Month: November 2008

oh noes: it really is a scam!

When Classmates.com told user Anthony Michaels last Christmas Eve that his former school chums were trying to contact him, he pulled out his wallet and upgraded to the premium membership that would let him contact long-lost fifth-grade dodge-ball buddies and see if his secret crush from high school had looked him up online.

A Classmates.com user alleges in a lawsuit that he’d been scammed by the online service.
But once he’d parted with the $15, Michaels learned the shocking truth: No one he knew was trying to contact him at all. Classmates.com’s come-on was a lie, and he’d been scammed.

[From ABC News: Classmates.com User Sues; Schoolmates Weren’t Really Looking for Him]

context here.

Tip of the beat-up and weather-stained photographer’s chapeau

[sigh]

ipodtouch_image3_20080909.jpg

My 11 year old is going to buy one of these. With his own money.

Remember your first music player? Was it as cool as this?

I think this makes good sense for a lot of people (like me). I think it could replace a laptop for my purposes. But not anytime soon.

The old AdSense revenue trickle isn’t all that helpful (4¢ today! Woo hoo!). And my other paying work is pretty limited.

W’s legacy

It will be a fitting irony if George W Bush’s greatest legacy to the country is that he has so damaged the Republican party that it has permitted the (non-crazy) citizens of the US to elect their first non-white president. Not that he will ever see it that way.

[From TBogg » If you live in this world You’re feelin’ the change of the guard ]

I was thinking the same thing earlier today, that instead of a more entrenched hard-right Republican majority, he leaves an energized Democratic party, has created a political environment that has gotten millions of people to register and vote for the first time in their lives, and will see his agenda — tax cuts for the wealthy, wars in the mideast, politicization of everything — dismantled piece by piece over the next couple of years.

quote of the quadrennial election ritual

It is hard to think of a thing more out of time than nobility. Looked at plainly it seems false and dead and ugly. To look at it at all makes us realize sharply that in our present, in the presence of our reality, the past looks false and is, therefore, dead and is, therefore, ugly; and we turn away from it as from something repulsive and particularly from the characteristic that it has a way of assuming: something that was noble in its day, grandeur that was, the rhetorical once. But as a wave is a force and not the water of which it is composed, which is never the same, so nobility is a force and not the manifestations of which it is composed, which are never the same. Possibly this description of it as a force will do more than anything else I can have said about it to reconcile you to it. It is not an artifice that the mind has added to human nature. It is a violence from within that protects us from a violence without. It is the imagination pressing back against the pressure of reality. It seems, in the last analysis, to have something to do with our self-preservation; and that, no doubt, is why the expression of it, the sound of its words, helps us to live our lives.

— Wallace Stevens, “The Noble Rider and the Sound of Words”

[From Alex Ross: The Rest Is Noise: For Barack Obama]

No surprise Mr Ross was honored by the MacArthur Foundation, is it?