News You Can Bruise

Speaking of Evan, he's started a new weblog, walltype, where he curates photos from Flickr that fit his own baroque categorizations. I think it has explodingdog-esque potential.

Speaking of new weblogs by my friends: Pat Rafferty's Raffertyesque. Now you have something to read while you look at Evan's curated pictures.

Gaze with me into the mists of OPML... these are the weblogs I'm happiest I subscribed to in 2009. Again, not as many as in 2008.

• Sisoid's Blog of Geekery, featuring obsessive reviews of comic books and Star Trek ephemera. For instance, did you know that Cremaster 3 is not just a ripoff of Donkey Kong, it's a ripoff of an old Conan the Barbarian comic? Conan? Conan!
• The Daisy Owl web comic.
• The Geek Feminism Blog, now with extra Sumana.
• The Physics arXiv Blog.
• Two game-related weblogs: Hardcore Gaming 101 and The Grind.
• Objectively speaking, Baking Bites needs to be on this list, even though I'm not sure when I subscribed to it. Pretty much every recipe on that site is something I want to make, and often I do make it, to great acclaim.
• One of my goals in 2009 was to seriously learn about the pop culture of the 1970s, instead of dismissing it as an era covered in fake wood paneling and drenched in canola oil. My Retrospace has done... something to inform me about this time. I can't say I agree with the writer's conviction that the 1970s were the pinnacle of pop culture, but it's always good to read people with whom you disagree.
• Twitter update! So many people started using Twitter and Identica this year (even Sumana!) that my anti-Twitter position seems more William F. Buckley-esque by the day. I now subscribe to several Twitter feeds and it's possible that in the coming year I will even post. If nothing else, it seems like the simplest way to have a conversation with Kris.

  When "...Awesome Dinosaurs" was published I started searching Twitter for the phrase "awesome dinosaurs" to find people talking about the story, and I never stopped. The story talk died out months ago, but now it's a never-ending celebration of dinosaurs and their awesomeness.

You may have noticed that Sumana's weblog has been down. For quite a while. That's because the Berkeley OCF has been down for quite a while. We plan to take action on this once Sumana is less stressed by other things, but in the meantime Sumana is one of the people posting at Geek Feminism.

Three other weblogs I subscribed to recently:

• The Game Developer Research Institute is devoted to digging up the most obscure information about the video game business as it used to be: most notably, who did coding work for whom, and who ripped whom off.
• Similarly, Hardcore Gaming 101 not only has insanely detailed essays about specific game series, it now has a weblog that digs up more general retro tidbits, compares American and Japanese versions of games, etc. Less obscure stuff here than at the GDRI, since it focuses on the games rather than on the software companies that make them.
• The great thing about the Internet is that you can get access to cutting-edge scientific papers. Unfortunately, most of those papers are incomprehensible. Until now, the public was forced to resort to print science-popularization magazines with their long lead times. But now, there's the physics arXiv blog, presenting understandable summaries of the arXiv's most interesting or sensationalistic papers, as they're pre-published.

Uh, and a Wii Fit update: I've lost 6±1 pounds since I started my maniacal jogging a couple months ago. Not a whole lot, but it's the first time in my life my weight has gone down instead of up, and I haven't really made any other lifestyle changes.

Still needs a little work, but I think it's ready to launch. Roy's Postcards is a new Crummy weblog that will feature a new scanned and transcribed postcard from the 1980s, every day for the next three years. Most of the postcards were written by my father, either as notes to himself or as letters to me and my sisters, sent while he was on one of his many business trips. Some of the postcards are quotidian, some are crazy or silly, some are emotionally charged. A lot of them have beautiful, interesting, or bizarre pictures on the front. I hope you'll give it a look.

This is the largest extant corpus of my father's writing and I've been trying to figure out the best way to present it since I discovered these postcards in 2006. I think the one-a-day format, in a weblog intended to be experienced through the RSS feed, is the best way to keep the presentation interesting. It'll give you a little visual break every day in your feed reader while letting me go into some detail on each postcard, point out funny things, and explain what needs to be explained.

Over the past week or so I've processed enough postcards to have a year's worth of backlog. I estimate my total time investment in this project at about 100 hours. Not bad for three years of daily entertainment.

Keep looking back! This will probably be the last 2008 retrospective unless I decide to go through the books I read in 2008 or whatever. These are the syndication feeds I'm happiest I subscribed to in 2008. Caution: may contain nepotism.

• A Symbol A Day: only exists as an RSS feed. Every day there is a new symbol.
• Back of the Cereal Box: essays on obscure pop culture topics. But they're the obscure topics my age cohort cares about, so bite me.
• Also cordially invited to bite me is Twitter. If it takes longer for me to context-switch than to read something, I'm not going to read it. The only Twitter feed I read is Rachel Chalmers's, and she protects her updates, so I can't link to them.
• At the opposite end of the attention spectrum are podcasts, which I don't really listen to except while cleaning the kitchen. For such a task I prefer the harsh cleaning power of Retronauts and The Children's Hour of Knowledge.
• Friend weblogs: Kirk, because the RSS feed finally kind of works and because I met him this year. Evan finally started his own weblog and now only comments on 60% of my entries.
• Comics: chainsawsuit and Hark! A Vagrant!
• The Brothers Brick aggregates cool LEGO pictures so I only have to skim one LEGO weblog.
• Cinemassacre. James Rolfe is prolific and funny.
• Susan McCarthy tells awesome stories about animal behavior, and sometimes about Soviet show trials.
• Topic: video games. I unsubscribed from Gamasutra and subscribed to sister site GameSetWatch instead, because 1) when there's something I'd be interested in on Gamasutra, GSW usually links to it, 2) the columns are great, 3) they link to my weblog sometimes, and Gamasutra never did that.

  I also subscribed to DS Fanboy and Nintendo Wii Fanboy and Tiny Cartridge so I wouldn't be wandering around in a haze with no knowledge of the games available for the game systems we got this year. I feel like I should get rid of one of those subscriptions, but if I had to choose I'd get rid of NWF, which would leave me without total platform coverage!

  Finally, Auntie Pixelante is great all the time, like if Jake Berendes made video games about B&D.

• Topic: science fiction. On the demand side, tor.com is much better than the fluffy Gawkeriffic io9. On the supply side, the specficmarkets Livejournal community.

I heard a rumor that there was a recent NYCB entry that Evan hadn't left a comment on. Rather than investigate this rumor directly I went looking for whatever time-sink was keeping him from total comment coverage. It turns out that Evan has gone the route of many regular commenters on weblogs and started his own weblog. Subscribe for cross-references between life and literature, with pictures.

Hmm, it would seem that silly software also needs proper resource design. Who knew? In the meantime, enjoy Susan McCarthy's awesome animal behavior weblog. (cf.)

Mark Dominus's weblog is great! Don't worry, it contains hardly any Perl. It does contain "The Sesame Workshop people were not able to solve the problem."

Riana started a weblog about Search Engine Marketing, which I think is the flip side of the Search Engine Optimization business.

Speaking of marketing, to raise some extra scratch I've been forced to accept advertising in the Starslip Crisis RSS feed. Some might say, "Hey, shouldn't Kris be getting the money from that?", but those people don't recall that time in college when I lent Kris an infinite amount of money.

Noticed that I haven't been writing as much about spam recently? That's because I've been posting it all over at Spam As Folk Art. So have Kevan and Sumana.

Ever since Sumana first said "frog blog", people have continued to create weblogs called "frog blog". Recently we saw a frog blog that starred Demon Dog! Only they call him the Quiet Coyote, and his job is not to show up and commiserate with you when you are bored or annoyed, but to show up and silently express his Puritan disapproval of your noisiness. He is quiet; why can't you be?

Maybe Demon Dog is Quiet Coyote's evil brother. Or I could see them in an Odd Couple type matchup.

Seth's diary is now on NewsBruiser, after an evening of rewrite rule magic and Apache configuration frustration. Now you too can subscribe to his RSS feed, or just enjoy the superior navigability of NewsBruiser over... HTML files. Yeah, that was hard to beat.

The licensing stuff has to wait a little bit, because today I discovered that Movable Type has a data dump format! Well, you know how I love importing entries from other weblog tools. So I had to add a plugin to NewsBruiser that eats up that format and turns it into NewsBruiser entries. Thanks to Josh and Anirvan for sending me example dump files for me to work with. Today's new library is Transfusion, which parses the not-so-great MT data dump files into something you can use.

Incidentally, I've noticed a worrying difference between email spam and weblog spam. With email spam, the spammer can maybe approximate your spam list (after all, even spammers get spam), but they can't see your non-spam list without cracking your email account. On the other hand, with weblog spam no one sees the spam you deleted, but all the non-spam comments are right there for everyone to see and parse. It would be trivial for a comment spammer to post an exact repeat of someone else's comment but with Viagra links all over the place. In the long run, a Bayesean filter for comment spam might degenerate into an IP and URL blacklist. Is there any algorithmic defense against an attacker who has access to everything previously blessed by the algorithm?

In the court of The Sun King, cell phones are mandatory. (From Hart's Weblog via Sumana.)

Check out The Religious Policeman, an relatively new English-language weblog written by a Saudi. Your average political complaining weblog, except he's complaining about the lack of elections in his country. Caution: contains pictures of public executions. I'm not kidding.

I'd love to find more English-language weblogs written by natives of non-English-speaking countries--please post your favorites in comments. I want English-language weblogs because I want to read them, not collect them, and unfortunately I don't speak all the world's languages. I'm a failure!

Kevan's latest project is a syndicated weblog of Victorian satire Diary of a Nobody. It uses NewsBruiser, and in doing so exposes all the warts of the portal page that for some reason I never really anticipated being used as the front page of a website. Gotta get busy.

PS: Coming soon: more Kevan mania. Wait til you see the link he sent me! You won't believe the twist! Because it's based on a counterfactual!

PPS: Already here but not actually released: mine and Peter's weblog-ish hypertext versions of Gogol's Diary of a Madman. There's also fifty contemporary weblogs with the same title, most probably named after the Ozzy Osbourne song rather than directly after the story. Find the next trend before it happens!

Pepys' diary should be a Livejournal, not a Moveable Type installation.

The Eater of Meaning provides a great tool for other people's April Fool's Day jokes, so I should be excused forever from having to come up with them, right? I think that's how it works.

Anyway, Sumana suggested I could make an April fool as a dessert today. As far as I can tell no one has ever thought of doing this before, though there are lots of April Fool's Day themed recipes for tormenting your kids with. I don't have any specific April ingredients, but there were key limes at the grocery store yesterday, which there usually aren't, so unless they've started selling the runts as key limes those are probably seasonal.

This was my thinking way back this morning, when I thought a fool was a kind of sponge cake or something. It turns out it's just cream whipped with flavored syrup. Now it doesn't sound like much of a dessert. Sounds like the thing Brendan got in the Sizzler clone in Illinois that he thought was pudding but turned out to be Cool Whip and Oreos. Wait, that was hilarious! If I could somehow harness the power of that incident, I'd have the perfect April fool April Fool!

Sumana just IMed me saying she'd finally caved in and read the "We're under zombie attack" weblog, which made me realize that it's sort of the real life equivalent of a zombie. I try to resist its undead power, but everywhere I turn I see it coming towards me, closing in! Help!

My cousin Kristen Smith, Alyson's sister, now has a weblog on crummy.com. Man, this is turning into Livejournal! In a good way.

Remember the days of wacky flowcharts? No, I don't either. But they existed, and for a time the writers of wacky flowcharts were given high esteem. They mingled with the likes of the guy who did the "You Want It When?" and "If You Think People Never Come Back From The Dead, You Should See This Place Around Closing Time!" posters, and did fearsome battle with the "Hang In There!" kitten. Their deeds were recorded on... extremely linear flowcharts, I guess.

+-----------------------+   +---------------------------------------+
| Wrote wacky flowchart |-->| Incorporated suggestions into version |
+-----------------------+   | 2 of wacky flowchart                  | 
                            +---------------------------------------+
                                              |
                                              v
                    +---------------------------------------------+
  +-----------------| Revealed 6 new flowcharts at company picnic |
  |                 +---------------------------------------------+
  v
+------------------------------------------------------------+
| Came up with trendy Cabbage Patch Dolls flowchart, big hit |
+------------------------------------------------------------+
                         |
                         v
         +------------------------------------+
   +-----| Cabbage Patch Doll market collapse |
   |     +------------------------------------+             
   |
   |   +---------+    +---------------------------------------------+
   +-->| Despair |--->| Slashed wrists with own flowchart templates |
       +---------+    +---------------------------------------------+
                                           |
                                           v
                                     +-------------+
                                     | NO PROBLEM! |
                                     +-------------+

As flowcharts became obsolete, a few of the surviving wacky flowchart writers managed to make the transition to wacky UML diagrams, but their audience ever shrinks and becomes more technical. Some of the old stuff is really good, though. For instance, today on Crooked Timber they posted a funny, multi-page Meta-Cosmology Theory Flowchart. That was actually the whole point of this entry, but it's sort of overshadowed by the graphic. HEY! LOOK OVER HERE! There, that should do it.

Even today, flowcharts are sometimes funny, but it's usually unintentional.

Hoo, if I may, hah. I've got my nitro-burning NewsBruiser Bayesian spam detector working and into CVS, and it is sweet. Now that I've got it working, I can implement comments in NewsBruiser with a relatively clear conscience. It's still a way for people to automatically write on your website, but now there's a way to automatically stop them from writing crap. There might even be comments on NYCB in the relatively near future (shock, gasp, etc.).

Other reasons why you should look at that screenshot: the first fake weblog name is really good, good enough for someone to use[0], and while making up fake spam for the sample Bayesian network I came up with the phrase "the set of all sluts".

I think the lack of comments is the leading cause of people who might use NewsBruiser not using NewsBruiser. Every time people complain about Blogger or Moveable Type, I (along with every other penny-ante weblog software author) see an opportunity to plug our own software. I'm too shy to actually do it, though. I'm stuck in the naive hacker's world where if I make something better everyone will automatically use it.

I still need weblog spam from you. I want to provide a starter Bayesian network with NewsBruiser, and I need me some data. The trackbacks and comments will share a Bayesian network, BTW; the datasets are undoubtedly similar, and that will cut down on training time.

PS: I made Reverend work with Python 1.5, because I live in a cave. If you're interested, it's here.

[0] Another weblog name I made up recently: "Commodius Vicus". You're welcome.

Do you have a weblog? Are you bothered by unsightly trackback spam and/or its sinister, tar-dripping companion, comment spam? I'd like to collect samples of these noxious materials for NewsBruiser work I'm doing. I can find lots of places where people *talk* about weblog spam, but by the time they start talking about it they've already gone in with a pitchfork and killed it all. So please mail me some weblog spam you've gotten, if it's convenient for you.

I know I previously swore revenge on Ned Batchelder's weblog, but it's growing on me. On Monday he linked to a big list of historical documents from computer science, including the feelies of historical computer science, flowchart templates. My dad gave me a couple flowchart templates when I was a kid, and I drew with them, and I just now realized in a where-does-your-father-do-his-barnacles moment that not every child drew or draws pictures made of flowchart template shapes.

Anyway, that's the software side of things, and on the hardware side there's the collection of old scanned computer manuals, truly a labor of love. A random skim through the manuals reveals, eg. the Hayes Stack Chronograph, which is an external system clock. I thought external CD-ROM drives were old school, but it turns out that that school was built on the ruins of an even older school.

[Wait, under what circumstances did you swear revenge on Ned Batchelder's weblog? -Ed. Such questions are not productive in these times of transition, as we seek to reopen friendly relations with Ned Batchelder's weblog. How come I never heard about this? Is this one of those delusional things you make up as you type to make an entry more interesting? -Ed. You're a spy for Ned Batchelder's weblog, aren't you? Fie! This means war!]

I thought this joke Python proposal was pretty funny. So funny, in fact, that I already linked to it. Note to self: replace this entry with something new.

OK, here you go. Resign Patterns, including "Simpleton" and "Flypaper". From Ned Batchelder's weblog.

Hey. I'm proud to announce the existence of two new weblogs hosted on crummy.com: A Day In The Life by my cousin Alyson Matkin of Texas travelogue fame; and Traffic by John Chadwick, Susanna's husband and my brother-in-law (man, that sounds weird). Both weblogs sort of look the same, because I am not the world's greatest web designer. Minimalism is a good trick, but by definition it only works once. If any of you good readers want to help them out (which seems a little unlikely, since nobody's bitten on the icon thing yet), I'm sure they'd love a nicer-looking front page than what I've made for them. It'll look better once I get their pictures.

Incidentally, if you are related to me and you want a weblog, I'll host it here.

Are there any websites besides weblogs.com and blo.gs that want to be pinged when you update your weblog? Now that it's possible (with more plugin magic), I want NewsBruiser to be set up to be able to ping all of them.

Assuming, of course that your day job is the previously discussed one of traversing a huge virtual reality representation of world trade, looking for the tiny inefficiencies between the cogs of global capitalism. Just give it up already. The PRBop weblog regularly finds enormous inefficiencies between the cogs of global capitalism (like more useless stuff in the Metreon), and there's just no way to exploit them. (Link found via BoingBoing, in what is apparently phase II of the "lure Cory Doctorow to my home" scheme. Why am I doing that, anyway?)

The guest weblog was a big success, such a success that I've taken it off the front page to remove the temptation to not write anything in NYCB, instead cynically pretending the guest weblog is something I write somnambulically. I don't know whether to move it to a side spot on the front page like the BoingBoing guest weblog, causing the participants to lose interest as the novelty fades, or to just hide it until the next time I'm gone. Probably the latter, since I was unable to think of a downside for that option. Thanks to all participants for their great entries, especially to Brendan for putting up the first part of his semicanonical Jake Berendes West Covina graphic novel.

More information about my trip coming soon. If you want a trilobite, talk to me. If you want pictures, wait until I get my DSL equipment (I called today and discovered that someone forgot to push the damn button that sends my equipment, so the guy filed a Request To Push Damn Button, and hopefully that will be the end of it), or check out Seth's cool pictures from Germany.

Welcome the latest addition to the NewsBruiser family: Timo Virkkala's WeeTee's Piece Of Mind, all the way from Finland. (Wow, I now know an amazing 0.00005% of the population of Finland! Only 5909239 to go!)

Timo's installation story is pretty harrowing, but only one of his problems was directly caused by NewsBruiser (and it's been fixed in CVS), so I feel a little better. It's always painful setting up a web application on a machine you don't control; I tried to design NewsBruiser for that situation because I know the feeling. Anyway, I hope Timo has a great time with NewsBruiser.

Incidentally, the download URL I gave Timo is this one, and here's the patch against nb/NewsBruiserCGIs.py which fixes the infinite loop problem in version 1.13.0. I guess I'll have to release a version as soon as I get Internet back:

131c131
<         while not os.path.exists(dir):
---
>         while dir and not os.path.exists(dir):

For the impatient, Jarno has information about EuroPython and the surrounding vacation: 1 2 3

Sumana pointed me to a sweet entry in Zoe's weblog.

I'm not talking about your mass-market weblogs for Dawson's Creek characters. I'm talking grass-roots weblogs for stuffed elephants.

The stuffed elephant has been to Belgium, too.

(Via AMAI, another in the endless series of weblogs found via Downhill browsing)

A while ago I said that a good simple name for a weblog would be "x's Wild Weblog". Well, now I present Jughead's Wild Weblog!. I love the un-self-conscious writing style. Reminds me of Adam.

Here's the thing: Downhill. It's basically an Oracle of Bacon for weblogs. It uses the weblog ecosystem data to find the shortest path between any two weblogs, measured by outgoing and incoming links. I was surprised not to find a preexisting implementation of this, but now it's been done. Just my contribution to the LazyWeb.

Topher Tune's Times linked to some mighty trick photography (the mightiest and trickiest is the second photo).

Here's a great article on the implementation of VisiCalc (the first spreadsheet), article written by Bob Frankston, one of the original authors of VisiCalc. This article reveals all: as inevitably happens, they shipped the prototype.

The other primary author of Visicalc, Dan Bricklin, has on his website a wealth of VisiCalc reference material, including a less technical history with photos, all with a really cool navigation system that makes it feel like the future. Dan has his own weblog, and he and Bob collaborate with some other folks on the popular SATN.org weblog, where they talk about telecommunications, copyright, and other curmudgeonly topics.

[Note: this entry inaugurates "Heroes of the Elder Age", the new series of Crummy trading cards and weblog entries (trading cards not available). HotEA honors the authors of cool old pieces of software and does a sort of "where are they now" showcasing of their current web sites. There was a previous entry in this series, on Jeff Lee, one of the authors of Q*Bert, but the series hadn't been titled yet, so it doesn't count as inaugural.]

TEoM was linked to by a lot of weblogs. Here are some of the ones I liked, with links to the cool stuff I found via them that made me like them.

• Angels from Another Pin linked to a great site about medieval writing. Includes explanations of what the ancients thought they were doing when they went through all that trouble to put into manuscripts stuff that now seems like fancy superfluous junk. I'm talking to you, illumination!
• Stormcaller.net has occasional roundups in categories "Science/Tech", "Geek", and "Stuff", which is partly stuff you've seen on BoingBoing, and partly stuff that could go on BoingBoing but hasn't. Highlights include a one-man cruise missile project, a UK-based site for less destructive tech status symbols, and the awesome, already-linked-everywhere to-scale renditions of fictional spaceships (the cool thing is not just that they're to scale but that they're all drawn in the same sort of semitechnical style, so you could see them all engaged in one enormous, canon-shattering space battle).
• relicious linked to Blogmatcher, which is like an automatic version of The Blog Twinning Project which uses some weird algorithm to decide that your weblog is like other weblogs that link to the same thing. (Incidentally, TBTP now pairs Crummy with The Cynic's Tea Party) I think that Blogmatcher should not consider my links to things which are themselves weblogs, but other than that it's useful (but doomed to be assimilated into Technorati and forgotten about).

  Also from relicious I found an archive of Transformers. I'm not some kind of Transformers freak or anything, but I enjoyed the prototypes and the Transformers Knock-Offs page. The latter does not cover entire lines of Transformers knockoffs like the Gobots; it details actual copies of actual Transformers with pathetic filed-off serial numbers of names ("Ancient Animal?" Give me a break!). It also reminds me how pointless a lot of the later Transformers were. How was a Transformer that turned into a dinosaur supposed to fool anyone? "Oh, it's just an ordinary titanium Triceratops, nothing to worry--GAAH! IT TURNED INTO A ROBOT WITH A GUN!"

• I don't think 101-280 actually linked to TEoM, but they get an honorable mention for being named after the freeway junction I traverse every weekday going to work and back.

More Salam Pax. "Some idiots started firing their Kalashnikovs and guns and made my paranoid aunt totally believe that the American troops are in the street."

He's a Python programmer. She's... also a Python programmer. They have blogs! Also available as one huge barely-differentiated group weblog.

(PS: format taken from They Have Blogs, a web toy of about a year ago).

1. All my troubles seemed so far away.
2. I went to see Seth.

At Seth's place I showed him my PyCon presentation. Then we went through my code. Both presentation and code were well-received. Seth complimented my use of object-oriented design, and we came up with some minor improvements to I Want Options (for instance, IntegerOption should be called CountingNumberOption).

Then Seth showed me the features of Movable Type he likes. I have all of them except for user accounts and permissions (which isn't going to happen anytime soon) and a clever entry list in edit mode. I also like the category list in edit mode.

I passed along to Seth the copy of The Bug, about which more later. I have to pack for DC.

kathy's wild weblog

"x's wild weblog" is a good construction, and as far as I can tell it's never been used. Go to it!

Here's Sushicam, a cool photo-heavy journal from Japan. This segues nicely into the thing which has almost nothing to do with that, which is that I've convinced Ed to bring me back those copies of those Godzilla movies when he returns from Japan. I have no way of watching the DVDs, and they probably won't have English subtitles, but I remain confident that Providence will... provide.

With GPS Drawing, you can visualize your wanderings from the air as an elephant, or a lattice of explodingdog-ish geometric shapes. If Conan Doyle were still around, Holmes could locate the jewels right where they appeared when you superimposed over a map of London the Punch cartoon depicting the theft, in an amazing feat of deduction and high-stakes geocaching. Maybe Stephenson will come through with something similar. Link from the abyss means...

This has been unobtrusively hanging around on the front page for a while now, but I should mention it because I generally mention such things. You can now receive NYCB by email every night, thanks to Bloglet. This is the realization of the hosted email RSS aggregator I mentioned earlier. "I'll never need to visit Crummy again!", said Manoj. If this idea appeals to you, go to the bottom of the front page and sign up. Heck, you can do it here!

Sumana said "frog blog". I searched for frog blogs. Here are ten.

1. Squished Frog Blog
2. zen frog blog
3. frog blog
4. Electric Frogplate - Frog Blog
5. frogBLOG
6. Ribbity Blog
7. The Boiled Frog Blog
8. frog's blog
9. Frog n' Blog
10. A Frog in the Valley

toastedkitten and friedkitten. Fight!

Real Live Preacher, one of the best new blogs, thanks the Creator for The Big Lebowski. Just below that entry is a guide to tamales ("Do not eat the corn shuck wrapper, Yankee.").

Spyblog ("Simple Python blogger"). It's got comments!

A. Holloway read the entire NYCB ouvre for 2002, and decided that his favorite entry was the very first one of the year, the one about Carmel. Runners-up: Smells Like Teen Circuit, The Two Saturns (aka "How Leonard Thinks"), The Weblog Foundation series, and the one where it gets weird.

My mother's favorite is the putative description of Kiss Me Kant.

That's it (unless you have an email on this subject that you've been holding off sending).

What can we say about 2002? For those of us still under NDA, not much. [That wasn't an NDA! It was a credit card receipt from the grocery store! -ed.]

OK, apparently I have to actually write this entry. 2002 was a bumper year for uninformed speculation and hysterical fearmongering. I admit that many of the predictions in my Weekly Standard article, "2002 Predictions for 2002 (Not That You'll Be Around Next Year To Verify Them)" were off the mark, and may even have irresponsibly contributed to the year-end rush to stockpile dog collars and refried water. My assertion that by May we would all be sweeping diamond dust in the gem mines of Aldebaran was clearly off by a couple of years, and I can no longer mantain with a straight face that hair lasers are only months away. However, according to Lexis-Nexis my predictions for the hottest buzzwords of 2002 ("if", "the", and "and") were spot on, and my tepid attempt at an Enron joke prediction remained trite and boring the entire year.

Longtime NYCB readers will not be surprised to learn that for another year my warnings against the dreaded giant clam went sadly unheeded by both parties in Washington. My Pulitzer Prize-winning article, The Sociology of The Continental Shelf proved invaluable for filling up that section of the Times-Picayune they print on Mondays even though it's only about four pages long, but its policy recommendations never reached the right ears. Admittedly, Congress passed several anti-bivalve bills last year, but none of them credited me for being the first to call the attention of the public to this vital issue. The only bright spot was the retirement of Senator Strom Thurmond, for many years notorious as the best friend in government of Big Clam.

2002 was surely the Year of the Blog. Turning now to my own prodigious output, I find over 1200 "entries", each crafted with the care and political acumen which an old hand like myself can draw upon. As the tumultuous events of 2002 unfolded, it was blogs like NYCB which brought you the voices of real people on the front lines. In 2003, as more print journalists discover the possibilities of the Web, will we see the democratization of media and a closer connection between author and audience? If this old dog can learn new tricks, then perhaps the best answer is... stay tuned.

Next: readers nominate the best NYCB entries of 2002.

Mike Popovic has an amazing two new weblogs devoted to the Hiptop, a cool unreleased PDA with the incredible business model innovation by which you pay one flat fee for a month of connectivity (you may remember this business model from the freaking Internet). Mike is testing a Hiptop, which has many other cool features, and he logs his experiences and ideas for additional features at mikepop meets hiptop. Meanwhile, at Hipshake, Mike writes little skits presenting glimpses into the horrifying world that is modern life with the Hiptop. Caution! It's damn fake!

Mike's weblogs provide much-needed competition for Danger Info, which has become a bit complacent recently. Actually, I just made that up.

I'm wondering if NYCB qualifies as a weblog. Here is my reasoning on the subject:

Me #1: It's on the Web, and it's a log. Thus, it's a weblog.
Me #2: It's not a log, you freak!
Me #1: It's a log. Try Nathan Hale Weblog Beer. It's a weblog. Beer.
Me #2: NYCB is not a weblog, dammit! It's you talking about the stupid things that happen in your stupid life!
Me #1: Me? It's you who does that! I bring the weblog to life with witty anecdotes and hot links with the freshest commentary around!
Me #2: Yeah, well weblog this! [hits Me #1 in the face]
Me #1 Why I oughta... [jumps Me #2]
[rumble ensues]

I think if you sliced NYCB a certain way, you would get a weblog, but that would be a mighty poor way of slicing it, as you would miss all the weird entries like this one. Well, this particular one you would probably get.

Yes, Leonard's Yummy Homepage has returned. Bigger, bolder, and brassier than ever, the new page on the new server has got more nifty personal stuff than you can shake a stick at. For those who would charge me with narcissism, I say this: I like going to people's homepages and looking at their pictures and seeing the cool things they've done. If you don't like that sort of thing, I have other sites which you can browse and browse without ever learning very much about me personally. If you do enjoy such voyeuristic activities, then in the words of the America Online guy, welcome. You've got mail. 98% of which is spam.

    Hey all you impressionable kids, don't forget to read our special holiday message! Heh heh heh...

    Bleeg! I'm splitting a (ph/f)at 90-minute tape with underground pop sensation Jake "I've lost all underground pop sensation in my fingers" Berendes, he's the man, if he can't do it, eat raisin bran. I want my side to be called First Church of Deranged Sock Puppet, Sock Puppet because, well, it's a funny title. Look for the tape to have its own IRS page, or whatever we're going to replace IRS with, soon.