Ben Hammersley: "The combination of comment spammers, and the database calls made by mt-comments.cgi and MT-Blacklist, is putting so much load on servers that the admins are having to pull sites down to save the others."

I haven't used MT-Blacklist for my Movable Type sites, because I am loathe to trust third parties to provide up-to-date and correct blacklists. I'm having good results so far by simply closing old entries to comments and trackback.

Movable Type · 2004/12/15 · 1 COMMENT · Link

Departing Anchorman is Rather Odd

When Dan Rather leaves CBS Evening News in March, America will lose our best chance to see an anchorman completely blow his top on live television, Howard Beale style.

During the Jennings-Brokaw-Rather era of network news, there has never been question who the weirdest anchor was. Wikipedia runs down a few rather odd moments, from the disturbing "what's the frequency, Kenneth?" mugging to his telling people "Courage" at the end of broadcasts for one week in September 1986, at which point he chickened out in the face of widespread mockery.

As a Texan myself, I will most miss Rather's clumsy attempts at folksy metaphors, especially when he's vamping during a live broadcast. He says so many odd things that they've come to be known as ratherisms. One from Election Night 2000 turned out to be a pretty good description of the broadcast media's performance that evening:

Frankly we don't know whether to wind the watch or to bark at the moon.

Many ratherisms lose some of their homespun wisdom by virtue of being completely made up, rather than something that Texans have been saying to each other for decades as we talk between spittoon shots at the local saloon at the end of a cattle drive before bedding a comely schoolmarm. Lately, Rather's been trying to invent a new double-adverb, tee-totally, me-mortally.

A 2003 appearance on Larry King Live:

King: Time magazine is reporting that some Arab leaders are encouraging a scene whereby Saddam Hussein is overthrown, exiled or possibly taken out. What are you hearing about that over there, Dan?

Rather: Larry, I've seen absolutely tee-totally, me-mortally no indication of that in traveling around Iraq, principally in and around Baghdad.

On Election Night 2004:

Lawyers are swarming over Ohio like locusts. And there are going to be more of 'em there tomorrow, and more of 'em the day after ... [Bush's people are] absolutely tee-totally, me-mortally convinced they’re going to carry Ohio.

A Google search shows this adverb to be completely original to the anchorman. No English speakers appear to have ever used it in a sentence unless they were quoting him.

So to Dan Rather I say, you will tee-totally, me-mortally be missed. Courage.

Journalism · Jargon · 2004/12/15 · 4 COMMENTS · Link

You May Already Be a Winner

I received around 25 entries in the Movable Type Bible Desktop Edition book giveaway.

Chosen at random from received comments and trackback, the five winners are Elise Bauer, Richard MacManus, Harrison Brace, Christian Crumlish, and Judi Sohn.

I'm also sending one to Hanna for the shameless heart-wrenching tale of hard luck in her contest entry:

I could mention that I'm ridiculously poor, being disabled and a ward of the state. But that would be demeaning, wouldn't it?

I'll be fighting the last-minute Christmas crowds at the post office to mail out these books, dodging surly Floridians with holiday cheer deficiency syndrome who have dug hideous sweaters out from storage for our first (and perhaps last) freeze. Wish me luck.

Movable Type · Publishing · 2004/12/14 · 7 COMMENTS · Link

Joe Daugherty waxes poetic about the Pocket Disc, a 4-inch vinyl record format that didn't catch on in the '60s. Their slogan: "Carry them in your pocket -- they won't scratch."

Music · 2004/12/14 · Comment · Link

Deliver Us From Sean Hannity

Caught a minute of Sean Hannity's radio show last night, and it was enough time to break my brain. He claimed that this newspaper item on Jimmy Carter demonstrates that the former president is a limousine liberal:

As one of the most prolific authors ever to sit in the Oval Office, former President Jimmy Carter knows how to sell books. As he hawks his 19th, Sharing Good Times, Carter reveals his secret to reaching the bestseller list: Pitch buyers at discount warehouses. "Sam's Club and Costco," he says, "have a vast array of customers. So they're very valuable assets." Carter, who favors Costco for West Coast book signings and Sam's in the East, says the warehouses draw a different audience than do bookstores. "Barnes & Noble people go there almost by definition to buy books," he says, "where at Sam's they come in to buy different items ... and as an aside a lot of them just come by and buy one of my books because they announce on the loudspeaker system that I'm there signing books." The customers are "not sophisticates," though he adds, "Anybody who buys my books is a good person."

I read that as a funny example of Carter's self-effacing humility -- he thinks people only show up at his signings because they're already there to buy 80-roll packs of Charmin toilet paper.

The evil simpleton of the airwaves, Hannity said that it shows liberals like Carter fly on private planes and have people make their peanut butter sandwiches for them, looking down their noses at people in the middle class "like us."

Hannity charges $100,000 a speech and requires private planes to get him there.

Carter makes free speeches or donates the fee to the Carter Center charity. He lives in a modest house in Plains, Georgia, that he's owned for decades, according to a 1999 Money magazine article, and refuses to cash out on his presidency by joining corporate boards:

John Moores, who owns the San Diego Padres and sits on the board of the Carter Center, says, "I couldn't possibly live the way he does. ... He is as insensitive to material goods as anyone I've ever met."

Publishing · Politics · 2004/12/14 · 10 COMMENTS · Link

AIDS Conspiracist Takes the Prize

The Nobel Foundation gave the yearly Peace Prize today to a Kenyan environmental activist who believes that the HIV virus is a biological weapon created to kill blacks.

Wangari Maathai, honored for a long career of empowering women highlighted by a movement that planted 30 million trees, made the claim to an AIDS workshop in Nyeri, Kenya, Aug. 30, according to the East African Standard:

AIDS is not a curse from God to Africans or the black people. It is a tool to control them designed by some evil-minded scientists.

Though Maathai now claims she was taken out of context, she reiterated the belief in a press conference on Oct. 9, the day after news broke she would win the prize:

Us black people are dying more than any other people in this planet. ... it is created by a scientist for biological warfare."

Politics · 2004/12/10 · Comment · Link

The magazine eWeek broke a huge tech story that got lost over Thanksgiving: Richard Stallman and Eben Moglen of the Free Software Foundation are working on the first new version of the GNU Public License in 13 years.

The changes planned for the next release, Version 3, a draft of which is due next year, focus on several broad topics that reflect the dynamic change in the software industry since the early 1990s—intellectual property licensing and patent issues, the question of how to deal with software used over a network, and concerns around trusted computing.

Linux · 2004/12/09 · Comment · Link

Read More Entries