People of Poland: Nie Rozumie

The pope has to be multilingual -- upon his selection, Pope John Paul II wowed the crowd at St. Peter's Square by addressing them in fluent Italian.

Apparently, popesquatters have to be multilingual too. My weblog has been overrun by discussions in Polish. I don't know what they are saying, but I've been told that it's bad. I can handle that, as long as you lay off my matka.

I've created this weblog entry as a place to hold all of the comments in languages I do not understand (i.e. everything but English and a little Esperanto).

To my new friends in Poland, I've looked over a phrasebook to cross the language barrier as best I can:

Kocham cie. Kochasz mnie? Sto lat niech zyje nam!

If someone could translate "buy my books" into Polish, I would appreciate it.

Update: kup moje ksiazki!

Domains · 2005/04/20 · 253 COMMENTS · Link

Habemus Domini!

"A spokesperson for the US Conference of Bishops declined to speculate on whether the Vatican would ask Cadenhead to transfer ownership of BenedictXVI.com and the other potential papal name addresses he controls. Messages left with the Vatican's embassy in Washington were not returned."

When I registered six domain names at the end of a 14-hour writing day earlier this month, I didn't realize that my actions would reach all the way up to the Vatican. I figured that some idiot was going to do it, so the idiot might as well be me.

I've received an offer from a gambling site. I'm pretty sure that's a bad idea, ecclesiastically speaking, but I should contact Bill Bennett to make sure.

Thinking out loud, I'm trying to figure out what I might ask for, should Pope Benedict's people get with my people (a hastily convened College of Cardinals that includes my grandmother Rita and my in-laws, fellow Catholics whose commitment to our faith was demonstrated by their nine children).

Here are some things I would like. Please do not call them demands:

• I. Three days, two nights at the Vatican hotel they built for the conclave.
• II. One of those hats.
• III. Complete absolution, no questions asked, for the third week of March 1987.
• IV. A back-cover blurb from the Pope for the next edition of Movable Type 3 Bible Desktop Edition. But only if he uses the book to create his own weblog.
• V. World peace.

Domains · 2005/04/20 · 53 COMMENTS · Link

A Pope is a Pope is a Pope

The cardinals of the Roman Catholic Church will lock themselves into the Sistine Chapel in around 15 minutes and stay there until they've chosen a new pope.

When a candidate receives at least 77 votes, a two-thirds majority of cardinals, he'll be asked, "do you accept your canonical election as supreme pontiff?" If he replies "accepto," he becomes the pope and can immediately choose a new name.

As I understand the process, he can select anything -- Pope P. Diddy I, Pope Atrios I, and Pope Jurassic Park IV are not out of the question -- or simply keep his own first name. But for 15 centuries the new pope, like rappers, bloggers, and actors, has adopted a nom de pontiff.

In most cases, the name is chosen to give props to a past pope, as John Paul II did for John Paul I.

My money's on one of these six names:

• Benedict XVI
• Clement XV
• Innocent XIV
• Leo XIV
• Paul VII
• Pius XIII

I mean this literally. I registered all six of these as dot-com domain names earlier this month, which I feared was tacky -- to say nothing of soul-imperiling -- until I read about the vacant papal see stamp. Clearly I'm not the only baptized Catholic who gets geeked about this process.

I don't think there's any speculative potential in these domains, but I couldn't resist the chance to have some skin in the game. Someone else already has JohnPaulIII.Com and JohnXXIV.Com, but otherwise I put a chip down on every name of the past three centuries.

A Hungarian web site caught me doing this, accusing me of legöbb spekuláns a pápa.

I don't expect we'll get another John Paul -- the Italian saying "always follow a fat pope with a skinny pope" refers to cardinals' desire not to go too far in one direction. But I'm concerned about John.

The Irish betting site Paddy Power has Benedict as a 3-to-1 favorite, trailed by John Paul at 4-to-1, Pius at 6-to-1, and Peter at 8-to-1.

The last choice would lend itself to rapturous excitement among end-times believers -- there's a long belief that the last pope will call himself Peter II.

Update: A few news reports suggest that I might have popesquatted BenedictXVI.Com to sell it to pornographers. For the love of God, people, that's not going to happen. I will be running any plans I have for this domain by my own Catholic doctrinal enforcer, my never-miss-a-Sunday grandmother Rita.

Update to the Update: Florida Man Secured BenedictXVI.com Weeks Ago, Washington Post

Update III: Habemus Domini!

Domains · 2005/04/18 · 607 COMMENTS · Link

Brian Buck, 1971-2005

For the last several years, I've read Brian Buck's weblog and marvelled at the energy and optimism he mustered during a fight with osteosarcoma that began nearly five years ago.

Buck died April 7 at age 33.

His whole site's worth a read, but here are a few of my favorite entries:

• Aug. 5, 2004: "I'm a sucker for that Dylan-esque sound with the sky high organs and the lyrics about driving and dreaming about some girl."
• Jan. 9, 2004: "I took this photo about an hour after the fog had lifted from the valley."
• Jan. 8, 2004: "This was one of those beautiful April snowstorms."
• Feb. 23, 2003: "I am still learning the language of mourning."
• Sept. 18, 2002: "It is scary, some might say stupid, to let it all hang out and tell the world about your vulnerabilities."
• June 10, 2002: "What I was really fighting for was a return to normalcy."

He wrote often about his illness, both in personal and pragmatic terms. Advice from a January 22, 2003 entry in particular ought to be shared, as people spread this sad news:

Dave: "$400 a month -- I asked what it would cost if I didn't have insurance. $400 per month. And that's just one drug."

And this is just the tip of the iceberg. Chemotherapy can cost up to, and sometimes even over, $25,000 a week.

If you don't have good private health insurance, you are not going to be seen by anyone but the complete bottom of the barrel MDs. And this won't be at a nice facility, it will be at the shitty hospital in town, you know, the one on the 5 o'clock news where people die all the time of simple, treatable diseases like bronchitis.

My friend's husband died of lymphoma because the crappy HMO he was being "treated" in completly screwed up. They claimed to not know what was wrong with him. When he finally paid out of his own pocket to see a doctor at Sloan Kettering, he was Stage IV, it was too late, and he died.

Then factor in you are not working. If you do not have disability pay, forget about getting paid for a long, long time.

If you are the main earner in the house, count on being financially ruined without a disability policy. Count on cutting corners on your treatment since you don't have any more money and are hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt.

This is scary as hell! Trust me, I was a figure of health before I was diagnosed with bone cancer: never got sick, had a decent weight, exercised semi-regularly, ate healthy, and I was only 29 years old in the prime of my life. And like Dave, before any of this happened to me, I was completely clueless.

Fact is, cancer and most diseases do not discriminate. Rich, poor, black, white, fat, skinny, healthy, sickly -- it does not matter and it could happen to anybody, anytime.

It was never my intention to get cancer. But here I am. And so far I have been extremely lucky to have excellent health and disability coverage. I am 100 percent sure that I would be dead already if I had worse insurance.

If you don't believe me, and want to research this further, begin reading with this Google search. It will open your eyes.

2005/04/17 · 5 COMMENTS · Link

David Raynes has released Workflow, a plug-in for Movable Type that adds fine-grained editing capabilities to weblog authors. As Anil Dash explains:

Workflow lets you limit control of publshing rights to certain authors in your Movable Type installation, allowing other people on the system to act as editors and review entries before they're published. Administrators can control who has rights to any of these levels of permissions. Plus, authors can transfer ownership of a post to other authors and they'll be notified by email when the transfer happens.

The most remarkable thing about this release, which is supported by a free personal license and $250 commercial license, is that the Workflow plug-in can be extended with plug-ins.

I'm skeptical that third-party developers can be profitable creating add-ons to weblog software, even a product as popular as Movable Type. As the author of books on Radio UserLand and Movable Type, I'm finding it difficult when the pool of potential customers is limited to a single weblog tool, though I greatly enjoyed writing the books.

But I'd love to be proven wrong.

Radio Userland · Publishing · Movable Type · 2005/04/16 · 2 COMMENTS · Link

I'm Totally Straight, But ...

A few weeks ago I invented a new game dubbed googlemilking -- looking for a phrase in search engines that lends itself to hilarious, off-color, or unintentionally self-revealing results.

The game was covered by the Scotsman newspaper yesterday, and you can find players by searching for the first googlemilk: "I'm totally straight, but ...":

Just as you know that any sentence beginning with the words "I'm not one of those racialists but ..." will end in a diatribe about immigration, it is obvious that the closing part of a statement beginning "I'm totally straight but" will be something along the lines of "I'm not totally straight". Some of them are hilarious. Some are shocking. All are entertaining.

The phrase turns up a lot of interesting (and obscene) results, the greatest of which is the totally straight guy struggling with his attraction to Aragorn from Lord of the Rings:

I'm totally straight, but even I admitted the [blank]ability of Aragorn. Seriously, check the guy out. What a total badass. Doesn't mean I'd actually [blank] him, but if I were the type to [blank] guys, he'd be on my list.

My favorite googlemilk so far is so I decided to do something about it, which catches people right as they turn a long repressed desire into action, getting the hair, breasts, insemination, or teddy bear manufacturing business they've always wanted.

As a side effect of the game, I'm now the top result on Google for "totally straight," which ought to finally put to rest those rumors back in college.

Jargon · Googlemilking · Google · 2005/04/14 · 10 COMMENTS · Link

I've Stumbled and I Can't Get Up

I discovered several hundred links from StumbleUpon this morning in my referrer logs, a multi-browser, multi-platform toolbar for reviewing and recommending web sites. Installing the toolbar as a Mozilla Firefox extension took less than a minute.

The toolbar has "I like it" and "Not-for-me" review buttons to rate the site being viewed, using these ratings to find sites that people similar to you have liked. A "Stumble!" button sends you to one of these recommended sites.

StumbleUpon also provides a chance to do some egosurfing, even without the toolbar: Users write site reviews, which are shared publicly.

These review pages provide a new place to argue about web sites, as you can see on the SaveToby, Daily Kos and Andrew Sullivan pages.

Each user's reviews and comments form a weblog with its own RSS 2.0 feed and another feed for comments. Here's one for Janah, a user who enjoys cats, gardening, Led Zeppelin, Robert Heinlein, and me me me!

The end result looks like the out-of-wedlock love child of LiveJournal and de.licio.us. I can't decide if or the site's , but you could do cool things with that data if the developers offered an API.

2005/04/14 · 2 COMMENTS · Link

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