Well, then! To all of the few of you reading uBlog at this point, I have simultaneously won success not only in transferring Figure Concord contents from one domain to another, but have reimported all of my blogging data: and managed to reinstate the ability to leave comments, to boot! Damn.
Tinkering with the silicon world has always resulted in drawn-out, character-building epics where I consider flinging myself out a window several times before, finally and mercifully, a given computer or software program relents and services my request. This outing, though fraught with the risk of losing all of my posts, was practically seamless. Painless. I feel great!
I had a fantastic discussion with the honorable Mr. Richard Grice at lunch today. Spying the headline "White House Wimp-Ou?" of my twice-folded The Wall Street Journal, Rick proceeded to address his concerns with the Bush Doctrine: should we impose our values on the rest of the world?
I argued for aggressive implantation of democracy. A friendly argument - he's quite a broad-minded fellow - I'd like to think that I planted a seed of consideration in his mind. Baby Boomers, I notice, exhibit a certain sedentary perspective in regards to foreign policy. They grew up with the Iron Curtain, as obstinate and apparently infinite symbol of evil and oppression as ever there was one. 1989 seems yet to have sunk in, and most Baby Boomers (many in power and directing America's policies) are incognizant of the potential for a new world order - the expulsion of dictatorship and the edge-to-edge expansion of freedom.
The most striking idea I was able to put into words: acting in the right is by no means diminished when unpopular. Esteem is not moral authority.
It looks as though the Movable Type database was corrupted when I ran out of disk space, and that comment-tracking is a casualty. I'll be attempting a series of head-spinning computer-surgery acts, fresh with advice from the MT forum.
Thankfully (oddly? suspiciously?) the headlines have quieted down a bit. Congress' next session is sure to bring about some pitched battles on national priorities; Newt Gingrich posted a self-described GOP wishlist in The Wall Street Journal today; tax cuts, litigation reform, robust defense spending. For all intents and purposes, I can see the coming political season as a Republican victory - kicking a compromiser like Lott out of the way makes for a doubly resolute Congress, and Bush seems as solid as ever.
Alright. Fixit time.
Reassessment: only comments after I clogged the cache refuse to show.
I'll figure this out eventually. Sooner rather than later, no doubt!
Megan, whether or not I currently exercise my Second Amendment rights is irrelevant to the legitimacy of laws drawn from them.
All comments seemed to have been deep-sixed. Damn.
Luckily, I downloaded a mirror to the office a week or so ago; I should be able to find the file containing comments there - hopefully. They'll be old, but I think they'll be tangible.
Whew. uBlog just about gave Ubaldi a uHeartattack. Since last night, I couldn't reload the page; two comments - one from Anna, the other today from Megan - came to my e-mail account but God knows where they ended up on the blog server. My first hunch was correct: my cache is bursting at the seams. I took down an MP3 from the Concord section in anticipation of calling Corecomm tomorrow to pony up for another ten megabytes of storage.
So there. Everything's okay. Silent night. Holy night. All is calm. All is...white. Damn, I love stereotypical New England Christmases in the Rust Belt!
Megan: I support concealed carry because I believe law-abiding citizens should be able to arm themselves for protection. Why shouldn't they even the score?Criminals have been carrying concealed weapons in public since the firearm was invented. If I were a crook, I'd think twice about whether the couple I'm about to mug or the bank patrons I'm about to rob are packing heat. Conversely, since England banned all private sidearms, crime rates have skyrocketed. Everybody will kick the dog when they know all he has are gums. Do the math. :-)
God Bless us, everyone.
A blessing that this lucky lady didn't get hers in the wringer.
If I weren't already working through a slight case of the pre-holiday blues, what more to help my diminished condition than a car alarm blaring in the office building's parking lot? The relentless, sing-songy, wailing klaxon sounds as if someone hooked up the audio output of a PAC-MAN arcade unit to a bullhorn.
That's a compelling image. So it is slightly amusing. Grin.
The Two Towers pulled in more dough its first night than poor old Star Trek: Nemesis has in over a week.
One of the more exciting aspects of checking FigureConcord's usage statistics turns out to be reading the search strings used to find my page among listings on, say, Google. More than likely due to the ever-growing vocabulary and serendipitous combinations of words on one HTML document, every succeeding month witnesses more bizarre string entries.
I'll present the Top 5, comments in parentheses:
5. "devil with the devil damned firm concord" (Exciting, as it's a Milton quote I used for the lyrics in a Concord song.)4. "midterm elections bush weaknesses" (Fun to read because baby, it didn't happen!)
3. "partino le rondini" (From a scathing review I wrote regarding the worst Master of Fine Arts graduate show ever to behold.)
2. "marilyn manson as a commodity" (Somewhere, somehow, someone is about to write the worst term paper ever.)
1. "pictures senator ted kennedy red nose" (To Whom it May Concern: You came, ideologically, to the right place. Sadly, I don't have any of those yet.)
Congratulations!
