Call your representatives and say, “This is BAD. Vote NO.” Christ. Just do it, would you? (It’s hard living in an area where my congressman is always against this stuff, but yours might not be. CALL.) If you have zero idea of who your reps are and where they stand, Pro Publica has done the legwork for you.

An analysis of SOPA and PIPA from the right-wing Pajamas media. (Because when lefties analyze stuff, they’re biased.)

Oh, you want balance. Here’s the notoriously left-wing Cato Institute on why SOPA is a con. (The oh-God-don’t-send-me-to-Cato version.)

SOPA/PIPA are supposed to shut down online piracy of movies and other media and save jobs? Yeah, not so much. A Hollywood professional on why SOPA/PIPA are bad.

“Fascism should more appropriately be called Corporatism because it is a merger of state and corporate power”

– Benito Mussolini

• The Happiness Project by Gretchen Rubin, who also has a new book by that name (which I haven’t read but sounds very interesting and very much the sort of thing I’ve started doing on my own anyhow right now). A regular gal—albeit one who clerked for a Supreme Court justice—decides to investigate the various bits of advice she’s found hither and yon on what makes for happiness and actually does them to see how well they work.

• Tiny Buddha by assorted authors. Yes, we’re back onto the happiness/zen/meditation track here, but hey: that’s what I’m interested in these days! Nice articles about the little things you can do in your every day life to improve your experience and the experiences of those around you.

• The Great Fitness Experiment by Charlotte Hilton Andersen. Ever read some fitness magazine’s recommended workout and thought, I wonder if that really works? Well, Charlotte doesn’t just wonder; she goes ahead and does it. One experiment per month, undertaken with hilarious and awe-inspiring intensity. She’s a witty, fun writer whose explorations into all things health and fitness will knock you upside the head. Also: she just had a baby. Ever wonder how to get your groove back after having a baby? Imagine you’re on the newest of four young tots. Yeah. It’s good stuff.

• Cookie Madness by Anna. Seriously, do I need to explain this one? Pictures + recipes + descriptions of COOKIES (and other tasty baked treats) = love. It’s Cookies. It’s Madness. Go.

• Bakerella by Bakerella (who’s probably a baker named Ella, natch). Usually when I think “crafty,” I think “manipulative and evil, and can you teach me how to do that?” When Bakerella does crafty, I think “gorgeous, amazing, and tasty, and can you teach me how to do that?” Oh, I want to be able to create the sorts of treasures you find here.

• Copenhagenize by Mikael. Mikael would like us to Copenhagenize the planet—that is, put everyone on a bicycle and get us out of our cars. They did it in Copenhagen (a city once devoted to its cars), so let’s get out there, folks! Since I feel this is an admirable goal (even as I still drive around in my 8 year old, 100k mile Honda Odyssey), I think everyone should read the inspiring tales of moving to better transportation.

• The Secret Diary of Steve Jobs by Fake Steve (or Real Dan Lyons). I know, Fake Steve’s been around for years, with a prolonged hiatus during Real Steve’s medical issues. Now he’s back and when Fake Steve is on, he’s on. The whole crusade against AT&T’s annoyingly sucky service? Excellent, Smithers. His series of slams on Tiger Woods? Evil but hilarious. Whenever I see terrible retail layout (I’m looking at you, Borders) or seriously tacky bling (that would be you, teenagers), I hear Fake Steve’s snarky voice in my head.

  Darin, surprisingly, does not find Fake Steve as hilarious I do. I can’t imagine why.

• Please to watch this absolutely brilliant four-minute-long opening credits sequence for The Kingdom, which manages to cover the salient history between Saudi Arabia and the US. I still have no interest in seeing this movie (despite the presence of the ever-awesome Jason Bateman), but this sequence: Wow. When’s the last time you saw a credits sequence this memorable? (For that matter, when’s the last time you saw a credits sequence? Seems like they’ve been missing from every movie we’ve seen recently.) (Via Making Light)

• Speaking of movies you should see or Netflix immediately: The King of Kong. I have to say, I wasn’t that thrilled about going to see a movie about a showdown between two Donkey Kong players (I don’t even like arcade games), but this documentary about what happens when a guy decides he wants to beat the high score in Donkey Kong is fabulous. I am so happy Darin and I went out of our way to see it in downtown San Jose.

• Have you ever said to yourself, “Self, I need a Hostess cupcake that’s bigger than my head”? Well, if so, Nicole at Baking Bites has felt your pain, made the band-aid, given you pictures and a recipe.

• Jon Carroll gets right on the whole no-gays-in-Iran thing, discovers there are some who “believe that Iranians will like any group of Americans that doesn’t try to kill them.”

• There are approximately 8 million people in the greater Los Angeles area, at least 2 million of whom have SAG cards. And the producers of the number one hit show on TV from last year couldn’t find at least FIVE who could do a decent Irish accent for the opening show of the season?

• Speaking of the fall season, is there anything out there that I absolutely, positively must catch amongst the new shows? We watched Moonlight because of Jason Dohring (he of Veronica Mars fame), and our JD love remains intact because he was the only good thing in this amazingly horrible pile of dreck — he managed to deliver unsayable dialogue with panache. The rest of the show was poorly written, poorly acted, and poorly stitched together. We had to turn it off halfway through, and we never turn off shows.

We’ve also watched Reaper (yay, Ray Wise, but we liked this show much better when it was called Brimstone) and Chuck (yay, Adam Baldwin, but sorry, dude: you’ll find a better show eventually).

Darin really likes Mad Men (the portrayal of women’s roles in 1960 gives me the heaves — let me just put it this way: I hate it when I hear a woman mutter that she doesn’t believe in feminism, and this show perfectly dramatizes why).

• My God, Torchwood is silly stuff. The big mystery to us is how Captain Jack kept his American aviator’s coat in such perfect condition for the past 60 years — perhaps he had one made up in alien fabric.

• Have you ever said to yourself, “Self, I need a wrist rest that’s both useful and funky”? If so, the people at the What On Earth catalogue have felt your pain and produced the Baguette Wrist Rest. (Via Nicole at Baking Bites.)

• The ever-fabulous Otto passes along the best of Craiglist Boise:

2 COWS OR MORE – $1

Reply to: sale-437692507@craigslist.org
Date: 2007-10-01, 11:32PM MDT

HERE IS THE DEAL IF YOU WANT TO RAISE YOUR BEEF I HAVE THE PLACE.LETS TALK
CALL xxx-xxxx
——————–

Free Llamas–You catch, you haul

Reply to: see below
Date: 2007-10-02, 10:00AM MDT

We have three llamas that we don’t have time for. They’re free, but you need to catch them (in a corral) and haul them. One young male, one adult male and one adult female. These llamas have NOT been trained for packing. Please call Tony at xxx-xxxx.

There must be a million more. Which am I missing?

And here is some interesting information about the Great LJ Exodus of August 07 that fanfic writers and others may be interested in.

Dr Who livejournal icons

(Turns out there were a lot to choose from, too.)

Feel free to post your own strangest Google searches ever. (Except for pornographic ones, because, like really, who cares? Nothing about pornography is statistically improbable, unfortunately.)

One great side benefit is that, with NetNewsWire at any rate, I can see editing changes between versions of the posts. It’s interesting (to me, at any rate, the queen of minutiae) to see how some writers go back and reword their entries. I was just reading Glenn Greenwald (the go-to guy for info about the NSA Scandal) and his entry “Erasing the Cold War from history” had several edits. The substance of the post didn’t change, just the phraseology. It’s neat to see the editing part of the writing process — a big, important part that’s not taught nearly enough — in action.

Let me show you a short example:

But beyond the these self-evident factual errors in Captain Ed’s post argument is a more fundamental and pervasive falsehood which is being peddled with increasing frequency to justify the Administration’s law-breaking. It is the notion that restraints on the Executive Branch generally, such as those mandated by FISA or ones prohibiting the incarceration of Americans without due process, are now obsolete because they were the by-product of some sort of peaceful, enemy-less utopia enemy-less, utopian era which we no longer enjoy.

exists.

It’s a little hard to read, but if I found it too distracting I could always open the entry in Safari or something.

Of course, sometimes this side effect of RSS feeds can be hilarious, when you see giant swatches of a post that have been crossed out, complete with secret information that obviously the writer thought twice about sharing with the world. In case you didn’t know? Caught by an RSS feed once, caught forever.

Really fast feedback on the ME mailing list too…

(Convert Line Breaks?)

I don’t know if I really need an automatic entry writer/uploader — isn’t that what BBEdit is for? — but maybe it’ll be the coolest thing since sliced bread.

Update: Hmmm. Needed to do some editing of the posted entry, because there’s no “Title” on the MarsEdit menu. (Same problem I had with MacJournal.) Off to see if there’s a fix somewhere…

And if you don’t have an RSS feed on your blog. Make one. ‘Cause I’m gonna stop reading your blog, and so are a bunch of other people.

For those of you as ignorant of RSS as I was a week ago, RSS (who cares what the acronym stands for? but if you must know, it stands for Rich Site Summary or Really Simple Syndication) is a way to distribute the headlines and content of…well, just about anything. Blogs, news sites, updates to the Wikipedia.

I was refreshing my Blogroll 20 times a day, to see if the little “updated” icon showed up next to a blog. And sometimes I’d already seen the post, but the updated icon stayed there for the requisite number of hours, during which time the blog might have updated again. Then for a couple of weeks (it seemed), Blogrolling was down, so there were a whole bunch of blogs I never visited, not realizing they had been updated. And I kept visiting other blogs over and over again, hoping to see if they’d been updated.

I don’t need to do this any more. Now I click the “Refresh All” button in NetNewsWire and it shows me the headlines of new articles in my favorite blogs. And if the blog is syndicating using RSS 2.0, I get the whole entry. If it’s using RSS 1.0, I get the first paragraph or so, at which point I click the link and new tab with the blog opens up.

I’m slowly trying to delete the blogs I have a feed for off my Blogroll. I’m frustrated by how many blogs don’t use RSS: if your host doesn’t provide RSS/Atom support, I think you can sign up with Feedburner to make a feed. And if you don’t have any good RSS reading software, like NetNewsWire or Safari, you can use Bloglines.

I guess the downside of all this is that now there’s instant notification of new posts, which means my desire for even more new stuff grows. But it’s way cool and I’ll be very annoyed with you if you don’t syndicate.

§

I told Darin I was using NetNewsWire instead of Safari to read blogs using RSS. He sighed and said, “Well, at least they’re using WebKit.” (A project Darin also works on.)

§

Update: Apparently my RSS feed looks wonky. Waaah. And how come certain headlines keep showing up as new, even after I’ve read them? Do they show up as new if they get edited or something? (Corrente is an especial offender: its headlines are always renewing themselves.)

And I was going to attempt to explain the differences between RSS 1.0, RSS 2.0, and Atom — but why should I, when there are better-informed people out there to do it for me?

Mac users can’t download the Google Talk client, since it’s currently Windows-only, but we can use iChat (which is wonderful, because who wants to use a whole different app anyhow?). Turns out—oh, the things I learn during random moments—that I can use iChat for MSN and Yahoo Chat too. It’s one-stop shopping for online chatting!

I was having trouble setting up Jabber in iChat, until I found Google’s helpful page on setting up Google Talk in iChat. (Hot new food? Arugula-Google-a. Hot new car? The Hybrid Google 3000. I’m telling you: it’s one-stop shopping for Evil Overlords!) I tried to add Scalzi to my list, so as to test this out. At the moment, all it says is, “Waiting for Authorization.” No idea what that means. Do you have to approve people adding you to their lists? And if Scalzi doesn’t approve, what does that mean? For my ego, I mean. Not for Google Talk or Jabber or iChat or whatever.

Anyhow, if you’re trying out Google Talk, I’m D i a n e . P a t t e r s o n >at