Betsy Devine: Funny ha-ha and/or funny peculiar

More identical letters signed with different names are hitting small-town papers around the country. All of them claim that the US occupation of Iraq has been an unqualified success.

Right-wingers claim it’s just a homegrown, amateur effort by low-level soldiers.

That’s not what the soldiers who signed say about these letters.

• “When I told him he wrote such a good letter, he said: ‘What letter?’ ” Timothy Deaconson said Friday, recalling the phone conversation he had with his son, Nick. (Gannett story)
• One soldier, who asked not to be identified, said he was reluctant to sign the letter because he did not agree with the comments in the letter but said he was ordered by a superior officer to sign. “When I’m given an order, I obey it,” he said.  (Capitol Hill Blue account)
• Sgt. Christopher Shelton, who signed a letter that ran in the Snohomish Herald, said Friday that his platoon sergeant had distributed the letter and asked soldiers for the names of their hometown newspapers. Soldiers were then told to sign the letter. (Capitol Hill Blue account)

An amateur effort or a slick PR job? Well, what does this sample sound like to you?

“We also have been instrumental in building a new police force. Kirkuk now has 1,700 police officers. The police are now, ethnically, a fair representation of the community as a whole. So far, we have spent more than $500,000 from the former Iraqi regime to repair each of the stations’ electricity and plumbing, to paint each station and make it a functional place for the police to work.”

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To see the whole letter, just do a Google search on “I have been serving in Iraq for over five months now”.

I remember my mom, age 80, telling me, “I look in the mirror and I think, who’s that old woman?”

I don’t know what my mom’s “real” image really looked like. I do know the person who lives behind my eyes–she’s still somewhere in between 10 and 13. She’s somebody who lives happily in her body, but expects you mostly care about her ideas and her jokes.

Yep, that’s me up in that apple tree.

And how about you? What do you really look like, inside your head? Give me a comment and post a link to “your” picture, okay?

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Another Photoshop toy* from Betsy’s subconscious: International Babe Magnet Frank Paynter.** I see him surrounded by glamorous bloggeresses. (If you saw the first Austin Powers movie, you know–these “girls” are far from pushovers. Each cute fluffy bra-cup conceals a machine gun! But with IBM Frank, one just wants to have fun.)

I got to know Frank because he interviewed me.
I’ve done interviews before, but Frank’s are amazing. He asks such friendly, surprising, intelligent questions–because he wants to get to know you and let you shine.

Some other personal favorite Frank Paynter interviews:+ Elaine of Kalilily, Jeneane Sessum, Halley, and most recently Shelley Powers who pointed out:

“…this isn’t a Frank Paynter interview if there isn’t sex in it in some way.”

And in conclusion, I’d like to thank Beth for sharing her IBM husband with the blogworld.

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* No actual women were harmed while making this picture–all models accurately represent my own appearance and clothing at BloggerCon.
** My other favorite IBM Niek Hockx was too busy Nederlands shutterclogging to get to BloggerCon.
+ Frank also does great interviews with men, though that’s off my topic. If Frank wants to interview you, say “Yes, yes, yes, yes!”

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Oh, the things we do for, er, love.

I myself remember when I was 14 or so, and very smitten with an “older man” of 18, trying to make myself desirable by dipping the ends of all ten fingers in a teacup full of perfume. Yes, I poured several different perfumes into a cup and dabbled my fingers around in it thinking, “What am I doing? This is so stupid!” But even so I was smiling….

He never looked twice at me, though he must have wondered about the perfume smell–don’t you think? And yet, even remembering it, I’m smiling.

So I’m not surprised by this official news–sex is good for you!*

I’m still hoping for similar news about chocolate and whiskey….

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* That is, sex is good for you if you’re an affectionate, grown-up human being. If you are a penis-fencing flatworm (ouch!), it’s bad news to be a female. On the other hand, when redback spiders have sex, it looks to me as if the pleasure’s all hers.

(Thanks to Amity Wilczek and the Harvard sex tutorial for exotic links.)

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In the picture above the God of Technical Innovation swoops in from stage right, bringing new possibilities for work and play to Technically Challenged Humanity.

Support for God has been provided by BloggerCon Angels including, left to right, Dave Winer, Chris Lydon, Dan Bricklin, and Bob Doyle.

Ready to take over when any gods get tired, the cool guy in a hot shirt is Feedster’s Scott Johnson.

I’d like to thank the Spirit of the Gift Economy,
Dan Bricklin for all the headshots and–er, excuse me, Michelangelo’s lawyers seem to have buzzed my cellphone…

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Actual tech news from BloggerCon:

• Scott Johnson is prototyping a multi-blog feed that lets you look at, say, 5 candidate blogs in parallel.
• Erin Clerico (Weblogger) announced new virtual hosting for multiple blogs.
• Adam Curry–even cuter in person than his blog pix–created a Syncpod channel to put web audio into your iPod. He and Markserman–er, I mean, Kevin Marks–plan to do more with it.
• Chris Lydon and Bob Doyle just launched BlogRadio–check it out!

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No, not Rush Limbaugh, and not Andrew Orlowski–there’s an actual giant plastic Colossal Colon headed our way.

Big Blogger Dave Barry (I guess he’s famous for writing some other stuff too) crawled through the colon when it was in Miami. And if local bloggers want to meet up in Copley Square sometime between October 15 and 18, let’s do the same.

But let’s do lunch first–we might not feel like it later.

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Q: How does Snoop Dogg wash his clothes?
A: With ble-ach!

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This joke got peals of laughter from my kids and a meta-kid at lunch yesterday–I just looked blank, which made the joke more sweet.

They kindly explained: Snoop Dogg is a musician, famous these days for creating his own mini-language. For example, when he says “Be-ach” (a lot), he means the word Barbara Bush euphemized as “something that rhymes with witch.”

Another Snoop-Dogg-language feature is using “izzle.” You can stick izzle in the middle of any word–the example I got was that “Holyoke Center” becomes “Holy-izzle-oke Centrizzle.”

An expert can substitute “izzle” for most of most of a word–“Fa shizzle” in Snoop-Dogg language means “For sure.”

I was impressed and jealous that all three kids could perfectly speak and understand Snizzle Dizzle–while I had to think it out slowly, word by word.

Back in my bubble-gum days, we “fooled” our parents with “ig-Pay atin-Lay.” Many years later–our parents were too smart to tell us–we found out Pig Latin had been our parents’ private kid-language too.

Kids now are too smart to make that same mistake. Son of a bee-ach–it doesn’t seem fair, fa shizzle.

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Multiple choice, please mark your answer clearly:

• A. Conservative voters say the many accusations against Schwarzenegger upset them as much as those made against Bill Clinton.
• B. Liberal voters say the many accusations against Schwarzenegger upset them as little as those made against Bill Clinton.
• C. Schwarzenegger reached into the crypt mummy’s shirt–photos on eBay.
• D. After the California recall election, political news will be less ridiculous.
• E. None of the above.

I’m betting on E, but A or B would be nice.

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Once upon a time there were three friends who came home from BloggerCon.

The first friend posted, “That was so amazing–I can hardly wait to do more stuff with my weblog! Weblogs are going to promote collaboration and creativity in schools, in politics, in journalism, in business–and some of us will make barrels and barrels of money.”

The second friend posted, “Who falls for that hype? I mean, hello, does anyone remember hearing all those same promises during the dot-com boom? No thanks, I’m not getting fooled again.”

The third friend took a few minutes off from making funny pictures of people at BloggerCon to read her friend’s blogs and was dismayed by the idea that she was supposed to believe one or the other, though she had to admit either would be more consistent than what she really believed–both sides at once.

Which is not to claim that the third point of view is better–Einstein knew that light is both a particle and a wave, and that didn’t mean he could find the bathroom light switch.

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And the moral of this story is: You can fall off a bike by leaning too far to one side or the other, but to get somewhere you have to forget about falling and pedal like hell.

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Kevin Marks (Epeus Epigone) earned the admiration of BloggerCon web addicts by providing WiFi where mighty Harvard could not. He also made some of the best comments I heard. “Able to leap tall buildings at a single bound”? Puleez! Kevin Marks was much more awesome than that. Even more photo-news from BloggerCon to come….

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Just a few great Bloggercon Kevin Marks quotes:

Journalism (Day 1)

“The question is who can speak when. With weblogs, everyone can speak at once, in parallel. Prisoner’s dilemma–the weblog gives you a motive to be trustworthy.” [More on this in Kevin’s own blog and also here.]

Cluetrain 2003 (Day 1)

” The net changes the power law of the media curve. If you look at relative popularity on the web, using something like Technorati, you get a power curve that goes all the way down gradually, to the bottom where you see pages that got just a single click. If you look at popularity in the “real” world–best-selling books, or top music–the power curve drops like a stone from a very high level. That’s because in order to get a book published, or a piece of music recorded, you have to convince somebody that you’re going to sell a million copies. You end up in a zero-sum game, where people pour enormous resources into being number one, because number two is only half as good. The promise of the net is that the power of all those little links can outweigh the power of the top ten.”

Technology (Day 2)

“I realized that I can read thoughts–but only if people write them down first. Our thoughts are constrained by the way we write them down.

Writing on IRC–tendency to flirtation, chatting–it’s easy for someone to destroy by shoulting abuse. The tendency for a WIki is consensus–debate doesn’t work because stark disgreement makes people go back and forth erasing what the other side wrote. Weblog–spontaneous, personal, but you are motivated to be more coherent that IRC because it’s a little bit permanent.”

Audioblogging (Day 2)

In the audio-video world we have live stream, in real time, basically like IRC. We also have professionally produced stuff that takes a long time to create. What’s missing is the “just-in-time” audio, the equivalent of blogging. “

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p.s. Kevin and Adam Curry are working an a gateway called “SyncPod” between RSS feeds and an iPod, so that you can automatically put stuff into an iTunes playlist to listen to on the iPod.

p.p.s. (from Day 2 Technology session
Frank Paynter: ” I argued with Kevin Marks a bit online, and friends warned me, “Kevin is a good guy, so you don’t want to offend him–and he’s a genius so you don’t want to argue with him.”
JoiIto, via the IRC feed: “And Kevin’s got an upper class accent that’s hard to argue with.”

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