Somebody needs to explain to me the software that writes spam blog comments. (Fortunately, WordPress and Akismet stop 98 percent of them.)
Some of these comments have a wonderfully surreal character:
hi everyone, my argot is sausage and i virtuous need to say that this is an superior blog flier and i truly pioneer it stabilizing, would it be alright if i submitted posts to this blog virtually topics i found fascinating?
I’ll have the word salad with argot sausage and vinaigrette, please.
My old friend Jay Kenny, founder and editor of Gnosis: A Journal of the Western Esoteric Traditions, is now blogging at The Daily Grail.
His first post: “Do we want real history or lucid dreams?”
It was written in June, however, so I hope he does more.
The artist also forgot to add blogging.
First black-headed grosbeak of the season (left).
If it’s Beltane, why I am still splitting firewood? Usually I observe the rhythms of the “Celtic” year by turning off the furnace at Beltane and relighting it at Samhain, using just supplemental wood heat otherwise. Not this year.
But during a brief sunny interval yesterday morning, the first black-headed grosbeak of the season landed on a feeder, and I snapped a quick picture through the window. That’s a downy woodpecker on the shadowed side, and up above, facing the camera, a male evening grosbeak—they have been hanging around for a couple of months, an unusual “irruption,” as birders say.
Other stuff:
• The Beltania music festival happens next weekend, just down the road. The weather still looks iffy. A friend on a Colorado Pagan email list said that spring weather is “manic depressive.” My own mental image for Beltane is snow on lilac blossoms.
• I liked this quote from an interview with Lon Milo DuQuette at Patheos:
I have a new book coming out in November (from Llewellyn) titled Low Magick — It’s All in Your Head, You Just Have No Idea How Big Your Head Is. It’s autobiographic and contains stories of magickal operations I’ve done over the years. The title is a bit tongue-in-cheek, facetiously using the term “Low Magick” to refer to any magickal operation one actual performs rather than those one just talks or argues about.
• Jonathan Ott, who gave us the world “entheogen,” had his home destroyed by fire, needs help.
• An article on depression and dreams offers this:
In the 1970s, psychologists noted that people suffering from depression also report more dreams than average. In fact, people who are clinically depressed may dream three or four times as much. The quality of REM dreams (also called “paradoxical sleep”) is different too: more intense emotions, more negative themes, more nightmares, and more unpleasant dreams, in general.
And consequently depressed people often sleep worse. It’s a vicious circle. Processed food is also linked to depression—another vicious circle. Feel low -> eat worse, etc.
• The Pagan Newswire Collective has two new group blog projects: The Juggler, on the arts, and Warriors & Kin, about issues facing past and current Pagan military personnel. They will be added to my blogroll.
. . . is one that WordPress has been stopping. It consists of comments that merely duplicate earlier comments on a blog post.
These pseudo-commenters generally use free accounts—Hotmail, Gmail, etc.—no surprise there.
Often there is a URL linked to the commenter’s name, but instead of directing you to a site trying to sell something, it just goes to a blog with no entries.
So what is the point?
We are to believe that the author of “Six Things Social Media Can’t Do for Your Business” is only 18?
He sounds like another middle-aged cynic who has seen too many new-technology parades pass down Main Street, leaving only manure piles in their wake.
Because Colorado’s lawmakers in their wisdom are trying—and failing—to make Amazon.com collect state sales tax, Amazon has cut off all of its Colorado affiliates.
From my perspective, the legislators were willing to sacrifice individual “Amazon affiliates” who happen to live in Colorado (like me). In return, they get nothing except the satisfaction of making some kind of point that will be lost in the general political noise.
I never made big money as an Amazon affiliate. It was about enough to pay my Web-hosting and email account bills for the year. Who knows, I might have spent part of my commission in Colorado and paid Colorado state sales tax.
But no more.
Way to go, wise legislators!
Today marks the seventh anniversary of Letter from Hardscrabble Creek, originally the name I gave to a column that appeared in various long-gone Pagan zines.
It all started with this.
Governments in more and more countries are afraid of “unregistered” (sic) bloggers.
China was still the leading Internet censor in 2009. However, Iran, Tunisia, Thailand, Saudi Arabia, Vietnam and Uzbekistan have all also made extensive use website blocking and online surveillance to monitor and control dissent. The Turkmen Internet remains under total state control. Egyptian blogger Kareem Amer remains in jail, while well-known Burmese comedian Zarganar has a further 34 years of his prison sentence to serve.
However, the Report also notes that democratic countries have not lagged far behind, instancing the various steps taken by European countries to control the internet under the guise of protection against child porn and illegal downloading. It also notes that Australia intends to put in place a compulsory filtering system that poses a threat to freedom of expression.
Some people think that blogging and tweets will overthrow governments. Eh…not so fast.
Today got off on a weird note: I got up, fed the dogs, and walked the dogs, only to come home from the dog walk (M. still asleep) and find the electricity off.
I called our electric co-op, and was promised that the linemen would be informed.
After M. awoke, I wheeled out the generator, which is pretty noisy, and restored power. Having a well with an electric pressure pump means that a lack of electricity cuts into morning washing and cooking.
An hour later, a lineman from the San Isabel Electric Association was knocking at the door. His one-word diagnosis: “Squirrel.”
This afternoon one of the dogs found and brought me the unfortunate electrocuted squirrel. All winter it had been eating out of our bird feeders, and this was how it repaid us (he thought anthropocentrically).
Eventually I was able to get to work on this new journal layout job, which is progressing by fits and starts—I have a whole string of “What do you want me to do about X, Y, and Z?” questions for the publisher.
For break time, I sometimes wonder around the Web–and sometimes haul firewood.
Today I learned to my surprise that BeliefNet has snark, in the form of the blog Stuff Christian Culture Likes (obviously a take-off on SWPL).
Funny enough, but will the day come when Pagan clergy–thinking of here of all those people who can’t wait to be salaried Pagan clergy–worry about “being relevant” in their clothes and marketing?