In our discussion here the other day about sexual harassment at conventions, I ran an e-mail from Juli Thompson and she mentioned something called The Open Source Boob Project. I received a few e-mails, all from folks who wished to not be quoted by name, telling me that she had misrepresented The Open Source Boob Project and that it was not as she described. Frankly, I think that if you start something called The Open Source Boob Project, you're kind of begging to be misunderstood, no matter what you intend. One person wrote, in part...
At the very least, in the interest of fairness, you could point out that the description of the OSBP was not quite accurate, and post a link to the blog article written by the person behind it.
I hereby point out that Ms. Thompson's explanation may not be the best one but I'm not going to post the link. You can probably find it easily via Google if you care...which you shouldn't. Actually, the founder's explanation makes it sound even stupider and more sophmoric than what Juli described.
The preceding has been the last mention you will ever see on this blog of The Open Source Boob Project.
Now through the end of September, TwoMorrows Publishing is having a helluva sale, marking down all sorts of magazines and books, including mine. The three collections of my silly essays depicted above are now available for 50% off the cover price, which was already a bargain. And while you're at it, there are plenty of other things you'll want to order. So what are you waiting for?
I'm kind of half-watching the Democratic convention. Everyone's waiting for Hillary Clinton's big speech and saying that it has to accomplish this, it has to accomplish that, etc. If it does anything less than cure AIDS, it will be a disappointment.
Mitt Romney is going around saying that John and Cindy McCain deserve all their mansions and riches because of all the "hard work" they've done to get them. Damn straight. Do you think it's easy to inherit a fortune from a rich father or to marry a woman who did?
I've decided to become a "values" voter. I'm going to throw my support behind politicians who can speak for one whole minute without using the word "values." I could do without all the strained Olympics analogies, too.
No one ever refers to Barack Obama except as Barack Obama. He's never Senator Obama, Mr. Obama, Obama or Barack. He's always Barack Obama. It's the same way with Charlie Brown. Always the first name and the last name.
The best line so far today has come from Senator Robert Casey from Pennsylvania. He said, "McCain likes to call himself a maverick but he votes with George W. Bush more than 90% of the time. That's not a maverick. That's a sidekick."
That's all for now. I'm going back to work until it's time to half-watch Hillary.
Once upon a time, my e-mailbox was jammed with messages from folks in Nigeria who wanted to cut me in on huge inheritances. It was clogged with ads from people who wanted to loan me money. It was inundated with mail from those who wanted to sell me medications that would shrink or enlarge key portions of my anatomy.
Thanks to the expert Spam-filtering efforts of Time-Warner Cable, those have slowed to a trickle. What I get now is a different kind of unwanted e-mail...
People — an odd array of friends, casual acquaintances and total strangers — want me to join Facebook. They want me to join LinkedIn. They want me to join Grouply. They want me to join Ning and Friendster and MySpace and Plaxo and various Yahoo newsgroups and all sorts of personal networks that don't seem to amount to anything else than me getting more unwanted e-mail.
I gather that in many cases, these are not personal invites. The person did not say, "Oh, my Facebook group would not be complete without the valuable participation of Mark Evanier." They just dumped their entire address book into the service and I happened to be in there.
An amazing percentage of these invites are from people whose names I do not recognize. Someone named William Keefe keeps writing, "I want to add you as a friend in Grouply so you can see my profile with my pictures, my groups, and my favorite group messages." I'm not joining, Bill. I mean, it's tempting because if I see your profile and your pictures and your groups and your favorite group messages, I might get a clue as to who you are. But I'm not joining.
These groups are supposed to bring people together, I guess, and cause us all to be friends. I find they're having the opposite impact on me. I'm starting to figure that anyone who wants me to be his friend this way is no friend of mine.
Okay, time for an old commercial. This is for Funny Face Drink Mixes, which were kind of like Kool-Aid. No, come to think of it, they were exactly like Kool-Aid, which I also couldn't stand. I wrote about Funny Face Drink Mixes here and here. This spot is for the original line before Chinese Cherry was replaced by Choo Choo Cherry and Injun Orange got changed into Jolly Olly Orange. Later on, Paul Frees provided the voices of all or most of the Funny Face Drinks but these ain't him...
August 27, 2008
