Big Fat Hairy Living

Eugene Plawiuk, who has the worst blog sidebar I’ve ever seen in my life, discovers a left-wing engineer and writes:

Most Engineers I’ve met tend to wander into the world of Ayn Rand Objectivism. Being such linear thinkers, it’s the trade you see, they think that Ayn is both a great philospopher and a great novelist. Ah poor deluded Engineers, but then again the slogan of Engineering school is ‘Geers Rule the World, to which my reply has been; No wonder it’s so messed up.

Sure, most engineers are awful, but not all of them are — Jimmy Carter was an engineer and I even know an engineer who films porn. I’m an electrical engineer and I’m not just a lefty, I’m a card-carrying social democrat. And I like fisting!

Buried deep in an article about the xenophobic terror of some in the US at the prospect of a Spanish version of The Star Spangled Banner is this gem:

While critics sketch a nightmare scenario of a Canada-like land with an anthem sung in two languages…

The nightmare!

And a crypto-racist weighs in:

“I’m really appalled. . . . We are not a bilingual nation,” said George Taplin, director of the Virginia Chapter of the Minuteman Civil Defense Corps, part of a national countermovement that emphasizes border control and tougher enforcement, and objects to public funding for day-laborer sites. “When people are talking about becoming a part of this country, they should assimilate to the norm that’s already here,” Taplin said. “What we’re talking about here is a sovereign nation with our ideals and our national identity, and that [anthem] is one of the icons of our nation’s identity. I believe it should be in English as it was penned.”

Yeah right, as it was written. The British want their drinking song back, asshole.

Probably because I’m the only electrical engineer at work, the people here seem to think I have a magical ability to answer electrical questions off the top of my head. Just the other day someone came to me to ask me about a diode. “I have an LED that’s not working,” he said. “Do you know what it could be?” How the fuck am I supposed to know? What am I, the Amazing Kreskin of diodes or something?

It’s usually annoying, but I actually kind of like it. Being the only electrical engineer here gives me a strange sense of power. I could say anything and these guys would believe me.

The latest threat to Freedom: Dildos.

Lucy’s Love Shop employee Wanda Gillespie said she was flabbergasted that South Carolina’s Legislature is considering outlawing sex toys.

But banning the sale of sex toys is actually quite common in some Southern states.

The South Carolina bill, proposed by Republican Rep. Ralph Davenport, would make it a felony to sell devices used primarily for sexual stimulation and allow law enforcement to seize sex toys from raided businesses.

“That would be the most terrible thing in the world,” said Ms. Gillespie, an employee the Anderson shop. “That is just flabbergasting to me. We are supposed to be in a free country, and we’re supposed to be adults who can decide what want to do and don’t want to do in the privacy of our own homes.”

In related news, the South Carolina legislature is also considering changing the name of French Ticklers to Liberty Ticklers.

Jane Jacobs died this morning.

Detroit Free Press:

She heard the piercing scream coming from a window above her sixth-floor apartment Thursday morning.

Irene Lowe ran out onto her balcony, looked up and saw a mother looking down on the lifeless body of her son.

The child, whom police identified as 16-month-old Saviour God-Scientific Allah, had tumbled out of a bedroom window of a seventh-floor apartment at the North Park Place apartment complex in Southfield.

Saviour God-Scientific Allah?

Steve Konopka is hot. He’s 6′4″ tall and weighs 285 pounds. Puny!

He has no neck, though. That makes up for his sub-300 pound weight.

Over the years, I’ve learned what I think are the rules for good blogging:

• Know your audience. People often tell new bloggers to write for themselves and their audience will find them. That’s bad advice. What kind of topics do you want to talk about in your blog? What kind of people might be interested in those topics? What will keep their attention? What kind of writing style should you use? If you don’t know the answers to those questions, then the chances that anyone will keep reading your blog are diminished.
• Always ask yourself “Why would my readers care?” If you can’t come up with an answer to that question, you probably shouldn’t post it.
• Don’t post one-liners. One liners are inexcusable. They’re bad because nobody except you knows what you’re talking about and odds are that a year from now, you won’t either. If someone needs to ask a question to figure out what you’re talking about, don’t post it.
• If you don’t have anything to say, don’t say anything at all. Quality is the key to keeping and attracting readers, not quantity. It’s ideal to have both, but if you have nothing to say, don’t feel an obligation to post just anything. If you post a few times a week and they’re quality posts, readers more likely to return than if you post five links a day, all of them to sites everyone’s already seen.
• Don’t personalise unless you’re actually involved. Write in the third person and don’t involve yourself unless you’re actually really involved. If you’re writing about something like politics, referring to yourself in the first person is not only jarring, it’s downright strange. I read political blogs and sometimes run across sentences like this: I haven’t written much about [topic] because [reason], but I though I should weigh in because [other reason]. The first thing that I think when I read a sentence like that is “Why do I care what you think?”despite the fact that I’m obviously reading the person’s blog because I care what she thinks. Even worse is the rhetorical “What do I think?” because it invites the response “Why do I care?”
• Avoid cryptic references to real people. If you’re going to write about something that’s happened between you and someone you know, approach it abstractly. Avoid phrasing it in terms of actual situations and avoid referring to yourself. If you don’t, people will ask you who you’re talking about, assuming they don’t figure it out themselves. Even if they don’t ask or don’t figure it out, they’ll be confused or frustrated.

I’ve been known to break these rules.

Update: Can we all stop taking this so fucking seriously? What part of “I’ve learned what I think are the rules for good blogging” and “I’ve been known to break these rules” can’t you understand?

I’ve been so busy with work and classes that I’ve barely had any time to do real writing. I haven’t even had time to e-mail Claude during work as much as I should.

Easter weekend was fun and relaxing, despite my inital anxiety about seeing Mark’s parents again knowing that his mother doesn’t want the world to know that her 51-year old unmarried artist son who paints campy pictures containing old movie actresses, drag queens and penises is gay.

Mark’s mother and father were perfectly nice to be around. His mother even made little easter gift baskets for Mark and me filled with chocolates. I still wonder how she can be so nice to me in person yet still be so uptight about people knowing that her son is gay.

We spent Saturday with Shawn and Angus. There was no nudity, though we did go to a Superstore, something almost as good as naked men.