I have finally caved to the peer pressure, and joined Twitter. So, for all of you Twitter-ers (or whatever you call it), feel free to follow me if you’re so inclined. And while we’re at it, you can feel free to add me on MySpace or Facebook.
That is all.
Hey everyone! I am back from my business trip and ready to get back to blogging. First, though, I want to thank everyone for your birthday wishes and gifts. I appreciate it more than you know! Second, a HUGE thank you to MK Freeberg, who helped me out tremendously by filling in last week. He did an AWESOME job, which I knew he would, which is why I asked him! I’m sure you all enjoyed his blogging, so add him to your daily blogroll (House of Eratosthenes and go and visit him more often.
Now, back to the blogging!
- Cassy
Sometime tonight I’ll be signing off, by means of a good-bye posting, or by means of accidentally “stepping on” our hostess as she and I both toss something up at the same time. I dunno. If I’m her, I’m probably thinking of unpacking and relaxing and doing non-blog things until the following day. But that’s me, she’s her.
Cassy, the innernets didn’t work so well once you stepped away from them. Sitemeter took a dive and it affected your blog, along with several others. Daniel took out the widget, and even though Sitemeter seems to have gotten their act together again, it’s still missing from here. So your daily hit count is zero. You can read about it here and here.
Everyone’s sick of me, glad to see you back, oh and your plants are dead because I forgot to water ‘em.
Seriously, what a great experience and what a fantastic audience. Enjoyed it immensely. Hope you had fun. All others reading this, why don’t you hit the comment thread and jot down a word or two welcoming her back.
Regarding this blogosphere-wide Internet Explorer/Sitemeter conflict from last night, I’ve asked Daniel to remove the widget and he got it done. Thanks, Daniel.
IE users, you may want to follow the link above to find out why this page (along with hundreds of others) has been crashing your browser. To quote Bart Simpson, Ididn’tdoityoudidn’tseemedoityoucan’tproveanything. Really. We didn’t do it
The Blog That Nobody Reads still has the widget, so if you’re one of the nobodies who hasn’t been clicking over there to not read what may or may not be there, well, it’s still going to be crashing until Sitemeter fixes whatever ails it.
…if you’re reading this.
Blogger friend Phil brought it to our attention that Internet Explorer is crashing when the front page to House of Eratosthenes is being loaded. Adding to the concern, for us, is that Cassy Fiano’s page, where we’re guest-blogging this week, also wouldn’t load in IE. And other blogs do.
Hmmmmmmm….
Well, the first thing we did was save an off-line copy of the front page, and then go in with a text editor and hack away at the HTML code line by line, until enough code was missing that the problem would stop happening. And this narrowed it down to the sidebar, specifically, the Sitemeter widget. The problem was confirmed when I loaded up yet another blog, one in which I don’t have these blogging responsibilities, and it crashed IE just as reliably — also through the Sitemeter widget.
I found three entries in the Sitemeter support/announcements blog that might relate to this…
Visit or Page View Counter Display, July 31: For those of you who currently use the SiteMeter Icon that displays the total visitors to your site we wanted to let you know about some forthcoming changes to this feature…
Scheduled Outage August 3, 2008 (SM1, S17, S21, S26, S36, S37, S38, S39, S40, S41, S46 and S47), July 29th: Greetings, Our hosting provider has scheduled an outage on August 3, 2008 from 12:01 AM - 05:00 AM to consolidate their network into a single autonomous system. The following servers will be affected…
Sitemeter Icons Vanishing, July 17th: For the next 30 - 45 days we will be testing our servers and databases in preparation for the launch of our new SiteMeter platform…
There. Now you know everything I know.
Unless you’re using IE, in which case you’re not reading this.
Cross-posted, out of necessity, at House of Eratosthenes to help reduce confusion for us all.
Update 8/2/08: Here’s your reading material. Thanks to Gerard for letting us know this morning it was starting to pop up.
Wired: Web Sites Using SiteMeter Are Crashing with Internet Explorer
The Inquisitr: Site Meter causing Internet Explorer failure
It’s my birthday! OK, so maybe it’s only the best day of the year for me (and really, still not necessarily the best day). But it’s a pretty damn good day anyways. One of the good things about today being my birthday is that it’s the one day of the year that I’m allowed to be a shamelessly capitalist greedy pig. With that said… here’s what I’d like for my birthday from you, my dear readers, that would make me happy.
As you probably already know, Cassy’s going to be out this week. And this isn’t her writing now; she asked if I could come by and do some “guest blogging.” I’ve been asked this before, by others, a few times over the years. I’ll have to confess to having made a hash out of it, for the most part. But I agreed to it this time because I notice Cassy has a lot of people commenting over here, and you guys have a good track record in my book for raising new perspectives on things. To me, that’s what makes blogging worthwhile, is the meeting of people. Also, I have a little bit more time for it now, and I see she’s tossing up a post or two a day…quality over quantity, in her typical style. Keep the fires burning for a week? Seems doable. Hope I don’t disappoint too badly.
My name is Morgan K. Freeberg (LinkedIn profile: here; Blogger profile: here), and I’ll tell you right up front that I’m sick to death of talking about that guy Barack Obama. And that other hardcore left-leaning liberal John McCain. I can’t foresee what’s going to happen this week, but I tend to put a lot of effort into finding things worth talking about, that have nothing whatsoever to do with those guys. Trying to, anyway. Usually failing at it; it is an election year, after all. Events this week will probably force me to talk about those two chuckleheads again a few times. I dunno. We’ll see. Consider your input solicited, anytime. You can reach me with your praise, criticism and suggestions at mkfreeberg@hotmail.com.
I started reading Cassy for two reasons. For one, she is a talented writer; I would put her right about on the line where “gifted” starts. It’s one thing to spell things right and get your grammar straight, it’s quite another thing to translate that into a bunch of words that can be read easily. If you’ve not tried to do either one of those, you can take my word for it. I succeed at the spelling-grammar thing, and fail at the easy-fun-reading thing, on a regular basis. Cassy is just about the furthest thing you can find from some comment on DailyKOS or some other left-wing site — you know what I’m talking about — where you have to read what’s been written, over and over again…three times, four times, five times…only to find out the whole point is to recruit you on some “Am I The Only One Who” bandwagon or “Can I Get An Amen Here” bandwagon.
The other reason I read her is far more important, though: Her understanding of what makes sense, and what does not, is exceptionally strong. She thinks for herself but still has a sense of decency, abiding by Isaiah 5:20, “Woe unto them that call evil good, and good evil.”
This is an important point, one I think is worthy of clarification. Permit me the indulgence of rambling…
I’ll tell you why I think this is important. We have people who are “strong” and we have people who are “weak”; I do not mean, by this, that the “strong” people are people you’d want to have as your allies. I do not mean, by that word “strong,” anything even necessarily good. I’m talking about, in the disorganized, anarchistic hodge-podge of a process we call “life,” these are people whose ideas are likely to prevail. This is what Jack Nicholson’s character Schmidt was talking about in the final scenes of that movie, where he says “I am weak.” His character made a critical mistake, confusing the ability to prevail in the trivial matters immediately under discussion, with the ability to survive; to achieve some measure of immortality. This is, I think, a mistake we all make at one time or another. So let me be clear on the meaning of “strong” here. I do not mean long-lived, healthy or robust. I mean, likely to prevail in the trivial matter immediately under discussion. Within an environment that is not dedicated to discerning validity or truth. This cosmetic, skin-deep sense of “strength.”
And then we have good people and evil people. Evil, tough as it may be to recognize at times, is fairly easy to define: It destroys, or preserves other things that destroy. So picture these divisions as quadrants within the human condition:
1. Strong-good people;
2. Weak-good people;
3. Strong-evil people;
4. Weak-evil people.
My point is, when we do not regulate ourselves, as we interact with each other this strong-evil quadrant begins to swell…the folks who are the subject of Isaiah 5:20, and can warp the prevailing sentiment to conform to their evil desires. We saw it with Bill Clinton lying, and all those “strong” people strongly getting in our faces, waggling their strong fingers at us — “It wasn’t a lie because it was indecent to ask him the question!” There are other examples of this, but listing them is pointless. That’s my favorite one. It’s my favorite because it was so ground-shaking and yet it took place in such a narrow frame of time.
In the summer of ‘98 we had one definition of “truth,” and by a year later we had an entirely different one. That’s a terrible thing. Don’t blame Clinton; the fault lies with us.
That is evil. It calls falsehood truth, and vice-versa. In so doing, it seeks to destroy that which creates or preserves, which is human intellect, and preserve that which destroys.
I view it as metaphorical — ancestral, I should say — for the kind of nonsense we’re enduring now. For example…we have to “responsibly redeploy” from Iraq. Deep down we all understand, I think, if the ideas underneath these tangled, complicated words were good for us, the words used to carry them wouldn’t be so tangled and complicated. We would say “just get out.” Well, we don’t say that because it is logically unsustainable to entertain that this might be a good thing to do. This is an example of the evil being strong; that idea, which we know is a bad one, has become a prevailing sentiment. There are pretty sound arguments being made that this will culminate in a disaster…yet the evil is strong…so into the cul de sac we go.
Popularity is on one side of the fence, reason and logic are on the other. That’s how it works, more often than not.
Here’s another one we have now: Saddam Hussein “did not attack us.” The only idea in that vein that could strongly bolster an argument, would be “Saddam Hussein was completely harmless.” Notice, nobody is saying that. Nobody is even debating that anywhere. The outcome of such a debate would be unhelpful to the strong-and-evil, so we leave it alone. But here, again, by being unspoken, that argument has been all-but-lost. The prevailing point-of-view is that taking any action there at all was a bad idea — and yet nobody is willing to sign their name to the idea that the area could have been safely left alone. Nobody except clowns like Michael Moore. (More on him later.)
The earth is getting warmer and we all have to sacrifice! Eh, actually the facts say no, it isn’t; and the proposed sacrifice isn’t connected with any solution, except by means of vague platitudes. The platitude mumblers don’t actually sacrifice much. They sacrifice as much as they have to, not to save the earth, but to stay popular, and become more popular. Which isn’t much. Changing light bulbs in your house is IN. Riding a bike to work is OUT. We pretend to be saving the planet, but we’re really just incorporating a new sense of fashion sense and saving the planet doesn’t have anything to do with it. Yet again, that message has stuck. The evil have become stronger than the good.
Why does this keep happening?
I’ll tell you why right now.
Because an important sub-contingent within the faction of “evil,” is narcissism. Good weighs consequences; evil, caring only about itself, charges on ahead. The advantage of momentum, therefore, goes to those who do not weigh consequences — the evil. The Isaiah 5:20 people. The conflict comes down to something resembling a game of “chicken,” in which only one of the contestants is wearing a blindfold. A force of nature wins out over a force of reason and intellect, every single time. Those who observe, analyze, weigh, discern and evaluate, end up being just like Jack Nicholson’s character Schmidt; their arguments do not prevail in the matter immediately under consideration. They must settle for, perhaps, prevailing over the longer term. Losing the battle and winning the war.
There are reasons to think they will succeed at this:
…but there are reasons to think they will fail. We have a presidential election, and the front-runner hasn’t done anything, hasn’t said what he’s gonna do about anything without flip-flopping later, lacks basic background knowledge about even mundane things like how many states there are, is backed up by a menagerie of America-hating asshole friends, and doesn’t even seem to be that bright. In short, he does everything he does, by showing off. He’s embarrassed himself quite often lately but overall, it still looks like this is his year. And what’s worse, is he’s sort of a vanguard, if you will, for all others who function this way: Sidestepping reasoned argument, and as a substitute, seeking to manipulate the prevailing emotional flavoring. Result — they stand for nothing. But they run everything.
They get their come-uppin’s eventually, more often than not. But in the meantime they do a lot of damage.
And so Cassy is, to me, the kind of “bloggress” we need now. You wad up some sloppy ball of nonsense and toss it at someone like her…even something that finds a smooth pathway from cranium to cranium in these unenlightened times, like, uh…”if you are not actively serving in Iraq, you are not allowed to say anything good about anybody who is.” Or, “one of the big obstacles women face in achieving equal status in our society, is sexual abstinence education in the schools.” Or, “‘real patriotism’ has to do with finding the most anti-American position of any issue, and consistently taking it.” Yeah, something like those. And Cassy is one of the few people around who have the balls to grab the emergency cord, yank it hard, and say out loud in a strong firm voice, “that’s crap.” Even though some supposed “majority” might say otherwise.
I should say a word or two about my own corner on this, because Cassy invited me to do so, several times. And it occurs to me, this would help you to understand where I’m coming from.
My spot is House of Eratosthenes, known colloquially as The Blog That Nobody Reads. We are a contributing blog to Webloggin. Some of the nobodies who don’t stop by to not read The Blog That Nobody Reads, grumble a bit when I call it that. But they seem to like whatever consistency ripples through it, and I like the kind of folks who have been attracted by the themes and stuck around because of the themes.
Those themes within House of Eratosthenes are multi-fold, and I’ll try to give each one of them it’s due without boring you to tears in the paragraphs below. The primary one is simply this: We point out things that “everybody knows,” that everybody knows for no better reason than that “everybody” already knows them. Nonsensical stupid things, things people bully others into believing but can’t state word-for-word, fastened on to any reputation worth defending. Things people “believe,” only because they’re worried about their continuing survival if they’re caught believing something different. Things like single mothers can raise children as well as married couples; if women run the world, war will become a thing of the past; God is fiction, we’ve evolved, there is no master design to our inner workings, and yet somehow we weren’t designed to eat meat. Things like, President Clinton told something that was virtually true because it wasn’t any of our business to ask him the question in the first place. Or that Saddam Hussein was a harmless teddy bear. Or that global warming makes it important for us to “come together” and “sacrifice” so we can “do this” — but it’s everlastingly trivial and unimportant and meaningless, somehow, to contemplate what exactly “this” is. Or womens’ equality has something to do with girls indiscriminately screwing a whole bunch of sub-standard guys.
Those things and more. I said, above, that this is Barack Obama’s year. As any thinking person knows, this is not a pinnacle of civilization or “progress,” but rather a low nadir of chaos. In our society, the intellectual “house” is a pigsty. It’s what you’d expect to find if you loaned out your house to a dozen frat boys for a month There are messes everywhere.
House of Eratosthenes is not here to clean up the messes.
It is here to point them out. Clean-up is an individual responsibility. We’re each responsible for keeping our “houses” in order, and clean the cobwebs, pizza boxes and dust bunnies out of them. There is no way for us to do this, short of respecting ourselves. We own the decisions we make, as individuals, whether we realize it or not. When we decide things in groups, we make a fustercluck out of it because the entity making the decision, the group, is distinctly different from the entity that owns it, which is the individual. Quoting Ayn Rand, in one of her snippets providing the greatest ease of understanding for strangers to the topic:
The smallest minority on earth is the individual. Those who deny individual rights cannot claim to be defenders of minorities.
And so what we do, is to champion the decision-making power of the individual; and, just to keep our sense of humor about such a grave and complex matter of human relations — make fun of the decisions made in committee.
Because you know what? That’s exactly what history does.
All who would argue that point, might find it educational to review the story of why we use a funny name like “Eratosthenes.” We’re named after a guy who figured out the size of the earth about two centuries B.C.; the experiment is discussed in detail here. That’s because, when you ponder big questions like the size of the earth, and you don’t have any technology available to find the answer by conventional means, you have to arrive at some unconventional means. Therefore, you must think for yourself. Really think for yourself. We honor this experiment, because it is logically impossible in a whole fistful of ways for it to have been conceived in committee. The premise upon which it was based, alone — the earth might be round — would’ve been shot down in a heartbeat. Bah! Who are you to say? Scientific consensus, it’s flat! And so, what one guy managed to do a long time ago, seems to be something we can’t do anymore. It represents a style of thinking that is slowly asphyxiating.
Even the good decisions we make, nowadays — how did we make them? We got twenty or thirty highly-paid professionals in a room, wasted an hour or two, and then did what the “smartest guy” said we should do. Without inspecting it. So at it’s best, group-think really is just individual-think, without anyone taking responsibility for it.
There’s something else busted, too: The people who are best at doing that…the sitting in a meeting, pretending to pay attention, and then simply mimicking the “smartest guy”…are our “educated” types. And those are the ones who make the decisions about what viewpoints should prevail and what ones should not. Over the course of a lot of years keeping my mouth shut and paying attention, I’ve learned something funny about those people: Most of them aren’t really educated. Not functionally. They don’t have an education good enough to repeat Eratosthenes’ experiment. They’ll brag all day long how they went to graduate school and learned all about climatology; and yet, they can’t do trig. They can’t even carry a conversation too far, about how angles relate to distance. By the time you’ve finished the ninth grade, you should be able to explain the Earth-measuring experiment down to the smallest detail, and answer Q&A about it. That requires a commanding knowledge of geometry, powerful enough to enable you to figure out how things work. To come up with an experiment of your own — that requires the ability to produce a list of procedures, not simply follow one.
And if you’re running around spewing nonsense about Saddam Hussein being harmless just because that’s what the other guy said, this goes well beyond what you’re doing.
Among the secondary themes, one of the most popular ones is the girls in skimpy outfits. That started out being just for fun, but then we realized quickly that this secondary theme had a lot to do with our primary theme. We’d put up a picture of Erica Chevilar in her red bikini, the Google hits would spike, our traffic would zip upward for a little while, and then someone somewhere would start sounding off about all the things that are bad about nice-lookin’ girls in red bikinis, without being able to explain what’s bad about ‘em. And that’s our central purpose. The bullying. The “That’s Just Bad, Can I Get An Amen Here?” stuff. The nonsense. We’re going to make rules about girls wearing more clothes, and department store mannequins being thicker, so our girls don’t develop eating disorders. Sports bars are oppressive to women. Women who work in banks should be fired if they wear swimsuits for calendar shoots on their personal time…in the name of “womens’ choice.”
Another theme is lamentation and alarm over the various subtle and veiled attacks on plain old-fashioned manhood. This, too, dovetails in strongly with the primary theme of people not thinking for themselves. We’re a little bit chicken to harp on it often because some may misconstrue the message — but boys and girls are different, and men and women are different. Women are better at establishing and preserving protocol. Men are better at stepping outside of it, should the need arise. Part of thinking for yourself is keeping track of what’s moderate and what’s extreme, and part of the damage we’re doing to ourselves nowadays is creating established protocols for everything; as if, any human activity that isn’t cloaked in a rigid agreed-upon social convention, is some kind of unfinished task. One trope you’ll find in our pages on a recurring basis is (roughly paraphrasing here), “if you can’t state the idea without using the word ‘every,’ ‘never,’ ‘always,’ ‘all’ or ‘none’ — it isn’t a moderate idea.” In 2008, our standard of living is very high compared with the years past, and we have a tendency to identify toxins, strip them away, measure the residue, strip it away some more, and when we’ve gotten rid of it all call ourselves “moderates.” Carbon dioxide is a great example of this. The residue-toxin can also be something intangible, like probability. The likelihood your kid might scrape his knee on the playground; extremists are trying to get rid of that, and calling themselves moderates as they do so. There are other phony toxins. They all have to do with getting rid of the exigencies associated with life — therefore, they have to do with getting rid of life itself.
Another theme is just a big ol’ hodge-podge of things that are “red state,” that we happen to like; anything that ends up being under attack by these evil-strong prevailing-viewpoint bullying-not-explaining people. Guns. Meat. Barbeque sauce recipes. Really big powerful internal combustion engines with multiple turbochargers. Beer, wine, practical jokes, James Bond movies and robots.
The list wouldn’t be complete without mentioning the one really deadly thing we’re REALLY supposed to hate, without understanding why we hate it: The woman who loves her man and does nice things for him. We obsess over the seemingly meaningless gesture of bringing her man a cold beer — simply because that ticks off the feminists faster than anything, and they themselves can’t seem to coherently explain exactly why. But here in Northern California, the strong-and-evil feminists have emerged triumphant in molding the prevailing sentiment. We’re supposed to look with disdain down upon women who bring their men beer, and show some kind of fawning respect to women who do not. Even the fellas are supposed to do this. Therefore — men are supposed to be nice to women who are mean to them, and mean to women who are nice to them.
You know, prevailing sentiment that may be, but I don’t think that dog’s gonna hunt.
So who am I, to dare to point this out?
I’m just a middle-aged guy who writes long, windy, bloated essays like the one you’re reading now. I’m concerned about the “Strong Good” quadrant. It is anemic, and it should not be. As Edmund Burke said,
All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.
The primary concern there, is the primary concern here. When the good remain silent, everybody else slowly departs from the kind of thinking that energized Eratosthenes’ experiment two thousand years ago, the kind of thinking that powers “The Blog That Nobody Reads”; and they start to babble away with all their foolish nonsense.
Things you say for the purpose of getting attention. How quickly we are seduced when we say things to get attention. And that is the key reason why we call ourselves The Blog That Nobody Reads; as a reminder. If you’re still unclear on how that works, you could review the List of Things People Say To Get Attention, which is a little compendium I’ve been putting together of self-inflicted injuries, of the public relations variety, perpetuated by celebrities, politicians, authors of letters-to-Editors, and other folks drunk on their own glamor. It is not meant to be exhaustive; the point isn’t how long I can make such a list, the point is that there is always a fresh supply of such incidents rolling in.
People don’t think when they’re showing off. It’s a simple fact of human nature.
What else can I say by way of introduction. I’m often told a sign of a civilized society is one that gets rid of the death penalty. To me, a death penalty is one of the fundamental things a civilized society keeps in place.
What are my less popular views…
I think the word “totally” should be banned.
The best movie swordfight of the twentieth century was at the end of The Phantom Menace.
I’m in Dr. Savage’s corner on this whole autism business…mostly. Not completely. I think he committed a sin for being both a doctor and a shock-jock, demanding credibility for one of those roles, and then speaking in the capacity of the other. He was tactless; to date, I don’t think he’s suffered any punishment that he hasn’t deserved. But in my book, his point was a valid one and it’s overdue for some critical inspection. We are not thinking like Eratosthenes on our Four A’s (autism, aspie, AD(H)D and allergies). This is group-think at it’s most damaging and millions of children are suffering for our mistake. Some of them, perhaps permanently.
And I don’t smile for photographs. Ever.
I grew up in the Pacific Northwest. My resume is full of Information Technology stuff, twenty years’ worth. Most of my positions held, especially back in the younger years, had to do with software development. I’m afraid that’s why my treatises are a bit bloated — in software development, of course, if anything is left undefined, the whole damn thing ain’t gonna work. People ask if I’ll start a writing career; I like the idea of being able to do something for money, late in life, with one foot in the grave and writing is just about the only thing that would fit that. But I harbor no delusions about becoming a great one. Ever. You have to have empathy to do that. You have to anticipate what the audience already knows, and leave it out. Like lots of nerds, and children falsely diagnosed with the 4 A’s, I’m empathically-challenged. Hey, maybe someday some one will come up with some disorder label for that. Then nobody will ever expect a damn thing out of me. We could call it P.E.D.D. for Persistent Empathy Deficit Disorder.
Kiddin’.
I have no college education, and my high school GPA is medium-to-dismal. I’m one-time married, divorced for sixteen years and almost seventeen; I have a live-in girlfriend who loves doing things for me. And yes, I do things for her. I have one son who is eleven years old. He’s weird in all the ways I’m weird, and then some. The schools tell me he’s off-the-charts intelligent but they don’t know how to relate to him. That’s what a lot of people say about his Dad. I’ve pretty much figured out why they call the boy intelligent. Why people call me that, sometimes I have to seriously wonder.
I’m a South Park Republican, I think. I don’t like seeing religion used to inflict guilt, and I tend to part company with my more fundamentalist right-wing brethren on this point; becoming more horrified every single living year with the decisions that are made in groups, and how they are made, I just can’t bring myself to go to church anymore. Haven’t gone in quite some time. But the liberal hierarchy of “values” is really offensive and odious to me. I think that fits the definition, or overlaps with it anyway…
I hate conservatives, but I really f—–g hate liberals. — Matt Stone
I believe in God. I wasn’t too sure about Him until my son was getting ready to get born. I was encouraged, in those oh so civilized, sensitive, enlightened Clinton years, to take an active role in all tasks that had to do with the pregnancy. Darwin just left waaaaaay too much unexplained. So when the know-it-all atheists can get condescending and snooty, I can be condescending right back, and I can rattle off exactly what is left unexplained by the gnostic atheist viewpoint. No, I’m not talking about that silly creationist-banana thing. Better stuff than that. YES, there’s a God. It isn’t open to question, except for patently absurd, silly questions. The kind of surreal strange questions socially desperate and strong-but-evil people ask, not to learn about anything, but to show off and get attention.
I don’t imagine this leaves you hungering for more by way of introduction. But there’s always the possibility that I may have been guilty, again, of clarifying one thing, when the curiosity of some may have been focused on something else. So consider the following as reference material — take what you like, leave the rest:
Things I Know
Things I Doubt
Things I Don’t Get
What’s Wrong With the World?
The Oath of Eratosthenes
House of Eratosthenes Glossary
Yin and Yang
What Is a Liberal?
Seven Steps to Insanity
Anyway. Plum pleased to be here. Cassy says she’ll be back inside the week. In the meantime, I’m going to do my darndest to make sure, in the week ahead, this is the longest single thing you ever have to read outta me… 
Hey everyone! I have a quick announcement to make. Unfortunately, I have to go out of town this week for a seminar for work — as in, my non-blogging job. I will have no internet access this entire week: zero, zilch, nada. Of course, this presented a problem as I wouldn’t ever want to leave you guys with nothing to read here. So, I have lined up a guest blogger: MK Freeberg! Many of you will probably recognize him, as you’ve probably debated with him in the comments. He’s a blogger as well, and his blog, House of Eratosthenes, is one of my daily reads. He’s a great writer and is always entertaining and thought-provoking. So I asked him if he’d be willing to fill in for me this week, and he thankfully accepted. So, enjoy the guest blogging this week and make sure to go and visit his blog as well. I’ll be back Sunday.
Also, my birthday is this week. I turn 24 this Wednesday, July 30th. More on that later, though…
– Cassy
All right guys — time for me to head out on vacation! Mike and I will be going to the Lone Star State to visit some family, and on the way back we’re going to make a stop in New Orleans. I’ll be getting back home late Sunday night, so blogging will resume Monday. I’ll try to get some posts up between today and Sunday, but I don’t know what kind of access I’ll have to internet, so we’ll just have to see about that one.
So, I hope you all have a WONDERFUL Independence Day. When you’re watching the fireworks, or grilling out, or hanging out at the beach, please take some time to remember the brave patriots who founded this nation, and the ideals upon which it was built. Take some time to remember the sacrifice of the selfless men and women who gave everything so that we might remain free. These holidays are more than just an excuse for time off of work. They have meaning. So please, take the time to remember that meaning and to celebrate it.
Enjoy the time with your families, and I will with mine as well. See you Monday!!
- Cassy
I know that John does this every quarter, but I don’t think I’ve done a list of my favorite blogs before. I’m not listing them in any particular order here, but these are my top picks, my must reads — these come highly recommended by Yours Truly, and therefore, you should definitely read them
And of course, there’s Wizbang and Stop the ACLU, where I blog in addition to this site. They are great blogs that you should also read regularly.
So, there’s my list of daily must-reads in the blogosphere. I think you should go read them all if you don’t already. Like, right NOW.
