The JE title is deliberately misleading. ;-)

I'm not going to try and provoke a flamewar over the two sites -- if anything I'm thinking about how to link them.

A thought occurred to me. Since there are a number of people who have said they can't or won't make the move to Multiply, I could hack up an RSS feed reader to put their JE headlines on the group's central page over there. I already did that for the /. front page over there, and it works more or less; I could set up a fake user here to friend those who won't be coming along so the /my/amigos RSS feed would pipe in their JEs to the Multiply group's page.

A few people have contacted Multiply to get full RSS support over there, so my hack shouldn't be necessary after a while (hopefully). And for that matter maybe /. will at some point support RSS feeds from elsewhere, in which case the Multiply group's feed could show up here.

The point being that this could actually keep the group from splitting. Indeed it could actually make it potentially get huge -- as it is the level of activity on Multiply from those who've moved is pretty striking...

Whaddy'all say?

In another Slashdot discussion, IamBMETammy asks what the measure of a man is.

I was kind enough to provide an answer, but she apparently wanted to order a brochure with further information, because she asks (and I answer) as follows:

How does one measure Ethelredness factor? Or is it only visible to the enlightened (ie: Ethelred).

Essentially it is the futile attempt to compare the hawtttness of a given mortal male to my own glory, and assign a number to it.

I begin to be curious how other men on /. measure up

What a silly question. They don't.

of course I also wonder what the scale is.

From null to Ethelred.

Is this a 0.02 out of 1? or 100? Is it even possible for the pathetic flesh of a human to contain an Ethelred factor of over 5 without exploding?

The sole time anyone actually got over 0.03, the person nearly died in a spontaneous combustion.

Remember when Michael Jackson's hair blew up in a Pepsi commercial? That's what happened. And now look at what's left of him.

Thus only I am capable of containing pure Ethelredness in my person while not causing thermonuclear explosions (except in the throbbing hearts of adoring women-folk).

At this point I would smell my armpit, but I would run the risk of falling madly, totally in love with myself. (Not that this has happened already.)

Blog update over there.

Too lazy to post here. Meh.

If you haven't yet gotten a Multiply account, then you are like sooooo 90s and we cool people haughtily wave our private parts at you. Meanwhile 49 others are in the new-fangled Circular Refuge. This is because I promised them each a state of their choice when I seize power.

I lied, of course. They all get to fight over Iowa.

This is my new home away from home, so to speak.

Like subgeek, I don't know if I'll move there permanently, but I just might.

In particular I like the fact I can play with the design. :-)

And I went ahead and created a home for everyone else.

The beachhead has been established. You have your orders.

As an addendum to my remarks on the German coverage of the Super Bowl yesterday, here are a few more things that annoyed the hell out of me. (Yes, yes, I'm whining and ranting, but hey, it's all for your amusement.)

One good thing about the show was they didn't have any ads. Nada. The bad part is that because of the many pauses in the game, they would fill the gaps with inane and often totally irrelevant commentary, and generally demonstrate how little they really understood the game. (There has been German coverage of NFL Europe for some years and there are German players who've been in the NFL, not to mention there is a German professional league, so you'd think they could have found someone who knew their heads from their asses and could assemble intelligible sentences.)

The lack of knowledge about the game was at times glaring. One example was how Indy would line up with a single running back behind the QB (which, oddly enough, is called a "single-back formation"), and the announcer would say "Indianapolis is lined up in an I formation". They did that repeatedly. They also frequently seemed to have to think of the right terminology -- "we're nearing the end of the, uhhhh, second quarter".

What made it additionally strange is they stuck to the habit of NFL Europe announcing where they don't translate hardly any football jargon into German, so a typical sentence would be "nach dem incomplete pass und dem abgelehnten penalty ist es third and eight, mit sechs Minuten to go im second quarter". Come on, either speak English or speak German. Otherwise you're just giving me a headache.

Boris Becker seems to have been included because 1) he plays a sport 2) he speaks German 3) he happens to live in Florida and 4) once played golf with Peyton Manning. (They actually mentioned the latter two repeatedly.)

They also repeatedly pronounced Billy Joel's name as "jo-el", i.e. rhymes with "Noël" and with a very Gallic "j". OK, he's not as well-known here as in America, but still.

And naturally for the singing of the national anthem, they had to make stupid editorial remarks to the effect of "and in this extremely patriotic country, singing patriotic songs is part of their strange customs". Look, you're reporting American football. You may as well remark on the arrogance of Paris waiters when covering Zidane. WTF relevance does it have?

A good example, though, of just how amateurish the whole production was: They frequently needed filler for the commercial breaks, and once in a while showed a graphic displaying a revolving Vince Lombardi Trophy.

With smeared fingerprints on one side. Somehow that spoke volumes.

Of course, I should be grateful, because I could watch the Super Bowl live. Thing is, this was on one of the state channels, which means I'm paying subscriber fees to these idiots. Thus I'm not in a very forgiving mood.

The one bit of good news: They mentioned that the NFL Europe is considering expanding, and Hannover is a leading candidate. I imagine that the successful German Bowl in Hannover last year must have gotten their attention -- Hannover's a relatively minor city, but it has a huge stadium and has a couple cities close by with German professional and semipro teams (Braunschweig Lions and Hildesheim Invaders). The bad omen, though, is that Hannover's own semipro club, the Hannover Musketeers, closed the pro-level team for lack of money and now only has youth teams...

Has to be the weirdest Super Bowl I've ever seen. Good Lord, any more turnovers and I'll think this is an NFL Europe game.

That first kickoff return was fscking awesome, though. I thought it was kinda funny how it looked like he was watching himself on the 40' display.

Unfortunately the Bears offense looks about as limp as the weather. Losing your RB with a ground-based offense is also Not Good(TM).

So while I'm an old NFC guy (go 'Skins!) and thus am rooting for da Bears, I have to say it looks like the Colts are going to win it as they wear the Bears D down. If I can keep my eyes open for the rest of the game, that is (since it's now 2:30 am). Yeesh.

And while I've never been much of a fan of Prince, I have to say that halftime show rocked.

Unfortunately the Krauts seem to have sent a bunch of complete utter amateurs over to do their production. All kinds of weird cuts and camera angle choices, nonsensical commentary, and for God's sake Boris Becker as a commentator (WTF?), with insipid remarks on the number of players with German last names. Their man on the field just sits at one end of it and never leaves his spot, and they occasionally cut down to him for information about injuries or whatnot, and he just rambles on about how he's getting soaked, while having no useful information whatsoever (even when directly asked about something, he just whines about being soaked).

Thus if any of you ever complains about Madden or Theismann or whatever, it could be much worse.

UPDATE Rex Grossman (hey! a German last name! :-P ) has to be the worst quarterback ever in a Super Bowl. And with that I'm off to bed. Congrats in advance to the Colts.

For pythorlh's granddad, Sol's dad, and my aunt and great aunt:

Sunset and evening star,
And one clear call for me!
And may there be no moaning of the bar,
When I put out to sea,

But such a tide as moving seems asleep,
Too full for sound and foam,
When that which drew from out the boundless deep
Turns again home.

Twilight and evening bell,
And after that the dark!
And may there be no sadness of farewell,
When I embark;

For tho' from out our bourne of Time and Place
The flood may bear me far,
I hope to see my Pilot face to face
When I have crossed the bar.

Crossing the Bar, Alfred Lord Tennyson

Peace.

Watch and enjoy.

Or, more accurately, analyzing "The State of the Union". That is, analyzing the text of the speeches from George to George.

One thing is blatantly obvious from that (rather nifty) app: the downward trend in reading level in speeches. Washington's first was at 22.4, that is, postgraduate level. Dubya's bump around in the lower high school years (the most recent was at 10.1). Somewhat surprisingly, Clinton's were even lower.

Yep. The dumbing down of America, in graphic style. *sigh*

I have often been bemused at how the conservative populist party in Germany is called the Christian Democrats (CDU) -- Angela Merkel's party -- when they seem to have precious little actual Christianness about them. I don't mean that in a snarky way as I would with, say, Dubya. I mean they just don't seem to have terribly much to do with Christianity at all, even though their origins were in the old Catholic Centre Party before the war.

Just today I had a classic example: The suburb where our parish is located had a mayoral election recently, and the winner -- who's from the CDU, like most of his post-war predecessors -- invited our priest (along with the other clergy and hoi-polloi in the suburb) over for a "get to know you" reception.

On Sunday. At 10 o'clock in the morning.

Our priest felt obligated to go (mainly to curry favor in hopes of getting the town to get its nose out of our church building project), so we had to make do without him in today's service. Those present at the reception remarked to him that it was the first time any of them remembered that any of the clergy had shown up for such an event, which is traditionally on Sundays at 10 o'clock, and they remarked on how that struck them as odd -- without a hint of irony. (Trust me, Germans are not good at irony. Bronzy and goldy maybe, but not irony.)

What's also funny is that the new mayor is (supposedly a practicing) Roman Catholic and thus duty-bound to attend church every Sunday. Yet it didn't occur to him why a Christian clergyman would possibly have better things to do on a Sunday morning.

What is additionally ironic, and adds to the Bizarro World character of it all, is how prominent members of the (left-liberal environmentalist) Green Party are also avowed Christians (one example is Katrin Göring-Eckardt, vice president of the German Parliament, who was very visible at the recent German Protestant Church's national synod). There is even a special committee for them in the Green Party.

Meanwhile the Social Democrats, as befits a party with roots in Marxism (though it's now rather more centrist, with the Greens and the Left Party occupying the left wing), remains very skeptical of faith in any form.

Turns out, to my shock and horror, The Hour of Power is on the boob tube in Germany as well.

Well, one advantage less to living in Germany.

See, where I grew up in Virginia -- as my brother puts it, in the buckle of the Bible Belt -- on Sundays there was nothing else on TV except televangelists of various stripes. 700 Club, PTL, Hour of Power, you name it -- every channel had some quasi-pious mucketymuck asking for money.

Well, there was one other thing that was on TV on Sundays. Pro rasslin'. Which, come to think of it, may be morally better to watch, because at least them rasslers ain't claimin' to be honest about it all.

Stargoat whines that we should have a Passenger Bill of Rights. To which I say, Harrumph!

Once again I must confess to being baffled by these half-hearted solutions to common problems, particularly when insisting on creating new lists of rights for people, when it would obviously be far simpler for the world to submit itself to my arbitrary rule. No more lawsuits (I'd just tell people to settle it themselves with weapons of their choice, starting with the lawyers), no more wailing about lack of punishment (I'd be sure to issue plenty of that), no more complaints about respecting each other's rights (because I'd make sure there are no rights, except for my own, of course)...well, you get the idea.

What's so hard to understand about that?

Bah! I'm going to retire to my lair and crush some lackeys under my heel until you fools finally get the point.

PS: Meanwhile, another anonymous person has sent me tribute in the form of a three pack of animated LOTR movies, for which we grant a lackadaisical royal wave in gratitude. See, some people around here are starting to get the point!

Germans, especially northern Germans, most especially northern Germans in the countryside, very most especially elderly northern Germans from the countryside, are notorious for being busybodies. If you do laundry on a Sunday, this is against some unwritten rule, and you will hear about it from them. If your car is insufficiently clean, you will hear about it from such people. If you fail to hang out your laundry in a satisfyingly symmetrical pattern (most especially if it's on a Sunday), don't be surprised to hear about it from the neighbors. And so on.

Of course, generally they make some exceptions, especially for the young (who presumably don't know better yet) and foreigners (who are of course beneath contempt because they can't make a proper Bratwurst anyway, let alone pronounce an umlaut). But once in a while I still get some bit of this hostility for having dared to upset the delicate world of German Ordnung.

Except that the latest example is so bizarre...

See, I own a bike. I, like several other residents of our building, store my bike in the back courtyard when not in use. Various people have sort of claimed spots for their bikes over time, and because I got my bike rather late in comparison, I got stuck with my "spot" being to chain it to a post of an old clothesline. Additionally my bike chain is rather short, and to effectively chain it up (i.e. through both the frame and front wheel, to prevent the front wheel from being stolen), I can pretty much only chain it to a vertical post anyway, so no big deal.

Everything was peachy, I thought.

Recently, as you may have heard in the news, we had a big gale blow in, with winds of up to force 12. Naturally my bike got knocked over (since the others were along walls and so on, they apparently didn't fall over). BoE righted it once; it apparently fell over again, because a day or two later I went to get it and it was on its side. Whatever, I picked it up and rode it to wherever, then chained it up when I got back. No big deal.

Today I went downstairs and discovered a small black and white photo of my bike lying on its side sitting on a windowsill. Naturally the person could have righted the bike as a nice person would, or could have just assumed the wind knocked it over, or even could have rung our doorbell to inform us the bike had fallen over, but instead they went to the effort of:

1. going upstairs to get their camera
2. taking a photo of my bike
3. taking the film to have it developed
4. picking up said film and paying for it to be printed
5. sticking the photo in the windowsill

This, you see, is how Nachbarkriege (literally "neighbor wars") are declared, all because I had the bad form to allow my bike to be disorderly. Of course, if I complain to the management about my neighbor harassing me, I almost certainly will be lectured for having allowed my bike to fall over anyway.

It's times like this that I really feel like leaving this fucking country. Then I try to remind myself that changing countries just means changing problems. But still...

As it happens the in-laws were here, and of course I told them and BoE about the photo (I had left it where it was for the time being -- I had intended to confront my prime suspect with the photo later, because I'm not about to take this shit lying down). And of course MIL had already disposed of it. Great. Just great.

I'm working on a letterhead design at the moment, and I guess you can tell I'm a bit annoyed at it. (It's for a company that makes equipment for fertility clinics.)

As a placeholder recipient address, I came up with:

Dr. John Richard Johnson
Nockerup Clinic
169 Fallopian Tube
Givera, KS 42420
USA

And it's signed:

Sincerely yours,

Alfred E. Newman

And in my current mood, I may well send it to the client like that. (They probably wouldn't get the joke anyway. Then again, they'd probably ask, and I'd have to explain...)

Bleah. On days like this, I really hate work.

In some random musings regarding the functioning (or the lack thereof) of the Apple spellchecker, I have invented a new word:

Mephistophisacriligeousexorcisodocious!

Which just makes me want to sing!

Um beetle beetle beetle um Beelzebub
Um beetle beetle beetle um Beelzebub
Mephistophisacriligeousexorcisodocious
Even though the sin of It is something quite atrocious
If you do it loud enough
You'll always sound ferocious
Mephistophisacriligeousexorcisodocious!
Um beetle beetle beetle um Beelzebub
Um beetle beetle beetle um Beelzebub
Because I didn't like to pray
When I was just a boy
My father gave me hell to pay
And told me I was goy
But then one day I learned a word
That saved me reddened fanny
The biggest word I ever heard
And I heard it from Granny:
Oh, Mephistophisacriligeousexorcisodocious!
Though it's not yet a deadly sin
They just forgot to tell us
If you do it oft enough
You'll sing alto in Hell's chorus
Mephistophisacriligeousexorcisodocious!
Um beetle beetle beetle um Beelzebub
Um beetle beetle beetle um Beelzebub
So when Lucifer has got your tongue
There's no need for dismay
Just pray a thousand rosaries
And it's all just washed away
But better pray 'em carefully
Or it may change your life
Otherwise it's a one-way trip
To Hades with your wife!
She's Mephistophisacriligeousexorcisodocious!
Mephistophisacriligeousexorcisodocious!
Mephistophisacriligeousexorcisodocious!
Mephistophisacriligeousexorcisodocious!