WHAT BAD MONEY MEANS TO ME

The Bartender was kind enough to e-mail me the results from sending "Bad Money" through the Internet Anagram server. Now, I don't like to put a lot of stock in random coincidences, but a few things became clearer after I perused the list, like:

Why I'm not a hippie - NAY BE MOD

Yet I'm still destined to convert to communism on my deathbed - MAO BY END

Why I keep writing bad poetry - ODE BY MAN

Why I'm so damned hairy all over - MANE BODY

Why I spend so much time blogging to all hours of the night - DYNAMO BE

My least favorite part of the marriage vows - DAMN OBEY

Why that last crappy Matrix movie pissed me off so much - MAD BY NEO

What effect all the charming women of the blogosphere have on me - MADE BONY

Who should be on my list of "bloggers I'll never be funnier than" - MAYBE DON

Why lousy days at work seem to last a LOT more than 8 hours - MY BAD EON

How I was lured into blogging in the first place - BY A DEMON

And, finally, why women find me so irresistable - AMEN BODY

Can I get a hallelujah, ladies?

IT'S NOT JUST ABOUT THE PACKERS

In addition to being the land of cheese, cows, beer, great football, and really crappy baseball, Wisconsin also has the honor of being home to some of the most unpronouncable and unspellable city names in existence.

This is a feature, not a bug.

Many states are jealous of this glittering jewel in the Dairy State's crown, but this no longer need be the case. Thanks to a link I found at Heather's place, now your state can also have city names that make people go, "uh, can you spell that, please?"

Don't forget to click the first link so that you may enjoy my comment to her post, which simply drips with down-home-Wisconsin dialectical goodness.

THERE'S NO PLAN FOR IRAQ!

...oh, wait... here it is.

I have no idea how Matt O'Blackfive gets ahold of this stuff, and he'd probably have to kill me if I found out, but while I'm still drawing breath, I'm gonna mention this memo he posted which contains some serious and thought-provoking observations on the situation in Iraq. I love this because it makes some points that I don't normally think of, but that once I hear them, make a lot of sense. I love reading stuff like that.

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1. An infantry battalion commander told me, “You can’t assume kindness will win their hearts. You’ve got to get in sync with the Arab male mentality – then they will respect you – tough but fair.

2. From point 1 comes the need to balance “Dignity and Respect” with operating within the cultural norms. Do we compromise our values to operate within their value set as did Laurence of Arabia? At what point on the toughness scale does the new unit enter the fray? This is a really tough decision for the leadership of the new unit – and I do not think it should be left to subordinate leaders to make this determination.

3. Units have got to have their game face on before they leave the operating base. Standards have got be impeccable. This means looking correct enough that no one who wants to live would dare attack you. Units that do not demonstrate this degree of professionalism will invite attacks. I went on an early morning raid with a mechanized unit. We looked as tough as tough could be. The operation went off without incident – every soldier looked ready for action all the time. As we returned, after daylight, we passed a logistics convoy. Soldiers were not postured with the same alertness as ours; some were out of uniform. Later on, we observed a lone vehicle drive by – the policy is three, two of which must have crew served weapons. Both the convoy and the lone vehicle were inviting attacks. In the train up for this mission, I would inflict kills every time on ill disciplined convoys and lone vehicles to make the “Game Face” point.

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There's lots more. It's a real eye-opener. Go read.

STUPID KIDS

Via the Beloved Wife, from the "forwarded a million times" file, here are some dumb answers to science questions, hopefully not written by your children:

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I weep for America's future.

LIKE I NEED ANOTHER REASON TO HATE THE FRENCH

...ah, what the hell. I'll take it. This via Matt O'Blackfive, a AP report on what those nasty, furry, surrender-monkeys were up to last year:

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French and Russian intermediaries "repeatedly assured Hussein during late 2002 and early this year that they would block a US-led war through delays and vetoes at the UN Security Council," the Post said Monday.

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Ok, so you already knew about or suspected this story. That's fine. But give Matty a visit, because he's got a link to a beautiful visual for you that makes it all better.

NAUGHTY IS AS NAUGHTY DOES

Just when things have slowed down between the Axis & Alliance to the point where you'd almost think there was a cease-fire, Misguided Minioness Jen has to go and start trouble. This time she's posted some poorly photoshopped evidence and used it as justification to question Frank J.'s patriotism.

Wily, cunning, and never to be trusted. She's like Catwoman to the Alliance's Batman.

... uh, excuse me a moment while I relish a mental image of Jen in a cat suit...

[space][space][space]...

TODAY'S LOVE NOTE

(Introduction)

You are the hot air balloon. You are the one floating among the clouds with the world below, details insignificant, astounding beauty enveloping you. I am the one reaching for you with my feet well grounded. And, as I reach, when I touch you... For just that second, I loose the ground and fly. And the flight is worth the agony of reaching.

[to which I added]

(thanks for making me stretch from time to time :-)

TODAY’S GRAFFITI CURRENCY



After 12 beers, Matt O'Blackfive was struck by a brilliant idea around which to form a new political organization. However, after 24 more beers, he stuffed the dollar into a dancer's g-string and forgot it ever existed.

[Note: per the Bartender's request, this picture is a gif instead of a jpg. Does this make it show up now, and are the others still missing?]

LINK WHORING, WELFARE, AND AFFIRMATIVE ACTION

If you're a member of the Bear's Ecosystem, you need to check out the discussion that's going on at his main page. It seems that the League of Liberals has recently taken to passing around gratuituous linkage posts amongst its members in an effort to artificially inflate the Ecosystem rankings of certain liberal blogs. Blog welfare, as it were.

I've been mulling this over for the last day or so, and I'm having trouble deciding if this is good, bad, or indifferent. Offhand, I'd say indifferent, with bad future prospects.

Indifferent, because it doesn't physically hurt me, cost me money, ruin my reputation, or cut into my readership. No one is going to go, "yeah, I used to read Bad Money, but ever since he dropped down to Reptile, I stopped." The actions of the LoL won't take away my links or page views, so it doesn't really matter. My blog will be continue to be judged on its merit (such as it is).

The downside to this activity will be a dilution of the value of the Ecosystem itself as a means of feedback on a blogger's overall performance. Currently, when I check Ecosystem ratings, I can get a feel for the relative popularity of my blog. It means something (although exactly what is debatable) to know that I'm ranked somewhere in the top 10%. But if the LoL link-whoring makes me fall into a lower bracket, does it mean that I've gotten worse or that they've gotten better? No. What it means it that some blogs have gained status that they haven't earned through the quality of their blogging alone, and as such, it dilutes the value of the higher realms. People will look at the rankings and go, "yeah, he's a mammal, but he's a liberal, so he probably just whored his way to the top." In this way, the corrosive effect is much like affirmative action. As an analogy, if a black man is attending a prestigious college, he may have gotten there by merit alone, but the existence of affirmative action programs casts a shadow of doubt on the notion. He may be an unqualified racial token. There's no way to know without further investigation.

As I understand it, the goal of the LoL plan is to enhance the status of their members. But without power, status is unimportant. And in the blogosphere, power is site traffic. The ability to receive & deliver page views. The links the LoL are tossing about so freely have very little power to deliver actual traffic. And without driving page views, those links will do nothing to spread their message. If communication was their goal, they'd be better off taking the time they spend linking posts and using it to write compelling descriptions of why a single link should be clicked.

Don't get me wrong. I'm all in favor of gratuitous linkage. It's a great way to tell a fellow blogger that you care and are thinking of him, even though you don't have time to write an entire essay on why this or that post should be visited. It's a warm and wonderful gift to be on the receiving end of. But what the LoL is doing is cold, calculating, and impersonal. There's no caring or personal affection involved. It's just a numbers game, and the bloggers they link are just pieces being moved about on a virtual gameboard. Tools to be used and cast aside as required. It's like the difference between being told "I love you" by an actor that you hired for the purpose, and hearing it from your wife who says it of her own free will because it's true.

I'm hoping that what comes of this is that the Bear finds a way to meld site traffic stats into link stats by some sort of formula in order to more accurately measure a blog's relative strength. For example take a blog with 100 links & 300 hits per day. This would imply that, on average, each link drives 3 hits (I know there are a lot of sloppy assumptions in this example, please don't nit pick). Which further implies that each link comes with a strong endorsement of the linked post, probably due to the post's quality. Conversely, if you have a blog with 100 links and 50 hits per day, not every link is driving a hit, so... draw your own conclusions on how valuable those links really are.

In the follow-up post at the Bear's site, the Bear goes into some detail about his opinion of this whole episode & what it might mean for the future of the ecosystem. In the comments a member of the LoL says that he'll no longer be using whore-posts. Whether you believe him is up to you. But in any event, it'll be interesting to see how this mess pans out.

BUFFY: THE DECENCY SLAYER

Blogless Brother Tom is a big Buffy fan, and possessed of a juvenile sense of humor. So when I was over at Madfish Willie's during Happy Hour, and saw the Buffy Swears link under the "Movie Madness" section, I thought to myself - I've gotta remember to send a link to Tom so he can check this out.

Then it occurred to me that he's probably not the only juvenile delinquent I know that can type "the quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog", so I decided to post the link here. If your sense of humor is even remotely sophisticated, don't even bother.