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I review “May No Soldier Go Unloved”

Not that they’re dying for traffic, but I’ve given my review of May No Soldier Go Unloved by Jeff Bader, a new book from Soldier’s Angels over at Wizbang.

Now that I’ve got my own post–shilling over with, somebody wanna tell me what the heck’s with the 18,000 Vinnie posts and the guest-post-a-rama and the total dis on thanks for making with the blogging? A little help over here?

I’m thinking that maybe, perhaps, after personally keeping this thing alive in 2005, I may have prolonged the inevitable. I just don’t know. I swear to all that’s holy, if I don’t get some ’splainin’ real soon, it’s Open Trackbacks Post time!*

*Note, this is not an Open Trackbacks Post. Calm down.

Because there’s nothing better on a Saturday night than reading poll results

Stunningly, Dr. Ron Paul did not get the turnout we were expecting. Perhaps it’s because there was no way to vote for Dr. Ron Paul.

Should’ve thought of that.

Regardless, the votes are in, and since nobody cheated (here? are you kidding?), we can certify the results from last week’s poll. It seems ya’ll like the format, and see ye olde poll results with the click of the after–the–jump thing.

Read the rest of this entry »

And now, a poll

Remember when we posted so much we used to use that post timestamp thing? Me either.

I just recall a day, a couple of years ago, when we were posting so much stuff here that we were all like, “wait, don’t cover it up yet, give it a couple of hours.” Now we’re invoking the fine name of Ron Paul for cheap blog hits — how the mighty have fallen.

In that vein (GAWD I love spelling it that way), I’ve created a nifty poll for you, the loyal snicker Bama’ Pachyderm Caucus. It asks the salient question: What should Beth blog now?

Put any additional ideas in comments, and I’ll think about adding them.

Your weekly recap

Thought I’d chime in here with your weekly recap of what’s going on in the Bamapachyderm Empire.

1. Ron Paul = mad blog hits

2. Martin doesn’t like John Edwards. No video needed.

3. Jihadists bad.

4. Bloggers suck.

5. Beth hearts Ace.

Ace from Jake Hurwitz and Vimeo.

6. There are nearly enough link lists around here. Seriously, we need more.

7. Beth is lazy.

8. LindaSoG rules, Beth drools.

9. Ron Paul Ron Paul Ron Paul Ron Paul Ron Paul Ron Paul Ron Paul Ron Paul Ron Paul Ron Paul Ron Paul Ron Paul Ron Paul Ron Paul Ron Paul Ron Paul Ron Paul Ron Paul Ron Paul Ron Paul Ron Paul Ron Paul Ron Paul Ron Paul Ron Paul Ron Paul Ron Paul Ron Paul Ron Paul Ron Paul Ron Paul Ron Paul.

This concludes your bi–annual weekly recap. See you in a month or so!

Yes, I still can post here

Just trying to classy up the place a bit. That should do it.

(I’m pretty sure this is a repost, but what the heck?)

Oh, and there’s this. I’m just sayin’.

Enough with the bored, already!

Who’s ready to never hear Beth complain about boredom again? Hands?

Yes, it’s your beloved MacStansbury, back again to pull you out of your doldrums. I’ve been hard at work trying to create things that’ll keep people with the attention span of a kitten (like Beth) interested for many, many minutes. One of those projects is called…

[Bored]

What is it? I’m not sayin’. But Beth is hanging on to 5 invites to the thing, and if you ask her nicely, or harshly, maybe she’ll let you in on our little secret.

If not, here’s some others that are holding on to invitations:

EM
Alabama
tommy
penni
The Random Yak
Alli
Chip Mathis
Portia
Agent Bedhead
6pence

But mostly, bug Beth about it. Because you know how much she loves it when people bother her.

Has it been a year already?

The first post Beth throws her cigarettes at the laptop

John explains the blogosphere

Back, last year:

Howdy. My name’s John, and I work here now.

Seriously.

I still have no idea how she did it, but she found my story about Conservative Bloggers Take Weekend Off, but she did. For a while, she’s been schooling me on how to suck, and now, I get the chance at the big time: sucking here, full-time!

Seriously.

Anyways, I’m the hired gun, if you will. I’m also the guy nobody’s heard of, but that’s not important. All you need to know, is that I’m the guy that writes the boring political crap that nobody ever comments on.

Oh, and I’m a man.

I promise not to suck from now on.

Oooooh how I wished that was true. From there I continued to suck, strait to the bottom of the TTLB, so thoroughly that I melted my own blog into oblivion. Well, that, and the American legal system. Don’t wanna talk about it.

But what you should understand is, this is my bittersweet goodbye from MVRWC, as I’m leaving to concentrate on other internetly interests, mainly involving an unnamed system I’m developing from scratch, and slacking. I’ve lost almost all taste for both politics and war, and blogs, for that matter, the bedrock of 99% of every post here. It’s just not me, anymore.

Okay, that 99% figure might be off a little. There needs to be like, 5-10% for 80s band videos or something. YouTube is such a two-edged sword.

When Beth first invited me to ~~do all her work for her~~ fill up blog space, I jumped at the chance, hoping to suck the MILLIONS of hits a day to my own crummy blog. Then, I proceeded to post maybe 10 links in a 12 month period. Not good blog-whoring, even with the tutelage from the master. It wasn’t what I thought it would be.

Then there was that whole “King of Cotillion” things. We won’t get into that. Just painful memories of bitter defeat at the hands of a guy who uses “Darth” in their title. How do you beat a Sith?

PRACTICE!

Badumching!

Okay, I’m babbling now. I tend to do that at times. Like, daily between 9 am and 3 am.

Part of my reasoning, also, for joining MYVRWC - which I convinced Beth would be easier if we used MVRWC, less typing you know - was that I had this desire to conquer the internets. It was just another step moving up in the blogosphere. And that’s when I started learning.

Want to know the mystery secret of owning the blogosphere? Here is the most honest, truthful, perfect way to supremacy in that TTLB. You can tell everybody you heard it here, first, people! And here’s the magic trick:

Be lucky.

That’s right, it’s all just pure luck. It isn’t being a hottie with a great rack, it’s not being a law professor from Tennessee, it’s not being a gay rights activist from USC…it’s all an un-planable crapshoot. There’s absolutely no way to guarantee success on your blog, regardless of who you are. Add to that, starting from anonymity in 2006 is completely different from the same thing in 2001.

To put it in perspective, there are over 5 million blogs out there, mostly dormant or splogs, and few of them get any appreciable traffic. The most successful blogs have some connection with a mainstream entity, whether it be a newspaper, radio, television station, or industry giant. The latest shining star of the blogosphere is a guy by the name of Glen Greenwald, a guy who primarily picks on FOX News’ Michelle Malkin and the like, the folks on top of the conservative blogosphere. How’d he get such good press, and notability? He’s selling a book through a major publisher; he’s got a built-in push that normal folks like you and me don’t have.

Which is all the more impressive what Beth did with the Cotillion. It’s a network of women bloggers, ones who wouldn’t have the Google Juice to get their voices heard, yet can combine their efforts to focus a great deal of attention to a subject. With no major backing from some university, media outlet, or PAC, this is as good as you could hope without making some major financial obligation.

There’s a couple of other efforts, like 9rules, that aren’t really closely connected, they’re really only connected by a look and a banner. You’ve got Pajamas Media, which is an advertising network, I think, put together for…some reason. That vague business model makes it hard to understand just what Pajamas Media does. You’ve got the most successful web networks, Gawker Media, which has always been clear about its paid-blogger blogs, and Weblogs, Inc., which was so good it got acquired by AOL.

What I’m trying to say is, you can be a great blogger, good as the day is long, and still have nothing in the Site Meter to show for it. Trust me, I know. After a couple of stabs at it, I realized the blogosphere wasn’t responsive to my threats of leaving, as people were to thinking they could make a ton of money off of it. One of reasons going to drop off the radar, is that I lost the will to play the game, the open trackbacks, the pligg, and the endless blogrolls. Somehow, these things were supposed to work, but no matter how many buttons I put up, the mad blog hits never came.

Here’s a little something written by my homie Sun Tzu, in his New York Times best-seller, Just Give Me The Damn War:

Sun Tzu said: The good fighters of old first put themselves beyond the possibility of defeat, and then waited for an opportunity of defeating the enemy.

To secure ourselves against defeat lies in our own hands, but the opportunity of defeating the enemy is provided by the enemy himself.

Thus the good fighter is able to secure himself against defeat, but cannot make certain of defeating the enemy.

Hence the saying: One may know how to conquer without being able to do it.

For about three years, I’ve worked hard at doing something I hate: selling myself. It was something John Hawkins said the other day (not about boobies), about selling ads. To paraphrase, he was willing to compromise some of his beliefs in order to sell an ad to something he didn’t inherently believe in. That’s something I’ve done, but I don’t want to do anymore.

And just for fun, here’s a bonus, super-magical way to get thousands of hits to your website: buy $2,000 worth of Google AdSense ads. In fact, advertise almost everywhere you can find. That’s what MySpace did, and look at where they are. The rumor was that this one guy made up the site, and all these cool people showed up. First of all, it was made by a marketing company, and the pages and activity were part of paid endorsements.

If you’ve paid any attention to who I’ve linked (and I’ve linked a lot), you’ll see a consistent thread. They are good writers or finders of news. They’ve added to the story, or been the first to break it. They are the aggregators and the pundits. To borrow a line from probably Lawrence Simon, they are the thinkers and linked.

Sweetness & Light, Gateway Pundit, Princess & VC, it’s not like their material isn’t great, it’s just that you’ll never catch them on top of the Technorati Top 100. It’s a shame, and completely predictable, that blogs are judged by link count. But that’s how it works; notoriety is more important than ability. That’s what bugs me most about a lot of things.

Tonight I’ll be gutting my politics feeds, concentrating on learning my php voodoo spells, and finally relax, assured that somewhere, out there in this big old world, somebody is arguing with somebody else over something of life and death importance, while I’m playing Madden on my XBox. I’m sure the blogs will get along fine without me.

And it’s not like I’m burning my key, or anything, I’m just going into extended hiatus. That’s what you say when you want to leave people when you want them to think you’re coming back, just in time to save the paper from going under. I totally promise this isn’t like that one episode of the Simpsons where they vote out the garbage commissioner, and put Homer in charge, and after he nearly destroys the town, they vote to bring him back, and he goes up the microphone and starts laughing at them for the mess they got into, then leaves.

I would never do that.

Promise.

Honest.

It’s been a fun, exciting, maddening year here, and I’ll miss it all. Sort of.

Except for the maddening part.

And now, I leave you with my theme song:

And, yes, I know it’s Art of War. Just making sure you were paying attention.

Dear Martin, your blogthing is completely stupid

You Are a Liberal Republican

When you tell people that you’re Republican, they rarely believe you.
That’s because you’re socially liberal - likely pro-choice and pro-gay rights.
You’re also not so afraid of big goverment, as long as it benefits people and not politicians.
You are the most likely of any Republican type to swing over to the Democrat side sometimes.

What’s Your Political Persuasion?

I’m not even going to start on how wrong this is.

Take all them things, switch them 180° the other way, and you’ve got me.

Now I know why Beth put “I hate memes & quizes” in here.

The horror of US Military torture

Sounds exactly like Friday night at the Kappa Alpha house.

The latest boobies blogger? Ann Althouse.

No, really

UPDATE: At first, I didn’t see what the big deal was. So Bill Clinton’s with some bloggers, how can that be all anti-feminist? Okay, now I see.

Tags: boobies, blogs, Althouse

2996: Shock and Awe

Shock and Awe. That’s a pretty good summary of my feelings about 2,996.

Check out what happened with D. Challanger Roe with Project 2,996:

1. My webhosting account was “temprarly suspended” (sic) at about 10:45 AM EDT on 9/11 for excessive MYSQL queries—not bandwidth. Repeated online chats with my host’s technical disservice, resulted in the following chain of events in a repeating pattern: unsuspend the account, demand I stop putting a load on their servers, ignore my requests to make the changes from their end, resuspend the account. I was finally able to convince them to change a directory name directly at the server and then unsuspend the account. This resulted is an almost exact replay of the above events, with the new problem being http access requests. At about noon on 9/11 the 2,996 blog was getting an average of 200 requests every minute.
2. For a while I tried to keep up with all of the 2,996ers who jumped right in and posted mirror lists from Google’s cache, but with trying to get the site back up I lost track.
3. On 9/11, the 2,996 site was active between 12:00 AM EDT and about 10:45 AM EDT (and maybe another hour total throughout the day). During this period I burned through 14.5 GB of bandwidth and received more than 400,000 hits.
4. Some helpful emailers clued me into some mentions of 2,996 from Media sources. An article from Wired Online included a link to 2,996, and a short while I was named and quoted in an AFP article on Yahoo News (quite a little thrill, let me tell you).
5. An online tech article (which I did not see, so this is heresay) mentioned 2,996 as a possible cause of extreme lag on blogger, myspace, and aol journals.

Change your links and whatnot to Project 2,996, and don’t forget about the tributes, just because it’s 9/12 or later. Never forget.

Tags: 911, 9-11, september 11th, 2001, 2996

I can’t wait to see the outakes for this movie

Tags: borat, borat movie

Sorry to be typically cryptic…

…but I’m having a mental block on something, and I wanna really just keep it supur seekrit, anyways.

I figured out #1, #3 (wasn’t even hard), #4, #5, #6, and #7 (heh, “modest”), but I just can’t recall where I’ve seen #2.

It isn’t that I don’t remember, it’s that I don’t remember where. It’s not something you’d expect that I’d forget, but I have.

Trust me, I’ve been racking my brain for the last hour.

Scholastic is all about the truth

SCHOLASTIC REPLACES “THE PATH TO 9/11” CLASSROOM GUIDE WITH NEW DISCUSSION MATERIALS FOCUSING ON CRITICAL THINKING AND MEDIA LITERACY SKILLS:

New York, NY (September 7, 2006) — Scholastic, the global children’s publishing, education and media company, today announced that it is removing from its website the materials originally created for classroom use in conjunction with the ABC Television Network docudrama, “The Path to 9/ll,” scheduled to air on the ABC Television Network on September 10 and 11, 2006. A new classroom discussion guide for high school students is being created and will focus more specifically on media literacy, critical thinking, and historical background.

“After a thorough review of the original guide that we offered online to about 25,000 high school teachers, we determined that the materials did not meet our high standards for dealing with controversial issues,” said Dick Robinson, Chairman, President and CEO of Scholastic. “At the same time, we believe that developing critical thinking and media literacy skills is crucial for students in today’s society in order to participate fully in our democracy and that a program such as ‘The Path to 9/11’ provides a very ‘teachable moment’ for developing these skills at the high school level. We encourage teachers not to shy away from the controversy surrounding the program, but rather to engage their students in meaningful, in-depth discussion.”

The new guide clearly states that Scholastic had no involvement with developing the ABC docudrama, and that the company is not promoting the program, but that the program can provide a springboard to discussion about the issues leading up to 9/11, terrorism and the Middle East. The guide will focus on three issues:

1. Media Literacy - what is a docudrama; how does it differ from a documentary; what are the differences between factual reporting and a dramatization?

2. Background to 9/11 - what are some of the causes of unrest in the Middle East and other parts of the world that give rise to attacks on the U.S. and other countries?

3. Geography and Culture — there is a long history of conflict in the Middle East. How well do students understand each of the countries involved and what influences their behavior?
Scholastic has been providing free educational materials for use in the classroom in conjunction with television programs and films since the 1950’s. Classroom discussion guides have also been created in the past to support discussion of major events such as the Challenger and Columbia shuttle disasters, the shootings at Columbine and many others.

“As we have done with many discussion guides in the past related to major events, we encourage teachers to engage their students in these important discussions about news, media and public opinion. Understanding and evaluating media messages can be challenging for adults and young people alike and developing media literacy skills is critical for students in order for them to be well-informed participants in our democratic society,” added Robinson.

The Scholastic mission is clearly stated in its credo and editorial platform which includes the statement: “Good citizens may honestly differ on important public questions. We believe that all sides of the issues of our times should be fairly discussed – with deep respect for facts and logical thinking – in classroom magazines, books and other educational materials used in schools and homes.”

The new guide will be available on Friday, September 8 at www.scholastic.com/medialiteracy.

I’ll be waiting in eager anticipation.