From flackette:
“To read without reflecting is like eating without digesting”
Alas, it seems that the Kindle has backed up my colon!
Category: wordplay
Stuff about words or phrases
Making it personal
Media moguls—journalism moguls, anyway—need two sets of skills. They have to be able to select and package material from the world in a way that gives it order and narrative drive and swagger. They also have to forge, through creativity, cunning, and force, a set of arrangements with customers, competitors, governments, advertisers, production facilities, and distribution networks which can generate a lot of money. Even in an era of focus groups and marketing research, any news publication that attracts an audience has to have a personality, which means that it has to bear the stamp of a real person.
—Nicholas Lemann on Joseph Pulitzer, William Randolf Hearst, Barney Kilgore, and Rupert Murdoch in “Paper Tigers”, The New Yorker, April 13, 2009
[To a friend on what I liked about her latest blog posting.]
“It’s like the Lauren ad from Microsoft. Using the recession to talk about things holds a lot of serious interest,” I said.
“That’s what I think too,” my friend replied, “But I remember when I used to make references to it in posts for someone else, the editor would always delete them.”
“He hails from a school that’s outdated. The biggest blogs make it personal. Take Orangette—that’s a blog about cooking. Why is it one of the most popular blogs? Or ZenHabits—how did it in two years become one of the top self-help sites?
“When I write personal articles with wide application, they take off on FeedBurner.
“It’s about making it personal, without taking it personally.
“My problem is I always take it personally, 😉 ” I finished.
She laughed. “Well I already know what I’m going to write tonight!”
Tire swinger
Reading the comment rage on this article makes me smile. Michael Scherer’s career strategy is not a good one. But a piece of political vocabulary passed me by. 🙁
“What’s wrong, Mikey? The White House won’t provide you with a tire swing, like Uncle John did?”
—donovong comments on Swampland
and
“DougJ, I think the simpler explanation is that Michael Scherer is a ‘Tire Swinger,’ and he’s still pissed that Obama rumbled his man McCain in the election.
“Look back at Scherer’s loveletters to McCain during the 2008 campaign season, and you’ll start to see a pattern of resentment against the “new guy” reformer that Obama was perceived as.”
—cfaller comments on Balloon Juice
Does anyone know what this means? It probably has something to do with this:
In any case, it’s an amusing image, even if I don’t understand how it got from there to here.
Continue reading about Rush-Obama game theory after the jump
My monkey typing resonates
“We’ve all heard that a million monkeys banging on a million typewriters will eventually reproduce the entire works of Shakespeare. Now, thanks to the Internet, we know this is not true.”
—unknown
Your humble author at work writing this article.
I love to quote people quoting me. I do this by creating a vanity feed— I like to look at it as stalking myself. Skimming my vanity feed last night, I read this:
Terry Chay once said something that resonated with me — one of the few things, actually — and it was something like this: complex > complicated, and that simple does not necessarily mean “not complex”. The point is that you can have a complex implementation that covers many use cases, without the implementation being complicated, and with the API still being relatively simple.
—Matthew Weier O’Phinney
Only a few? Geez. I’m (almost) hurt. Next time, I see you, I’m going to call you Matthew O’Phinney.
For reference, here is the talk where Matthew is referring to, along with other previous references.
Since, like Matthew I work on a framework, I thought some of you might find this simple/simplistic complex/complicated distinction resonates with you as you write code.
I can’t claim credit for this idea. It comes from a different monkey, well before the internet:
“Everything should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler.”
—Albert Einstein
Dustbin of history
“Couldn’t care less about George Bush, he’s just a gutless spoiled brat asswipe that belongs in the dustbin of history. A Wiki entry a hundred years from now beginning with ‘GW Bush elected 43rd president of the United States. WTF were they thinking?’”
—Tsulagi on Balloon Juice
I found this quote amusing.
One interesting thing I’m noticing from that thread is that I can now agree with the points both sides are making even though I reserve my opinion on the matter. That’s how I used to be feel about politics back in the 80’s and early 90’s.
Even though my opinions were wrong then, it’s nice to feel that being wrong is an option.
After all, we learn by being wrong.
Ode to Quality Assurance
Quality Assurance has been delaying a release for a month and a half. As a consumer facing website, we normally have two code pushes a week. It’s a major rewrite, sure, but at this point we’re at about 20x the bug count of any previous release. The bugs are no longer: “You do this and the site goes down” but more along the lines, “You do something that nobody in their right mind would do and sometimes you get an error message, but everything is fine if you reload the page.”
Continue reading about Drunk with power and other random reasoning after the jump
Seven things: Basura and Bathrooms
This is part one of a seven part Seven Things post. (I’ll explain later.) This first one was inspired by Andrei’s affinity for languages.
#1. I once peed in the women’s bathroom.
At work, a blue trash can reads “SAVE. Recycleable cans and bottles. Custodians do not throw out.”
Then, it “helpfully” adds: “NOT BASURA.” Basura being the Spanish word for trash.
I walk by amused.
Continue reading about Linguistics isn’t logical after the jump
Heavenly bound, earthly good
Quote from the comments on an article on pro-Gay backlash on Proposition 8:
“Some people are so heavenly bound, they’re no earthly good.”
Continue reading about Clarifying a previous article after the jump
To that seven-year old Muslim-American kid
I’m also troubled by, not what Senator McCain says, but what members of the party say. And it is permitted to be said such things as, “Well, you know that Mr. Obama is a Muslim.” Well, the correct answer is, he is not a Muslim, he’s a Christian. He’s always been a Christian. But the really right answer is, what if he is? Is there something wrong with being a Muslim in this country? The answer’s no, that’s not America. Is there something wrong with some seven-year-old Muslim-American kid believing that he or she could be president? Yet, I have heard senior members of my own party drop the suggestion, “He’s a Muslim and he might be associated terrorists.” This is not the way we should be doing it in America.
I feel strongly about this particular point because of a picture I saw in a magazine. It was a photo essay about troops who are serving in Iraq and Afghanistan. And one picture at the tail end of this photo essay was of a mother in Arlington Cemetery, and she had her head on the headstone of her son’s grave. And as the picture focused in, you could see the writing on the headstone. And it gave his awards–Purple Heart, Bronze Star–showed that he died in Iraq, gave his date of birth, date of death. He was 20 years old. And then, at the very top of the headstone, it didn’t have a Christian cross, it didn’t have the Star of David, it had crescent and a star of the Islamic faith. And his name was Kareem Rashad Sultan Khan, and he was an American. He was born in New Jersey. He was 14 years old at the time of 9/11, and he waited until he can go serve his country, and he gave his life.
—Colin Powell endorses Barack Obama on Meet the Press
Revisiting Saddleback
I haven’t watched any the presidential debates because I sort of like my LCD television set and don’t want to damage it just yet by throwing things at it. Plus, other people do a more amusing analysis by counting tongue juts and generating word clouds.
This explains why I’m furiously googling what the hell a “Joe-the-Plumber” is (not that it mattered).
It also explains why I base my opinion on word-based transcripts and not strange body language.
And it occurred to me just how different the transcripts on McCain’s end seemed between this and the Saddleback Forums. You remember that? It was the debate at a evangelical Christian megachurch in which to be fair the same questions would be asked of both candidates with the latter being in a “cone of silence” which McCain won handily.
Continue reading about On comparing Saddleback to the debates after the jump