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Archives for March 2003
Hack
I think I would be able to take (Colonel) David “Hack” Hackworth’s war commentary more seriously if he projected the image of someone with a military background.
I know that he’s a decorated veteran and a damn tough SOB–he enlisted in the merchant marine at 14 and the Army at 15.
But for some reason I can’t help but chuckle when I look at his trendy Caesar haircut and ever-present black shirt. He looks like a fashion designer. Maybe it makes wuss journalists feel more comfortable in his presence?
Crow Tastes Good
I had crow for dinner Sunday night.
Frankly, I’m still shocked they gave him the Oscar, given his views on Israel and all.
I’m Three
Since just about everyone seems to be waxing poetic on their blogging birthdays as of late, I feel compelled to engage in a shameless act of one-upmanship.
My blog turned three a few weeks back.
Furthermore, this site has been online–in one form or another–for over six years. So there.
Revolutionary New Logo
I felt a new design was in order so last night I kicked off the new communist beer mug logo you see to your left.
I’m still making changes to the CSS stylesheet for this site, so you may notice some general bugginess with the appearance of comments and trackback pages for the next day or so.
Cope.
Liberty Cabbage Redux
This is the most idiotic news story I’ve read all year. I don’t even want to know how much money was spent holding the news conference.
The Republicans really need to learn that fiscal responsibility begins at home.
Cover This
I’m glad I accidentally stumbled across this cover from last September’s issue of The Nation.
Politics aside, it’s a brilliantly executed cover. You really need to download the PDF to see all the detail (e.g. the screenprinting effect).
Little Red Books
Today we launched a new site for FIRE. It’s to promote a series of guide books on individual rights for college students that they are publishing.
I’ve had a chance to look through the books and I must say that I’m very impressed. They are clear, well-written, and very useful. I wish I had them on my bookshelf when I was running an independent campus newspaper back during my college days. They’re available in PDF on the site so go and check them out.
There Goes The Neighborhood
Today Julian posted a link to Amitai Etzioni’s new blog.
When I was a student at GWU I actually took a graduate level class taught by Etzioni in “Elements of Communitarian Thought.”
Communitarianism is probably the most inconsistent ideology I’ve come across. Whenever the course required me to approach a problem from a communitarian perspective I merely spouted a statist response and prefaced it with something about the importance of social approbation.
I got an “A,” and to this day, I have no idea what the elements of communitarian thought actually are.
*[GWU]: George Washington University
Obligatory Raging Cow Post
It seems that pretty much everyone has been commenting on the Raging Cow site today. Some people have decried the use of weblogs as a tool for corporate marketing. Others have called for XML disclosure of all marketing interests on weblogs.
I’m going to go out on a limb here and say, for the record, that I don’t think this kind of marketing is going to become too prevalent in the future. People smell this kind of thing a mile away. Look at the outrage this cow shit caused today–the marketing droids definitely won’t want a repeat performance of this one.
However, I thing this Raging Cow marketing campaign was brilliant, nonetheless.
Nobody knew what Raging Cow was yesterday. By being the first to upset the standards and sensibilities of a particular emerging medium, Dr (no period) Pepper was able to effectively make Raging Cow the discussion topic of the day in that medium. If you don’t believe me, just look at Blogdex.
Pissing people off is generally a good way to get attention. I have no doubt that major media outlets from Playboy to The Wall Street Journal will soon pick up the story and run with it. Later this week people who have never even visited a weblog will read all about Raging Cow’s new marketing campaign.
Part of me has always believed that Paula Jones was the reason Bill Clinton was able to get elected in 1992. The scandal gave Clinton the media exposure he needed to win name recognition early in the campaign.
This weblog fiasco may just give Raging Cow the name recognition it needs to make a strong entry in the cutthroat non-alcoholic beverage market.
An Elegant Sexual Convention
I bought an excellent book on Go from Amazon last week. I was particularly impressed when I noticed a interesting writing convention that’s used throughout the book, despite the current trends regarding gender neutrality in writing.
The black player is always referred to with male personal pronouns and the white player is always referred to with female personal pronouns.
The use of gender-specific pronouns contributes greatly to the clarity of text describing gameplay that could easily become very confusing:
Black takes the ko with 23. Now White may not capture Black 23 immediately, so she plays somewhere else with 24. Black responds at 25.
