Saturday, January 22, 2005

Inauguration Speech: The Backlash Begins Sheesh.  It's worse than I thought. I have never heard of an inauguration speech that required press statements to calm down the world. But now Bush has done it.  With a speech that he surely thought would be inspiring and moving, he has managed to scare the hell out of the parts of the world that don't happen to be democracies.  That is, most of the world.  Plus he's scared and confused a few democracies as well.  Apparently the White House has had to rush out a statement saying that Bush was not expressing his desire to invade Russia, Egypt, Pakistan, or anywhere else, chop their leader's heads off, and convert them to Christianity and democracy.  Amazing - who else could take a nice little victory-lap speech and turn it into an international incident? On the other hand, it's probably Fox News' fault.  Look at the headline they used on Friday.  (Thanks to the Black Flag for the cartoon.) 9:58:48 AM     Speak up!  []

A Box with Wheels I'm going to do my best to spruce up this blog in the next few weeks.  For the first several months of TMBS' existence, I've used the technology in the simplest possible way.  A blog was a way for me to post my thoughts, nothing more.   I used it to put my words on a webpage.  Then I needed a visual editing module so I could add stuff like bold and italics and links, so now I use Mozilla so I have the WYSIWYG editor.  then I wanted different categories, and so I created a few different categories.  And then I just stopped playing with it.  It did what I wanted, so I stopped working on it. This, by the way, is remarkably similar to how I use my car.  A car to me is not an object to be worshipped or an extension of my personality.  It's just a box with wheels.  So I drive it and drive it and drive it until something breaks down, and then I fix it.  But if it's not running for fully optimized performance, I usually don't care until it doesn't do what I want it to do.  That it, when it ceases to be a functional box with wheels. But now the blog is starting to bug me.  It's not doing what I want it to do.  Some of the categories don't work.  See for yourself - try to click on the "Friends and Family" link on the right.  See what happens?  What the hell is that?! So I'm going to create a few new categories, recategorize some old posts, and generally try to evaluate the look and feel of this whole thing.  Any tips would be gratefully accepted, all you people out there in Radioland.  9:39:21 AM     Speak up!  []