Spam in the Place Where You Live...

Spam.

If you're on the Internet, odds are you know what it is. How could you help but? Unless you keep your email address in a safe and never give it out, some spammer has gotten ahold of it at one time or another—which means they all have it. If you're like me, that means your mailbox is filled to overflowing with people who want to enlarge both your penis and your breasts, sell you "V1agra" or "C1alis" or software or printer supplies or mortgages on the cheap, get you to help them get their money out of Nigeria, have you send them your or just fill up your box with missives in languages you cannot read.

I was fortunate enough to come to the Internet back in 1992, when the "August" page had not yet been torn off of the Internet calendar. I enjoyed my first couple of years of email entirely spam-free. I still remember the furor caused by Canter & Siegel's legendary First-Ever USENET Spam that heralded the start of the Internet spamming industry (and was just one more element of the "eternal September" that's been going on ever since). If you're like me, you wish you could find a time machine and go back and stop them...but even if you did, you know someone else would come up with the idea sooner or later.

What percentage of all Internet email messages do you think spam constitutes? 20%? 30%? Try 65% of all email messages sent over the Internet, according to Symantec. That's right—out of every 20 emails sent, 13 are spam. Multiply that by the billions of emails that are sent daily...what a nightmare. It's the tragedy of the commons on a grand scale.

Think of how much more efficiently the net would run if we could flip a switch and make all that spam go away. Think of how much faster files would download and "legitimate" mail would be sent.

I doubt you will find more than the occasional oddball here or there who is unwilling to admit that spam is a problem. I don't think anybody normal likes the stuff...I doubt there's one of my readers who would be sorry to see it go. This kind of begs the question...if the average person doesn't actually want the stuff, then why do the spammers keep churning it out? You'd think they'd have gotten the hint by now that this is not an optimal way to sell a product.

But the thing is, spam may very well be an optimal way to sell a product, as this quote from a Salon.com article indicates:

According to a former [Davis Wolfgang] Hawke associate, the [...] spammer boasts of earning "six figures" and often carries around a wad of hundred-dollar bills in his pocket, totaling thousands of dollars.

What's going on here? How can someone be making so much money selling something almost nobody wants?

The key word here is almost.

In a way, it goes back to an old ethnic joke wherein the person of the ethnicity, nationality, or hair color of your choice is standing next to a watermelon cart with a sign reading "Watermelons, $1,000,000 each." A passer-by asks, "Are you crazy? There's no way you can make a living selling watermelons for a million dollars each!" The watermelon-seller replies, "I only have to sell one."

In similar vein, spamming is so incredibly cheap to do that the spammer only needs to sell a handful of his product to make a profit. When you think about it, with today's high-speed Internet access and software programs specifically designed to automate the spamming process, sending an email costs almost nothing at all. You can send out thousands of emails per second if your connection is fast enough. How much does one thousandth of a second of electricity cost? Of wages? If only one in one thousand people to receive a spam bought, and it was sent to a million people, that's a thousand sales right there.

And the less moral kinds of spam enjoy an even greater level of success than that—because many people are depressingly gullible. A recent study has revealed that users are unable to tell fake "phishing" (fraudulent social-engineering for the purpose of stealing your credit card number, identity, etc.) emails from genuine business emails. These are the messages that claim to come from PayPal or Visa or eBay insisting that they need your credit card information, but really point to "PayPaI" or use HTML redirect tricks to take you to a non-Visa site. (Even more depressing...I took their test yourself quiz and only scored 60% accurate myself—though I still maintain they cheated by removing the actual URLs to which the email HTML pointed and leaving just the ones the email claimed they pointed to; in a "real-world" situation comparing the claimed to the real URL is one of the main methods I use to tell the difference.)

At any rate, spam isn't going to go away soon. Proposed legislative solutions lack teeth; most technical solutions are either unrealistic ("let's charge everyone for email!") or still in the planning stages, and what's needed is a solution for here and now. Fortunately, there is a current technical solution that seems to work pretty well as a stop-gap.

I'm not going to duplicate the LiveJournal post in which I describe exactly what it is and how I set it up, but suffice it to say that, at this point, Bayesian filtering seems to be the best answer to combatting spam on a personal (or server) level. There are software systems that use Bayesian filtering available for all OS platforms (it's even included in OS X's default email application) and it works remarkably well. I've seen the spam in my inbox fall from dozens a day to four or five per day at most, and even that will fall off as the Bayesian filter learns more about what spam looks like. My mailbox is down from fully half spam by subject-line to readable again. I no longer miss messages because they're buried in spam.

Maybe someday the Internet calendar will flip on to October and the spam will stop. It's something to hope for. Until then, we just have to filter and make the best of it.

Let he who is without sinister Castro the first stone...

You know, as a writer and occasional journalism student, it was driven home to me repeatedly that you always check your sources. If a source for something is questionable, then you don't use it or you could end up with egg on your face. And if you're George W. Bush in an election year, you may not have that much un-egged face left.

Well, it's time to fry some more up for our beleaguered President. As found in this link from BoingBoing, it seems that Bush used an unconfirmed quote from Castro—relating to Cuba's sex-trade industry—in a speech to Florida law enforcement officials on July 16th that Castro has since denied, calling President Bush "sinister." But it gets better. The student who wrote the paper, one Charles Trumbull by name, says the unfootnoted quote was "probably a paraphrase" and taken out of context by President Bush anyway.

So, how would you like to be the college student whose paper caused an international incident? I can't feel too sorry for him, though—as fellow web journalist Matt Lavine points out, he had it coming. I mean, even if Castro really did say something similar to the paper's claim, if it's not a direct quote, you don't quotate it, you paraphrase it. And you footnote it so the reference can be checked for veracity later on. But that being the case, I would assign a far larger portion of the blame to Mr. Bush's wonderful speech-writing fact-checking department, who really should have known better by now. Even if the paper did win a prize from Dartmouth College, that doesn't automatically mean everything in it is correct.

The most amusing thing to me, though, is Castro calling Mr. Bush "sinister." This is, after all, a fellow who has been ruling the same little Caribbean communist country for fifty years...the fellow who was being satirized twenty years ago for his longevity (see a little book called The Stainless Steel Rat for President by Harry Harrison, involving a dictator of a Spanish-speaking rum-exporting planet who has been using anti-agathic drugs to prolong his life and his reign for 200 years) and he doesn't look any older now. (Another bit of fun-poking comes from the recent James Bond movie Die Another Day, which obliquely suggests Castro is using gene-therapy to stay young.) This is a man who has survived multiple administrations' attempts to oust him, a man who goes around in military uniform all the time, a man with a very impressive presence whatever else you can say about him, a man with a beard that is capable of concealing small children...and he calls our funny-looking little President "sinister"? This is the pot calling the kettle black...and the kettle is actually shiny.

Politics

I'm not much into politics. Maybe that's a mistake. They're the way our country is run, after all, and that should be everybody's business. I guess it's just that something in me doesn't like divisive debates—a series of horrendous arguments in my past (completely unrelated to politics) have made me somewhat gun-shy over anything that could possibly make people yell at me more. And politics heads the list of those things.

I'm sure we've all made the mistake at one time or another of bringing up politics in mixed political company. I remember one time my father, mother, and I were being driven to a square dance by a family friend who I assumed, being from the same largely conservative area as us, shared the conservative political views...except he didn't, and I made the mistake of bringing up politics. The atmosphere in the car got decidedly chilly after that.

Political discussions seem to share some of the same characteristics as religious debates. (Perhaps this is not too surprising, given how tied-together politics and religion seem these days, at least on the far-Right.) The average party-loyalist feels that what he believes is God's Own Truth, and the other fellow who disagrees with him is either a sadly deluded fool at best, or Pure Evil at worst. It doesn't seem like there can be any middle ground. And, like I said, I try to stay out of that kind of discussion.

My father is a staunch, staunch Republican. He practically worshipped the ground Reagan walked upon, severely disliked Carter and Clinton, and thinks highly of the Bushes. I was exposed to this philosophy a great deal in growing up. Now, there are two opposing schools of thought on the effect this should have. One is that I would be indoctrinated by this upbringing and come to be a staunch Republican myself. The other is that each generation always rebels against the values of the previous generation, so I should be driven to become just as staunch a Democrat.

I think the truth lies somewhere in the middle. For a while, I was a staunch Republican. Without really thinking much about it. But I got exposed to a lot of things in college, and it broadened my mind. I started thinking a bit about the actual issues instead of party loyalties. I took web-surveys on my stance on what I thought about individual issues and they told me I was closest to being a Libertarian (except where foreign policy was concerned).

By this point, I've come to realize that no political party really matches my views 100%, and I'm probably going to have to settle for whatever seems the lesser evil. (I need to get one of those bumper stickers that extols you to "Vote for Cthulhu—why settle for the lesser evil?" Well, I would If I still had a car, anyway.) I'm still somewhat conservative at heart, but I try not to think of myself as a -crat, -ican, or -arian of any kind. I'm a voter who makes up his own mind based on the issues as best he can.

I don't really follow most of the issues du jour on which politics is based. I couldn't really tell you who proposed what tax cut, or who proposed what spending hike, or what they all mean. I know that the Dems say the Republicans want to cut taxes on the wealthy and soak the poor, and the Reps say the Democrats want to soak the rich and create a welfare state. It would probably take Solomon to work out the actual truth of things. I know that health care is a mess.

The thing that bothers me, though, is the whole War on Terror and Iraq thing that's gone on over the last few years. I keep thinking of the song line "I'm proud to be an American, where at least I know I'm free." Well, now I'm not so sure I know I'm free, and I'm not so sure I'm proud to be an American, either.

I was, along with the rest of the world, horrified by the attack on the Twin Towers on 9/11/01. I can still close my eyes and see the pictures of the fireballs, the flailing bodies falling through the air that I still can't believe were (and wish hadn't been—or at least that I hadn't seen) shown on television. And I was as gung-ho as most other people when it came to Bush sending the armed forces into Afghanistan and Iraq.

But look at the things that have happened since then in the name of fighting terrorism. We've gone to war with the wrong country (although I still think that we were right to depose Hussein, even if he was entirely unrelated to Al Queda—the man had done enough other bad things over the course of his career that it should have been done a long time ago) and, even though we did clean out one of the right countries, it looks like we've left the other big contributor (Iran) alone. We've passed laws aimed at aiding the fight on terrorism that may be overly broad and step on all manner of civil liberties—and Ashcroft wants to pass still more.

We've suspended the Geneva Convention for prisoners of war on a technicality. ("They're not really enemy combatants because they're not the official military force of an opposing nation.") This has subsequently led to blatant prisoner abuse of the sort that we commonly associate with Germany or Japan in World War II, or more recently third-world countries. And it was our soldiers who were doing it, on orders from higher up (and you can bet that the soldiers will be hung out to dry while the officers who ordered it will get off with a slap on the wrist). We have held an American citizen for months without access to his lawyer. We have apparently even imprisoned innocent people to force wanted members of their families to turn themselves in! This is not the kind of thing that I want to think the country that I love is doing!

It shouldn't matter that "they're the bad guys," as "good guys" we have to hold ourselves to a higher moral standard than that. Innocent until proven guilty. I've reached the point where I'm afraid to read the news, because I know I'll just be more disgusted by the next great revelation of our human rights abuses. It makes me feel more than a little ill when I think about it—we're turning into the very thing we rebelled against two hundred years ago. Our Founding Fathers would be appalled.

And it was Bush's administration that was responsible for all this—if Bush didn't directly give the orders, one of his hand-picked staff did. If they did not give the orders, then they were not aware of the things that were going on beneath them, which means they were either criminal in action or criminally incompetent. Even some of my conservative-leaning friends are shaking their heads and saying that running Bush again is a poor choice for the Republican Party, and they wish they could vote for someone like McCain. I'm just not sure that another four years of Bush is a good idea. But I'm not so sure that I like Kerry all that much, either (though that could be just the ingrained conservatism of my family bucking at voting directly for a Democrat). Or any of the candidates. Douglas Adams said it best in The Restaurant at the End of the Universe:

The major problem—one of the major problems, for there are several—one of the many problems with governing people is that of whom you get to do it; or rather of who manages to get people to let them do it to them.

To summarize: it is a well-known fact that those people who most want to rule people are, ipso facto, those least suited to do it. To summarize the summary: anyone who is capable of getting themselves made President should on no account be allowed to do the job. To summarize the summary of the summary: people are a problem.

But what can you do? We've got a two-party system. All the third party candidates are, frankly, a joke. I respect some of what Ralph Nader's accomplished in terms of consumer advocacy, but there's no way his running for President is going to be anything but an attention-grab (and a vote-grab away from the Democratic candidate). The closest thing we've had in living memory to a viable third-party candidate was H. Ross Perot, and he turned himself into a big joke by his habit of pulling out of and then dropping back into the race. So you're voting for one candidate or the other, or else you're wasting your vote on somebody who has no chance of winning, and by so doing you're helping the candidate you would otherwise have voted directly against win anyway. Which is a great way to make a statement, but a poor way to run a country.

Or you can just not vote at all, which means you "lose the right to complain" (or at least the moral high-ground to complain, since the 1st Amendment guarantees you the right—though one is tempted to say that given the current administration's legislative moves, who knows how much longer that will last?) if someone you didn't like wins. There's just no good choice at all.

I don't know what I'll end up doing come this November. Maybe I'll vote for Kerry. Maybe I'll vote Libertarian as a protest. I wish I could vote for McCain, who seems like a deeply moral man. I just don't like the current state of things at all.

---

A couple of links: Jeff Kirvin, columnist for the PDA blog Writing on your Palm, does a bit of political venting in the current edition; also, the Democratic National Convention site has transcripts of some pretty good speeches by Carter and Clinton, a not-as-good one by Gore, and various others.

The Secret Pleasure of Not Watching Catwoman

Today, some of my friends in an online chat forum were discussing and quoting critics on the Halle Berry movie Catwoman, which has drawn abysmal reviews from nearly every critic. Its Tomatometer reading is a remarkable 11%, which is to say almost 9 out of 10 critics reviewing it thought it stank. This is a level of awfulness to which most bad movies can only aspire. Off the top of my head, I can only think of one other movie that ranked worse, and that would be Freddie Got Fingered.

One of my friends happened to mention on arriving that he was getting home instead of seeing Catwoman. "Yesterday I didn't go to see I, Robot," he said. "I'm not seeing a lot of movies this week." This put me in mind of something I had read recently; it took me a while to remember what it was, but then I realized it was a vignette by P.G. Wodehouse entitled "The Secret Pleasures of Reginald" (via ebook site BlackMask.com). The tale is about a fellow who spends a relaxing weekend not visiting a boring acquaintance...in detail.

"You don't understand. I do not mean that I am simply absent from Bodfish's place in the country. I mean that I am deliberately not spending the weekend there. When you interrupted me just now, I was not strolling down to Bodfish's garage, listening to his prattle about his new car."

It's one of Wodehouse's funnier short works, and I find it perfectly captures the spirit in which to consider rotten movies such as Catwoman—the great degree of pleasure one can derive from reading the reviews and then not going.

Why on earth did Hollywood have to mess around with Catwoman anyway? As many different versions as we've had already, it's not as if we really needed an entirely new one. What was the point? Wouldn't a film about Selena Kyle, cat burglar, be just as interesting? Heck, I could even stomach something about Selena Kyle, resurrected-and-brain-damaged secretary, from the Burton Batman movie. They didn't even go with the recent inner-city-prostitute comic book version, for that matter; this Catwoman seems totally new.

Catwoman has had many faces over the years. The funny thing is, the place where I was able to find the most information about the original Catwoman was in a piece of soap-opera fanfic that I found randomly by searching one day a couple of years ago—based on the Catwoman fantasies of the female half of a tempestuous soap opera romance. I wish I could find it now; I'd like to read it again but it's been obscured by a flurry of links probably engendered by the new movie, and other things. I can't even remember what soap opera it was based on (I think it was Days of Our Lives but can't be certain). Anyway, the point of the story was that the Catwoman fan was very annoyed by the then-current comic book re-envisioning of the Catwoman character as an inner-city prostitute who got beaten up, and the movie version whom she described (with more than a little justice) as "mentally ill." She went on about how the original 1940s version of Selina Kyle was a socialite with many redeeming and endearing qualities. Someday, I'd like to find a collection of those comics, just so I can get the "true story."

The Catwoman with whom I am best-acquainted is the Paul Dini Batman: The Animated Series version—a wealthy socialite burglar involved in animal-cruelty causes as well as filling her own pocket. I quite enjoyed her appearances over the course of the show. My only complaint was that she was "outed" way too soon in that series; she ought to have been able to keep her secret identity and continue fencing with Batman for quite a while before they found out who she was. That being said, she was a fun character and very classy even as she broke into jewelry stores and the like.

The "mentally ill" Batman Returns version of Catwoman? Well, she looked nice in the suit, and was good with a whip...but she was Burtonized away from her roots (as was The Penguin from the same movie, for that matter—turning a debonair, prissy (albeit vertically-challenged) gentleman into a bestial sewer-dweller? Puh-leeze!), which were really the main things I had liked about the character. Catwoman was supposed to be a female Robin Hood on the wrong side of the law, separated from Batman only by her penchant for enriching herself at the expense of others—not this brain-damaged nutbar (who, nonetheless, did look good in a catsuit).

Let's also not ignore the fact that Catwoman was, from the very beginning, meant to be a foil to Batman—by turns an adversary, ally, and love interest. The original 1940s-universe Justice Society versions of Catwoman and Batman ended up retiring, marrying, and raising a family, for goodness sake. As a criminal, she has a certain darkness in her that makes her one of the only ones who truly can understand the darkness that drives Bruce Wayne. They really are meant for each other; they balance each other out. Even leaving aside all the other changes, the Catwoman movie apparently replaces Batman with some ordinary schmuck as the love interest—a bystander rather than a brooding hero. The equation is unbalanced.

To blame is the quintessential Hollywood adaptation-and-remake problem. Hollywood is run, by and large, by egotists, who can't bear the thought of putting all this hard work into adapting someone else's story...only to have that other person get all the credit for it since, after all, he's the one who really created it...the movie person just photo-copied it to the screen. They want to put their own stamp on it, so they can point to it and say, like that production studio logo that plays after some TV show credits says, "I made this!" They "mark their territory" so to speak—by piddling all over the original concept. So we get things like Catwoman, or like the recent proposed Superman remake script that completely altered Superman's backstory (and turned Lex Luthor into a Kryptonian, among other things). These changes often have no real reason or amount of thought put into them other than that they want to make it "different" from the original...as if "different" always means "better." For instance, the recent Sci-Fi Battlestar Galactica remake turned Starbuck into a woman for no real reason I could discern, and the producers said in interviews that they were intentionally breaking with the old Galactica because they wanted to.

It typically takes a degree of control by the original creator of the work (J.K. Rowling in the case of the Harry Potter movies) or someone extremely respectful of that original work (Peter Jackson for the Lord of the Rings trilogy, Sam Raimi for Spiderman) to hew close to the spirit of the original—and even then there have to be changes just to make it into a film ("Organic webshooters? Yuck!" cry the Spidey fans).

You'd think that Hollywood types would have learned by now not to mess around with the goose or it'll stop laying golden eggs. Why make a movie about an established character or concept, ostensibly to attract people who like that character or concept—and then change it beyond all recognition? But they just keep turning out these turkeys. It makes me really disgusted with Hollywood sometimes—but then, I'm at least mildly disgusted with Hollywood most of the time, so maybe that isn't saying too much.

At any rate, now that I've gotten that out of my system, I can't think of a more delightful way to spend the evening than here at home, not watching Catwoman.

Harry Potter and the Adaptation of the Cinema

I finally got around to screening the DVD of Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets and then went ahead and watched Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban in the theater this last weekend. Both movies——indeed, all three movies counting Sorcerer's Stone——were very good, as far as they went; however, there is something missing——particularly from Prisoner of Azkaban. I'm going to try to avoid spoilers as much as possible, though there will be some details from book and movie that I will have to mention here.

Where PoA, and indeed the whole series, is good, it is very good indeed——the CGI has improved a great deal since Sorcerer's Stone, and the thespians who play the kids and teachers are almost all spot-on for how I pictured them in my head. Hogwart's looks and feels very much like I had imagined. Whoever designed and decorated those sets should win an Oscar of some kind.

The problem with translating the Harry Potter books to the screen is that J.K. Rowling is, more than most authors, a consummate master of fine detail. She sprinkles all these myriad little details in the stories that may not mean anything now, but wait until the end of the book——or even wait 'til three books down the line! Character names dropped as throwaway references in the first chapter of the first book may become important characters in the third or the fourth or the fifth. Incidents that seem to have little significance will prove extremely important down the line. These little details add to the reread value (if you know XYZ is secretly 123 from Book 5, you can go back and see all the little hints that were dropped in Books 1 to 4, and things take on whole new shades of meaning), and also help to "sell" the setting as a genuine, living, breathing world.

When adapting a book to a movie, 90% or more of those little details simply can't be represented on the screen——so they must be either changed or dropped altogether. And PoA ended up dropping more than either Philosopher's Stone or Chamber of Secrets——it was the longest book to be filmed thus far in the series, yet it became the shortest movie. Peeves the Poultergeist was absent (though granted, he was absent from the first and second movies as well); Nearly-Headless Nick (John Cleese) was missing, too (though the Headless Hunt from Book 2 did appear); many little omissions were made.

Yet, in most cases, this didn't hurt anything as far as the movie is concerned. Looking at the movie on its own merits, it doesn't matter if we don't get to see Hagrid's classes on flobberworms or Sir Cadogan's brief tenure as keeper of the Gryffindor Tower door. They're not necessary to the condensed version of the story the movie tells. I even found myself liking some of the changes, such as the expansion of a sequence where Harry gets to ride on a magical beast: covering just a couple of paragraphs in the book, in the movie it becomes a several minute sequence of wonder comparable to the dragon ride from Neverending Story. One change that I do have a particular quibble with is that Harry is seen practicing an illumination charm in the first few minutes of the movie——something that would have been cause for expulsion in the books!——but that's just a minor nitpick.

The thing that makes Prisoner of Azkaban break down has to do with an important confrontation about 3/4 of the way through the story. In the book, this runs on to dozens of pages of talky conversation as details of characters' motivations, actions, histories, and so on are all related. Things that were puzzles all through the book were explained, minor details tied together, and a clear light was shed upon many things that had been murky. This was my favorite part of my favorite book in the Harry Potter series. But one can easily see that to a filmmaker this massive chunk of exposition would present a problem, much as the similarly-talky Council of Elrond scene did for Peter Jackson when adapting Lord of the Rings. Most audiences——particularly child audiences——are not going to sit still as 15 minutes of conversation brings the pacing of the film to a dead halt.

So the conversation——and thus the movie——was gutted, cut down to its barest essentials about who betrayed who and who (or what) certain people really are. It entirely left out how the betrayal happened, and why certain people really are who (or what) they are. Furthermore, certain details and plot points that did make it into the movie——the true identities of a certain set of cartographers, the reason for the shape of Harry's patronus, how and why Sirius escaped from Azkaban, why a black dog showed up in the beginning of the movie to startle Harry out of his wits——are left entirely unexplained, where the book renders them clear as day. In the end, many key details of the story are left murky. This may not bother many readers of the books, who already know the answers, but someone who hasn't read any of them could be left puzzled.

Thus, the movie version of Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban suffers from a large sin of omission. Perhaps if they had been able to make them four hours each, as Peter Jackson did with Lord of the Rings...oh well; to paraphrase Humphrey Bogart, we'll always have the books.

So, if you've never read the books or seen the movies, which should you do first? It's an interesting question, because if you read the books first, it will spoil your enjoyment of the movies...but if you read the movies first, it will give away most of the plot from the books. I would be inclined to say that the better of the two works is the one that should be perused first, so it's the worse one that gets spoiled—so, by all means, read the novels before you see the films.

On an unrelated related note, here's a link to a terrific LiveJournal essay on the politics and justice system of the Harry Potter universe. It runs to ten parts, plus an appendix, but is it ever a worthwhile read (if you've read all five books, mind you; it contains some major spoilers)! It is certainly the greatest scholarly work I have yet seen on the internal workings of the Potter universe, and that includes entire litcrit books I've read on the Potter saga. Don't miss it. (But do read all the books first!)

That's All I Have to Tell You...

"That's all I have to tell you...that's all I've got to say."

—The Last Unicorn

So, Chris, you might be wondering, you've already got a livejournal that you barely keep up with as it is...why do you need a blog, too?

The answer to that is two-fold. First of all, because I can...I have my own domain, so now I can host it with FTP without having to jump through hoops like having a GeoSh—I mean GeoCities account or having to go with blogspot.com (which I'm sure is very nice, but I like the control having my own webspace affords me).

Second, you don't hear about livejournaling causing a journalistic and political revolution. There seems to be a distinction among web readers that livejournals are just that: journals of lives, "dear diarists" formed into a community—but blogs are more serious, journalistic endeavors that can topple dynasties and so forth. Of course, I'm sure there are a lot of people out there who use their blogs as little more than diaries, though I don't think I've ever seen a journalistic (in the "news reporting" sense of the word) livejournal. Still, Drudge doesn't run a livejournal, and you didn't see livejournals from news reporters in Iraq...

Anyway, since I can, and I'm already a member of the free service, I've decided to start a weblog over here, that I will use for essays, editorials, reviews, and so on, thus reserving my livejournal for recording my day-to-day life. I'd just like to get one thing straight, though: I cordially despise the term "blog"—it sounds like the noise one makes while throwing up—and I don't find "weblog" to be all that much better. This is a journal, darnit! Not a "live" one, but one where I can chronicle my thoughts and ideas. The only reason I use the term "blog" at all in this writeup is that I rather have to—it's fallen into common usage and everyone knows what it means; it's even part of the name of the service I'm using to record the thing.

But I'll be darned if it shows up anywhere in the URL for the thing...