Category: blogs

Comments

I’ve been blogging 2.5 years and yet I haven’t had a formal comments policy. Noticing that Jaquandor (yes, him again) wrote one up some time ago, I thought it’d be a good idea to do likewise.

1. I encourage comments about the topic at hand. In fact, I would enjoy receiving more. Indeed, I’ve left it so you don’t have to do word verification when commenting. You don’t have to even have a Blogger account, since you can just click on the anonymous button. (And if you DO want to identify yourself, just sign it.)

2. As we all are, I’m imperfect. If I’ve made an error of fact, or have a link that doesn’t work, please let mer know ASAP, in the comments section or via e-mail, posted in the sidebar.

3. I expect that, from time to time, readers will have a strong negative reaction to something I’ve written in this blog. I’m good with that. Leave a comment to that effect.

4. But there’s a certain level of social decorum that I expect. I would refer to it as as “common sense” except that it isn’t as common as I would have thought.

a. No flamewars. If you start attacking others, or me, in a way that I feel is inappropriate, I will delete the post. Except for spam, and one incredibly racist comment, I’ve never done it before. I don’t like doing so. But I will.

b. If you want to attack me and tell me that I’m stupid and only an idiot would believe that GWB should be impeached, fine, but such comments will require a name and an e-mail address. Anonymous attack comments will be deleted as soon as I learn of their existence.

c. Every comment left here is also forwarded to my Gmail address, so don’t think that leaving a nasty comment on a post that’s buried deep in my archives will escape my notice. Since many people seem to come to this blog via search engines, that happens quite often.

d. Any other comments that I deem inappropriate – and I have VERY liberal standards – will be deleted. Also spam, unless it’s REALLY entertaining.

“Hey, Roger, don’t you believe in the First Amendment?” Indeed, I do. I support your right to start your own blog and have your own rules.

e. Please limit comments to the topic of the post at hand. If there’s something else you really want to call to my attention, e-mail me. I check it often.

ROG

ROG

Talk Like a Pirate Day ’07


Ahoy, ye mateys! Jolly Roger Green here with another Talk Like a Pirate Day!

Here ye find some Pirate quotes. Yo ho ho.

Some Willie Stargell quotes. (He be the pirate pictured.)

Pirates of the Atlantic game. Drink a bottle of rum, for I have not tried it meself.

And here’s the account of the great pirate Roberto Clemente and his 3000th flogging:

If ye be looking for more Roberto Clemente quotes, I hoisted those last year. And I see that I never mentioned Clemente by name, yet that Scott sussed it out anyway, that scurvy dog.
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Which brings me to my new favorite project: retrospectively labeling my posts. It’s a tedious process, and I figure it’ll take weeks or months, betwixt and between. But then I’ll be able – and YOU’LL be able – to find articles on topics more easily than by search. At this writing, I’ve only labeled the pieces from from May 2 to July 12, 2005 and from January 18, 2007 forward; my goal is to be finished by my birthday in March.

ARRRROG

ROG

When the Cat’s Away QUESTION

Unusually, my wife and my daughter were both away for a week last month. This meant I got to do all the laundry the day before my wife returns, which is a good thing. I got deeper into my T-shirt collection, as usually the same three or four shirts get washed and end up on top, so that those other shirts don’t get the love they deserve.

I’m hoping Tosy or Jaquandor can remind me of the particulars of this scene from the excellent, but short-lived, TV series Once and Again: Karen Sammler is sorting her (underwear?) drawer so that those pieces that hadn’t gotten worn recently got put on the top. I’m sure I saw this scene, and since I almost certainly watched it on tape, I rewound it and showed it to my wife (who seldom watched the show). “See? See?”, I told Carol.

Anyway, I did things such as all of the dishes at once. I stacked all my reading material on the living room floor one day, and cleaned it up en masse the next. My wife’s more incrementalist.

So, here’s the question: what things do you do when your boyfriend, girlfriend, spouse, roommate is away that you would never do when he/she’s there? If you’re living alone now, or have lived alone in the past, post-roomie, what did/do you do solo that would have driven your exes nuts? Conversely, what did they do when you were away that would drive you nuts? (My wife would tidy up, then I’d ask her where so-and-so was that had been sitting on the kitchen table for weeks, and she had no idea – sure it LOOKED good, but some Thomas Dolby quote would come to mind.)
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How to: Be an uber blogger, by Cory Doctorow

ROG

ROG

Metablogging about Someone Else’s Metablogging

I read Thirteen Blog Clichés last month, and thought I’d discover how many sins I’m “guilty” of, and whether I care.

1. The Useless Calendar Widget – don’t have one. I do have a clock, mostly because I don’t trust my computer clock which tends to run faster and faster.

2. Random Images Arbitrarily Inserted In Text – never thought to do that, but hey, maybe I’ll start!

3. No Information on the Author – well, you got my name, my city, my hometown, my profession, and more. What else would you like to know?

4. Excess Flair – not likely to happen, not by my discipline, but from the fact that I’m too technologically deficient to add a lot of widgets.

5. The Giant Blogroll – Some of the author’s readers really fussed over this one. As someone else once recommended to me, my blog I do initially for me. I refer to those links. Some I read regularly, some I use as bookmarks (Major League Baseball, e.g.) Yes, I could RSS most of them, but then I’d miss that random nature of wanting to check out Lefty on Friday when he’s going to post his questions, e.g.

In fact, I added a couple new links yesterday, first-time bloggers, each of whom I’ve known for over a quarter century: Joe Fludd, an old FantaCo artist and customer, and CD, with whom I shared a boarding house, along with nine other people, in New Paltz in the mid 1970s.

Philosophically, it’s like how I sometimes would pull out my address book, leaf through it and realize I hadn’t checked in with someone for a while, and I would give him or her a call. (Some girlfriend of mine at the time complained about me doing that; she thought I should just know who I wanted to call, and call them. I thought her complaint was nonsensical.)

6. The Nebulous Tag Cloud – don’t even know HOW to do this. I’m/you’re safe.

7. Excessive Advertisements – I resisted having any ads at all. Think I’m OK. I’m utterly fascinated, BTW, what topic my ad (that I can’t mention) will read, based on the varied topics on my blog.

8. This Ain’t Your Diary – yes, it sorta is. But generally, I leave a lot out.

9. Sorry I Haven’t Written in a While – Well, since I haven’t missed a day yet, not applicable. But I agree with the general point.

10. Blogging About Blogging – the obvious irony of the author noting that one. Occasionally guilty. Like now.

And while I’m thinking about it, how does Technorati actually work? A story about a recent post that appeared in Journalista!, but not the initial referral that ADD made. Yet other ADD stories have shown up.

11. Mindless Link Propagation – never! Only MINDFUL Link Propagation. For instance, H.R. 811, expected to be voted on today, is bad legislation. There’s this link about kissing is a story from Australia quoting a UAlbany professor. How about a baseball league with only one team with a winning record? I hadn’t read about Turkey’s previous incursions into northern Iraq in the MSM. Someone asked me to pass along this Snopes story about a virus posing as a postcard.

12. Top (n) Lists – I like them. It’s one of my favorite features in Tosy’s page, e.g.

13. No Comments Allowed – I agree with this complaint, and I am open for comments. In fact, I would like to get more comments. More, MORE, MORE.
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Blogging Success Study.
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Oh, the “random picture” is of Ana Ivanovic, the tennis player who lost to Venus Williams at the U.S. Open this past weekend.
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My latest poll asked:
Do you know the source of the line, “Vote for me and I’ll set you free”?
19 of you said, “Of course!”
9 pf you said, “It sounds familiar but I can’t place it.”
4 of you said, “I have no clue.”
the answer is the song Ball of Confusion, originally made famous by the Temptations in 1970, and covered by Edwin Starr (1971), Undisputed Truth (1971), Love & Rockets (1986), and Duran Duran (1995). I’ve also heard the Neville Brothers perform it live a couple years ago.

ROG

ROG

Next Post QUESTION

I’m curious how you folks who look at other blogs actually find them. Initially, I went through the links of the handful of bloggers I knew then, but I soon found a certain redundancy of common sites.

So, my favorite thing to do became using the Next Blog feature on the Blogger sites. However, I’ve been trying it recently and finding it increasingly unsatisfactory. I keep finding, every fourth or fifth hit, a sex site. And not just a sex site, but one site nearly identical in spite of mild permutations. It’s always a white background with a title of the video, which may be fairly innocuous – “David Beckham’s first MLS goal”. But on the right is a list of:
Related Top Posts that include – and I’ve eliminated more than a few:
# PAMELA ANDERSON AND JENNA JAMESON BOTH IN ONE SCENE!!!!(772)
# Sexy Chopper Biker Girls Naked(708)
# hot girls part 3 – the russian(445)

Of course, the non-sex sites I find are uneven. Either, I can’t understand the language or it contains information such as: “Well let me just say this, Zac Efron totally hotty! Danngg!” What’s a Zac Efron? (OK, I DO know about High School Musical.)

I do find some interesting places, but, where it used to take me about 10 minutes to find three commentable sites via Next Blog, now it takes a half hour, because among other things, the porn sites have disabled the Next Post button, so I have to go back before going forward. (They’ve also taken out the Flag Blog feature, not surprisingly – is there a way to report them to Blogger some other way?)

So, as I asked initially, what do YOU do to seek out new sites?
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And speaking of Disney and sex, Mark Evanier, writing about the demise of a Disney digest, writes: Once upon a time, Playboy sold seven million copies per issue and now it sells three million. This is not because of a declining male interest in beautiful nude women or because the women aren’t as beautiful or as nude as they used to be. The phraseology, for whatever reason, cracked me up.
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Geico Uncovers Secrets About Flintstones, Clampetts – the commercials will almost certainly be better than the upcoming Caveman series.
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Starting this Monday: Changes in the comic strip For Better or Worse.
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Two guys named Ken:
Levine – and his readers – on movie theater etiquette (or the lack of same)
Jennings (August 30) on separated at birth
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I had asked who won the Democratic debate in Iowa on ABC-TV’s This week a couple weeks ago. I got five voters, four of whom picked Dennis Kucinich, and one who selected Barack Obama.
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Karl Rove and now Alberto Gonzalez are both gone, and I’m not feeling the happiness I thought I would. It’s like the letdown I got when I would rehearse for a choir piece or a play; the event would go off well, but I’d be left with a mild melancholy. At least now I know why they left when they did.

ROG

ROG
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