Dick Cheney may be hiding out in an undisclosed location unavailable to answer questions from the public (just as his boss ended the practice of holding press conferences back in February of 2001), but you can ask a simulation of Dick Cheney anything you like. My question: Will Halliburton benefit from the reconstruction of Iraq after Gulf War II? The Unofficial Official Simulator answers here.
categories: x-syndicate
6:17:04 PM 
say what []
Gnome-Girl has all the fun.
categories: metablog
5:41:38 PM say what []
The condensed parody version of the Two Towers is densely witty. Here's a snippet:
TREEBEARD: We have opted, hoom, not to do a damn thing.
PIPPIN: I didn't expect that.
PEOPLE WHO HAVE READ THE BOOK: Neither did I...
I still kinda like the Humphrey Bogart version (also at iFilm).
categories: memewatch x-syndicate
4:17:19 PM say what []
Republicans hauled out "class warfare" talking point this week as they do every time one of their "tax relief" plans is challenged as extremely tilted toward the superrich. It must poll well for them.
If you're tired of hearing this feint or disappointed with the timid rigidity of the Democrats' response, Matthew Miller of Tribune Media Services offers some suggestions for alternative tax plans that take on the concept of class warfare with gusto.
categories: x-syndicate
2:18:01 PM say what []
New current favorite blog of note: shrevie hoister's LiveJournal. Jump in anywhere. Looks like shrevie's been backfilling to 1995. Random shards of a mind (and fingers, and probably toes) at work, good linkage.
Brain says: yummy.
categories: x-syndicate
2:17:27 PM say what []
Following my usual scattershot process of trying out multiple methods for doing the same thing and then sometimes randomly stopping when something works well enough, I dropped by Stephen's Web today and have added the code for his hosted referrer-listing system. I may install the backend code myself, but I don't mind filtering my referrers through his host as an experiment.
Installing the tool seems to be simply a mater of adding
<script language="Javascript" src="http://www.downes.ca/referrers.js"></script>We'll see how it works. I still haven't got metalinker working right and I haven't even tried to install Textism's Refer tool yet.
categories: metablog
12:46:35 PM say what []
Nick Denton continues to bash the San Francisco bay area, now discerning a brain drain going on in the form of an exodus of notable bloggers:
So Dave Winer, a Silicon Valley institution, is moving to the East Coast. Winer, an influential independent developer, as influential as he is crotchety, is taking up a fellowship at Harvard Law School.(Emphasis added.) Now, if you read up on Nick you'll learn that he made his transition from journalist to entrepreneur in London, then moved to the Silicon Valley during the bubble, and eventually relocated to New York.
Dave Winer's originally from New York, and has been spending more time on the East Coast while his father has been ill. But he's part of a general movement of web people. The Bay Area just isn't as much of a draw, either intellectually or financially, as it was.
Meg Hourihan and Jason Kottke moved over to New York in December. Ben and Mena Trott are thinking about it. Paul Bausch and Jack Saturn moved to Oregon. Dan Gillmor is writing his new book from New York. Cory Doctorow yearns for Toronto.
Like Dave, I am myself originally from New York but moved to San Francisco about seventeen years ago without any speculative venture drawing me here (besides the general exploration of life and alternatives to the New York City megalopolis where I spent the first 21 years of my life).
If the Bay Area is no longer drawing web people, that's probably all to the good. The web should free people from having to overload a single metropolitan area to get productive work done. I'm not sure why the web should draw people to New York either, for that matter. I've retained many ties to New York and would happily live there again if the circumstances were ripe for it, but I've never noticed a lack of intellectual stimulation here in the San Francisco area. I suppose that's more a matter of who you know and who you spend your time with.
So is there really a "general movement of web people" out of Bay Area? I know when the bubble burst a lot of the people who moved here purely to work for startups had to leave or no longer had any reason to stay. Who wants to stick around a place where you went to make money and instead lost it?
Those of us who came for the climate, architecture, social history, and cultural tradition of openness and experimentation may not feel as compelled to quit the scene. Meanwhile, if I need a dose of intellectual stimulation from Manhattan, there's always Capital Influx and The Gawker.
categories: memewatch
11:05:44 AM say what []
