You try not to fall on your face

I'm so not sure what to make of this at all. Is it intended to be humorous? Is it a branch off the 'put quotemarks randomly around words in a sign' concept? What the hell?



If you can't make it out, the line is:
W.W.W.Com. "We Do It All!"

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News on the radio: happy birthday

It is Daughter Number Three's birthday today.



More here.

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Did I offend you?

[09:51] rev: "he fights to vanquish crime and efend the helpless "
[09:52] rev: Typo? Or new word meaning "to offend people online"
[09:52] grizzly: is that like the dot-com version of offending someone?
[09:52] grizzly: DAMN
[09:52] rev: Two bodies, no mind.
[09:52] rev: And I'm not the least bit surprised that we both instantly went to the same conclusion.
[09:53] grizzly: I'm not either.

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I churned butter once or twice

I was unaware that margarine is illegal in Missouri. Can we add high fructose corn syrup to that ban as well?

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Where did all the money go

Where are all the conservatives who declaim wealth redistribution in the form of social services? One would think they'd oppose *all* wealth redistribution schemes. I don't blame the companies for trying to take advantage of the situation, it is in fact something they are legally required to do. If the government is handing out taxpayer dollars for no good reason to large swaths of the business community, CEO's have a fiduciary duty to try and get a piece of that action and can in fact be sued for failing to do so.

Certainly there are true fiscal conservatives who are critical of these many bailouts, but it sure seems like a lot of pundits who normally are opposed to government taking one persons money and giving it to someone else are perfectly OK with it if it's big companies who are the beneficiaries. As long as it doesn't help the average American, it's fine with them.

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We relive our lives in what we tell you

John Scalzi posted a link to an older post in the context of replying to a blogger who declared that "no adult understands what it's like to be a teenager today" (paraphrased). In that older post as well as in the current one he notes that quite the opposite, every single adult was at one point a teenager and understands a fair amount of what it entails*.

contrary to what the media would like to suggest, being a teenager is largely the same today as it was 10, 20 and even 30 years ago. There are minor cosmetic differences (teens today have much stronger thumbs thanks to all the text messaging, for example), but at its core it’s pretty similar.

THANK YOU. I have been saying this since I was a teenager. I loved history and biography books in high school. I didn't particularly care about the politics or business and it would have been well nigh impossible for me to care any less about the wars. I was interested in what was daily life like for people in the past. And the more I read the more I realized that in spite of the scare stories of the media people really don't change much over time. Do you remember "Wilding" and "Superpredators" that destroyed society in the early 90's? No? Well if you read Time or Newsweek or NYT or WSJ in the late 80's it was JUST AROUND THE CORNER that these alien TEENAGER creatures were going to overrun the world. Funny how that didn't happen. Certainly Dubner has some compelling work on why that's the case (hint: it involves Roe-v-Wade).

There are also of course complexities of race, religion, social class, economic class, etc etc but when you get below the superficial a 15 year old today is not much different from one in 1908. They are angsty, hormonal, insecure, confused, invincible, and the center of their universe. Scalzi's journey back to Goethe does a nice job of debunking the generational uniqueness of the emokids. I'd only gone so far as to point to Joy Division and Echo and the Bunnymen when discussing the progenitors of Fallout Boy, but he's dead right that it goes back hundreds of years. And had I kept my textbooks on medieval English literature I could probably go further, as neither did Goethe spring forth fully formed.



*one can certainly argue that there are a multiplicity of "what it's like to be a teenager" experiences with all the subsets of jocks/nerds/burnouts/et al. The point is those are surface as well. There is a core underneath those where there is a commonality of experience of life where even if the experiences aren't the same they are similar enough that empathy is easy. "History does not repeat itself, but it does rhyme." - Mark Twain.

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Sometimes words have two meanings

Maybe it's unfair, but when I'm reading what purports to be an in depth analysis of the role of ratings agencies (Moody's et al) in the housing bust I'm disinclined to continue reading when multiple times the author writes that the SEC has 'former' authority over the agencies rather than 'formal'. If you can't be bothered to check your work, why should I be bothered to read it? It indicates a sloppiness of thinking that gives me cause to doubt the quality of work done on the rest of the work most importantly the fact checking.

My level of expectation is commensurate with the site, naturally. I don't expect the average blogger to do painstaking copy editing. But on the site of a major national publication I expect at least a high school level command of the language. CNN is perhaps the worst offender, and I long ago gave up looking at anything more than headlines on that site, but it is astounding how poorly written and edited the content on many 'professional' web sites is.

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The songs are years long and have been playing for days

So there's a collection of files floating around teh intarweb containing 688 unreleased Prince studio tracks (outtakes, alternate versions of released songs, etc). Being a bit of a Prince fiend I didn't see the point in grabbing 3+ gigs of audio. But I still retain a bit of the obsessive completist nature of a Collector. So I did get it.

There are actually tracks that I'd never heard before or versions that I hadn't heard. The fact that I know the differences between five versions of Witness does disturb me a bit. So I'm starting my week off with 2 days of Prince queued up, organized chronologically. I'll have to compare with my main library so I don't import any dupes when I sync this up with the file server.

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