This is a sort-of blog I've set up at StumbleUpon, at


      http://josephdunphy.stumbleupon.com/


with a companion at


      http://people.tribe.net/joseph-dunphy/blog


It is not a replacement for my journals at Blogger.
StumbleUpon is a site for the posting of reviews of other
websites, and out of this can grow a kind of blog, as I
explain on the current introductory page:


      http://saguaro.bravehost.com/Joseph_Dunphy/Reviewer/


The stringent character limits per post are one of the reasons
why one sees a companion blog, which I've named "Stumbling
into the Void"; the secondary blog at Tribe offers added room
for commentary. It also offers a working feed, which brings
us to one of the severe drawbacks of using StumbleUpon. The
link at the head of each excerpt on a feed takes one, not to
the full post itself, but to the site being reviewed when the
post is reviewed, the link being altogether absent when the
post is anything else.

Tribe feeds, by contrast, work properly, so in the short run,
as I bulk my StumbleUpon location out (it's currently one its
eighth page), the little place at Tribe might be helpful in
keeping track of what's going on. In the long run, once I've
made the Void into something bigger and better developed (let's
say, somewhere around page 40, maybe), I'll start interlinking
more between SU and "Monday Never Comes", which is the new
name for the successor to my Yahoo 360 blog.

I had a few reasons for choosing the name I did, some of
which will become clearer as I go along. My earliest loves
in Mathematics were not what I do now (mostly Applied
Mathematics, Probability and Statistics), but things a
little purer - some would say a little drier - including
Mathematical Logic. There is a sort of emptiness waiting
to be filled by the theoretician at those more foundational
levels, and so the name of this new place of mine in part
refers to that, as I will be looking for and discussing sites
on that and related subject matter, among other topics. Yes,
there will be some philosophy, and it might not completely
meet with the approval of some.

There will also be, as there already is, reviews of a number
of photographic galleries, of which StumbleUpon offers a
nice assortment, and other things. I'll discuss that a little
more, later, once I've posted maybe another eight pages.




Joseph Dunphy

I <commonsense666atlast@...> wrote:

> This is definitely a traveller's advisory. Do not
> go to Burning Man, or to any Burning Man affiliated
> event, anywhere. Yes, you can probably see a lot of
> halfway decent looking women naked at these events,
> but who cares about the looks if the spirit does not
> intrigue and the mind does not command one's respect?
> Every year this arts event and those who attend only
> seem to get crazier and more hostile which is to be
> expected at any gathering where drugs have come to
> play such a major role. If you did go at what you
> perceived to be my recommendation, I regret the
> misunderstanding and will try to make my prose
> clearer on that point, among others. My best advice
> is keep your art at home, or at least somewhere in
> the civilized world. The 60s are over, and if Burning
> Man is any guide to what experiencing that era would
> have been like, we didn't miss much.


Today's Burning Man, at least. The one I saw in 2001 was
a much different creation, but times have changed and
in this case, definitely not for the better - and even
back in 2001, there was already real cause for concern.
But, if you absolutely must go, there is an alternative
resource of sorts that you can try, where the neonazi
silliness does not get a friendly reception. The place is
called "Travel to Burning Man", located at

http://bmtraveller.proboards56.com/

home to a never used resouce called "ePlaya in eXile" (how
cute) offered for use during that forum's many outages.

http://bmtraveller.proboards56.com/index.cgi?board=eplaya

The management of that board doesn't seem supportive of the
kind of antics I described in my earlier post, so that might
offer a more pleasant alternative, or at least would if more
than four people would ever use it. Not exactly buzzing
with activity, but then, no alternative Burning Man resource
is, so I might as well mention that one.

Currently, on it I can find a story

http://bmtraveller.proboards56.com/index.cgi?
board=stories&action=display&thread=1143120185

and a discussion of "Motorized Chess"

http://bmtraveller.proboards56.com/index.cgi?
board=creative&action=display&thread=1147307416

among other material. Whether much more will be seen
there has yet to be seen.

Hi, guys. I know that this administrative stuff gets dull, but
somebody raised a point that might be of concern to some of you.
In a short while, Yahoo 360 is expected to go the way of Yahoo
Photos, because an incoming executive at Yahoo has decided that
all of a user's different Yahoo profiles need to be merged into
one so that he will have "a more integrated experience", whether
he wants one or not, I suppose. The great unanswered question is
what happens when one's various Yahoo ids start getting merged,
which one would think would be the implication of this. Are we
about to find ourselves looking at a massive breach of privacy
here at Yahoo?

With up to five different profiles on a membership, you can use
one profile for one group, another profile for another group,
and nobody but you and Yahoo will know that these two profiles
are both you. This, I would argue, is right and proper - just
because you want to share one part of your life with some people
you know, that doesn't mean that you necessarily want to share
all other parts of your life with those same people. The
existence of multiple ids allows the user the freedom to
exercise discretion in this.

If there are two groups of associates who you really don't
want to bring together this way, now might be the time to start
strategically deleting ids. I don't know for a fact that this
will prove necessary, but based on nonresponsiveness of the
Yahoo staff to queries about the future of Yahoo 360 during
the last few months, I think that I can say with some confidence
that you won't be hearing back from them until after the
transition. In one way or another, you will be leaping before
you look, so you might want to give some throught to where you
would most mind landing, and plan accordingly.


Joseph Dunphy

... which should be a little more interesting to read as summer
begins. Right now, what is there to write about? I'm putting up
the last of the winter fruit (quinces and lady apples; I didn't
get around to getting any bitter oranges, but have a lead on
a future supplier, now), and the last few pumpkins of the season
are drying in the oven. There's a little outgoing drama as I
slowly downsize my involvement in the Webring system, but some
of these stories have a "dog bites man" quality about them. At
this point, who doesn't know that life online is deeply absurd?

At any rate, here are the new (or newish) blogs:



The Green Tortoise and Other Travesties

      http://josephdunphy.blogspot.com/

Despite the title, this one doesn't actually have much to do
with the Green Tortoise. The title is a reference to the
strange fact that the "Bad Times on the Green Tortoise"
article seems to be what I'm best known for, online. This
blog will mainly be about Chicago, but don't expect a lot
of local boosterism. There's such a thing as pushing self
esteem to such a point as to induce a radical break with
reality, and on a civic level, I think we're there.



Then there's my miniblog, which comes as part of my Yahoo!
360 profile. You can find that through my Yahoo profile,
or just go directly here

http://360.yahoo.com/cafe_satan

I honestly don't know what that one is going to be about.
Early in the miniblog, I suggest that it is going to
be an opportunity for me to revisit subjects raised in
some of the strange places I've been online, and examine
them without the screaming, but on examination, that really
would not be a good idea. The last few years, post-ePlaya
and post-Usenet have been so relatively relaxing, that I
forgot just how obnoxious those people really were, and I'd
like to make a conscious effort to go on forgetting that.
I've already written about the bizarre incident somebody
told me about, in which there were calls on the Burning
Man board (ePlaya) for the extermination of the world's
Muslim population based on somebody's delusional belief
that he had seen 100,000,000 angry muslim protesters on TV.

What DOES one say to such a thing? One clears one's throat
and goes "I guess that must have been a big screen"?!

The word coming down - and this checks out - is that they've
also been celebrating anti-semitism, that hatred toward
anybody in the sciences who is trained to work at any level
higher than that of "technician" is out in the open, and
at some point, trying to work through a difficulty just
stops making sense. I think that I reached that point with
Burning Man a while ago, and recent events have turned a
firm decision into a decision that I feel good about and
one that, to be perfectly blunt, I'm astounded that I didn't
make long before I ever went to Black Rock.

If you look at Joe Winston's film "Burning Man: Just Add
Couches" in snippets, one sees the kind of imaginative
goofing around that I saw a little of in undergrad, and
I miss it, which I guess is why I went. But take a good
look at the "fifteen minutes of fame" booth, in which
one gets to see the burnies show their wit by dangling
their genitalia in front of the camera and really,
seriously - what could I possibly have been thinking about?
These are not my people, they never were and never could
be. In my deep boredom, I had gone slumming.

While there's nothing wrong with the "creative potluck"
concept or with interactive art, I think there has to
be a conscious effort to seperate these things from the
less wholesome aspects of that drug soaked subculture,
and to achieve that, one needs a radical break. No
desert survival discussions, no culture jamming and
given that we're in Chicago, ahem, no fire. ePlaya, then,
will not be revisited and my mood should be the better
for it. What has the miniblog been about, then?

So far ... I don't know. Honestly, I don't. I just jot
down whatever just grabbed my attention, and I'll see what
it evolves into.



Joseph Dunphy

I'm serious. The positive part of the Yahoo! Answers experience
put me in the mood to finally put that Angelfire site to go use
as a Mathematics site. Yes, I am qualified to write about this
subject, having a graduate degree in it and having taught it
at the collegiate level, and having a (cough, cough) number
of years of tutoring experience under my belt. Never you mind
how many. A bunch.

What I'm going to start with are a few worked problem sets,
so if there's something you want to see done, shoot it over
here and I'll take a look at it. If nothing else, this is a
good excuse to get back to the library and do some reading.
The first text we'll be looking at is Introduction to
Mathematical Statistics by Hogg and Craig, which I highly
recommend as first text in the subject for a student who
has already had Calculus. Having dealt with the half teaching
that lower level courses at State Universities sometimes
require of those providing instruction, and having been the
hapless TA left to fill in the many gaps left by the text,
I've often seen students left confused by dumbed down texts
thatm in leaving out the details, ironically make the material
difficult to the point of incomprehensibility. While keeping
their presentation simple, Messrs. Hogg and Craig avoid
that pitfall, presenting their material with a level of
clarity, directness and rigor rare in texts on this level.

We'll look at some exercises from other texts as well,
including the requests I get, and the occasional proof
and counterexample, of course. What on earth does this
have to do with the Halls, you ask? A few things. It's
material that people seem to want to see, and which I'm
comfortable with providing them. Even taking the very
real need for improvement on my photo pages, I've found
the level of interest in that material to be limited, so
I'm looking for something that will draw in more visitors.
But, aside from that, the Halls have long been written
in opposition to Political Correctness from both the Left
and Right, and the abuse of Statistics plays a large role
on both. Disspelling a little innumeracy can do a lot
to make the public less susceptable to being fooled, and
the skills acquired are ones of general, practical use.

Figure that if you actually want to buy a book about
the subject, you're looking at a cost of at least $100.
This online text will be free. The downside, of course,
is that I'll be assembling it, in bits and pieces,
during my free time, so this free book won't hit
textbook length for a while.



Joseph Dunphy

Something was waiting for me when I logged in a short while ago,
and reminded me that I've maybe been a little remiss. I wrote
my Burning Man pages back in 2002 and never quite got around
to finishing them or updating them, because I wasn't having
a good time with the material. The Green Tortoise was an
experience that I could write about, and you can see me
playing around with using nonlinear narrative to handle the
multiple plotline problem. There was some payoff for writing
the thing. On the other hand, when I put together something
about the bizarre behavior on the Burning Man lists, there's
not much narrative to work with. On the Tortoise, I was out
there interacting with the real world, for better or worse.
When dealing with the burnies online, it's just me looking
at obnoxious remarks on the screen, while stuck in my
apartment very eager to blow the whole thing off and just
go gallery hopping or something. Other than me being
annoyed, nothing's really happening, and on a narrative
level, what do I do with that? There are ways of dealing
with that, but without any especially colorful characters
to work with, I'm not having fun.

So there I left it, unmodified, and somebody innocently
dropping by might see what I've written as being a qualified
endorsement of the experience, because that's what I was
giving it back in 2002. Times change, and so has that event,
from all I've heard. Ticket prices, already excessive at
$200, have become insane at $250. The economy in the Bay Area
has become reminiscent of the one in Chicago, so those
ambitious artworks of old are now beyond the budget of artists
who, ironically, are being priced out of the very event that
their work provides with its attractions, meaning that
attendees are now paying more to see less. That's reason enough
to stay away, but just now, somebody gave me a much better one.


Take a look at this post:

http://tinyurl.com/3a3sss

which resolves to this url:

http://eplaya.burningman.com/viewtopic.php?p=208057&highlight=#208057

in this thread:

http://eplaya.burningman.com/viewtopic.php?t=12344


Wow. I'll give you the short form. Guy writes in to see if
anybody would be interested in setting up a Muslim prayer
group during Burning Man 2006, and discovers that whether
or not an Anti-Muslim holocaust would be acceptable is
a topic of serious discussion on a board presided over
by the Burning Man LLC itself, which should tell one a lot
about the LLC and that event. Would you want to go out into
the desert with a group of people insane enough to think
that this was an acceptable response to such an inquiry?

Looking back, I did allude to another incident in which
somebody who wanted to set up a movie night in order to
promote their event ended up becoming the target of calls
for his murder and dismemberment because he didn't want
to show the John Waters film "Pink Flamingoes". My
immediate thought was that this was enough to drive the
point home, but looking back, I can see that I left that
notice in a location where relatively few visitors were
likely to see it, so what needed to get done in this
section of the Halls did not completely get done.

A truism, perhaps, but this all has become very, very
strange, when viewed from afar. The thought I had when
I first visited the Bay Area was that what I was having
was something like what I thought a visit to a Parallel
universe would be like, everything so familiar and yet
not. At the time, I meant that in a good way, seeing
tolerance and comfortable acceptance in a Neocon infested
era of smothering cultural conservatism, but now what I'm
seeing is something very different. The road not taken
that I get to see our San Franciscan friends taking is
that America might have headed down, had Gore been elected
and used the Presidential bully pulpit to keep the
Age of Political Correctness going strong into this
decade. Let's note that the self-consciously exaggerated
racial sensitivity of that era never seemed to extend
to Latin or Semitic people. Quite the contrary, and if
anything, the bigoted hysteria seems even shriller there
than it did during the 90s.

This is definitely a traveller's advisory. Do not go to
Burning Man, or to any Burning Man affiliated event, anywhere.
Yes, you can probably see a lot of halfway decent looking
women naked at these events, but who cares about the looks
if the spirit does not intrigue and the mind does not
command one's respect? Every year this arts event and those
who attend only seem to get crazier and more hostile which
is to be expected at any gathering where drugs have come
to play such a major role. If you did go at what you
perceived to be my recommendation, I regret the
misunderstanding and will try to make my prose clearer
on that point, among others. My best advice is keep your
art at home, or at least somewhere in the civilized world.
The 60s are over, and if Burning Man is any guide to what
experiencing that era would have been like, we didn't miss much.



Joseph Dunphy

I've been answering questions over at Yahoo lately, and I've reached
a point in level two that I thinks calling for a small celebration:

               http://tinyurl.com/yweqd2

Yes, I'm at the 666 point mark. It's as good an excuse for a party
as any other. Any suggestions as how best to celebrate?



Joe Dunphy

The article below was posted by me to the Google Pages
Creator Group. If you haven't tried out Google Pages
as a hosting service, my advice is "don't". Google Pages
has adopted the unique practice of forcing its users to
use one of a limited set of templates for creating their
homepages, resulting in what some have called "the prefab
look". One solution to this prblem has been to build
redirects into the homepage, to take the browser to
one of the .html files one is allowed to upload.

Google's response to this has been to redesign it system
in order to sabotage the redirection code its users have
installed, leading its users to adapt the code, which
Google then deactivates through further modifiatons, if
past postings in that forum are to be trusted.

As I asked over there, don't we all have better things to
do with our time? This all seemed more than a little
adolescent, even by Internet standards.



-------------------------------------------------
post begins
-------------------------------------------------



At least one other homepage provider I know of offers
templates to its users (Angelfire comes to mind), but no
other user I have ever heard of tries to force its users
to make use of them.

On the off chance that somebody from Google is reading
this: OK, guys, at some point you're going to want to
make money from this Googlepages project of yours, in
which you have invested so much time and money. With 100%
dead-on certainty, you will not be able to do so by turning
the free service into a paid service. There are too many
free services in existence to which your users can switch
over, and the quality of your editor is not competitive
with what is available from even the least expensive paid
sites. Your only option is ad revenue.


There are two very different kinds of webmasters. There
are those who are motivated enough to try to improve on
what they've done in the past, however good or bad that
may be. Then there are the unmotivated sorts who will throw
any slop on the screen, say something clever like "it's
not just good, it's good enough", and then never be bothered
again because they just plain don't care. However more
numerous the latter may be than the former, if you end up
with only the unmotivated  types on your server, your
revenue stream will be nil, because you won't have
anything on the Googlepages site that anybody
will want to see.


For those who do care enough to be bothered, who do try
to grow creatively, whether they're rank amateurs like
myself who would just like to be a little less rank or
talented artists sharing what they've created just for
the joy of creation, the kind of creative straightjacketing
represented by those templates is a deal breaker, one
which your investors should look at with particular
interest, representing as it does the driving away of
revenue enhancing opportunities, pursued with no rational
business objective in view. When a provider screens sites
for "offensive material", this may represent an undue
limitation on the writer, but one can at least say on
behalf of the provider, that there was a purpose to the
limitation - the provider didn't want to scare off
advertisers. Is there any advertiser, anywhere, however,
who is going to be upset that a site didn't look
prefabricated, and if so, why haven't any of the
other providers seem to have encountered this curious
individual, yet?


While you maintain a niche in the market as expansion
space for sites hosted on other providers that have
treated their users with greater respect, I'm sure that
you've noticed that diskspace is getting steadily cheaper,
allowing diskpace allotments to rise; at some point,
the whole concept of "expansion space" is going to become
severely dated. When you take a look at just how many
Googlepages links are to be found on forums, to material
intended only for temporary view, you may find that "at
some point" is not so comfortably far in the future
as you may like.


Think about it, guys. Or don't. Your choice to make,
your gain or your loss, and either way you'll be getting
precisely what you deserve, because you will be making a
free and informed choice that you will have the resources
and opportunity to act on. There is something to be said
for the concept of market discipline, don't you agree?


-------------------------------------------------
end of post
-------------------------------------------------




As some of us keep saying, there is a difference between
Corporatism and Capitalism; Capitalism has no problem with
the concept of the market being the proverbial two way street.
At this point, while the glut of free website providers isn't
as great as it was before the severely predictable dot-bomb
collapse of the 1990s, it's still fairly impressive, with
far too many providers chasing too few sites where the
webmaster shows any sign of having made an effort at all.
Supply and demand favors the webmaster, not the provider.

Further, as one of the people I've webmastered for pointed
out in his blog's goodbye post a few hours ago, we should
consider the nature of this industry, sustained as it is
by the fee gifting of creative material from its "customers";
who stands to lose more from the loss of the relationship?
The vast majority of the "customers" of these services stand
to lose nothing more than the chance to give their work away
for free; the providers stand to lose their livelihood. This
means that even if somebody were to successfully create a
trust, leaving the "customers" with a "take it or leave it"
choice regarding something like GP's template fixation, almost
all of the "customers" would be very capable of shrugging,
and walking away from the whole childish affair.

This means that even were the industry to speak with one
voice, its leverage would be only as great as its users
fooled themselves into believing that leverage to be; all
they would need to have power in this relationship would
be for them to recognize its presence. But even this is
not the case, as one can see simply by doing business with
any of the providers of the sites you see associated with
this group. When I began with a very, very crude, plain text
site (which I've gradually been improving), while I haven't
always been happy with everything that everybody has done,
I've never had to doubt that when I worked on giving
my site at Geocities a better look and feel, that Yahoo
was supportive of my wish to do so. Lycos encourages the
celebration of such efforts, and Bravenet practically
chearleads for them, having offered some impressive
assortments of tools and toys for is webmsters in the past.
Googlepages is the only provider I've ever seen fight to
enforce a standard of mediocrity.

Is this because the people at Bravenet, Tripod and Yahoo are
wonderful human beings? They may well be, and sometimes
they've given me cause to suspect this of them, but also
they're going to do this because doing otherwise is not
a smart way to do business. Even if the users get resigned
to accepting that their site will look like c**p - and as
we've seen, there is no reason for them to feel that way -
their visitors aren't going to let themselves get resigned
to looking at c**p. If the Internet doesn't come through
for them, there are always books, there's always TV (gasp!),
there are always things offline that they can divert
themselves with. There are also sites aplenty at the paid
providers, most of which are free to visit, so to sabotage
the look and feel of the users' sites is to sabotage one's
own ad revenue, of which, at this point, Googlepages has none.

The real question, then, is not why every single free
homepage provider that practically anybody has head of
refrains from imposing templates on its users as GP does,
but why GP insists on them. Personal issues would seem to
clearly be involved, as they sometimes are online. But,
as many providers before GP have learned the hard way,
one can't get past the reality of market discipline through
sheer stubbornness, in an industry as non-essential as this
one. One can, however, be fooled into thinking otherwise
long enough for the financial buzzards to start circling
overhead, especially when the local culture encourages
one to be so blind as to allow this.

If you visit the Google Page Creator group, located at

      http://tinyurl.com/ycdjpe

I believe that you will that the loal culture not only
encourages such blindness, it practically demands it.
"Do you realize you're lecturing the most powerful Internet
Company on Earth" sermonized one of the Internet's many 18
year old "persons" who feels obligated to share the benefit
of his many years of experience with people who know the
world a bit better than he does. Do the math. When GoPlay
(one of the dot.coms mentioned to our little friend) bit the
dust, he would have been somewhere around 12.

Dubbing the reasoned argument you see above a "rant", which
I suppose is to be expected of somebody who came of age
under the system of self-esteem based education, this little
boy (who turned out to be one of the local cabal leaders) then
proceeded to lecture me on the dangers of talking like an
adult. If this sounds like it's about to turn into a
discussion of the latest netloon I've met and why I'd enjoy
smacking the little punk around, it's not. Note that I've
left the little punk unnamed. The point is to point to the
kind of culture that is developing among GooglePages users,
and by implication, the kind of feedback that Google is
going to get on its latest mismanaged project.

Google has succeed in surrounding itself with a culture of
cowardly, literally adolescent yes men who are going to tell
it that everything it is doing is wonderful and brilliant,
whether this happens to be the case or not. "Do you realize
that you're lecturing the most powerful ..." as if rich
people never did anything unreasonable or stupid, or as if
the growth of the current major dot.coms during the 90s was
a result of much more than a late 90s era fad of buying
"hip" stocks as a fashion statement, a little detail that
anybody old enough to remember the late 90s would know.
One really has to wonder if these little buggers know which
century they're living in when they say things like that,
but aside from the reactionary looniness of saying that it's
not our place to talk back to rich people, one has the reality,
already pointed out, that Google has very little experience
hosting websites and no history of making money doing so.

The responses that followed were a trip, in a very telling
way. We had our callow youths responding to the reminder
that Google had yet to line up even a single advertiser for
its webhosting service with the observation that people
would later choose to put advertising on their own sites -
apparently not getting that under that arrangement, the
website owner and not the provider sees the revenue. Imagine
talking with children who don't know that they're children,
and then picture those childen getting to create the consensus
view of reality. What you're going to get is the kind of
insane hothouse environment I've written about in the
past, in which the community groupthinks its way into pure
lunacy; I literally had one of these idiots tell me "in
his humble opinion" that if I wanted to make a page without
using templates I should get a paid site.

As I've pointed out before, and anybody can easily see just
by looking, almost every free website provider other than
Googlepages allows one to do just that, and in the case
of the ones you see me doing business with, have been doing
so for most of the history of the Web. Reality has departed
the discussion, leaving us in the realm of cultish
groupthink, at exactly the point at which Google, needing
to shake a fixation, is in desperate need of hearing a little
sense. What we have, instead, are people more or less going
"woo-hoo! bad service rocks!"

Following one's fixations to the point of one's own undoing
is the easiest thing in the world, both on an individual and
organizational level; were things otherwise, the world would
need far fewer twelve step programs and debt restructurings than
it has. Ego feeding is as much an addiction as alcohol, and
when one is surounded by those feeding one's addictions,
seeing the need to get past them is going to be difficult,
especially when those feeding them do so with the sense of
determination found in those acting out of the most venal
motives. One of the more vocal opponents of increasing the
flexibility of the Google Page Creator, somebody who has
gone so far as to lodge a free-associating attack against
somebody who wanted to insert meta tags on his homepage on
the basis that meta tags could be used for redirection, and
for bypassing those templates, has a page that makes the
venality of his own motives all too clear.

His site consists of nothing more than his homepage,
with one nondescript photo and a little forgettable "hi,
I'm here" text on it; I think it might very well be the
most pointless lack of talent put on display on a website
I've ever seen. As I say this, I do so without any claim
of being a geat artist myself, but there is such a thing
as at least making an effort. The only effort this gentleman
was making was in support of a fight to ensure that nobody
would be allowed to outshine him too terribly much. In this
way, an obscure man's egotism feeds that of a much less
obscure company, but not in a way that serves the company
particularly well, because the user's very negative form
of validation comes at the expense of that which would,
at some point, make the company's investment pay off.

As a Jew, I've often wondered why we have the reputation for
business sense that we do, espeially when I've seen some of
the atrocious investments I'e seen family members make, but
I think I'm beginning to understand. As a Jew, I will not
hesitate to call people on the manipulative games they play,
and really almost anytime other than Shabbes, I won't be asked
to; on Shabbes, business is verboten, anyway, so there are
no hustles to shoot down. Popular Christianity (as opposed to
the real thing), with its customary rejection of practicality
as a concern, tends to promote the development of an
ettiquette so baroque and so rigid as to preclude any kind of
open communication or clear thought. The native ability is
there, it is merely suppressed until the person possessing
it rejects all that he believes, leaving himself free to act
but without any moral compass guiding him as he does act, and
without the check that the prudent skepticism of others might
offer for his ambitions, being in place. The results are toxic.

In business, in real life, people arrive with different agendas,
and if you'e willing to say "scr** the rules" and see what's
really happening in front of you insted of seeing what you're
"supposed to see", and just project the logical consequences
of the actions people will take in reaction to their agendas,
fairly often you can see the future because it's contained
within the present. Think of it like this: somebody picks up
a ball and throws it to you. You reach out and catch it. In
order to do so, you had to know where the ball as going to
be before it got there. Does this make you a prophet?

No, because the ball, very deterministically, follows a
predictable arc. It's just a ball, and can't do anything
other than follow those very mechanistic laws of motion
that are plugged into our very instincts. What is sad is
that so many people allow mindless convention to overrule
good sense, that very often people will themselves follow
a reflex arc of responses just as predictable as that ball's
path through the air. Follow their stereotyped responses,
and you wll know where they will be. Reject those rules
that have no basis in anything but maniplatively conceived
convention, and you will reclaim your freedom to be the
one taking action, instead of the one action takes place
through the use of; it's the difference, at a baseball game,
between being the batter and being the bat; which sounds
like a role worthier of a man?

Watching the principals in this petty drama play their role,
we can watch it plot unfold into the future with something
close to inevitibility under the rules generated by the
choices each insist on making. The bulk of the user comunity,
under their poorly chosen leadership of undermotivated 18
year olds (!), insists on negotiating as if from weakness,
where market reality offers them a position of strength which
they reject. Google chooses to not be responsive to reasonable
concerns until it is confonted en masse by the very users who
greet it with the above mentioned mystifying cowardice. The
only logical conclusion is that none of the many undesirable
features of Googlepages (including the 100 file limitation)
will be corrected, because as Google management will likely
point out, there will have been no demand from the customers for
an improvement. Ironically, this will be because, as now,
an integral part of the culture than has developed among GP's
consumer base has been a refusal to speak directed and openly,
out of the fear of a negative reaction from that company, as
if they were the only show in town.

Googlepages, so mislead by its timid user base, will slowly
deathspiral by driving off the very people whose sites would
generate ad revenue; slackers can be tempting to listen to,
because they make so few demands of those in seeming power,
but having retained them as a matter of effective preference,
one is then stuck with the reality that they don't make many
demands of themselves, either. The dreck one sees on the entry
pages will be matched by the the even riper and more fertile
dreck one will find oneself seeing in the interior of many
of the sites, where templates won't be an issue, perversely
validating this unwise policy in the eyes of an administration
that will, as admins are wont to do, look only upon that
which is, and not consider that which might have been.

The practical import of this for somebody who wants to
design a site is clear - back way far away from this provider.
Bad things are already happening over there, and as the
pathologies of the local subculture are self-reinforcing,
attracting as they do those who manifest the characteristic
vices of the cabal in greater measure, what is bad, now, is
only likely to become worse in the future. We keep hearing
from the true believers that this service is only in the beta
stage and is going to get better; take it from somebody
who's been online for a length of time the Cabal ocver on GPC
would be hard pressed to conceptualize, much less match -
that's NEVER how a situation like this ever plays out. A
suit will back off on a power play because perceived
customer or user demand forces him to take that risky career
move, one that doesn't make him look strong; in all of the
years I've been around, I've never seen an admin back down
from a position because everybody gathered around and hugged
him, not even once, and yes, I've seen it tried. Often.




My point of view on such things tends to elude those who want
to see everything in simplistic pop christian terms of
unconditional "niceness" vs. unconditional "meanness". Like
most of those who have taught, I don't believe in being either
nice or mean. I believe in being fair. From a certain point
of view this means that, as a teacher, I've taken it upon
myself to destroy literally hundreds of lives, if, in fact,
not already a few thousand, and that I've done so without
remorse; maybe a few regrets, but I work to suppress them.
I still remember a student from one of the high schools I
subbed in (after my PhD coursework was done) telling me that
this wasn't going to be like that movie "Stand and Deliver",
after watching me tutor a number of students in a chaotic
class. I shrugged, and told him what so many have had so much
trouble understanding - "kid", I told him, "it doesn't matter
to me whether you learn anything or not. The only thing that
matters to me is whether or not you had an honest chance to
learn. Once that chance is given, wherever you end up is where
you ought to be, and how can that not be for the best?"

Yeah, I sound like a coldhearted b**tard, but one of those
little paradoxes that maturity helps one embrace is that
kindness always contains a little cruelty. Think about
what the world would look like if nobody ever was allowed to
fail; think about the stoner down the hall realizing his
life long ambition to be a brain surgeon, and you getting
to be his patient. Does my academician's wickedness still
sound so evil, or merely necessary?

As in school, so in the market. Destruction is only tragic
when it is unnecessary. When, as with that student, we
speak plainly with others and there is no collateral
damage, the only ones being hurt being those who have
truly freely chosen to walk down the path that leads to
what we might see as being their own undoing, we should
embrace their fall with no more sorrow that we accord the
chaff that is cast away from the wheat; if a company
belongs in a position of influence, there should be no
need to coax it into listening to reason. As with the student
who is to respond to the offering of insruction, we should
rejoice not in their success of failure, but in the presence
of their opportunity, however they may choose to make use
of it, because the dysfunctional companies must fall to
make way for the good, as the irresponsible student must
fall so the responsible one may find his way clear to claim
the role of leadership to which he was born.

This is why, when our callow young fool referred to my
article as a rant, why he didn't get it at all. To rant
one must feel some sort of emotion, some connection to
the subject and recipient of the rant, and I felt none.
Passion is wasted on a moment so ill defined as that,
especially when the stakes are so low. I simply did as
a teacher would do and opened the path to self-judgement,
for better or for worse, lacking the basis for passion
in that initial moment, until our little boys stumbled
into the trap tradition constructed for them, and which
I merely laid out in the open.

Convention isn't always an unworthwhile thing; the question
is, who created the convention and to what purpose?




So much for Googlepages, if this is the path that the
company wishes to walk, and if the rest of us have the sense
to walk away without a fight when the fools take control of a
piece of virtual real estate like GPages. Our instincts as
developed in the real world offline serve us poorly because
of one basic difference between virtual and tangible real
estate - physical territory can neither be created nor
destroyed, but the virtual landscape exists and vanishes
at our will. If, in society, the civilized members were
always ready to surrender any physical territory where
the undesirables held the upper hand, the sane and civilized
majority would find itself squeezed within a tighter and
tighter boundaries until it could no longer be a majority;
indeed, that's largely what happened during the 90s, with
many going a little bit crazy because they couldn't find
any sane surroundings to live in. But there is nothing
to keep us, as we retreat online, from creating more forums,
more sites to gather at, and to make our places of retreat
expand, even as the places we retreat from, in losing traffic,
gradually get dismantled, fading away. Imagine what retreats
would look like in the real world if, as we retreated from
a marauding horde, we could make the lands around us expand
until they were vaster than the territory we gave up.

Our instinct to fight to hold onto territory, then, one
which inclines us to fight the loons and the cabals where
we meet them, as sensible as this is offline, is pure folly
online. All we accomplish by fighting on these terms, aside
from a diminishment of our own plesure in life, is to give
content to dicussions that would otherwise lack them owing
to the mindlessness of the participants, perversely giving
life to that which would die of its own accord, if ignored
at the proper time, after it has been allowed the chance to
define itself in the eyes of all reasonable onlookers.

One strategy I devised was something I called "drop and walk",
back in my closing days on Usenet. I would dissect the
arguments of the kind of idiot who used to get my blood
boiling, and then, having left him with no logical route of
escape, walk off leaving him to fume without a response. In
the short run, this would cost me the esteem of the regulars;
in the long run, the lurkers were always watching, which was
the thought I always had in mind as I did this. Even so, the
thought of the flammage I didn't see and was leaving
unrebutted bothered me until one day I asked myself a simple
question - "If I met these people fact to face, how long
would I want to talk with them? How would those I hold in
regard, regard them?" These were not difficult questions;
I was dealing with the dregs of society who, like a poorly
performing company, were trying to bluff their way into a
perceived position of power, in the hope that perception
would become reality; the game only works is, as with
GPage's customers, we are so weakminded as to agree
to play it according to somebody else's rules.

In doing that, we give the prdictability to our own actions
that others desire, in the form of their choice becoming
that which is acted upon, and not that which is acting; we
surrender our freedom to those who will put it to ill use.
How much more prudent to remember that which we desire and
why, os that the objectives we pursue are our own.

This is why trolls like the ones in that forum maintain the
hypocritical divide between their own barely masked aggression
and their indignation over your refusal to be unconditionally
"nice" with such passion - because when you say "no" to that
uneasonable demand and stop caring about those who've forfeited
your concern, you're destroying the emotional impact of the
scorn of these little men, and in scorning them in the greater
measure your acceptance of your own rightness gives you,
setting yourself free. Once you've done that, the more they
scream the funnier they look, and it comes to you that that's
how they look to everybody else. Before, you knew that, but
know you KNOW that - the truth has registered emotionally,
and in your black little heart, it has set you free.






That, then, is my assessment of said provider and the community
that has grown up around it, and how it might best be engaged.
Think of it as a cesspool. Very useful, because the s**t has
to gather somewhere; at some point, you do have to hold your
nose and look in on it, but you sure as H*** don't want to go
for a swim or hang around in there. You do your business and
you get out, and that's what I'm doing.

I set up a blog, but word on the virtual street seems to be
that Blogger starts acting funny if a site on it sees much more
than seven hits per day, so there isn't much room for growth.
Given the spirit of "yay! it's garbage!" that the passive/
aggressively timid fan club greets Google with, in one area,
I wonder if their other services see the same response. I'm
guessing that they won't fix thst, either, so at some point
I'll cut my connection to both locations, probably very soon.

A thing that could have been more simply said, perhaps,
but what we do can be at least as much about our views of
our actions, as it can be about the actions themselves.




Joe Dunphy

Notes to list:

1. I've noticed that yahoogroups seems to be fouling up
much more often than usual. The original copy of this post
I sent to the list, last night, seems to have vanished and
my second attempt to post, just now, produced nothing but
an error message indicating that message 13 (Kerri's) could
not be retrieved. Under the circumstances, I'd recommend
retaining copies of anything one posts on the site to a
yahoogroup, at the very least until one sees it appear in
the archives.


2. I know I promised to set up another list to handle
webring related matters, and I did

      http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Joe_Dunphy

but judging from the fact that people are still coming onto
this list with Webring applications, something needs to be
updated somewhere to get people to head over to the new list.
I ask for your patience, as there is a lot to realign.


Note to Kerri B. : You're OK. Your application is in. I
just have a question or two to ask you, and obviously some
oversights of my own to go take care of, so others don't
get directed to the old list as well.


"Kerri B." <hls_kerrib@...> wrote:

> I have two sites that I'd like to get on your webring.

Which one? I run a few. I skimmed it briefly, and note that
a PM from you came from the "Tim Skirvin" ring. As your
blog isn't about Mr. Skirvin, but it is about free speech,
it looks like a better fit for one of my Free Speech rings.

> I am in the middle of a nasty, childish, and by far, the
> most stupidest internet stalking/harassing situation
> I've ever seen.

Sorry to hear about it.

> http://clflaggers.blogspot.com (original blog)

I'll take a look at it in greater detail tomorrow night.

> http://staffie.journalspace.com/ (blog I set up in
> retaliation to this
> blog: http://knuckles.journalspace.com - it has
> since been removed or taken private by journalspace
> because this person posted a personal email and photo)

There we're going to have a problem, because your second
blog is not viewable by the general public, meaning that I
would be breaking the ring by admitting it. Not a problem
with the first one, though.

> I had trouble signing up to join the webring.  Not sure if it's
> something you set up initially.

Whichever ring you have in mind, I believe that all is
explained on the hubpage and join pages for the ring.
I ask people to drop by my homelist (actually I have
two of them) and ask me to open the ring for them. There
are a number of reasons for this. It chases off the spammers
and it guarantees that applicants won't be left sitting
around with my navbar on their site, waiting for me to log
in and check for applications. If your site is a good fit
for the ring you have in mind, we should have you up and
running in a day or two, which is a much shorter turn around
time than most ringmasters manage.


Joe Dunphy

I have two sites that I'd like to get on your webring.  I am in the
middle of a nasty, childish, and by far, the most stupidest internet
stalking/harassing situation I've ever seen.

http://clflaggers.blogspot.com (original blog)

http://staffie.journalspace.com/ (blog I set up in retaliation to this
blog: http://knuckles.journalspace.com - it has since been removed or
taken private by journalspace because this person posted a personal
email and photo)

I had trouble signing up to join the webring.  Not sure if it's
something you set up initially.

Thank you,

Kerri Baker
Marshall, VA

"fitzj2001" <pastor@e...> wrote:

> Dear Mr. Dunphy:
>
> Having seen the SATANIC and DEPRAVED filth which you promote
> on your web rings, I had to write to you concerning your
> IMMORTAL SOUL.

(chuckles darkly) I opened up the ring for you. Come on in.

Oh, did I mention this onlist? I've set up a new ring,
called "Cafe Satan's Ring of Eternal Damnation".

      http://t.webring.com/hub?ring=damnation

Description: This is not a place for the Jeffrey Dahmers of the
world, but for those who know the difference between sensible
outrage and anal retentive indignation; a place for good spirited
irreverence and for any questioning of the accepted wisdom that
some may find offensive, for no particularly valid reason. Pages
which discuss Satan, Hell, the Gnostic demiurge or related topics
in a more scholarly religious, philosophical or literary context,
either Jewish, Christian, Islamic or other, are also most
welcome, as is reasonably sophisticated black comedy. Not a
good place for Fundamentalists, and New Agers definitely need
not apply.(The key word is "literary"; the focus should be on
your writing, something that might be expected to appeal to a
ringmaster who has been to graduate school and is glad and proud
of the fact that he went. Tabloid like sites with a postmodern
sensibility are pointed in the direction of the Weird Sites rings).

Homepage: http://web.newsguy.com/commonsense/Eternal_Damnation


Joseph Dunphy

Dear Mr. Dunphy:

Having seen the SATANIC and DEPRAVED filth which you promote on your
web rings, I had to write to you concerning your IMMORTAL SOUL. No
doubt the Jesuits, Jack Chick, Bavarian Illuminati, and breakfast
cereal companies have gotten to you with their FOUL and DIABOLICAL
propaganda, so I present for your perusal my website:

Eternal Damnation Ministry, found at http://www.damnationministry.com.

You are probably far too lost to benefit from the site, but others may
visit and avoid the UNENDING, EVERLASTING, PERPETUAL, and REALLY HOT
FLAMES!!!

Eternally yours,
Pastor Bobby Fay Swagland

Happy Bastille Day! Wish I was out doing something interesting,
but the fact that I'm sending you an e-mail at 10:45 pm tells you
the whole story, doesn't it? For as many of us as there are in
Chicago, of French or partially French descent, this is one
ethnic holiday that sees little celebration. I suppose that
there's something semi-apropo about my choice of kitchen
chores for tonight - I'm making liqueurs; liqueur rouge
at the present moment - but this is pretty darn sad, all the
same. I have to do something about that.

Right now, I'm resting my hands, and my slightly redenned
and sticky skin, to post about a small page I put together
a week or two ago. See if this reminds you of anybody:

      http://cafesatan.bravehost.com/Postmodern



Liqueur Rouge ... sounds expensive, doesn't it? If you managed
to find it in a restaurant, I imagine that it probably would
be; small glasses of liqueur tend to run one $5 - %8; the one
glass I've had in my life of Chartreuse cost considerably more
(but worth every penny). Well, I couldn't begin to tell you
how to make anything akin to Chartreuse. The recipe for that
calls for hundreds of different plants, most of which don't
even grow in my part of the world, many steps, ... suffice
it to say that it's been in high demand for generations, and
nobody has succeeded in coming up with a decent counterfeit,
as far as I know. A real sign that one is looking at
something far too complicated for the home enthusiast.

Other products, however ... something bearing a definite
resemblance to amaretto (called noisette) can be made with
a blend of peach and apricot pits soaked in alcohol
(I favor a 50-50 blend of vodka and white brandy) for about
a year, strained, and then sweetened. Many fruit and herbal
cordials can be made with a considerable amount of labor -
I almost killed the building alkie who tried to lift some
of my stash for use as a mixer with pepsi - but relatively
limited expense, and the results can be quite good, after
a little experience in gained. More about that later.




Stuff, stuff, and more stram of consciousness babbling ...

If you've been by the homepage for this group lately, you've
probably noticed a few changes. Obviously, that I've darkened
the page colors in response to Yahoogroups' change in layout.
The increase in contrast in tone makes for a more attractive
look, I think. More interesting from your point of view than
that bit of minutiae is the fact that this is no longer strictly
an announcement list. You can send posts to this list. They'll
be moderated, of course, though in the case of a number of
you, I recognize your names well enough that I'll probably
switch you over to unmoderated status when I don't have a
few cases of fresh fruit to deal with, and worries about
mold breathing down my neck. Putting it all in the
refrigerator is not an option; any refrigerator odors the
fruit picks up will be transmitted with disturbing
effectiveness into the liqueur. What you must do is process
your purchases on the spot.

Back to work. More senseless babbling later. Hope you
like the page.



Joe Dunphy

I set up a page of images I took in Chicago a few days ago.

        http://www.geocities.com/commonsense666atlast/Chicago

A very simple concept - I head out on a hike with my camera,
and take a rapid sequence of pictures of things that catch
my attention along the way. One thing that you will notice,
should you visit the page, is a paucity of shots of the
skyline. This is deliberate - the skyline has become a
cliched topic, especially online, to such an extent that
somebody who only saw our city on the Web might well wonder
if it reached anywhere beyond its own downtown.

Unlike most of my other pages, this one should get replaced
with new material once every few months, should I find that
there is an interest in it.

The recipes aren't up yet, but there are a bunch of photos with
that funny swirling effect that I make fun of on the front
page, located at

       http://commonsense666atlast.tripod.com/

In particular, take a look at the second photo going down.
What's up with that, you ask?

The answer is that, as I think I mentioned before, for the
first time I now have my own scanner, and am doing my own
graphics. I could have gotten rid of the banding effect
easily in a number of photos just by not compressing the
images, but I was getting file sizes on the order of 250K
or more, as opposed to the 80K they typically are. Aside
from the diskspace consumption, images that large are
no fun for the visitor as they download.

My guess as to why we're seeing this effect would go as
follows, and I may well be wrong. My guess is that the
jpeg format inefficiently stores images on a pixel by
pixel basis instead of, say, approximating the image with
a formula that would give the intensities of each of the
three primary colors (Red, Green, Blue) at a given point.
Observe the blockiness one gets when one over-expands
a small image. So, how would one compress an image stored
in this fashion?

Think quantization: if we approximate the colors at each
point with colors from a more restricted set, then we don't
need as many bits to described the picture, and that,
perhaps, is where the swirling effect comes from. Take a
look at a topographical map of an area. Notice how in steeper
terrain the contours come closer together. My guess is
that those bands you see are a higher dimensional analog
of those contours, applied to something that instead of
mapping a two dimensional area (the points on the map)
to something one dimensional (the altitude), maps it
into something three dimensional (the RGB triple, as a
function of position). The countours mark how far one
has to go before the color changes enough that our
quantization scheme sends it to a new approximate color.

Now, take a look at where we see the banding effect. Usually,
it is either up in the sky, or in the shadows - two places
where color and shading change very gradually - the color
equivalant of flatter terrain. While in areas of higher
contrast, those quantization bands might come so closely
together as to be unnoticable, where the contrast drops,
they're going to spread out more and become visible.




Well, that's my guess, and it seems to fit in with what
I've seen, but it's not really my field, so don't quote
me on this. I could be completely off in left field on
this one. This might leave the reader with the question
"didn't you see this coming, and why didn't you try to
do something to fix it".

Did I see it coming? No, it never occured to me that a
format in widespread use would be based on principles
that crude, especially given the fact that I know from
personal experience where a lot of computer science
grad students come from. A lot of them are former Math
grad students who were unlucky enough to have a bad day
when they took their PhD qualifying exams, and had to
switch majors. The level of Mathematical maturity to
be found among many of these people is considerable;
one less inopportunely timed case of food poisoning
or insomnia, and some of them would be professors, now.
So, definitely they could do better, and I just assumed
that they had. Maybe I do that a little too much.

As for what I could do about it? This trip was a rich
one for shadows. In a perfect world, I would have been
in New Mexico in August, not December. This is the high
country, and the climate is not much like what one
would find in Phoenix, one state over, so the winters
tend to be colder and grayer, plus the festivals seem
to cluster in late summer. But there we were, and we're
watching the weather channel, and to our utter disbelief
we're watching as a storm center coming over Puget sound
comes sweeping over almost the entire width of the country,
going from North to South, and hits Albuquerque dead on.

Bad luck? Yes and no. That storm is why you are seeing
far fewer pueblo pictures than you would have otherwise.
While it was mild stuff by Chicago standards, it left
the roads going out of Albuquerque iced over and impassible
for a few days. The state wasn't prepared for it. Even
after the sunshine came back, sort of, ice still lingered
in the shadows, so a hike up the mesa to the Acoma Sky
City would have been impudent. Maybe not too imprudent for
me to want to try, but the Indians weren't having any
of that. :) Closing times were very early. I'm sure they
don't really enjoy scraping tourists off of the desert
floor below, so this is understandable.

But it wasn't completely bad luck. The snow covered hills
took on a luminous appearance which, if it didn't really
come across in our photos, was memorable and apparently
relatively unusual. The mountains almost seemed to glow,
especially toward sunset. No photo could capture that.
Film doesn't glow. You just had to be there, and we felt
very fortunate that we could be.

That having been said, given that I'm stuck with the jpeg
format, what can and should I do with the images? I could
get rid of the banding by washing the sky to a uniform
blue and the shadows to an uniform black, but would that
really look natural? I decided to leave the effect in
place as an interesting novelty, onwe that gives the
pictures a surrealistic look that seems strangely effective
in helping capture some of the mood of the place in
the photos, to remember that "contrast is our friend" for
future shots. This is radically at odds with what one
usually does, especially because one tends to have people
in the picture, but for .jpeg use, it's something to remember.




I'll get working on those recipes in a few days. Search
engine related nonsense has taken me away from that, but I'm
more and more inclined to say "forget this" and stop
jumping through their hoops. There are more enjoyable things
to do, and it's about time I started doing more of them.
Certainly it makes for a more interesting site to read
through than to just eternally be talking about the cranks
that I've run into online. There is, of course, some merit
to the idea of clearing one's name, and to that of teaching
the reader a little about the realities of life online,
but when one looks at how Usenet has become a shadow of
its former self, and how even the mailing lists are dying
down, one sees that the point is getting to be understood,
and that one has more and more of an opportunity to simply
let some stories die and be forgotten. On to better things.



Joe

One gets these "your list is about to be deleted" notices if you
don't post for about 90 days, so while this is a little premature,
Yahoo policy forces me to post about now.

I'm about to get a scanner (my first), and it's really about
time. I've been using stock photographs and graphics from
free sites to decorate the Halls, and that's really kind of
lame. They're good photos - great photos in a few cases - but
they're photos that everybody has seen about a thousand times.

Having a few boxes worth of photos from Arizona and New Mexico
already, and looking forward to shooting a lot more out West,
I think that I can do a lot better than that. The photos from
New Mexico will be the first to go up, at an url to be announced.
They're going to be a little fuzzy, as the cold froze our
camera shutter somewhere near Sandia Crest. You have to watch
for that, when you're over 10,000 ft: being warm-blooded, you're
not getting cold in the thin air, but the "zeroeth" law of
thermodynamics is going to take hold of any inanimate object,
especially when the sun isn't out. 18 degrees is 18 degrees,
as far as it's concerned.

The photos aren't everything I'd like, and next time I'll go
out better prepared, but the subject is still beautiful, and
that carries through the limitations of working with a one-shot
and relying on automated developing. When I'm a little better
set, I'll look into getting those darkroom facilities.


Joe Dunphy

The Halls now spill over onto three servers, not counting
Internet Trash, where they linger. That, if it sticks
around, I'll probably use as photo gallery space, blocked
from the search engines because I've had enough trouble
getting the new site to show up in Google as it is.

The Cafe Satan material will mostly be in the new space
at Bravenet, as most of it is not controversial enough to
run into Bravenet's (admittedly restrictive) TOS. The new
page is part of that section of this site, and is entitled
"The Seven Deadly Sins: Have You Been Putting Them Off?"

      http://cafesatan.bravehost.com/seven_deadly_sins.html

The forum is, as I've said, not a place for the serious
Satanist. Not because of any anti-Satanist sentiments on
my part; I badly freaked out a previous ISP by publishing
something called "The Pamphlet of Intense Dislike" (since
deleted from the Dejanews archives), which could only be
termed pro-Satanist. But Satanism is serious religion,
something that does not lend itself to soundbites, and
the Cafe is more for relaxation than for serious philosophy.

The Theology you see bears no connection to anything that
ever came from LaVey's Church of Satan, or any other
Satanic institution; it's purely fictional, and the last
thing I want to do is add to the large amount of public
misinformation about Satanism already out there. I felt it
necessary to make sure that people understood that. Of course,
if an active, practicing Satanist wanted to come onto the
board, and clear up some of those misconceptions, he would
be more than welcome to do so. But then, what are the odds
that one of those will even be reading this, I suppose.


Joe Dunphy

A few years ago, I took a trip with a company that came highly
recommended, called the Green Tortoise, and wrote a journal
about the experience

       http://web.newsguy.com/commonsense/burning-tortoise.html

The name of the journal is "Bad Times on the Green Tortoise".
It's not an endorsement. I would not do business with them again,
and the account should make my reasons for this clear.

That was in 2001, and by the time 2003 rolled around, I expected
that this story would be over. The facts are not in dispute,
and if one is running a business, and reneges on one's agreements,
and abuses ones customers, common sense should tell one that these
are not choices that will help one's business.

But Pop Christianity, the spiritual basis for the American
cultural mainstream, has never had much of a focus on personal
responsibility, and sure enough, some nitwit wrote in to
bitterly complain that I had done his "friends" at the Green
Tortoise a terrible injustice by telling the truth about them.
Apparently, I was supposed to keep quiet about that, because
the truth was bad for the Tortoise's business.

I deconstructed a few of the boy's rationalizations

   http://www.geocities.com/commonsense666atlast/green_tortoise.html

Same old garbage - "if you were really tough, you'd give me what
I wanted without any backtalk". ROTFLMAO. I wasn't aware of the
fact that one had to remove one's own backbone in order to
become "tough", and I have to admit that I'm still a little
unclear on the notion of how caving in to pressure can be seen
as a sign of strength.

But then, I don't have a drug habit, either.



Enough of this c**p. The beauty of having one's own rebuttal
page is that this kind of thing eventually is OVER. When one
finally nails somebody, it's like shining a light on a burglar
- what's he going to say? Once the details are out, they're out.

And getting them out has taken a bite out of my time. It's
delayed the Burning Man movie night which will now be post-burn,
but finally, this is starting to wrap up. The PC era, in general,
seems to be on its way out, and the forums I find myself
in (eg.chi-burning) are saner, friendlier places that don't
leave me with a lot of rumors that I need to rebut.

The principle for creating and running such a forum is so
simple, I'm amazed that so many have had trouble finding it,
or accepting it - if somebody acts like a nitwit, show
him the door. Don't hold a poll, don't have a debate, just
send him away. For all of the wasted bandwidth and thought
that has gone into constructing rules and regulations for
forums online and off, simplicity is what works best. Adopting
it closes the door to those who would play "lawyer",
wasting our time.



Once I've fleshed in my rebuttal to the BMORG fan club
silliness, that's about it for the Internet rebuttal pages.
So, what's coming up? Photos and recipes, mostly, and
an occasional restaurant review. Time to mellow out a
little, and after running into the Otherkin (people who
seriously believe that they are elves), I've really had
my quota of strangeness for a while.



Joe Dunphy

Whether or not anybody other than me will ever use it remains to
be seen. The forum's homepage is located at

             http://cafesatan.bravehost.com/forum.htm

the forum itself being located at

            http://pub26.bravenet.com/forum/2190189085/

Have I mentioned what Café Satan is about, on this list? I can't
remember. If not, the homepage for that proposed camp is at

         http://web.newsguy.com/commonsense/Cafe_Satan.htm

I have the reading material, and I've been playing around with
recipes, but haven't gotten around to putting any into finished
form yet, for posting. In part, for a reason which is something
of a catch 22, I suppose : I'm not sure that anybody is reading
any of this. But, then again, if the recipes are what people are
dropping by for, maybe you ought to have more than one of them
up, eh, Joe? Yeah, probably.

On a more positive level, I've been getting back into my work
with greater effectiveness, and Chicago has been having something
it hardly ever sees - NICE WEATHER! Not freezing, not frying,
just nice. Nature is actually giving us a spring this year,
instead of going through its usual April-May vacillation between
a late winter and an early summer. My response has been to grab
my books, a notepad and my trusty noise blockers, and head out
for some fresh air and productive relaxation, which is one very
good reason why the Web has been my last priority lately.


What's the plan with the Café and its forum? Right now, I'm
starting a few threads explaining a variety of possible ideas
for the backstory of Café Satan, and seeing who gets interested.
I'm not inclined to pursue it as a Burning Man camp at present
for a few reasons, including these.


      1. Too much of a detour - work is keeping me busy, and
         a trip into the desert would eat up a lot of my time.

      2. Hostile audience - pure death for any improvisational
         theatre effort. The sad fact of the matter is that
         the ethic of "let's dive in and participate" has, in
         being taken to a mindless extreme, produced an
         unpleasant spinoff : a willingness on the part of many
         burners to hate others, merely because they're asked to.
         I'm not prepared to say most, but enough burners to
         pose a real problem.


My thought : let's (if there ever is an "us" for this effort)
do this as a Chicago-based theme party, and not even mention
"burning". We don't have to deal with the dyspeptic potheads
because they aren't likely to even hear about it until long
after the fact, and probably not even then.

I say this a lot, and maybe I'm starting to turn this into a
mantra, but one of the things that I found most tiresome about
the 1990s was the way in which sane, intelligent, decent people
were being driven underground by the crazed and the underhanded,
who would then fictionalize history in order to make events
seem less genuinely offensive than they really were. It's high
time that the 90s ended as a cultural era, and that trend got
turned around. All the rest of us have to do is try.

Went into the kitchen, played around a bit, and came up with a dish
from Southern Africa. "You mean South Africa?" No, Southern Africa,
as in the region.

This brings us to an unfortunate truth about the Web - the search
engines driving webpage design into irrational directions. To
classify African cooking by nation is not informative, because
those "nations" are defined by the lines of European colonialism, not
by ethnic / cultural divisions, and so the concept of "Angolan
cuisine" becomes questionable, because the concept of "Angolan
culture" is questionable. What is more sensible to speak of are
tribal and regional cultures, when speaking of the indigenous peoples.

The Southern reaches of Africa, like the Northern, tend to be arid,
and while I may be wrong, I'm guessing that one will see a large
nomadic element to the population as a result. I'll have to read more
on that, but one sees this in the northeast (or at least did until
recent times), because a nomadic lifestyle was an effective response
to the reality of devastating local droughts. Does the rain stop
falling in Ethiopia? Then migrate to Sudan or Southern Egypt, where
the vegetation still grows, and you can eat. Stay, and you starve.

Nomads become natural cultural middlemen, blurring cultural lines,
with the result that one finds difficulty when trying to say where
one culture leaves off and another begins. A common regional culture
arises, with local variation. When I start seeing dishes appear which
are common to the different countries of the region, but not to those
outside of it, I find myself wondering if I'm seeing one aspect of a
common, overlying regional culture.

But, we'll see. I have much more reading to do, as time allows.

Amazingly little, really.

As time allows, I'll be switching the font from cursive to
comic sans ms. I think it makes for a nicer look.

The Fred Cherry Story is complete, aside from a few font
changes and maybe a very small amount of decoration. "Small"
most likely will translate as "none", as I'm thoroughly tired
of the subject.

A small amount of Burning Man narrative will go up in the
near future, finishing the story. And the story is finished.
I'm tired of being the chronicler of the deeds of morons.
The only online forums I participate in are the ones run
by me, my family or friends, and those forums, by and large
are moderated ones, insuring that there will be very few
flamewars in the future that I'll need to tell my side of.
But the Burning Man one is a classic, with one of the
guilty parties actually having the nerve to complain
about my having counteracted his lies by documenting the
truth. It's the perfect note to close this story on.



But, what's next? Something better than this crap, to be
sure. African recipes, most likely, but mainly because I've
promised them and keeping my promises is a point of pride.
It ties in to the (now defunct) Café Satan theme camp concept.
Come to think of it, let me take that back a little bit. The
Café isn't defunct, it has merely been greatly rethought.
It's not going to be a Burning Man camp. Politics, obviously,
has been a problem, but it's more than that.

I guess (for me) the breaking point came at the last Burning
Man party I went to. The people were nice and they did some
creative stuff. Some. But a very telling moment came as somebody
laid out the haunted Labyrinth, putting some real effort into
it. Reasonably enough, he wanted some Halloween appropriate
music to go along with it, not a great shocker because this
was, after all, Halloween. The DJs refused, playing the
same exact material they would have played on any other day.

The designer was more than a little upset. This spoiled the
mood he was trying to create. The general reaction was the
he should chill out. Prudently, I kept quiet, and was able
to enjoy a good chunk of the evening. At least until I
conked out, because those people do party LATE.

The djs were nice people. The people backing them up were
nice people too. But, what ended up happening wasn't nice
at all. That's just how the Burning Man subculture works -
everybody running in his own prearranged direction, until
somebody clearly higher in the pecking order says "stop",
with the thought that they might do differently occurting
to very few of those involved. From the standpoint of
doing improvisational theatre, such a culture of aggressive
noncooperation is a disaster. People won't be able to work
together without being directed, and the piece will always
die before the audience's eyes.

I said that the Café wasn't quite defunct. Indeed, it isn't.
Burning Man didn't invent the arts, nor did it invent camping.
There's nothing keeping us, here in Chicago, from getting a
group of friends together, carpooling it out to the Dunes,
and making our own little minifest. It's not like being in
the middle of Nevada, but with something like 40 miles of
beach available, it's isolated enough for a group to be able
to be largely left alone. Nudity, fire and drugs will be
out of the question, but maybe that's a good thing. There's
an element which won't come because those things will be
missing, and it's an element we probably shouldn't want.

Group camping in the Dunes being the local tradition that
it is, getting something like that going shouldn't be hard.
Being left along won't be hard either, because when I do
get something like that going, I'll have enough sense to
not announce it online. "Then how do you plan on getting
it going, if you aren't going to let people know about
it" has been a common response to that remark in some
circles, and I have to laugh. How do these people imagine
that people met each other before the Internet was invented?
Chicago's a big place, with a lot of people, a lot going on,
and a wealth of offline publications to post anouncements
and articles in. The computer, if anything, gets in the
way, because it gets us used to staying at home, immobile
in front of the computer, instead of being out and meeting
people face to face.

Time to turn it off.



The recipes should start appearing in Midwinter. I hope
you'll enjoy them.