImClone Systems' Sam Waksal and Dennis Kozlowski of Tyco were not allowed to join the CEOnistas as they have already been indicted.


    So far, about 50 chief executives have been captured, including Martha Stewart, who was detained south of El Paso where she had cut through a barbed-wire fence at the Zaragosa border crossing off Highway 375.


    "She would have gotten away, but she was stopping motorists to ask for marzipan and food coloring so she could make edible snowman place settings, using the cut pieces of wire for the arms," said Border Patrol officer Jennette Cushing. "We put her in cell No. 7, because the morning sun really adds texture to the stucco walls."


    While some stragglers are believed to have successfully crossed into Mexico, Cushing said the bulk of the CEOnistas have holed themselves up at the Alamo. "No, not the fort, the car rental place at the airport," she said. "They're rotating all the tires on the Minivans and accounting for each change as a sale."

  • In the summer when the weather’s nice, I’ll often take my weekday workday lunches outside.  There’s a set of wooden benches at a downtown pavilion near to where I work and I’ll typically pick out an empty one to sun upon while drinking “lunch” , i.e., a Diet Coke. 


    Today, I precisely repeated this routine.   Supine and positioned facing the sun, I grew still, then consciously thoughtless, just letting the heat sink in.  That’s a sufficient metabolic description of my status, I suppose.  But what does this act call “sunning” really consist of at a subconscious psychological or psychical level?


    Sunning, I suspect, is truly occult, in the sense that its more profound effects are hidden and unseen.  Whether one just innocuously lays on a rock to grab a simple ray or partakes in an elaborate ritualistic outlay tantamount to sun-worshipping, surrendering to sunlight may actually be the lightest and brightest occult activity humanly possible. 


    So what is it that’s hidden, what’s unseen?  If one were to observe a girl topless and laying facedown on the beach sunning with just barely a thing called a thong on, one might come to the conclusion that the only things unseen are the other side of the cloth of that thong and her two breasts rubbing a towel into the sand. 



    Ahem— that’s a —er— natural  outsider’s perspective.  But what really is transpiring in her psyche as the sun flares its intensity down upon her?  What transformation of the spirit visits?  What healing repairs occur by this intermediation of solar incandescence? 


    I know what some of you are thinking: Sunning and the resultant tanning can lead to premature aging of the skin and even melanoma.  Well, as is the case with any mortal excess, damage is bound to inflow.  But I’m not talking melanin or Vitamin C or “nice, healthy glow”—no!  Rather, what it truly means to... “find your place in the Sun.”


    O, this blog has no answers.  Did you think I had the answers? No answers from me today! 


    Just an ancient Egyptian quote and some images:


    “Thou dawnest beautifully upon the horizon of the sky O Living Aten that was the beginning of Life.”



    A tablet from the early 9th century B.C. which depicts the  Babylonian sun-god Shamash seated on the right, holding emblems of his authority, a staff and ring, and the king with two attendants on the left. In the center, on an altar, is a large 4-point sun image, with additional small wavy rays between the points.


     



    Behind Pope John Paul II, on the front of the altar of St. Peter's Basilica, you see a sunburst design nearly identical to the pagan sun-god symbol of Baal / Shamash.


     



    Symbol of Babylonian sun-god Shamash


     



    John Paul II, and the symbol of Baal / Shamash appearing on the front of his fishhead-shaped mitre.


     



    Statue of “The Truth”  lovingly grasping the Sun, (by Gian Lorenzo Bernini) and decorating the tomb of Pope Alexander VII in St. Peter's in Rome.


  • Blogging wireless on the laptop has its advantages



  • Holy Smoke!


    photo from the Flats, Cleveland, OH

  • ...and dust to dust


    One of my favorite Shakespeare quotes is from Macbeth:


    To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow,
    Creeps in this petty pace from day to day
    To the last syllable of recorded time,
    And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
    The way to dusty death.


    Ah, dust!  This latest heat wave across America has kicked up a lot of it.  Add that to the particulate-laden smoke from all the forest fires burning, the scare of microbe-terror by airborne airburst, and the ever-terrifying phenomena known as dust devils...



    (yes, I was traumatized by a dust devil when I was a child),


    ...then we have the recipe for:



    Yet there is another side to dust that has slithered lately into our technology, culture, and language.  Can dust serve us?  Can it become an adjunct in ushering us into a techno-utopia?


    Dr. Kris Pister, a professor at the University of California at Berkeley, is among the scientists who aim to give microbatteries a trial run with a wireless network based on MEMS technology. Dr. Pister is the inventor of smart dust, or networked airborne motes of silicon that are designed to sense, measure and transmit data like temperature, humidity and light intensity.

    —Anne Eisenberg, "A World of Wee Devices Seeks Some Batteries to Match," The New York Times, January 10, 2002


    and...


    The Pentagon has a proposal for fighting dirty in the future: clouds of "smart dust" that could track enemy troops or check for dangerous chemicals. The tiny particles, about 1 millimeter wide by 1 centimeter long, could be shot into the air in a bullet and fall slowly in a cloudlike mass, according to Defense News, a weekly newspaper.

    —Jennifer Files, "Tech Bits," The Dallas Morning News, May 26, 1997


    add to that...


    In 1999, Gonzalez received $1.4 million from the National Institutes of Health to compare his enzyme-nutritional therapy with the best chemotherapy now available for the treatment of advanced pancreatic cancer. As a percentage of the fifteen billion dollars that the federal government spends on medical research annually, the grant amounts to what one federal health official described to me as "decimal dust."


    —Michael Specter, "The Outlaw Doctor," The New Yorker, February 5, 2001


    So how much of this federal decimal dust is being used to develop such smart dust...dust to dust !  LOL


    As a final reflection, consider the outbreak of blogs in the blogosphere as a form of smart dust: networked internet-borne motes of meaning-embedded bytes that are designed to sense, measure and reflect this incident called Life from day to day to the last syllable of recorded time, lighting fools the way to dusty death.

  • 'Forget all the rules. Forget about being published.
    Write for yourself and celebrate writing.'



    Melinda
    Haynes

  • fourth of july.
       i’ve counted
    six thousand and twenty-six firecracker’s
    boom!  already.
       boom!     boom!
    got some drunken girl next door
    running out naked every hour on the hour
    firing off in indiscriminate directions
    a thirty round clip from
    an M2 submachine gun.
    shit!          someone might
    call the cops
    exceptin’ her husband,
    who’s the chief of police,
    is laying out on the front lawn
    passed out in uniform,
    all vomited and pissed,
    a burnt-out sparkler jutting
    majestically from his mouth.
    ka—boom!             a massive gunpowdered steel-nosed
    acme rocket pierces aluminum-sided wall
    and explodes in brilliant festivity in my living room.
    i sit studiously considering the roman
    of this mutant roman candle thinking
    …somewhere tacitus turning in his grave.
    but what the hell!      screw tacitus!
    it’s the fourth!
    the day when all good, patriotic
    maniacs of America are proudly lunaticing
    their minds in uproarious prankstering merriment
    and deep dragon volcano booms!
    singing all the while:
    remember Lexington!        remember Concord!
    remember to buy more beer!
    hell, yes!     hell, yes!
    and i, too, a maniac!
    a real fucking yankee doodle maniac!
    up now with sufficient wine
    and out to the backyard
    with assorted red, white, and blue cherry bombs,
    mosaicing Old Glory in potent resplendence
    my prize Ohioan humus rose garden.
    then   ignite!      and:
    earth and flower petals
    in a grand simultaneous-exploding     jack—a—room!    delight.
    o, joyous good American smoke and dust!
    and i, then, dancing the earth with the drunken tears
    of a flag-loving, fist-waving patriot, screaming:
    jack—a—room!         jack—a—room!
    may you ever boom!, America
    long may you boom!







  • The top-note fleeting impression of this day is this: 


    “I told you I was high on light, the light of that vanished angel, unnamed  (after all, she was a star in my eyes).” 


    Yet the stars shall yet shine tonight and the darkness will not kill (“It’s not the darkness that kills, but the cold.” Miguel de Unamuno).  Light, in whatever form, is more than memorable, its rejuvenating.  And rejuvenation is a potent sense of nowness that both expresses and evinces previously assimilated radiances.  Let the light shine, let those who preach or perpetuate gloom meet doom.  How bright is Las Vegas at night?  Dimmer and dimmer the closer you get to the stars.



  • What life fails to discover, love will.


    In the summer, most seek refreshment and shelter from Inferno.


    Yet I sleek myself,  back onto the boulder, and  welcome every very probing incision from the surging Helios itself.


    Just one wish: Before the Inanimate seizes the day,
    I’d like the girls to come out and play.


    I just ran another 30 minutes in 90 degree heat.
    I ask: How can anything be more real?


    Running.


    Crossing paths with a tender sprinting blonde who throats “hello” in passing,  I sublimate.


    Panting.


    I’m pounding the sidewalk, when a glowing black girl from a car yells in passing: “Hey, hey…”
     I look over to the street and picking it up, bellow back : “Hey, hey, hey, hey hey! “ all the while smiling and pointing at her vanishing cheshire cat visage.


    Sweating.


    Shortly thereafter comes a petite brunette jogger seriously pumping with headphones on.  Remember the old adage: “Don’t shoot until you see the whites of their eyes?”  Now adapted: “Don’t acknowledge until you see the shadow off of their nipples.”   “Oooo hi!” , I finally acknowledge.  “Hi” she shoots back in a muffled voice, but with a glance that could get a  blind man hot.


    Digging. Burning.  Churning deep inside.


    I see it coming: There’s an obese dude walking just ahead with his back to me and his buddy in a convertible pulls up towards us along the curb with his horn blaring.   Too late: I’m already dancing on the curb between the two, threading the needle, so to speak, when the fat boy decides to turn into my path to reach for the car door handle. Imminent collision.   I need to warn him so I:  Clap.  Clap, clap, clap, clap.  He’s startled and insults me: “What the fuck, why don’t you run your lazy ass around me?”  Though panting, dehydrated, exhausted, and overheated, I turn back to him and challenge: “And why don’t you use these...?”  and I gesture happy-feet grotesquely by commencing high, thigh-slapping leg lifts while jogging demonstrably in place.  And then I pat my belly hard, making a hard sound, and declare: “And why don’t you lose that fat belly and get your ass agile?”  O hell. Now there’s the two of them in the car.  And as I continue running, I ponder whether they’ll turn around and return to challenge me.  Hell yes.  I’m ready.  Going to kick some ass. Going to melt into the sun.  Going to put face to the ground first one, then one. But the butt-ass buddies let up and just drive on.


    Final stretch and heading home. 


    An elderly lady is standing watering her lawn  and as I dash past, she disbelievingly remarks:  “How can you possibly  run in this insane heat?”  I laugh and call back: “How could you possibly  stand there watching me run in this ?!”


    Breathe deep.  Kick harder.  Home.

  • Only one of the following statements is true:


    1) I need sex.


     


    2) I’m insane and I need sex.


     


    3) I’m a butterfly.


     


    4) I’m a butterfly and I need sex.


     


    5) I’m an insane butterfly and I need sex.

  • Rarely do I blog a private post.  What's the purpose?  Both my public and private posts undoubtedly will be subpoened someday at my insanity commitment hearing (my defense will be a shrilling cry: "But I'm already committed!  I'm already committed!" ). 


    Still there occurs now and then an occasion or so when I'll write something so off the wall and palpably lacking in creative import or entertainment value that I'll just allow it to sit.  And rot.


    Such was the case at the end of Monday when I tersely scribbled and privately posted the following:


    The Sun's coming around.  Sure enough.  Just around the bend.


    What the hell was that supposed to be?  Quite profound, no?  LMAO   And yet...yet...it felt profound, profound enough to commit, yet too abstruse to share.


    Until this morning, when I read this on NASA's SOHO site:


    Molten Curl
    A huge, curling solar prominence in extreme ultraviolet light (ionized helium at 304Å) was seen erupting from the Sun on 1 July 2002. Prominences are huge clouds of relatively cool, dense plasma suspended in the Sun's hot, tenuous corona. Magnetic fields built up enormous forces that propelled particles out beyond the Sun's surface. Emission in this spectral line shows the upper chromosphere at a temperature of about 60,000 degrees K. For a sense of scale, the prominence seems to extend at least 30 Earths. There is a second prominence in the upper right as well.



    But even more interesting than the bent protrusion at the lower left is the activity at the upper right.  I have my notions, but what do you think that looks like? Mwuahahaha.

Recent Posts

Categories

The End of Days