Best comment on this video: “I think that they’re trying to trick earth women into returning to their planet with them.”
I’m all for “worshiping the divinity expressed in feminine energies,” but why does this video creep so many viewers out?
It reminds me of that tribe in Cannibal Women in the Avocado Jungle of Death—the Donahues (a joke whose shelf life is long expired).
There is some political name-calling in his post, but Stacy McCain does make one valid point about blogging.
If you are going to work for free, why build someone else’s reputation rather than your own?
I know two people who were writing for The Huffington Post—the site that owner Arianna Huffington has now sold for millions of dollars. As the man said, they got played, she got paid.
Now some of them are suing. But as they have no contracts promising payment, what are their chances?
Another colleague at the university started blogging at Daily Kos. So big deal, you have a “diary” buried deep in the site. You are building Markos Moulitsas’ reputation, not your own. Your “diary” exists only at his whim—regardless of what the site says about “community.”
Yes, I did have a blog at BeliefNet at one time—it was the feed from this one—but they purged it for, apparently, religious incorrectness. I would not go back, nor to the rival religion portal, Patheos.
If you are a blogger—in love with the sound of your own typing—independence is the main fringe benefit.
UPDATE: Law-blogger Eugene Volokh says (tongue in cheek) that we are all exploiting commenters.
UPDATE 2: Is the Huffington business model really piracy?
Count on a librarian to find fascinating stuff on the Web—a list of predictions on how the world was going to end, going back to 4490 BCE.
(TEOTWAWKI: The end of the world as we know it.)
I still have a sentimental fondness for 1973 and Comet Kohoutek.
Former American president (1977-1981) Jimmy Carter, international ambassador of helpfulness, notices that many world religions contribute to the oppression of women.
While eating breakfast, I saw a newspaper ad for Indo-European Sunflower Oil.
All I could think was, shouldn’t that be Sindhuh-Europe Sawel-bhel Elaia?
I think I was warped by playing the mad professor in Ionesco’s The Lesson in high school, with his rants on philology.
Back when this blog was young, I wrote a post called “Aphrodite will not be Denied” about the botheration caused to some Muslim clerics by the sultry Lebanese singer Haifa Wehbe.
If there is anything that drives the mullahs and imams mad, it is female sexuality.
The bloom is off the rose of the recent Egyptian revolution, you may be sure, for now the Muslim Brotherhood, the best-organized political grouping, wants to establish Saudi-style morality police.
Veena Malik
In a video at this link, the Pakistani actress Veena Malik rips into a grim-faced mullah who claims that she has “filled his heart with sadness.”
“No one in Pakistan can look at her pictures in the presence of their daughters,” he rants. (These mullahs can accelerate from reasonable to rant in 2.4 seconds.)
“I don’t think that her [hypothetical?] son will like to look at his mother’s pictures in the future.” (It’s always all about the boys.)
Whereupon she rips him a new one, suggesting, for example, that he concern himself with Islamic clergy who rape the little boys that they are supposed to be teaching. (Sound familiar?)
In American political discourse, however, feminist values too lead to some odd turnings when they conflict with the mainstream media narrative about “the religion of peace.”
For example, when Time magazine ran a picture of a young Afghan woman mutilated by the Taliban for an alleged sexual offense, the New York Times dismissed the photo as “war porn.”
And although Veena Malik might be shocked to hear it, I see the power of Aphrodite in her “smackdown” of the ranting mullah. As as goddess, she can manifest how and when she pleases.
Spammers and plagiarists target e-books (Kindle, etc.)
Mike Essex, a Search Specialist at UK digital marketing agency Impact Media, believes that ebooks are the next frontier for content farmers and is already noticing an increasing number of spam e-books hitting ebookstores like the Kindle Store. He originally wrote about his discovery on the Impact Media blog.
Amazon does not care.
Many ebook vendors don’t check copyright on works that are submitted, and Essex noticed that people are stealing content from the web, quickly creating ebooks about the same topics from multiple angles in order to target different keyword variants, and publishing them—some Kindle authors have “written” thousands of books in a single year. The Amazon.com domain name gives these books an added boost in search results; royalty payouts are high even when a book is priced at $0.99, and reviews aren’t a surefire solution to combating the problem.
More information at Making Light.
Bad writers, yes. One man’s trash is another man’s pit of voles. But one of the advantages of e-book/Kindle store/et al that we keep hearing from the e-book enthusiasts is that it bypasses the gatekeepers.
“Stolen content and scammers” is another area, and there isn’t any pressure on Amazon to stop ‘em, since they get their cut regardless. Adding acquiring editors would add time and expense, and keep the struggling geniuses whose works no one understand from ever getting published at all.
Ain’t it wonderful? This is what happens when you “bypass the gatekeepers” (all those grumpy editors).
H.P. Lovecraft claimed to be a total materialist, so how did his stories become so involved with the realms of the esoteric and magical?
Eric Davis, in an essay titled “Calling Cthulhu,” writes,
This phenomenon is made all the more intriguing by the fact that Lovecraft himself was a “mechanistic materialist” philosophically opposed to spirituality and magic of any kind. Accounting for this discrepancy is only one of many curious problems raised by the apparent power of Lovecraftian magic. Why and how do these pulp visions “work”? What constitutes the “authentic” occult? How does magic relate to the tension between fact and fable? As I hope to show, Lovecraftian magic is not a pop hallucination but an imaginative and coherent “reading” set in motion by the dynamics of Lovecraft’s own texts, a set of thematic, stylistic, and intertextual strategies that constitute what I call Lovecraft’s Magick Realism.
Speaking of new Lovecraftian visions, I finally saw The Call of Cthulhu, a retro-silent movie released in 2005. The H.P. Lovecraft Historical Society has more, much more, unspeakably more.
The Lovecraft cult has even reached the shooting sports: “Bullets over Arkham.”
• The writing process, graphed, from Boing Boing.
• The “great conversation” lives on: University students discovering ideas that their so-called teachers kept from them because they were not “relevant” or something.
• Why did Borders crash? Here is one view. Too much space given to music. for one thing, says the writer.
• Support for a “gap year” before university grows in the U.S. I could have used one.
. . . that Gerald Gardner did not invent Wicca in the early 1950s.
Or not.
But it is one of a series of “50 Unexplainable Black & White Photos.”
Number 2 looks like some kind of fertility ritual to me.