wake up!

Levi Asher tagged me with a meme, according to which I am to list the first sentence of the first post of each month for the past year. I’m game:

• January: “The talented Lisa Williams has launched Placeblogger” (Local blogging gets a site)
• February: “Grab your preferred username at Useless Account before someone else does!” (Signing up for the sake of signing up)
• March: “This story (Open Call From the Patent Office) suggest that a breath of fresh air may be entering the patent-review process” (Open sourcing the patent process)
• April: “What knowledge would be lost to the company if I were to leave tomorrow? What do I know that I have done a thousand times that I think everyone already knows?” (Pattern Mining)
• May: “Hmm, those options have an excluded middle.” (Answering danah’s twitter questions)
• June: “Over on the Well, in the public Inkwell topic, I’m interviewing my pal Nick Meriwether about his new book, All Graceful Instruments: The Contexts of the Grateful Dead, a scholarly work looking at the Dead phenomenon from a variety of perspectives.” (I’m interviewing Nicholas Meriwether)
• July: “If you missed Every Breath You Take: Identity, Attention, Privacy, and Reputation last March at South By here’s your chance to hear me, Ted Nadeau, Kaliya Hamlin, Mary Hodder, and George Kelly take on these topics, very early one Sunday morning after an untimely daylight savings change and, for many people, a night of carousing and drinking free drinks sponsored by startups and web behemoths.” (Podcast of my sxsw panel is now live)
• August: “Three jobs I have held: vendor at Yankee stadium, freelance legal summarizer, assistant sexton” (Three things about me you may not have known)
• September: “23. Write lots of numbered lists.” (35 ways to draw more readers to your blog - a series)
• October: “Since I started at Yahoo my workaday routine involves riding a shuttle from Oakland to Sunnyvale with a big laptop computer crammed on my lap so I can work, browse the net, or as I’ve been doing lately, blog.” (Can I blog from my iPhone?)
• November: “I’m feeling a bit under the weather, fighting off some kind of bug.” (Stumbling out of the gate)
• December: “Get salad greens and heirloom tomatoes at the farmer’s market at Splash Pad park” (Things to done)

I’ll pass this meme contagion along by infecting So-called Bill, Cecil, Leisa, Woody, and Christina.

The big version of the human calendar is amazing!

The portable version is kind of cool too.

From Craig Griffen, who also brought you the human clock.

Michael Wesch, who created the virally popular internet video called Web 2.0: The Machine is Us/ing Us (its success drew on a sort of meta-application of the very concepts it discussed), was the keynote speaker at IDEA 2007 last week. As part of his keynote, he previewed two videos he has now released to the web.

The first, Information R/evolution, examines the challenges we all face in this age of information glut and shortening attention spans:

The second, made collaboratively by one of his classes (Wesch is a professor of anthropology at Kansas State University, where he is launching a Digital Ethnography working group to “examine the impacts of digital technology on human interaction”), looks carefully at how we are teaching today and how out of sync it has become with the lives of contemporary students:

In some ways, for me, the highlight of the conference was Wesch’s story about how he frightened himself one night in the communal sleeping quarters in New Guineau when he thought his own arm, which had fallen asleep, was a snake lying across his body. This story became the kernel of Wesch’s reputation with the people he was studying and living among, and helped him realize that telling stories is a big part of how we gain identities and fit ourselves (and others) into society.

This is a quandary for me. I try to keep my LinkedIn network literally to people I know and have worked with or with whose work I am familiar. From what I can see, you seem like an excellent person to know, I’m flattered that you enjoy my posts on that list, and I appreciate your providing that context since so many invitations I get have robogreetings on them.

I couldn’t bring myself to click the “I don’t know Jack…” button, but since I take LinkedIn literally (I want to be able to recommend people from my own direct experience) I also don’t feel right accepting your invitation.

I hope you understand.

Friends and cow-orkers alike have heard me make the now clichéd quip about being disappointed not to have a jetpack yet, living as we do in the year 2000. Jetpack has in fact become a sort of shorthand for some awesome feature that probably won’t get included in a final design.

I still remember some of the sci-fi and futurist inspired visions of where we’d be in the year 2000. Remember George Jetson’s complaint? (“These three-day work weeks are killing me!”). So this article projecting life in the year 2,000 AD from a July 22, 1961 issue of Weekend Magazine mixes the sublime with the absurd, and a handful of things that aren’t entirely off the mark.

Some excerpts:

looks as if everything will be so easy that people will probably die from sheer boredom.

You will be whisked around in monorail vehicles at 200 miles an hour and you will think nothing of taking a fortnight’s holiday in outer space.

Monorail!

You’ll have a home control room - an electronics centre, where messages will be recorded when you’re away from home. This will play back when you return, and also give you up-to-the minute world news, and transcribe your latest mail.

You’ll have wall-to-wall global TV, an indoor swimming pool, TV-telephones and room-to-room TV. Press a button and you can change the décor of a room.

The status symbol of the year 2000 will be the home computer help, which will help mother tend the children, cook the meals and issue reminders of appointments.

(But apparently gender relations will revert to the postwar norm.)

At work, Dad will operate on a 24 hour week. The office will be air-conditioned with stimulating scents and extra oxygen - to give a physical and psychological lift.

Mail and newspapers will be reproduced instantly anywhere in the world by facsimile.

There will be machines doing the work of clerks, shorthand writers and translators. Machines will “talk” to each other.

(Using XML, no doubt.)

It will be the age of press-button transportation. Rocket belts will increase a man’s stride to 30 feet, and bus-type helicopters will travel along crowded air skyways. There will be moving plastic-covered pavements, individual hoppicopters, and 200 m.p.h. monorail trains operating in all large cities.

Rocketbelts? Where’s my jetpack?

Our children will learn from TV, recorders and teaching machines. They will get pills to make them learn faster.

…and to palliate their ADD. (via Reddit)

23. Write lots of numbered lists.

Two years after the first BarCamp (an ad hoc unconference formed initially in response to O’Reilly’s Foo Camp, I’m finally planning to make it to one, this weekend’s BarCampBlock, headquartered at SocialText’s offices in Palo Alto.

According to what I just jotted on the Sessions page on the wiki, I’ve just volunteered to lead or participate in discussions about portable social networks, identity, design patterns, particularly social-media related design patterns, and the gift economy.

I don’t know if I’m qualified to talk about all of those things but when has that ever stopped me before?

Since the moment that Liz Henry and Tara Hunt tipped me off to this event, I’ve had the feeling that this was an important one not to miss. So soon after my wedding and honeymoon and with a rapidly filling-up fall conference schedule, I could have been tempted to let this one slide by, but I have a strong intuition that many of the people I consider friends, heroes, and inspirations will be there and that I’d be kicking myself if I let another Bay Area BarCamp go by without joining in on the fun.

I’ll blog from there if I can find the time between no-spectatorin’ and schmoozin’ and gettin’ things done.

via B (who did hers in email):

Three jobs I have held: vendor at Yankee stadium, freelance legal summarizer, assistant sexton

Three Places that I have lived: Lawrenceville, NJ; Glen Canyon, SF, CA; Washington, DC

Three TV shows I like to watch: Flight of the Conchords, Ugly Betty, The Wire

Three places where I’ve been on holidays: Volcano (HI), NOLA, Big Sur

Three of my favorite foods: pasghetti, grilled salmon, french toast

Three places where I would rather be right now: a beach on the gulf stream, Tuscany, at home with my sweetie

Three people I think will respond: cecil, so-called bill, jac

Three things I want to do before I die: publish a novel, write and record a song, make a movie

Your turn.

In reply to apophenia: Twitter questions (curiosity is killing me…):

First, the practical question. Can i quote you?
[ ] Yes, and you must use my real name.
[ ] Yes, but please use a pseudonym and don’t use any identifying information.
[ ] No, please just use this for your own weird thoughts.

Hmm, those options have an excluded middle. I’d say “Yes, feel free, and you may use my real name, my online handle(s), or whatever other descriptor you find useful.” If I have to pick one I guess I’d pick the first one.

1. Why do you use Twitter? What do you like/dislike about it?

I use it to jot down my thoughts and narrate my day and to keep up with what some of my (online) friends are doing and thinking about. I like the ambient intimacy, to quote Leisa Reichelt.

2. Who do you think is reading your Tweets? Is this the audience you want? Why/why not? Tell me anything you think of relating to the audience for your Tweets.

I think my followers are reading them. Is that a trick question? It’s a perfectly OK audience for me, since it’s opt in. There are people, like close friend and family whom I’d like to also read them (if they were willing of course), but there is no invite feature.

3. How do you read others’ Tweets? Do you read all of them? Who do you read/not read and why? Do you know them all?

I read them sometimes via twitterific, sometimes from the Twitter website, sometimes receiving them as text messages. I don’t always read all of them but I do tend to read down till I reach familiar territory, much like the way I catch up on a blog I haven’t read in a while. (Having said that, I scan - I don’t read everything carefully.)

I read people whom I’ve met and a few whom I find interesting or appealing. So I don’t know them all but I think I know (meaning have met in person) 90% of them. I don’t expect any of them to reciprocate necessarily. That is, it doesn’t bother me if they are not interested in following my thoughts.

4. What content do you think is appropriate for a Tweet? What is inappropriate? Have you ever found yourself wanting to Tweet and then deciding against it? Why?

I haven’t thought about it too much. I go by instinct. I guess some descriptions of graphic bodily functions might not necessarily feel appropriate to me, at times. Beyond that I think it’s fair game and the character limit kind of helps.

I have thought about tweeting something and then decided not to, usually because I think it’s too random or trivial, because I’ve ceased to find it amusing in the first few seconds since thinking of it, or because I’ve posted a bunch of tweets lately and don’t want to be spamming people.

5. Are your Tweets public? Why/why not? How do you feel about people you don’t know coming across them? What about people you do know?

My tweets are public. I like doing things in public and don’t mind people paying attention. Therefore (back to the appropriateness thing) I probably won’t be tweeting about things that are illegal or offensive or humiliating (unless I can’t resist because it’s so entertaining or revealing). I don’t mind people coming across what I write. I expect it’s all out there and people will see it and even form opinions about me based on it. It’s all good.

6. What do i need to know about why Twitter is/is not working for you or your friends?

I can’t get the IM interface working and I would find it useful during the workday. There are many people I’d enjoy sharing with on Twitter who are not on the system but I can’t be sure they’d like it (so many people don’t) so I don’t feel comfortable evangelizing.

Unsurprisingly, Ze Frank is going all Hollywood in the near future.

Last year at SXSW (at least I think it was last year, and not 2005), I ended up going out to dinner with my Austin guru, some folks from WorldChanging, and I think David Pescovitz or maybe I just chatted with him at some party later on, and a very tall witty guy who I felt like I should know but didn’t, who was talking about the work he was doing mainly giving talks on creativity.

It was much later (that night) that I realized this was Ze Frank, the Ze Frank. Probably because he is so much taller than I, the angle on his face was different from his usual bug-eyed unblinking full frontal in his videos and more recently on The Show.

I’m kind of glad I didn’t recognize him and go all fanboy. Instead I probably acted aloof, and that’s cool, right? After all, did he really want another person saying, “Hey, I got your How to Dance animated gif forwarded to me back in the day. I’ve been a big fan for yea long!”

Meanwhile, he is a creative force of nature who should make me feel envious and insecure but who instead inspires me not to get hooked on brain crack and I’m not surprised he is about to cross over to the mainstream and I’m sure he’ll knock him dead in Hollywood town.

Oh, man. I can't wait to see Snakes on a Plan, starring Samuel L. Jackson. When Mike Stillman posted a link about this movie to the merry punster list, I couldn't tell if it was for real or just a high-concept joke.

Then MichaelZ posted a follow up link from a screenwriter who's turning "snakes on a plane" into a mantra, and it looks like it is for real.

Here's another guy's idea of how the script might look:

SAMUEL L JACKSON: You've got to listen to me. There are SNAKES... on the PLANE!

CUT TO: Samuel L Jackson punching a snake. The snake is wearing a pair of jeans.

Jackson finally knocks the snake out. He rummages through the snake's pockets and is shocked by what he finds.

SAMUEL L JACKSON: Oh my God. This snake has a PILOT'S LICENCE!

CUT TO: Samuel L. Jackson is talking on one of those phones they have in the seatbacks of planes. Tears are streaming down his face.

SAMUEL L JACKSON: Listen, sweetie, I know I haven't been the best father. I'm so sorry. I don't think I'm going to get through this, and I wanted you to know something: I love you very, very much. Oh, and by the way, there are motherfucking SNAKES! On the goddamn PLANE!

VOICEOVER: Coming soon: SNAKES ON A PLANE. Because on a plane... nobody can hear the snakes.

I was catching up with ALLABOUTGEORGE and I was intrigued by his Johari window. (I’m not sure I’m brave enough to try the negative-orientd Nohari window.)

It seems like a cool way to find out how you are perceived. If you’re interested in helping me with this, please stop by and pick a few adjectives to describe me (xian was already taken, so I used the domain of my personal blog as a handle).

This was once my favorite game:

(via TED)

I’ve got a deadline, so I’m going to stop playing this fastr game and get back to work.

OK, so nobody tapped me for this but it looks like fun:

Four Jobs You’ve Had

1. Paralegal
2. Architecture studio assistant
3. Vendor at Yankee Stadium
4. Literary agent

Four Movies You Could Watch Over and Over

1. The Sting
2. Dr. Zhivago
3. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead
4. Army of Darkness

Four Places You’ve Lived

1. New York City
2. San Francisco
3. Lawrenceville, NJ
4. Washington, DC

Four TV Shows You Love to Watch

1. Arrested Development
2. Curb Your Enthusiasm
3. House
4. The Shield

Four Places You’ve Been on Vacation

1. Prague
2. Hawai’i (the big island)
3. New Orleans
4. Big Sur

Four Blogs You Visit Daily

1. The Poor Man
2. Telegraph
3. Eschaton
4. after this I’d have to pick a blog I visit “frequently”

Four of Your Favorite Foods

1. Grilled salmon
2. Squash soup
3. Puerco adobo
4. Risotto

Four Places You’d Rather Be

1. San Francisco
2. Oaxaca
3. Rome
4. London

Four Albums You Can’t Live Without

1. Astral Weeks
2. Marquee Moon
3. Double Nickels on the Dim
4. Live/Dead

Four Vehicles You’ve Owned

1. 1969 Mercedes 250
2. 1988 Toyota Tercel
3. 1998 Saturn SL2
4. that is all

Tag to Frances, So-Called Bill, Cecil, and Xifer.

When, exactly, did 'nads become nards?

One small step for a man, one giant leap for moonkind.

Be sure to zoom all the way in.

OK, OK, I'll play (I guess you can call this entry the final straw, although I wasn't "tagged" by it, so this is kind of a bastard-child in terms of meme lineage):

Total number of books owned:

No idea. At least 2000. Possibly double that, counting boxes of books in the basement. Would be a multiple of that again if I hadn't purged my author copies and editor copies of every book I was ever personally involved in a few years back with the help / at the insistence of b.

Last book bought:

Paperback of John Coltrane: His Life and Music by Lewis Porter, on the recommendation of xourmas, who says the way we've been studying music theory together and learning to play has some parallels in Coltrane's own history.

Last book read:

Does re-reading count? If so, put me down for Patrick O'Brian's Aubrey / Maturin series, which I've just re-read for the umpteenth time. If not, Up from Conservatism by Michael Lind. It's now a tad out-of-date, and Lind is still more conservative than I have, but turncoats make the best informants.

Five books that mean a lot to you:

1. The Truelove by Patrick O'Brian. One of my favorites from that series.
2. Money and the Meaning of Life by Jacob Needleman. A philosopher takes a hard look at what money really is and what it means and why it matters. I'm probably overdue to read this again.
3. Creatures of Light and Darkness by Roger Zelazny. One of his space-future reinterpretations of mythology, in this case Egyptian.
4. Night Soldiers by Alan Furst. I love all of his books but this first one in the series sets the stage for the rest and begins the series of subtle interlinkings that connect them all.
5. Invitation to a Beheading by Vladimir Nabokov. Again, this stands for many, but is definitely my favorite among them all. Conjures up mid 20th century totalitarianism and manages to weave together an intertwined take on literature and spirituality, at least the way I read it. Postmodern without being annoying.

Tag five people to continue this meme:

Cecil Vortex

Bill Cassel

Frances Pabon

Pete Gaughan

Willem Knibbe

Trying out the Google Guessing Rank (GGR) game outlined by Jon Scalzi, I got a kick out of watching what Google Suggest (it's a beta) thought I might be searching for until I got four letters into my last name. Here's the literal sequence if I type all the letters (counting even when it doesn't change the guess, to make a prettier diagonal:

1. cnn
2. christmas
3. christmas
4. christmas
5. christmas
6. christmas
7. christina aguilera
8. christianity
9. christianity
10. christian dior
11. christian coalition
12. christian cross
13. christian cruises
14. christian crumlish
15. christian crumlish
16. christian crumlish
17. christian crumlish
18. christian crumlish

Big drop off in results with each new phrase, and I just barely missed the crusades along the way.

Scalzi is spreading a meme:

1. Open up the music player on your computer (if you have one -- the music player, I mean. Clearly you have a computer, because otherwise you couldn't read this).
2. Set it to play your entire music collection.
3. Hit the "shuffle" command.
4. Tell us the title of the next ten songs that show up (with their musicians), no matter how embarrassing. That's right, no skipping that Carpenters tune that will totally destroy your hip credibility. It's time for total musical honesty.

1. "You've Lost that Lovin' Feeling" - Righteous Brothers
2. "Junco Partner" - James Booker
3. "Down in the Cockpit" - XTC
4. "Cryptical Envelopment" - Grateful Dead
5. "Cup of Kindness" - Emmylou Harris
6. "Japanese Folk Song (Kojo No Tsuki)" - Thelonious Monk
7. "Pleasant Moments" - Scott Joplin
8. "Satellite" - Robyn Hitchcock
9. "All We Have is Now" - Flaming Lips
10. "A Soft Seduction" - David Byrne
11. "Dear Prudence" - Jerry Garcia

According to your real Japanese name generator, my Japanese name is

藤原 Fujiwara (wisteria fields)
海斗 Kaito (big dipper of the ocean)

Magister Mundi sum! ("I am the Master of the Universe!")

You are full of yourself, but you're so cool you probably deserve to be. Rock on.

Uh, OK then. Thanks, I guess, Which Weird Latin Phrase Are You? brought to you by Quizilla.

From dmasson on the Well:

This looks like a mistake. In case the link is taken down, it says:

AP Kills Limbaugh Painkillers Story

The Associated Press
Saturday, January 3, 2004; 5:06 PM

WEST PALM BEACH, Fla. - Please kill the story Limbaugh-Painkillers, V9991. Rush Limbaugh has not been charged with doctor shopping.

A kill is mandatory.

Make certain the story is not used.

Oops!

Although you're hacking out the future in RDF, you realise that all technology boils down to dating in the end.

What social software are you?

For a while I've been posting trendy idea-oids and "news of the weird"-type links-with-commentary to Meme List. This was meant to be a stake in the sand for a MemeWatch site where we'd do fun GoogleHack kind of tricks to track the rise and fall of phrases like "six degrees of Kevin Bacon" and so on. Naturally, most of these great half-baked ideas for collaborative webspaces have stayed on my drawing board and meanwhile I was just posting links like a million other goons.

Naturally, some of the posts got popular off the topics. We still get many posts to the Pete Townsend/Kurt Cobain thread and the one about Michael Jackson's baby on the balcony. But along the way I was also posting to a category here in X-POLLEN called Memes, and those posts were essentially the same kind of schtick.

Now I've decided to turn the Meme List into a plain old link log that I can stick in the side bar of any of my sites at will. A running bookmark list with wry comments, as per the current trend.

In the meantime, I've imported all my old Meme List posts here into this journal. I may recategorize some of them when I get around to it, but it feels good to be consolidating like this and not having to keep track of endlessly spawing similar spaces. Using the memewatch.com domain for my link log seems like a good idea too.

One neat thing is that MT imported my pings and comments too, although the crazed fans who post about Cobain and Jackson and Townsend will end up posting over at the old well-Googled address unless I set up some redirects, and I might be axing all the old entries in the Meme List soon since they're not formatted in the title/link/description structure that my link log will expect.

Longaberger makes baskets, and their building is a 16x scale model of one of their more popular products.

So who's buying all that herbal v1agra? rich, stupid guys:

There was a picture on the top of the page that said, 'As Seen on TV,' and I guess that made me think it was legit.

Careful with that crop, Eugene. Metafilter deconstructs the accidental peepshow Tech TV's Cat Schwartz unleashed on the Web.

I'm waiting for the conspiracists to suggest that she did it on purpose to release deniable cheesecake. TechTV nerdgrrls are definitely an improvement over camgirls and girlybloggers.

About that "bicubic interpolation," maybe it could help with my hairline?

• This album kills fascists (Billy Bragg)
• This sneetch kills fascists (Dr. Seuss)
• your musical engine kills fascists
• This blog kills fascists (saladwithsteve)
• To paraphrase Woody Guthrie, this website kills fascists (Auntie)
• This website kills fascists (Dancing about Architecture)
• Did I forget to mention Woody Guthrie? This website kills fascists (Queensboro Ballads)
• This site kills fascists (RasterWeb)
• This guitar kills fascists (Rhino)

I'm looking forward to reading Al Franken's new book, Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them: A Fair and Balanced Look at the Right. Here's the BuzzFlash interview that whetted my appetite.

Michaelz send along a pointer to the knockoff project, which documents album covers and the biters that bit them.

I first heard "off the hook" meaning "totally wild" or "out of control (in a good way)" a few years ago. (Example: "We're hiring bellydancers and fire jugglers for the party - it's going to be off the hook.")

Like so much innovative American language, it seemed to arise from the African-American community. But it puzzled me, since "off the hook" already means something else, along the lines of "no longer responsible for" as in, "I did the dishes, so you're off the hook."

I wonder if the etymology of this (new) expression has something to do with the idea of a meter (like something showing dBs) rocketing so high so quickly that it flies off its "hook"? That's just a guess. If anyone has the actual source of the term, I'd love to hear it.

Well, this LiveJournal post showing pictures of a slug navigating a maze of salt have been circulating now for months but it only just hit my inbox yesterday.

I was reading B headlines from the Times this morning and I saw that in the wake of the priest-molestation scandals the Boston archdiocese is announcing a fiscal crisis and impending layoffs. "They're going to lay off Jesus," I said. "No," said B, "they're going to lay off some disciples."

"That's right," I said. "Actually, they're going to lay off all the disciples, and then hire back seven of them as independent contractors, with no benefits."

Per Arnesen has come up with a device for keeping beer cold on hot days. We like his choice of Guinness for the test brew.

I'm getting tired of these "anti-blog screed so please, bloggers, all link to me" pseudcontrarian protobacklash articles. Most of them are as glib and boring as the worst blogs and they don't tend to even get their facts straight.

For example in, Blog eats blog, the author talks about ETCon and A List bloggers, writing

Howard Rheingold, Tim O'Reilly, Clay Shirky, Doc Searls, Dave Winer and Ben Hammersley (no, I'm not going to promote them even more by linking to them) are all what Register reporter Andrew Orlowski calls 'the A-list bloggers', the people whose regular musings on their personal websites can shape debate and make reputations (5). (Shirky may not have a conventional blog, preferring instead to post essays that are then linked to by others - but since his importance derives entirely from others' blogs, I feel justified in including him in the list.)

Plus, neither his shortlist nor the other prominent-ish attendees of the conference are all "economic libertarians." Then there's the Orlowskian notion that Google is carefully censoring out all non-bloggish points of view. Doy.

The cleverest part of the article was the neoblogism, "blogeoisie." Points for cuteness (and for including a pronunciation guide). Now let's get our minions at Google to wipe all memory of this article from the face of the noosphere. MUAHAHAHAHA.

Geoff Faulkner has posted an informative article describing how he set up a computer-mediated entertainment center. His solution converges the functionality of his TV and stereo system with a computer for controlling everything.

Jeff Green, who's been on a roll lately, has some choice words for us about iLoo. I suggest he go back and read my "Information pooper-highway" entry from The Internet Dictionary (Sybex, 1994, now sadly out of print).

Weirdly, just a few weeks ago I was riffing with another friend about the idea of putting web browsers above urinals in men's rooms. We quickly realized that no one would want to touch the touch screen, so I figured maybe the urinal itself could be used as a mousepad/tablet type thing for that built in "pointing device." Sure enough, not a week or so later, bOingbOing and the Reverse Cowgirl were covering a supposedly real invention along just those lines. Is the circuit from crazy joke to idiot investment really closing to such a tiny recursive feedback loop? Is it mass hypnosis? The zeitgeist? I'm going to grab the New York Times and go think about it for a while on the john.

Promoters of regime change in the US who run the fooled-ya GATT.org website have developed an alternate deck of cards for quick identification of their most-wanted list.

I've noticed that many people found the declaration by an Iraqi quoted in the New York Times a few weeks ago to be a great slogan for western values of freedom and the pursuit of happiness.

I prefer my spelling, in the title above, to the more typical "Whiskey" spelling. Why? Because it echoes the endings of the other two words. Both spelling of whisky are acceptable, by the way, although they've tended to be used to refer to different variations (Scotch and Irish) of the liquor that was once spelled something like uisghea.

What's Happening is yet another page that comprises a good list of memetracking websites.

I thought this Anil Dash weblog entry looked familiar:

I'm off to SF for O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference on Tuesday. I'm going against the grain this year by taking my laptop along, "blogging" in "realtime", and taking digital photos of people. If there's a box, I am out of it. If you're attending as well, stop by and say hello...I'll be the guy with the laptop and digital camera.

Oh, right, I saw it first (or a near variation) at plasticbag.org.

I was feeling kind of out of the loop (no, not the box) for missing this very expensive conference, though I figure any emerging techne will have to protrude a bit more and get beta tested by all the early adopters of the world before I'm ready for it anyway, but now I'm kind of glad I won't be there.

---begin forwarded text---

ENLARGE YOUR COALITION! GUARANTEED!!

Want a big international COALITION? Tired of getting spurned by hot European girls because of your "unilateralism"?

Now, YOU can experience the COALITION ENLARGEMENT you've always wanted with a MASSIVE accounting breakthrough!! 100 GUARANTEED!!!

THE APPEARANCE OF SIZE DOES MATTER!

With the help of our GUARANTEED plan you too will go from being a little bush to a THICK, MIGHTY LOG in no time! Best yet, our plan has NO Painful and Hard-To-Use international pumps like the UN, and NO annoying allies who might actually try and assert themselves!

With our plan, you can GROW that HUGE THROBBING COALITION in just THREE EASY STEPS!!!

1) Get one of your buddies at the health club (or in England) to SING PRAISES of how MIGHTY your Coalition is, then simply COUNT EVERYONE AT THE HEALTH CLUB (or in England) AS BEING PART OF YOUR COALITION -- WHETHER THEY WANT TO BE OR NOT. Remember to use the phrase: "Everyone down at the gym (or England) says I have a huge coalition" often.

2) MOCK anyone who questions the size of your coalition, especially if they ask for measurements. Be quick to say: "I don't have to measure it because everyone KNOWS it's HUGE." Better yet, ask them how big THEIR coalition is. That usually shuts them up real fast. If it doesn't, simply change the subject or walk out of the room.

3) Tell possible MEMBERS they can hang with you and the cool kids down at Club NATO after the show. If that doesn't work, promise to slip several billion dollars into their economy (Don't actually give them the money, just promise it.)

4) You can DOUBLE and TRIPLE the size of your international thang by padding it with SEXY sounding places like Latvia, Uzbekistan and, ooh baby, Eritrea. And if anyone wonders what good the Marshall Islands are when they can't even field 2 guys at the Olympics much less an army, you just shoot back "HEY, even with MICRONESIA on my side I'm still bigger than the French! HAR!"

5) And finally, when all else fails just tell people 1/3 or more of your coalition is HIDDEN and flatly refuse to pull out the whole length. Insist real gentlemen don't talk about such things in public and that they'll just have to trust your word as to how MASSIVELY THROBBINGLY HUGE the whole coalition is. Then cite security concerns and have them arrested.

If you follow the above 4 steps, you will be GUARANTEED to ERECT a bigger coalition that will leave them all too WILLING to drop trou, bend over and do ANYTHING YOU TELL 'EM TO!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

For more details, contact Ari F. at http://www.whitehouse.gov/

"'Enlarge your coalition' made me a man!" - George B.

---end forwarded text---

(thanks, MZ!)

It's been over three weeks since this (Who's leading Who?) appeared in my in-box and it still creeps me out every time I go take a look.

I think it's the phallic nose.

And, no, I've never thought this conflict was merely about oil, but it still amuses me to imagine the operation named as above.