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

• Postcard from a bobblehead in transit.
• The shaggy-guru “life-is-a-fountain” story.
• Aargh, dude! Pomos are indexing my Discourse!.
• Coders and cannibals: Can you tell them apart?.
• Blizzard in progress.
• Pioneers and people “early to the party”.
• Web 2.0 as a giant Schrodinger’s cat.
• I’m a Second-Law-of-Thermodynamics person.
• Hermit crab and the fingers of a blogger.
• Now we know what the little red hand really means.
• User-generated discontent. (coal barge)
• Phone Jammer Gate for beginners: A reference page.
• Tom, the loud cat, or enough politics for a while.
• Another week in yet another hotel room.
• Younger than springtime?

Who’s in charge of prosecuting the phone-jamming?

• Funny ha-ha: Tobin’s attorney on bloggers.
• A river runs through it…
• Phone-jamming: What real people think.
• Meet Guy Goma, BBC blooper-saver.
• Paku-paku, Mr. Pac-Man!
• Arms length? Maybe. Clean hands? No..
• Phone jamming wonkery from James Tobin’s sentencing
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• Warm heart, sharp wit: Freeman Dyson.
• Figs 2.0: The VC pitch from BC.
• Theory of something at a University 2.0.
• One second from eek!
• Some wounded veterans have funny ha-ha medals?
• Emblematic of life..but then, what isn’t?
• The path to wisdom leads past a big straw hat…
• One of those wonderful, wonderful moments at BlogHer.
• Big storm, and a tree squished Frank’s parked car…
• Terrifying thoughts from the Wikimania speakers’ lounge.
• My advice to citizen reporters.
• Summarize 3+ years of phone-jamming news in 3 minutes.
• “Paris Hilton” quantum effects on the two-way web.
• Amity inside Frank’s smooshed car, now minus the tree.
• Side view of surprising Swarovski waterfall.
• Opera postscript, and scientist-wrangling how-to..
• Alpine cemetery glows at night from candles lit on each grave.
• Judy and jewelweed inspire skunk-tomato story.
• Republican spinners heart “The View” of Rosie.
• The craziness inspired by four big, big cup holders.
• Happy 80th birthday to T D Lee!
• Frank Wilczek explains dark matter in 24 seconds.
• Searching for placeblogs, with town names from an old atlas.
• Dressed in blue jeans and (sometimes) dragonfly wings….
• If you live in NH, you need a woodpile…
• Could Frank Wilczek be right about this too?
• Breaking news: Not guilty by reason of saying ‘I take full responsibility’.
• May God’s blessing be with you, Ms. Vinny.
• Impossible problem checkmated by open-source software.
• Do you want your two-year-old forced to wear Manolos?
• Things to think about when you vote today.
• We’re in Norfolk, our suitcase is still in Boston.
• Thanksgiving goofs–just part of what families need.
• So many songs about rainbows…
• View from the backseat, ca 1989.
• To boldly go where I’ve never been before ….
• Funny ha-ha and peculiar–just five things?

Yes, the time of year I remember…

that I forgot my bloggiversary.

January 22. That wasn’t so hard, was it?

So here, in honor of this (fourth birthday?!!) season, are my favorites of the photos I’ve posted here in 2006:

And here are a few past strolls down memory lane–I’ll collect some of the best posts from 2006 later on, and post you the linkage.

Thanks for helping me make so much trouble for so long– as the blogmotto says, it’s all “for a better tomorrow.”

• Blog backstory
• My favorite blogposts from 2003 (my first year of blogging).
• My favorite blogposts from 2004.
• My favorite blogposts from 2005.

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Betsy to Frank: Do you know who Jerry Rice is? I think he’s a football player?

Frank to Betsy: Yes, of course. He’s probably the greatest wide receiver of all time. Why?

Betsy to Frank: Huh–well, I just saw him at the gym. He seemed like a very sweet person.

Frank to Betsy: No, I don’t think you saw Jerry Rice, the world’s greatest wide receiver. Maybe somebody else whose name was Jerry Rice.

Betsy to Frank: Why couldn’t I have seen the real, famous Jerry Rice? Why would I have him mixed up with somebody else.

Frank to Betsy: Because I don’t think Jerry Rice works out at your gym.

Betsy to Frank: [Pause, as the penny drops.] Oh. What I meant was that I saw the real Jerry Rice today when I was at the gym. I was at the gym, and he was cooking something on a TV show.

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Captain White Socks (1984 – 1996) entered our lives as a small, mostly-tiger kitten that Amity heard about from her camp-bus driver. Such was Cappy’s charm that it smote us all at once, even as we gasped at the giant fleas crawling out of his ears and over his tiny tummy.

Quick veterinarian action intervened.

Years passed, during which Cappy grew large and bold, treating our family with a courtly affection but expecting to be the alpha (neutered) male in his interactions with any outsiders. He was lordly (not to say a bit aggressive) and he may well have been chasing a car when he met his end. I had imagined that he (like our other cat Sylvester) always stayed in our back yard but kept away from the street.

It wasn’t so. There was a slight drizzle falling from the sky when I was summoned by the doorbell, and a very contrite driver, to look at Cappy’s now limp but still beautiful corpse, spangled with fog drops.

To my dismay taxidermists turned me down flat when I asked about getting Cappy “preserved” so that he could lie curled up on some mantel or windowsill. My children were baffled. We had been to Chincoteague and seen the body of Misty “mounted” (they don’t call it “stuffed”) for eternal memory. We had stayed in New Zealand with people whose parlors displayed even (now somewhat motheaten) dogs they had loved in their childhood.

But even though we were by then in Princeton, NJ, so that I was able to pester taxidermists all the way from NYC to Philadelphia, nobody wanted to “mount” our old Cappy so that we could keep him. “We don’t do pets,” more than one surly old-timer told me. Meanwhile, in our freezer, Cappy lay curled up in a giant plastic bag surrounded by frozen peas and fudge-ripple ice cream.

Frank, of course, had a truly unique suggestion: “Don’t say it’s a pet. Tell them I shot it.” Somehow, I hadn’t the chutzpah to try his method.

In the end, finally, I bought some beautiful cloth that was black and golden, like Cappy, to wrap him up in. We buried him in the back yard. Einstein’s back yard, which was our back yard way back then.

But if there’s a resurrection, Einstein can’t have him because we want Cappy back!

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Yesterday ten tourists died in a fire in a popular Chilean hotel with no in-room fire detectors.

Why do US hotel owners spend good money to buy smoke detectors and install sprinkler systems? Intrusive government regulation of their business practices. The kind of thing nobody would have to contend if right-thinking economists could just shrink government down to a size drownable in the bathtub.

Chile’s economic model is still largely based on policies urged by Milton Friedman and applauded by right-wing economists in the US. But if no law enforces fire safety on all hotels, then pity each individual hotel builder, having to decide whether or not to pay for such an unusual and unproductive extra.

Meanwhile, even right-wing Chilean politicians admit that Chile’s private pension system, once touted as a model for what US Social Security should become, has turned into an unfunded disaster, with pension companies raking off one-third or more of workers’ savings and posting annual profit margins near 50%.

Democrats, please pull our government out of that bathtub.

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Something beautiful in Wikipedia today: All 321 images being considered for Picture of the Year (2006). A few of my favorites:

• British fairground worker Albert Harris inside his “coconut shy” booth (# 8)
• Panorama of the British Museum reading room (# 71)
• Nuclear waste, who knew it could look so beautiful? (# 82)
• Satellite image of crops growing in Kansas (# 121)
• Beautiful blue day at Scheveningen (# 180)
• Ferrofluid spikes in a magnetic field (# 194)
• Clear glass, colored liquid, and the refraction of light (# 297)
• Black-headed gull descends like the Holy Spirit (# 300)

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On a different battle front for the public domain, many Wikipedia editors stepped up last week to baffle multiple and diverse attacks on Wikipedia’s Dave Winer article, including several attempts to blank or delete the whole thing.

Wikipedians really are doing grand things for the future of information’s public availability.

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