I love this rollicking review of Tom Wolfe’s new novel, I Am Charlotte Simmons. As background, he talks about Wolfe’s earlier exhortations to American novelists: “‘A battalion, a brigade of Zolas’ is what we need, Wolfe evangelized, then put on his dress-white uniform, screwed on his bayonet, and went screaming into the hills. ”
City Pages: Maidenhead Revisited
(thanks, bookslut)
Just realized that I’ve been writing this blog for 5 years — my first post was November 4, 1999, using Blogger — quite the novelty at the time. I blogged pretty regularly up until April 2000, then sporadically for the rest of that year (and, sadly, much of the archives from mid-late 2000 got lost at some point). In June 2002, I started blogging again, very lightly at first and then picking up speed later that year, and I haven’t missed a month since then.
By September 2002 I switched to Movable Type, where I remained until switching to WordPress this month. During that time I’ve had 4 or 5 different Web hosts. I also moved the URL of this blog’s home page (and RSS feeds) a few times, from www.tweney.com/weblog to www.tweney.com to dylan.tweney.com — and each time I moved, I lost readers; I wouldn’t recommend changing URLs to anyone now, if you can avoid it. But switching blog platforms or hosting providers doesn’t seem to make much difference.
Is it just me, or is Sen. Orrin Hatch (R.-Utah) seeming more and more like one of those unstoppable monster-movie zombies that just keeps coming at you no matter how many times you knock him down?
Wired News: Senate May Ram Copyright Bill
By popular demand: Clara’s “bad face” costume for Halloween. Here she is with Mara, the purple princess.
Michelle Goldberg’s longish piece in Salon is the most thoughtful reaction to the whole Red State-Blue State divide that I’ve seen yet: If at first you don’t secede. Honestly, I’m a bit irritated by the recent flood of gratuitous fuck-yous and pathetic disavowals; both seem divisive and unproductive to me, and on top of that, they make progressives look like a bunch of mean-spirited, foul-mouthed poor losers. Let’s face it: We lost the election, and that’s because the Republicans ran a better-organized campaign, because they were more in touch with popular sentiment than we were, or both. Get over it: It’s time to start figuring out how we can get back on track.
In many ways, the states’ rights line looks promising. That’s partly because Republicans have largely abandoned it in favor of increasingly intrusive big-government initiatives that limit private freedoms and curtail state laws. Abortion, gay marriage (and even civil unions), free speech, privacy, gun control: All are under attack by special interest groups who want to impose their values on every state, via big federal government bureaucracies and/or sweeping national laws. Now is the time to fight back — at the state level. Let’s make a stand for our values, and our right to make our own laws.
The onslaught of comment spam on my Movable Type blog finally made me scream uncle: I switched to WordPress this weekend. MT is an amazingly flexible tool, but it is slow, slow, slow, and it’s not set up well to deal with comment spam. It takes several minutes just to delete a single comment–and then you have to rebuild all the static files–and I just don’t have time for that nonsense, sorry. I spent a month or so fiddling around with the MT-Blacklist plugin, but that’s slow too, and not very effective: Comment spam keeps using new words and new URLs, and MT-Blacklist can only filter stuff that you’ve already flagged. That meant I was soon spending an inordinate amount of time fiddling with MT-Blacklist … and as you can see I have hardly had time to post at all in the last month, as a result.
WordPress, by contrast, is fast, elegant, requires no rebuilding (since all of its pages are dynamically-generated PHP), and makes it incredibly easy to moderate and delete comments, or to turn them off entirely if you choose. I feel like a new man.
Bear with me while I play with templates for the next few days; I’m still trying to find the right look for this site (preferably without doing any actual CSS work myself; I just want to find a nice template and drop it in).
State-by-state election returns make the U.S. look like a deeply divided country–red Republicans in the South and middle; blue Democrats on the coasts. (The division is eerily reminiscent of the division between free and slave states before the Civil War–how long the shadows of that ugly history are.) But if you map election returns county by county, you get a much more mixed picture of the country’s political leanings. I find this encouraging. (Details on how this map, by Princeton prof Robert Vanderbei, was created.) (via BoingBoing)
Indian farmers have discovered that spraying their fields with Coca-Cola may be as effective as–and lots cheaper than–spraying with pesticides. An Indian agronomist says: “I think Coke has found its right use. Farmers have traditionally used sugary solutions to attract red ants to feed on insect larvae. I think the colas are also performing the same role.”
