Bush resigns over plagiarism (not)

The Associated Press feed delivered some rather surprising intelligence to my Google feed reader this evening:

Bush resigning over the plagiaristic activities of a now throughly exposed senior White House aide? Wow. Who knew that The Decider felt this strongly about intellectual property? “The buck stops here,” indeed!

Alas, it turns out it was all a mistake, possibly corrected by now. Possibly.

Hmp. Guess Bush doesn’t care all that much about intellectual property after all.

Addendum: Welcome, Washington Post readers!

Food Fight!

Food Fight: “An abridged history of war, from World War II to present day, told through the foods of the countries in conflict.” LOVE. IT.

Turbulent week for St. Louis sports fans

The last few days have seen a string of unpleasant events for Gatewayville sports aficionados:

1. Up against the trade deadline, the reeling Blues deal classy and free agency-bound defenseman Bryce Salvador in exchange for young right winger (and local product) Cam Janssen.
2. The Cardinals cut their losses by releasing troubled outfielder Scott Spiezio, divorcing themselves from his substance abuse issues and his six-count drunken driving and assault complaint.
3. The Rams make a salary offer that longtime receiver Issac Bruce found it easy to refuse, and so dissolve their ties to the last member of the Los Angeles edition of the team.

Guess it’s a good thing this week that St. Louis doesn’t have a pro basketball franchise.

From Thirteen Ways of Looking at the Novel

Jane Smiley says:

Now that you have decided to begin your novel, you may congratulate yourself. You have not been asked or groomed to write a novel. You have not gone to novel-writing school, nor taken a standard curriculum of preparatory courses. Chances are, no one wants you to write your novel - if they say they do, they are just meaning that you should get it over with or get on with it. The people you know actually dread reading the novel you are about to write - they don’t want to read about themselves, they don’t want to be bored, and they fear embarrassment for everyone. You are, therefore, free.

Yes, ma’am.

More to come as seems appropriate.

Motorcycle club 1, machete-wielding robbers 0

CNN: Two hapless robbers encounter the Southern Cross Cruiser biker club. Hilarity ensues.

Penalized for being Jewish, basically

Sports Illustrated: Obviously, not one single person in the entire Colorado High School Activities Association has ever watched Chariots of Fire.

Subject to interpretation

Overheard at a restaurant:

But that’s not what Prozac says. It says you’re not supposed to drink a whole lot of alcohol.

Latest changes at Waveflux

If you read this weblog at all frequently - or you visit seldom but have a pixel-perfect memory - you’ll have noted that Waveflux has undergone yet another seismic shift in appearance and functionality, the second such alteration since the change in platform from Movable Type to WordPress. Indeed, it’s the adoption of WordPress that has made such layout changes possible easy. Back in the MT days - and I’m talking about MT 3.x, which was easier for me to use than the subsequent version - changing the blog’s layout seemed…well, if not a daunting task, then at least one not undertaken lightly. Consequently, the layout here didn’t change very often. You sort of learned to live with what you had until you finally screwed up enough courage/energy to have another go at it.

Now, with the ease of theme changing afforded by WordPress, I very nearly have the opposite problem: changing layouts is almost too easy. Not a bad problem to have, though.

As for the specific changes here: I had been using a slight variant of Thad Allender’s fine Gridline Magazine theme, but something just wasn’t sitting right with the layout. As I’ve already confessed to not being a designer, you’ll not be surprised to hear that I lack the vocabulary to express how I felt in anything but the vaguest of terms. The feeling itself was keen, though, and prompted me to review the “magazine-like” WP themes that are sprouting like dandelions all over the web. I tried out a handful of themes - astonishingly easy to switch back and forth; it’s like trying on jackets at the men’s store - and kept coming back to Arun Kale’s clean, grid-based, and interestingly-named The Morning After. Again, words fail me here: I can’t explain why I liked it so much, but knew that I did. I played around with a test installation, tweaking the code to accommodate my needs, then rather impulsively discarding the old arrangement and applying the new. Hence, the new digs.

As is usual after any move to a new place, not every room is ready for inspection and some painting remains to be done. We have time for that, though. After all, we’re all moved in now and hardly working against the clock.

The asocial Web says thanks, but no thanks

There’s irony somewhere in the juxtaposition of the arrival in the mail a couple of days ago of my newest beloved t-shirt, “Twitter is Useless,” and the arrival in my email inbox of Six Apart’s announcement of Twitter on digital growth hormomes: Action Streams!

Action Streams are a new feature, available now as a free plugin, which give you more control over the websites and profiles you use on the web.

Call it “unified social networking” — much like Facebook’s News Feed, or services like Friend Feed or Plaxo Pulse, Action Streams let you keep track of the things you do on over 75 services around the web. From adding favorites on Flickr to saving links on Delicious or Digg to posting videos on Vox or YouTube, all of your actions can be aggregated, displayed, and shared on your Movable Type-powered site. The Action Streams you publish can be for one person, or an aggregate of the actions by all of the authors on your site. And you have complete control over the privacy of those actions.

Okay, then!

Wow. I feel like I’m crouched in the shrubs under Byrne Reese’s rear window.

This really is social networking writ large, and for people who enjoy that sort of thing, more power to them. I’m not one of them, and why I’m not - considering that I’m communicating this by way of a, uh, blog - is worth a moment’s consideration.

I can’t blame age, exactly. People older than I am have Facebook and Myspace accounts and use them regularly. I have such accounts myself - in both cases prompted by a request by someone else - but I have used them exactly three times in a year and some change. I hope to log into them again only to delete those accounts.

I can’t even hide behind the claim of curmudgeonry, which - grouchy as it sounds - has a faint hard-earned quality to it, which harks back to age. No, I’m not a curmudgeon about networking so much as I am constitutionally less capable of it than others.

I am surprised to admit that I am rather an asocial being.

Not antisocial, I think. After all, this blog has an RSS feed - actually, several. They came with the template. Being antisocial denotes a fairly vigorous opposition to human contact, which frankly sounds like a lot of work. Of course, this implies that I’m simply lazy, which may or may not be true but is wholly immaterial here. Your correspondent is just kind of private…or as private as a person with a blog can reasonably be.

As I pause to figure out what to say next, I can sense a kind of inner Andy Rooney rising up within me, grumbling about all these people, young people mostly, Twittering amongst themselves, and isn’t that a good term for it, Twittering, chirping, not very substantial, idle chatter about some video they saw on the Web or how many lattes they had at lunch or…and then I slap him back down quick, because once you start talking like that, you very well might get stuck that way, and who wants that?

And setting Rooney’s problems aside, this isn’t about other people and their networking. It’s about me, of course, and possibly about an ingrained, old-fashioned, mostly unidirectional view of communication, stemming from traditional models of publishing and the days of three major networks (and you were lucky to have ‘em!), and rotary, landline, heavy-as-sin telephones and other antiques.

Or it could be something as simple as this: I already have - right here, thanks - all the community I can handle.

Yeah. Yeah. It could be exactly like that.

Well.

Glad we had this little talk.

Note: Not that I wish 6A anything but good luck with this venture. I’d have been uncomfortable with it no matter whose brainchild it was.

Bill Nighy, the website

Bill Nighy Info: A fansite devoted to the awesomeness of the most remarkable actor in the Universe.

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