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

Heh–glad to see Halley is back to blogging!

I had a good time with Halley yesterday. No surprise that hanging out with Halley is fun, but pretty remarkable when you consider our surroundings, a stacked-up waiting room for a behind-schedule doctor, and later the recovery room.

Halley of course quickly acquired a number of local fans, and I was glad to be able to smuggle her out, finally, without her getting married or signing any major contracts.

You’re not allowed to do those things within 24 hours after anesthesia. And there are a lot of even more enjoyable things that you can’t do in the first week or two…..

So, Halley, you might as well just blog and blog and blog….that would make the rest of us happy anyway.

Can you believe it?

Feedster, the little RSS-search engine that could, is up for a Bloggie Award at sxsw!!!

Category: Best web application for weblogs.

List of Finalists: Blogrolling.com, Movable Type, TypePad, Blogger….and Feedster.

Yep. Pretty darn cool! That’s my little company (ok, not totally mine, but the one I work for and love) up there with the big guys! Woo hoo! Woot! And other cries of pleasure….

Hey, join the fun–head over to the Bloggies 2004. Easy links let you check out finalists who include some of the best blogs and metablogs on the globe.

And, while you’re over there, plllleeeeeeez vote for Feedster!!!

Please vote for Feedster!

What if you could visit any spot on the globe by paying exactly $1?

In that case, the book I just fell in love with–1,000 Places to See Before You Die–would cost a mere $1020.

The author, veteran travel writer Patricia Schwartz, is a lot more excited than I am by famous restaurants and chic hotels. I’ll save money and time by skipping places like those.

In Massachusetts, she picked only three must-sees: the Freedom Trail, the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, and Legal Seafood. The first two are excellent choices, but the third is just–a restaurant. And how could she leave out Orchard House in Concord, where Louisa May Alcott wrote Little Women?

So I’m entitled to take her other advice with a grain of salt. Scuba-diving with manatees in Florida or a polar bear safari in Manitoba? Oh sure, they sound like fun, but….

(Sticking my fingers in my ears) I can’t hear you, Patricia! La la la…..

No longer content with heartless attacks on Linux, SCO has moved on to

(brace yourself for the shock)

spamming referer logs.

How else in keduckus can I have two “referals” in my blog stats from the SCO home page?
There’s no damn link to my blog there.

Maybe they were hunting for my parody post, SCO Declares “Law of Gravity” Void…

Or maybe they are exploring a new business model.

(Drumroll, please.)

Spam Betsy’s stats/referers for fun and profit….
What’s next? A massive new push by Microsoft to monopolize all the lucrative spam-blogs action?

What do I like to see in my referer stats? Of course I’m thrilled if your blog pointed to mine. I also delight in mysterious searches for stuff I never said that brought folks here anyway–for example, searches on “LOVE & XXX 2004,” “mac sticky c virus,” or “ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha.”

What can I say about any of this but …. ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha. Love and xxx from Betsy, January 14, 2004. May your Mac and mine remain free of the sticky C virus. (I’d hate to have real readers leaving here disappointed.)

What I’d really like to understand right now is not absolute Truth, oh thank you so very much, or any inner details of my Self.*

What I’d really like to understand is how to get RSS coding to work on French (and Spanish and Norwegian) accents.

Grrr.

Take for example, the lovely word “été”, which means “summer” in French. It looks a lot less lovely in 99% of RSS encodings.

ISO Latin-1 entities: été
HTML 4.0 entities: été
Unicode: 0x00E9t0x00E9 (even HTML can’t read that one.)
I hope I’ll have figured it out by the time summer comes, or (in bad French) Je espère que je puisse le faire avant l’été.

*

“Il faut se connaître soi-même: quand cela ne servirait pas à trouver le vrai, cela au moins sert à régler sa vie, et il n’y est rien de plus juste.”*

Blaise Pascal, (1623-1662)

Roughly: “You need to understand yourself–not as a guide to absolute Truth, but in order to manage your life, a more useful goal.”

BTW, I acquired a lifetime supply of inaccurate French in college, where I used to sit gazing at the cute French professor through the haze of everybody’s cigarette smoke, pitying his tortured soul and wishing he would fall in love with me and write poems about us. Of course, I was virtuously trying to think all these things in French.

Nanny Ogg, who has “the true witch’s ability to be confidently expert on the basis of no experience whatsoever,” offers world-class insight into the world of opera in Terry Pratchett’s Maskerade:

“There’s your heavy opera,
where basically people sing foreign and it goes like
‘Oh oh oh, I am dyin’, oh, I am dyin’, oh, oh, oh, that’s what I’m doin”,
and there’s your light opera,
where they sing in foreign and it basically goes
‘Beer! Beer! Beer! Beer! I like to drink lots of beer!’,
although sometimes they drink champagne instead.”

Can beer-drinking lead to foolish romantic choices?

Hah! You think you’ve got stories to tell? They are dwarfed by the tragic tale of the Australian male buprestid beetles.

Imagine you’re a shiny male beetle flying over the plains of western Australia with nothing more on your mind than finding a female to mate with and pass on your shiny genes. All at once you see the hugest, most beautiful female you’ve ever laid eyes on. Big females are the best to mate with because they carry the most eggs (more bang for your bang). Sounds like a dream come true, right? Well, if you happen to be the jewel beetle Julodimorpha bakewelli, you’ve probably been deceived. That gorgeous curvy body belongs to a beer bottle not a beetle….[more shocking details follow]

Thanks to Amity Wilczek for her blog Nature is Profligate and also, just a bit, for being my daughter.

xxx

Imagine you’re a shiny male beetle flying over the plains of western Australia with nothing more on your mind than finding a female to mate with and pass on your shiny genes. All at once you see the hugest, most beautiful female you’ve ever laid eyes on. Big females are the best to mate with because they carry the most eggs (more bang for your bang). Sounds like a dream come true, right? Well, if you happen to be the jewel beetle Julodimorpha bakewelli, you’ve probably been deceived. That gorgeous curvy body belongs to a beer bottle not a beetle.

It’s hard to pick one best moment in ROTK, but here are my top five (major spoilers ahead!):

Number 5: When Legolas fights a huge elephant plus all its riders.

Number 4: When Gimli tells Legolas, “That only counts as one.”

Number 3: When Eowyn and Merry defeat the Witch King.

Number 2: When Sam jumps up to go hit on Rosie Cotton.

Number 1 and absolutely best: Outside the movie, afterward, when my husband says, “Poor Aragorn. He really picked the wrong girl.”

Blogged any good books lately? makeoutcity has.

Jay McCarthy has been
blogging his reading of Dante’s Divine Comedy, * using the quotes-plus-notes that make him such a good guide to blogworld.

Then I started thinking–what if Dante rather than Jay were the blogger?
The Pepys’ Diary blog shows how a blog format can add value–even when you just reproduce a text and add hyperlinked notes.

But why stop there? Why can’t you “study” a favorite novel by writing a blog for each character? Why can’t you write a blog-novel where characters in a Live-Journal-like community interact? Or a role-playing game, where different players create fictional blogs that take turns talking about who did what to whom?

Anyway, I like the idea of re-imagining Dante as a non-professional blogger-like journalist who gives an extended account of extended adventures.** (Note, if you take up this project–lose the terza rima!)

In my work life I skim a lot of blogs using RSS*+*. I also find value in reading that asks my commitment, time, and thought.

Guess I’ll stop writing this now and go do some of it!

* You can visit more authors with Jay in his category “Books.” And Lisa Williams of Cadence90 has links to even more good books in her “Nightstand” over at del.icio.us.

** A modern non-fiction example: Susan Kitchens blogging of the Mars landing (thanks to Dave Winer for the link.)

*+* Excellent explanation of the merits of RSS for fast reading by Robert Scoble.