Category: Business

— Pope VodkaPundit’s blog is down today:

My host pulled the plug without warning, without explaination. I had to contact them — and wait an hour — to learn their puny servers can’t handle Moveable Type’s perl script.

Let me recommend Os Tyler’s NothingSpecial.com for your blog-hosting needs. Os keeps his system software up-to-date, it’s reliable and affordable, and it runs Movable Type with all features enabled better than the other two ISPs I’ve used. NothingSpecial also hosts most of the better blogs, including Layne, Welch, and Emmanuelle.

Update: The Vodkaman is back on-line – the VLWC can’t keep a good man down.

— If Beavis and Butthead had a media watch column, it would look like this: In the world of Web logs, talk is cheap. How dumb do you have to be to fall for an April Fool’s prank? Dumb enough to suspend Jeff Jacoby for writing a patriotic column; dumb enough to publish Ellen Goodman; dumb enough to insult James Lileks for writing too much. In other words, dumb as the Boston Globe, and gracelessly insane.

It turns out the little prick doesn’t like letters to the Editor correcting his mistakes, for some strange reason:

We in the glamorous media business have mixed feelings about the men, women and, yes, children who write in to express their views.

Beam’s whole anti-blog screed was a recycled version of this column, in fact.

— CNN.com – CNN And TIME Magazine Announce Top Winners Of Fifth Annual “Journalist Award”

“At Time and CNN, we’re delighted to offer this prestigious award to the brightest journalist,” said Adi Ignatius, Editor of Time, of Jerry Pournelle, the #1 winner. ” We have long wanted to honor Jerry Pournelle in this way, as his contribution to the society has been enormous.”

See this web site for details.

— In response to my remarks on her article on Russell Yates, Cathy Young says:

I’ve seen some conflicting reports on how much time Andrea Yates was spending
alone with the kids just before the murders; there was some mention of the
fact that a decision had been made to increase that time and have Russell
Yates’s mother come in somewhat later than she had been coming in previously.

One might also argue that when we’re talking about a mentally ill woman with
suicidal tendencies being alone with five children, an hour a day is an
extended period of time — extended enough, certainly, for major trouble to
happen. It would have been bad enough if Yates had slit her own throat in
the children’s presence.

She also mentions some hate-mail from fathers’ rights folks who express themselves abusively. Many in that movement are their own worst enemies. Dianna Thompson, director the ACFC, wrote a longish letter to the Boston Globe critical of Cathy’s piece, blaming Andrea’s doctor for not reporting her to child protective services as a danger to the children:

It is also important to note that the professionals to whom Russell Yates
took his wife, have a legally mandated duty to report any potential threat
to the children, to child protective services. As they did not do so, it can
only be assumed that there was no imminent danger evident. Why then,
is the media holding Russell Yates to a higher standard than that of
trained professionals?

It’s hard to predict the behavior of crazy people in any specific way, however — that’s what it means to be crazy — but you certainly wouldn’t HIRE somebody with a full-blown psychosis to look after your children, would you? That’s the point. As bad as public school and day care are, at least they don’t routinely murder their charges.

— According to O’Reilly Press’ David Sims:

I find webloggers bright and interesting folks, and I tend to agree with them much of the time. But they’re hardly representative: like me, they lean toward the geeky and they lean toward the left.

Tech bloggers live in their own, carefully crafted little delusion.

— mostly for what they didn’t do: sneering anti-Bush rants.

— Bias author Bernard Goldberg bites back at Frank Rich and his other critics in this interview in the New York Press

And here’s the bulletin: the people I’m calling liberals aren’t real liberals. Real liberals are people I personally admire. I admire people who put it on the line for something they believe in. Lliberals in our history, in the 1960s for instance, put their lives on the line. I admire that.

He calls them “liberals of convenience” in the book.

Goldberg delves into the motivations for Frank Rich’s tawdry hit-piece against him as well.

— This statement by Nick Denton, and his search for Gentle Soul Blogs silenced by ruffians of the right has The Sarges hoppin’ mad:

People like Doc Searls and Meg Hourihan are to the weblog as Oppenheimer and von Neumann were to the A-bomb. Gentle souls whose creation will be used by others more ruthless.

And it should. Not only does Denton display a massive arrogance about the delicacy of left wingers that flies in the face of your garden-variety WTO protest, he also displays an equally massive ignorance of the history of Web Logging. The first weblogs were run by people who didn’t have a political axe to grind, like Tim Berhners-Lee, and the first with political content were started by people like yours truly who are right-of-center, small-l libertarians. People like Searls and Hourihan didn’t stumble across web logging until it was already an advanced art, and in Hourihan’s case their contributions have been greatly exaggerated.

And as far as the hate-mail from “fundamentalists” goes, I have some from feminists that would curl Denton’s hair, but even that’s not as scary as the drive-by shootings they’ve done to people like Erin Pizzey who undermine left-feminist orthodoxy. Some people just can’t help being silly.

— Do it now, and don’t make him practice the degrading art of salesmanship again (KEN LAYNE)

If you’d be interested in a signed copy for … I don’t know, 15 or 20 bucks, and if you’d be willing to pay for it with PayPal, send an e-mail to [email protected] with YES in the subject line. I’ll add up the response in a few days, and then I’ll buy an appropriate amount from my publisher. As soon as they arrive, I’ll announce it, and then I will finally achieve my lifelong goal: selling mail-order crap.

I haven’t read the book myself, but I have had the pleasure of meeting Ken, which gives me the right to attest that he’s a gentleman and a scholar, a smart and witty lad, one very accomplished in the arts of dissipation and therefore worthy of your patronage.

— Ken Layne has renamed me after that other Bennett, the one who had to quit smoking so he could be the Drug Czar, so now I’m going to enforce strict moral standards on everybody:

William Bennett has more on the lousy SF Chronicle, but adds that the Merc ain’t exactly the model newspaper — especially since Joanne Jacobs quit. And, as Searls notes, the pioneering Mercury News site got swallowed by Knight Ridder, leading to a very ugly, ad-heavy site. KR also ruined the Dave Barry archives.

I went to the Univ. of Texas as an undergrad when Bill was working on his doctorate in Philosophy under John Silber and playing drums in a rock band (that’s a true fact), and I’m pretty sure we aren’t the same guy. I could never get along with philosopher king Silber, for one thing; and for another, I played bass.

By the way, all the article numbers are screwed-up since I took my blog over to Sonic, so the article on the Chron and the Murk is now at this number.