I finally looked up what “meme”

When I tracked down a trackback to one of my posts, I found this great CounterSpam Project that I want to promote. I’m a big believer that one person can make a difference, and this is a person doing something really worth trying to do.
Exerpted from the explanation of the Project:
……We know the spammers cull email addresses from any source they can. The real prize for them is a live email address. Scripting can automate the sending process, and a text generator can easily spit our address after address, but to get an email address that’s live is the real goal. And one of the easiest ways to accomplish that is to “crawl” a website for any email addresses listed. Sadly, even blogs are being crawled in this way now, with email addresses culled from the comments fields.
I’m undertaking a study…an experiment…a year long project. First, I’ve added an email address to the domain that will never be used. CounterSPAM@ipadventures.com is pretty clearly not an address that a human would knowingly send spam to, particularly since I’m publicly describing the project. It will appear in this entry, and in an occasional conversation on the subject. There will also be a single page describing my CounterSPAM project on my primary IP Adventures domain site. It will never be used to send an email. In short, the only way to find the address will be to crawl this modest web site or proliferation from there. It’s a receive only address that will be scrutinized closely……..
……I’m going to document a year of spam. Every message will be researched and responded to. Prosecuted where possible. Persecuted where legal and appropriate. Publicly derided frequently. Depending on how flagrant the offenders are, there may be a web of shame online identifying them with name, address and telephone number (it is after all, often public information)……
CounterSPAM@ipadventures.com. Proliferate it.
CounterSPAM@ipadventures.com
You go, Ken.

The FX network has been coming up with some great shows lately. I managed to catch most of the episodes of The Shield when it went into reruns. Now I’m hooked on Nip Tuck.
Of course, I’ve had a crush on Julian McMahon ever since he played that devastatingly hunky demon on Charmed. (Yes, I watched that too. Love anything witchy and/or with females who can give as hard as they get. My fascination with such things actually goes back to the 1942 movie, “I Married a Witch” with Veronica Lake and then the 1951 “Half Angel” starring Loretta Young. So you see, the seeds of my feminism and cronehood go way, way back.)
Nip Tuck is far from charming. It’s messy, unpredictable, unnerving, subtle, outrageous, disappointing, redeeming, revealing, and rewarding. Kinda like life. And blogging, sometimes.
I love the complexities of the show’s characters, the infinite shades of their gray thinking. It’s those moral and emotional struggles in all of us magnified a hundredfold — not enough to turn us away, but enough to hit home hard enough to pop our eyes open.
Kinda like our personal blogs should be, doncha’ think?

In my younger years I just loved those bad boys. You know, the ones who are so screwed up that they make you think of bloody wounds when you look at the lush lines of Renoir

I find reading blogs about blogging particulaly uninteresting. But the comments on something Tom Shugart posted (and he doesn’t often write about blogging anyway) gave me significant and thoughtful pause — mostly Dave Rogers’ comment that “What draws me to blogs is not the topic of the blog, but the revelation of the blogger.”
And maybe having a conference of webloggers to talk about blogging might be as boring as blogging about blogging. I’ve registered for the BloggerCon at Harvard in October, but I’m having second thoughts — for the afore mentioned reason as well as for the exorbitant registration cost. (They offer a student rate, but not a Senior Citizen rate.) I want to go so that I can come back and do a post entitled “The oldest living continuously posting female blogger tells all” and give an outsider’s perspective on all of those “A” list bloggers who will probably be there. I think it would be a hoot. A very pricey hoot, however, and one I’m not sure I can afford.
I am sure that I don’t want to blog so much about politics, although it’s hard for me NOT to write about politics, since today’s devious politics really irk me. But what I want to remember to do is write about me in relation to those politics rather than just recap something I read somewhere else.
Having said that, I’m now going to post something political — although I didn’t write it, myrln did. But they’re my sentiments as well…
Okay, we will again survive. I am struck by the uncommon goodness evoked by the outage: technology goes out, humanity comes in. Sounds like a correlation to me. In NYC people sleep on the sidewalks because they can’t stay in their hotels, and nobody bothers or assaults or robs them. Civilians stand in intersections and direct traffic to maintain a semblance of order and sanity. Subway-trapped riders evacuate the tunnels without panic, their way often lit by cigarette lighters held up as if at a rock concert (and despite Bloomberg’s smoking ban). People help the elderly and kids. A liver transplant interrupted by the outage is finished in some dim light and weak power. Somebody gives free sneakers to people without good walking shoes having to walk over the Brooklyn Bridge. Somebody else gives free ice cream (unlike the gouging vendors who took advantage).
Obviously, there is untapped, unasked-for, and unseen good in people. Our culture suppresses it in favor of greed and egocentrism. It does nothing to evoke that hidden wonder because if it did, here’s what we would learn: we don’t need overweening government or a political power structure, we don’t need oppressive big business, we don’t need mind-numbing consumerism. Why not? Because we would have community. People caring about each other for no other reason than we have our humanity in common. I wonder what it would be like to live in such a culture? What would a culture and government that encouraged and supported such humanity achieve? It would be a whole different world, to be sure, one we can’t/don’t imagine because there’s no room in our 24/7 world to do so.
Instead, we are saddled with a power structure (non-electric) that urges people to conserve power in this crisis, to forego air-conditioning if not essential, to keep lights out — while at the same time we see the t.v. pictures (from fully-lit, fully-monitored studios) of Times Square with all its neon ablaze, selling our souls while people’s bodies swelter and struggle just to stay alive. Or to get home.
I love people as people. I despise power (non-electric) structures because to exist, they must strip people of their humanity. We need a new Revolution. And not one of Dumbya’s kind. Reach Out is what I would call it. “Think of every day as a crisis for the guy next to you,” is what it would espouse.
Yeah.

If you

Woo hoo! Six floors of 250 apartments of senior citizens who are used to eating out!
As fate would have it, my mom and I were in the elevator with a wagon full of groceries including ice cream, heading to the 3rd floor when everything shut down. After an eternity of 10 seconds or so, the power began flickering, so I punched #2, the elevator stumbled to a stop on 2, and we charged out. It took me four trips up and down the flight of darkened stairs before I got the groceries, the cart, and my mom up to her apartment. Good think I’m not in bad shape.
I checked with my neighbors to see if anyone needed food, but everyone seemed to be OK. The hallways and stairs were totally dark; luckily our old batteries had enough umph left to power our flashlights and my walkman/radio. The power went back on just after it got dark, and in the meanwhile, there was a lot of grumbling going on behind all those closed doors.
We sure are a spoiled lot, we Americans, taking our reliance on electrical power as our god-given right. Of course, Dubya is mouthing a lot of talk about shoring up the power grid. I’m waiting to hear somesubstantive talk about moving away from fossil fuel toward more hydro-electric and solar sources of power. Yeah, right.

The Our Democracy, Our Airwaves Act:
Senators John McCain [R-Ariz.], Russell Feingold [D-Wisc.] and Richard Durbin [D-Ill.] will soon introduce a bill that would require television and radio stations to provide voters with more and better information about candidates and issues at election time.
The American people own the airwaves. But current law gives broadcasters free and exclusive rights to use our airwaves. In return they’re supposed to serve the public interest. Instead, they