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

Usually we get to paint our own portraits in these pages of ours, and to post photos that are at least somewhat flattering. For example, if I think about what I look like, I might think of these recent but still very flattering photos.

Anyway, I love the email interview Frank Paynter did of me–he is a brilliant question-devizer–and he was kind enough to take down a photo I didn’t like and replace it with one I sent him. So now this is what I look like, not just according to me but also in Frank Paynter’s interview.

But as for what I am like–that nerdy, ditzy persona in the interview? Frank got that perfectly right.

There’s a great big biosphere outside our blogosphere, and you can see some its strangest features in Amity Wilczek‘s Harvard blog “Nature Is Profligate.”

Aside from the fact that Amity is my daughter–I love the surprising stuff she blogs about and the even-more-surprising things she says about that stuff. To quote Amity on the subject of
two-headed snakes:

“Watching a movie of a two-headed snake is like watching a tug of war with a very short rope — one head says “Up!” while the other says “Down!”…Snakes have a keen sense of smell, which is very important in their prey location response. If one head smells like a recent meal, the other head may try to eat it!

(BTW, following Amity’s two-headed-snake-links, I discovered a
cute little duck with a 17-inch corkscrew for a penis. Did he evolve for two-thirds of “wine, women, and song”?)

Before I answer–speaking of the surreal–do you ever wonder how people find your weblog? I have been looking at my blog’s “referer stats“–the searches that found me. I now feel honored, and spooked, and very puzzled.

I’m both honored and spooked that people come here from searches for “E.B. White” or “Once More to the Lake.” Honored, because I love E.B. White–his honesty, insight, and crafty craftsmanship. (Check out his biography for more.) Spooked, to picture White’s admirers reading my prose. Wooooohhh, scary.

I first started blogging about Republican “Astroturf”–PR push-pieces sent out to small-town papers by the RNC, disguised as local “letters to the editor.” Now, six months later, people end up at my blog after searches for things like “where to buy astroturf”, “astroturf colors”, even “astroturf snow.”

Some searches that end up here are even more puzzling. “Charlotte’s+Web+sexist”? I never said that! “Custodial parents+are+evil”? I said the opposite! “Why+is+my+cat+timid”? Errrrr–huh?

Is this the fault of search engines or misshaped queries? Nahhhh, let’s join Andrew Orlowski and blame sneaky bloggers!

That’s right, folks! I confess–I wanted readers who had (sob) no interest in my blog. I set my sneaky net to capture people looking for something that I don’t offer. Okay, I’m no alpha-blogger–but we epsilon-bloggers are evil in our own way.

Coming next week: how custodial parents and colored astroturf create semiotic heuristic synergy–and that’s why your cat is timid!

So, how many surrealists does it take to change a light bulb? Best answer I know is, “To get to the other side.”

Harvard-blogger Yule Heibel has a smart, funny, quirky voice–and she points (all the way from Vancouver, BC) to cool stuff that you won’t read about elsewhere.

Here is just one of the gems she has pointed me to, an interview with a super-successful yoga named Bikram:

“Bikram…claims to have cured every disease known to humankind and compares himself to Jesus Christ and Buddha. Requiring neither food nor sleep, he says, “I’m beyond Superman.” When you ask how he can make such wild statements, he answers, “Because I have balls like atom bombs, two of them, 100 megatons each. Nobody fucks with me.”

Quick, somebody phone the President–we’ve finally found those weapons of mass destruction!

Why do Google searches turn up lots of bloggers? Is it because bloggers are basically one big link farm, sucking up bandwidth from real news sources and putting Andrew Orlowski’s knickers in a twist?

Dave Winer links today to two other theories–both suggest that “respectable” papers like the New York Times are shooting themselves in the foot when it comes to page rank.

First, Dave quotes Doc: “The ‘googlewashing’ Orlowski talks about was done by the Times, not by Google, and not by bloggers.” Google indexes pages that are on the Web. When the Times hides its archives so you have to pay-to-view, Google can’t find them. Open the archives, and those pages will start showing up in Google again.

Second, Dave cites a Microdocs study of what pages Google leaves out when it does searches. The telling point here is that Google often ignores pages that haven’t been updated in the past few months.

I use Manila, so my old stories are stored–not just in a page based on the month I wrote them–but also in “departments” that get updated each time I write a new story. By putting this story in my “Life, the universe, and everything” department, I am calling Google’s attention all over again to similar stories I wrote some months ago.

So the whole problem can be solved if the NYT turns into a blog and (this is my idea, not Dave’s, I want the credit!) starts using Manila. No, don’t bother to thank me, Mr. Orlowski–all in a days work for this hard-working blogger.

“Ansible,” a crazy Brit sci-fi email newsletter, is one of very few I subscribe to. Today’s issue says that the incomplete biog of sci-fi great Robert L. Forward is now online. Forward is perhaps best known for Dragon’s Egg.

Forward’s neutron star physics and exo-biology are spot-on–he’s a hard-sci-fi master–and _Dragon’s Egg_ also has some of the wackiest, most convincing alien sex scenes ever.

Want more alien sex? You may get a bang out of the species with 3 genders in _The Gods Themselves_ by Asimov.

I met a bunch of great Boston-area bloggers Thursday at Dave Winer’s Harvard blog meeting:

http://www.scripting.com/ “Scripting News: Dave Winer’s weblog about scripting and stuff like that”

Dave was there fixing our blogs and having fun with subjects from Chinese households to NH primaries.

http://radio.weblogs.com/0120875/ “Shiny Glass Beads: Shiny Glass Beads:
Pay it forward: Got a penny? Leave a penny. Need a penny? Take a penny.”

Critt Jarvis blogs about politics, collaborations, and of course blogging. Lots of good snips and links.

http://critt.weblogger.com “One Co-Intelligence Avenue/
Exploring wholeness, interconnectedness, and co-creativity”

A new group blog where Critt Jarvis will be a contributing writer.

http://www.castleblack.net/mikeb/ “Castle Black: It Made Sense at the Time”

Michael Booth’s blog–here is just one insightful quote:

“It is okay, within limits, to talk about an absent person, but when someone is in the room you are supposed to either invite them into the conversation or leave them out of it. The problem with the Web is that the whole world is in the room, so you can’t really talk behind anyone’s back.”

http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/stanleyc/“Stanley’s Weblog: Technology investing is my thing”

Stanley Cohen’s new blog invites comments on micro-cap stocks and broadband strategies.

http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/natureisprofligate/“Nature is Profligate or so it seems… “

Amity Wilczek is a Harvard biology grad student, who blogs about some wide-ranging bio interests with wit and a lot of fun pictures. Disclosure: I do aleady know her, because she’s my daughter.

Jamie, Mike, and some others whose names I don’t know

Start up your weblogs soon!

p.s. Most blogs link to the Daily Show’s own Bush versus Bush debate; I couldn’t get their plug-in to work. That’s why I linked yesterday to a different 12.4 M mov. version

Dave Winer blew me away today with a blog entry called “Why blogs are cool“. Dave, a major blog-software guru, has been thinking aloud online about Google and Blogger–and thereafter suffering through having other people quote, misquote, analyze, mis-analyze, etc. whatever he said. Dave responds to it all with good humor. My favorite quote:

Because I have a weblog, I can write about it at length, several times. I can write until I’m finished. If you don’t care, that’s cool too, you can hit the Back button. But I get to say what I want, and I can get it right, and if I don’t there’s a fresh empty page tomorrow that I’m going to fill, Murphy-willing of course.

Can you think of a better, or shorter, description of why blogs are cool? Thank you, Dave Winer.

Two weeks after starting this blog, I went to Dave Winer‘s blogger meeting at Harvard. Fortunately, I enjoyed being so outclassed by so many experts–experts not just in blogging, but in the meta-blogging world of cool software. It was a fascinating mix of people and interests.

You can enjoy the February 11 event, thanks to Donna Wentworth’s blog of it, and Dan Bricklin’s photos.

Dinner at the Bombay Club–anyone who wants proof of Dave Winer’s quick wit can find it in the blogs of Daniel Berlinger (Archipelago) and Michael Joseph (Notio).