Tag: Meta

(a reprint from our initial offerings)

It’s an interesting coincidence that exactly 50 years after The Declaration, Jefferson and Adams died within hours of each other.  Ironically Adam’s last words were- “Jefferson still survives.”  In fact Jefferson preceeded Adams which could have caused some embarrassment provided you believe in an afterlife and that Jefferson and Adams could have ended up in the same place.

Me?  Not so much.  People forget that our founders were revolutionaries and the establishment of The United States of America led to a string of more or less successful rebellions in Haiti, South America, and France.

It’s certainly not a historical leap of faith to call The Council of Europe and the Age of Metternich a reaction to a little fight we picked on the road between Lexington and Concord.

History is real, and not so very long ago.

These were people just like us.  Every bit as smart, twice as tough, and doing the best they could with the tools they had available.

Recently they’d been through 30 years of Civil War based on religious sectarianism and class warfare.  Fighting the French and Indians was kind of intermittent by comparison.

They were not rubes by any means though it’s a classic American gambit going back to Franklin at least to put a dead beaver on your head and pretend to be an idiot.  It makes the women want you.

My favorite Ben who is not a traitor was considered the head of the committee that composed The Declaration, but the principal Author was Thomas Jefferson whom we find recently to have made a last minute substitution of ‘citizen’ for ‘subject’ that I found reflective of his principles as a Founder.

Revolution is not all skittles and beer.

America had its Cincinattus and a Republic if we could keep it, but political feuding between the Democratic-Republicans and the Federalists was little short of open warfare in the election of 1800.  People were literally shot down like dogs.

Adams had to suffer Jefferson as a Vice-President (Mr. Heartbeat) and successor.  Two Term Jefferson left his office to James “Mr. Constitution” Madison and the rest, as they say, is history until Andrew “Kingfish” Jackson (but that’s a story for another day).

The democratic impulse and enlightenment values embodied in the work of our Founders, little things like the Constitution and Bill of Rights, the institutions of the Congress, Presidency, and Court have always been under attack by powerful elites who seek to influence outcomes in their favor.

The very least honor we owe these brave and principled patriots is to resist those efforts and defend justice and the rule of law to the best of our ability.

(a reprint from our initial offerings)

I’ve always identified myself as a writer, even when it was poetry for machines and deadline dreck for newsletters, pamphlets, and flyers.

I like words and written communication better than verbal or theatrical presentations because of the random access you have to the information as a reader.  With a speech, or Radio, or a Play, TV, or Movie the information is under control of the deliverer, not the audience.  It’s inherently a serial exposition, a sales pitch, designed by arrangement and order to lead you from reasonable premises to a predetermined conclusion without allowing you to revisit the path of the argument unless you repeat the experience from scratch.

You may call reading the last chapter to find out ‘who done it’ cheating, I suggest instead that it’s a challenge every Author should be willing to face.  If you can’t make your middle memorable it’s probably better suited for a Short Story than a Novel.

So that’s what’s in it for me.  It’s a form of self expression in a broadly accessible format that’s not really very expensive except in terms of the time it takes to produce the content.

What’s in it for you?

There are 2 parts to this answer.

As a Reader only, you get to bask in my brilliance and wallow in my words and if passive entertainment suits your style I’m grateful for your eyeballs.  By that I mean you’ll get a lot more of me if you can stand it and love or hate it I don’t really give a rat’s ass what you think about me as long as you pay attention.

But the beauty part of a blog is that you can have your voice heard too.  It’s called a Vent Hole for a reason and it accepts both positive and negative feedback.  If your ambition exceeds a Tweet or two you can contribute longer pieces that I will be more than happy to evaluate and feature.  There is nothing that gives me more pleasure than promoting the work of others.

I hope that The Stars Hollow Gazette will develop into a Group Blog where regular participants as well as muse driven Authors will provide a stream of fresh content that will make us a several time a day destination.

Activism

I think that blogs are both more and less powerful platforms than conventionally recognized.  Many people have a nostalgic affection for storming the Bastille and I don’t despise those who are willing to wear no pants.

My legs are not what they once were, though that doesn’t mean I won’t ‘kilt up’ if the occasion calls for it.

I don’t think a failure to summon musket armed militia is an indication of weakness.  The information battlefield has numerous hedgerows, stone walls, and trees to snipe from behind of.  If you think it doesn’t hurt you’re not listening to the howls of outrage from the ego struck elite you ungrateful cur.

My activist brother thinks the most important function of blogs is as a source of information and a historical record, an alternative to the monopolistic media with its competitive barriers.  I think it’s equally as important to amuse and distract.  Your eyeballs are money.  Your passive consent, complicity.

I call you to a life of resistance in the small and easily done things.  Move your money.  Use cash when you can.  Turn off your lights when you leave the room and properly inflate your tires.

If just two people do it, in harmony, they’ll think they’re both faggots and won’t take either of them.

I’ve been called worse things than a stick.  Whom would fardels bear to grunt and sweat under a weary life, but that the dread of something after death, the undiscovered country from whose bourne no traveller returns, puzzles the will and makes us rather bear those ills we have than fly to others that we know not of?

Thus conscience does make cowards of us all and the native hue of resolution is sicklied over with the pale cast of thought, and enterprise of great pitch and moment with this regard their currents turn awry and lose the name of action.

In thy orisons be all my sins remembered.

Civility

No one has any obligation to treat you any particular way on the internet.

Indeed, one of the things I most despise about our inbred Versailles Village political/media culture is their false politeness and evasion of the truth.

Calling people liars and cowards and idiots is not ‘hate speech’.

Saying that Jew controlled financial, media, and political elites are stealing victory from our brave troopers and using the blood of Christian babies to make Matzoh IS.

If you can’t tell the difference between those things it’s simply useless to talk about subtleties and I won’t bother to do so.

In general however you may attribute to me personally any vice- I claim them all, particularly sloth.  If you have something new and inventive you’d care to share I’m always interested in novelty.  On the other hand you can hardly complain when I return the favor and if I happen to do it bigger and grander than you and you leave impressed…

That’s envy, my dear.  There’s a little bit of envy in the best of us.

Evolution

If you’d bother to learn anything about me at all you’d know I’m not a great believer in it.  It seems to me contrary to the Second Law of Thermodynamics.

The law that entropy always increases holds, I think, the supreme position among the laws of Nature. If someone points out to you that your pet theory of the universe is in disagreement with Maxwell’s equations – then so much the worse for Maxwell’s equations. If it is found to be contradicted by observation – well, these experimentalists do bungle things sometimes. But if your theory is found to be against the second law of thermodynamics I can give you no hope; there is nothing for it but to collapse in deepest humiliation. – Sir Arthur Stanley Eddington

But change is only to be expected, and while most of it is merely increasing entropy, intermittently self organizing systems emerge and flourish for a time.

And if you’re lucky you can be a part of it.

So a year ago The Stars Hollow Gazette went public and since then we’ve published 3,396 pieces or an average of 9.3 a day.  We’ve had some 40,27 visits and 216,845 views for an average of 111 and 468 daily during the course of our initial year, not so bad for a start up with minimal linkage and whoring.  Considering most political commentary community sites perish well before this I consider it an auspicious omen.

On that first day I had 4 posts, punching a little above my average-

• Grumpy and out of sorts Stage One (because I was wiped from final set-up and this actually happened scant moments before our official launch)
• Why Blog?
• On Patriotism
• Evening Edition (first of somewhat less than 370 including Weeks in Review which were too hard to continue).

I’ll be republishing Why Blog? and On Patriotism because it’s always good to remember where you came from.  Now might be a good time for members and potential members to visit the FAQs and refresh your memories though they haven’t changed a bit.

If you’re interested enough to take a full trip in the wayback machine this link tries to strike a moving target, we’re nothing if not prolific.

During the coming week I’ll be visiting several topics related to our past year including some experiments that didn’t work so you can point and hoot at my mistakes.

I have an agenda of change that I hope is going to make our past, present, and future content more accessible and easier to find and link to.  Soapblox has a new 2.0 platform to which we may migrate.  I’m hopeful some linux script genius will come up with one that allows us to do independent site backups based on the sequentiality of the diary urls.

TheMomCat and I are both working on making the site even more self sustaining by developing a larger community of Authors and a revenue stream to carry the hosting fees and add site improvements.  If you sell patchouli or tie dyed T-Shirts I’m sure we can come up with some reasonable rates.

We’re open to running sourced and linked pieces from advocacy groups.  Your press release isn’t a sure promotion but we’ve no objection to our readers seeing it (for the most part, editorial decisions are capricious and final).  Soapblox is capable of handling 50 member contributions a day out of the box and you can easily add extensions to handle arbitrary amounts with reasonable currency.  I think I’ll keep the Front Page no hotter than 1 every hour.

Well, you should plan for success.

And that relies on you.  I like to think The Stars Hollow Gazette has developed into a site of character and interest, a place you visit several times a day to read the latest and are proud to contribute at.  If you feel the same I urge you to send us your eyeballs and read, link, quote, comment, and recommend.

Thank you for your support.

The reason I never get tired of talking about the how part of meta is I’m hopeful that some student will learn enough for them to continue or contribute.

I must admit the Yahoo News format change on Tuesday has proven a bit of a stumper for me.  What seems to have happened is that they removed the likely categories (Top Stories, World, U.S. News, Politics, Business, Science, etc.) and dumped all their wire service stories into a big basket, in fact making it tough to distiguish which of the 3 main services- AFP, Reuters, or AP you were sampling.

Over the last 3 days I’ve been able to assemble a collection of Bookmarks that approximately cover the last 24 hours of output.  The problem is numbers.  There are too many of them.

At 25 a page there are over 1,375 headlines to look at and while I’m not sure what the current Soapblox limit is, dk could only handle 60 or so which means I need to adjust my filters somehow so I can get the cut to 4%.  It’s harder and more time consuming to write short.

Not to mention on your computer.  Ubuntu 10.4 is keeping windows open in numbers that bring my XP system on the same hardware to it’s knees, but it does slug down and I have to concentrate.

Right now I’m finding it takes 2 – 3 hours to cover a single service by starting at 24 hours ago, clicking each promising headline into it’s own window, checking for interest and length, and shrinking it to move on to the next.  Only at the end in the last 45 minutes or so am I assembling it with cut and paste and formatting, completely different from my previous practice of picking and choosing as I went along.  By starting at the end and moving forward in time I create a stack of stories that I unload into the text in roughly chronological order.

There are certainly some other interesting organizational things I can do that may ease accessibility for you, but I’m trying to disdain them because of their time wasting qualities.  I realize my News Digests are probably the most valuable thing I write, but I feel sometimes they distract me.

So below you will find some links you can turn into bookmarks for your private amusement and I shall struggle on trying to make this a manageable task.

I’ve been in touch with TheMomCat and as it turns out both she and I will be without Internet connectivity for most of the day and probably tomorrow too.

I’d like to thank our regular contributors for maintaining their activity during his time and want to remind everyone else that this is a “community” blog and features your pieces too.  While even promotions will be difficult today I invite and encourage you to make your own fun in our Diaries section.

My schedule is going to be extremely problematic for the remainder of June though I expect TheMomCat will be back from Netroots Nation soon.  I understand she had a very productive and entertaining trip.

I hope you are enjoying your Father’s Day weekend and will “see” you online as soon as I can.

ek hornbeck

Just had a line of thunderstorms through Stars Hollow and they didn’t just take down the News (though they did that) but they also fried all my cookies and passwords.

So I have a new hobby.

I hope all is well with you and yours and I’ll be just as obnoxious as ever as soon as I can.

Could be worse, my hard drives are still good.

The world is ruled by an oligarchy.  Even the government functions primarily as a puppet of executives, serving mainly to pass laws – such as banning off switches on televisions – that protect and consolidate their power.  Technology has advanced to the point that people’s physical movements and communications can be monitored at all times, almost all non-security technology has been discontinued or fallen into barely functional disrepair.

The only real check on them are the people who regularly expose their unethical practices and allies both inside and outside the system who assist.

Truth, paranoia, or a dramatic introduction to more Meta?

Most people when they think of St. Patrick’s Day food think of corned beef, cabbage and potatoes. Being an bit of an adventurous cook and not overly fond of the cabbage part of the traditional cuisine, I found a recipe that had the beef and potatoes but also, the addition of an Irish Stout. A bit more work and planning, it is a hearty stew for any chilly day, looks pretty and goes well with a hearty Irish Stout. The stew is simmered slowly on the top of the stove and finished with the Stilton Crust in a hot oven.

Ingredients:

   * 7 Tbs. olive oil

   * 1 lb. white button mushrooms, quartered

   * 2 cups frozen pearl onions, thawed

   * Salt and freshly ground pepper, to taste

   * 3 1/2 lb. beef chuck roast, cut into 1-inch cubes

   * 1 cup all-purpose flour

   * 3 garlic cloves, minced

   * 2 Tbs. tomato paste

   * 2 1/2 cups Irish stout

   * 1 cup beef broth

   * 1 lb. carrots, cut into chunks

   * 1 lb. red potatoes, cut into chunks

   * 1 Tbs. finely chopped fresh thyme

   * One 16-inch round Stilton pastry (recipe below)

   * 1 egg, beaten with 1 tsp. water

Directions:

In a 5 1/2-quart Dutch oven over medium-high heat, warm 1 Tbs. of the olive oil. Add the mushrooms, onions, salt and pepper and cook, stirring occasionally, about 12 minutes. Transfer to a bowl.

Season the beef with salt and pepper. Dredge the beef in the flour, shaking off the excess. In the Dutch oven over medium-high heat, warm 2 Tbs. of the olive oil. Add one-third of the beef and brown on all sides, about 7 minutes total. Transfer to a separate bowl. Add 1/2 cup water to the pot, stirring to scrape up the browned bits. Pour the liquid into a separate bowl. Repeat the process 2 more times, using 2 Tbs. oil to brown each batch of beef and deglazing the pot with 1/2 cup water after each batch.

Return the pot to medium-high heat. Add the garlic and tomato paste and cook, stirring constantly, for 30 seconds. Add the beef, stout, broth and reserved liquid, stirring to scrape up the browned bits. Add the mushrooms, onions, carrots, potatoes and thyme and bring to a boil. Reduce the heat to medium-low, cover and simmer, stirring occasionally, until the beef and vegetables are tender, about 3 hours.

Preheat an oven to 400°F.

Stilton Pastry

Ingredients:

   * 2 1/2 cups all-purpose flour

   * 2 tsp. salt

   * 1 Tbs. sugar

   * 16 Tbs. (2 sticks/250g) cold unsalted butter, cut into 1/2-inch pieces

   * 1/3 to 1/2 cup ice water

   * 4 oz. Stilton cheese, crumbled

Directions:

In a food processor, combine the flour, salt and sugar and pulse until blended, about 5 pulses. Add the butter and process until the mixture resembles coarse meal, about 10 pulses. Add 1/3 cup of the ice water and pulse 2 or 3 times. The dough should hold together when squeezed with your fingers but should not be sticky. If it is crumbly, add more water 1 Tbs. at a time, pulsing twice after each addition. Turn the dough out onto a lightly floured work surface and shape into a disk. Wrap with plastic wrap and refrigerate for 1 hour.

Remove the dough from the refrigerator and let stand for 5 minutes. Sprinkle the top of the dough lightly with flour, place on a lightly floured sheet of parchment paper and roll out into a 12-by-16-inch rectangle. Sprinkle the cheese over half of the dough, then fold the other half over the cheese. Roll out the dough into a 16 1/2-inch square. Using a paring knife, trim the dough into a 16-inch round.

Refrigerate the dough until firm, about 10 minutes, then lay the dough on top of the beef and stout pie and bake as directed in that recipe. Makes enough dough for a 16-inch round.

Brush the rim of the pot with water. Lay the pastry round on top, allowing it to droop onto the filling. Trim the dough, leaving a 1-inch overhang, and crimp to seal. Brush the pastry with the egg mixture, then cut 4 slits in the top of the dough. Bake for 30 minutes. Let the potpie rest for 15 minutes before serving. Serves 8 to 10.

Starting on the 15th I’m going to be liveblogging the NCAA Men’s and Women’s Basketball Tournaments.

Not to get whiny on you, but events like that suck a lot of energy and I’m already quite busy as you can see.

Ideally I’d like someone, or several someones, to step forward and take over some of the easier but more time consuming tasks.

Prime Time in particular takes way too long.  It’s not so much the links (though it typically has just as many as any Evening Edition), it’s finding the quotes.  After making the list I look at the movies (or shows in some cases) for ones I’m familiar with and know have some quotable moments.  After that it’s Google |imdb (film here) quote| which usually turns up the Internet Movie Database quote page and then slugging through them to find something funny or appropriate (not always the same thing).

You can waste a lot of time doing that.

Back in the deep dark mists of 8 months ago when TheMomCat and I were setting up The Stars Hollow Gazette my concept was that we needed content in the overnight period that would remain kind of current and self updating, and provide something of depth and interest (if you click the damn links) for the reader.  I think it’s certainly served that purpose admirably.

Now, of course, I have the daily digests from DocuDharma and firefly dreaming to extend our broadcast day and it’s not quite as critical as it was.

On some levels it’s really instructive to do.  I’m not really a Nexflix type and what I like about cable is that sometimes it presents you with something fresh and interesting that you wouldn’t have thought that you’d like.  Reading the links as I harvested has informed me of things about old favorites I didn’t know.  Sometimes I wish I was able to devote even more time to it.

But it doesn’t have to be done the way I do it either.  Let’s say you were a big fan of (shudder) American Idol and you wanted to do a series of liveblogs.  Well, that’s an ok direction I guess.  So would the Magnifico less is more approach.  At the very least I’d expect you might consider more closely the networks you like and find reliable sources of mindless blogging background noise entertainment.

In any event now is the time to organize for the future and that future includes my customary June “vacation” where I take constant mudbaths at my spa and the Internet is mostly unavailable.  What I’d like to do is transition to a system of rotating responsibility like we used to have with Overnight News Digest and What’s for Dinner.

So, play in on the 15th, if you want alternative programming you’ll have to make your own fun or click the links.

Zap2it TV Listings, Yahoo TV Listings

Technical difficulties at Søapbløx.