Another unfortunate break in service – the hosting service for this blog didn’t tell me that the domain name was due for renewal until the day before it expired … and I couldn’t afford to renew until I got an unexpected check yesterday.
So, we’re back. And I am glad, because it would have been a bear, switching over to a new domain.
Apparently, we were hijacked by some spam-originator, which resulted in trouble with the host for the Brief … and what with one thing and another, it took most of the weekend to get it straightened out.
As if having to empty out a ton of spam every couple of days, now they’ve added injury to insult. Anyway, we’re back for now, although I’ve had to assign new passwords for the remaining regular contributors.
(Addendum: 8:45 AM – on the advice of our service provider, I am having to approve all comments, to prevent the hacker from doing any more damage to our reputation. We really risk beging taken down permanently, if there are any more complaints about ncobrief.com generating spam, so I do this, apologizing in advance to all the regular commenters.)
Just one of those things – slammed with some work projects, some book projects, a new book project – for pay, yet! – and preparing for a Christmas Fair in New Braunfels on Saturday … which, since the box of copies of To Truckee’s Trail won’t be delivered until Monday next … well, yeah, that does present something of a problem, sales-wise.
One of the projects this week – and I am kicking myself vigerously for never having thought of it before – is some collections of my best posts (presently buried in various archives where I am probably the only person who knows where to dig to unearth them) for Kindle. Organize them them by several themes, do some basic editing and formatting, and put those puppies up on Amazon. I’ve got one of them up already – a collection of short stories – and another is going to go live probably tonight – a collection of essays about places, people, and matters historical. They’re going to be permanent links in the sidebar to them – so, check them out. I had some seriously good stuff there.
So, thats where that stands. And Brian is still working on the picture thing.
Being that I am snowed under with finalizing the last details for the second edition of To Truckee’s Trail, and preparing to launch the sequel to Daughter of Texas at more or less the same time in order maximize my portion of what increasingly looks like a pretty dismal Christmas shopping season with sales of my books . . . I have been only intermittently able to put my head above the parapet lately and take a look around at the socio-political landscape. A more relaxed schedule might permit me to address each of the developments listed below at length . . . but time does not permit. Heck, brevity is supposed to be the soul of wit, anyway.
1. Potential Candidate Cain’s purported sex scandal. Hey, it would be a treat to have a sex scandal in which some actual sex was involved, rather like John Edwards and his campaign-trail inamorata/baby mama? At this juncture, all we have, though – is some unspecified act(s) committed by Mr. Cain, complained of by anonymous persons (presumably female) which took place in some unspecified venue, which resulted in an unspecified money settlement . . . which no one involved can talk about, because they all signed an agreement not to talk about it. At least the time frame of this unspecified action has been nailed down by our heroically working mainstream media professions to sometime in the 1990s. Ok, it’s nice to have that specific nailed down, but seriously; unnamed sources? I’m sorry, but unnamed sources, with a charge like this do not fly freely with me any more. If you want this charge to be creditable, start naming names and specifics, otherwise I will treat this matter like the gutter gossip that it appears to be,
2. At least the matter of the rock on a hunting lease in West Texas, which had a disparaging term for a racial minority painted on it, and which was painted over at least two decades ago, seems to have been dropped – er – like a rock into the well of memory. Did any of the faithful national press gumshoes actually find the damned rock? If that’s all the dirt you can find on Rick Perry . . . Look, the guy has been in Texas politics for years. They play for keeps here, politically – the brass knuckles at no extra charge. If there were any substantial dirt to be found on him, it would have been found, long since. Oh, and thanks for floating teh ghey rumor, alleging it to have been an open secret in Texas political circles for years. I haven’t had a good laugh like that since the last time I watched The Money Pit.
3. So – looking at the list of Occupy Whatever Street supporters and backers . . . including you, “San Fran Nan” Pelosi, Michael “One Teensy Thin Mint” Moore, Mayor Bloomburg, our “illustrious”* Commander in Chief, and assorted other fellow travelers, anarchists, anti-Semites and career protest ‘tards . . . you own them, root, branch and arrest records. They are all yours, even as various OWS locations melt down gloriously into Lord of the Flies territory. I repeat; all yours. Kinda make the Tea Party rallies look good in comparison, don’t they?
4. Isn’t it well past time for the Kardashian sisters’ ration of fame to be up? I mean; fifteen minutes each, there are three of the talent-free and parasitical skanks, which adds up to 45 minutes total. I had a case of mono which lasted longer than Whats-er-fern’s most recent marriage. The Cardassians of Star Trek fame were much more interesting. And realistic.
5. Finally, in site news; this weekend Brian is going to fight off the locusts that ate his day off, long enough to look at why we can’t easily post pictures on this website. I have a raft of pictures I want to put up, including a new header . . . and, well all sorts of stuff.
Sincerely, Sgt Mom
PS: The Kindle version of To Truckee’s Trail – second edition has already gone live. I am still taking pre-pub orders for Deep in the Heart, and for Truckee’s print edition. Your purchases help support me, and this blog, so . . . a portion of your consumer dollars thrown in my direction will be greatly appreciated.
WordPress has been updated, from the original older-than-dirt version, although alas, it still doesn’t look like I can post pictures. All thanks to Brian, who I think must have been tearing out his hair last night. But now the whole website seems to be a little more functional… and somewhat easier for non-programmers like me to play with. The look of the Brief will change in the very near future: I have been increasingly unsatisfied with how very clunky it looks to me in comparison with other blogs I’ve worked with. The Brief is dated, and the pages, archives and links are heinously tangled. The adverts for my books are also totally out of date — but now, hopefully, I can so something about it all.
I like the looks of some of the WordPress templates, and I want more than ever to be able to post my own photographs. I had also been giving some thought, before this upgrade to closing down the Brief entirely, when it comes time to renew the domain name and hosting agreement at the end of the year, or attaching it as blog to my celiahayes.com website, so that I would only pay the hosting fees for one domain instead of two. No, the lights will stay on: this blog is historic, one of the very first and longest running mil-blogs, and there are now almost ten years of archives which I’d like to make more accessible.
So, we’ll be around – but get ready for a bit of a change, appearance-wise.
PS – I like WordPress’s Twenty-Eleven Theme, very much, especially if I can fiddle with a bunch of my own photos to make a custom banner.
Well, I finally got around to taking down the PJ Media ads… why the heck should they soak up ad space on this blog? At this point, about all I want to promote is my own darned books, thank you. I will attempt to further tweak the sidebar to that effect, utilizing my own somewhat less than totally mad HTML skilz…
As you were.
(Gomer Pyle voice): As you were what?
Never mind.
Received the following yesterday afternoon, while working away on a poetry book for Watercress Press:
“As you know, last September Pajamas Media began a new initiative in Internet television called Pajamas TV. When we started with our RNC coverage from Minneapolis, we noted that we would be in a Beta Phase through the first quarter of 2009. In the last few months we have strengthened the PJTV lineup with shows covering Media Bias, Education Bias, Middle East Update, Sharia and Jihad, Powerline Report, Ask Dr. Helen, Hugh News, Poliwood, Conservatism 2.0, Economy and Finance, National Security, and others.
As the end of the first quarter approaches and we near the production phase of Pajamas TV, we will continue to build our emphasis in this area. As a result we have decided to wind down the Pajamas Media Blogger and advertising network effective March 31, 2009. The PJM portal and the XPressBlogs will continue as is.
You may continue to display the Pajamas Media ads through March 31. We will be sending you information in mid-March on removing the ads.
We thank you very much for participating during the formative years of Pajamas Media and we look forward to working with you in other ways. One of those is, of course, Pajamas TV. If you have any ideas in that regard, please do not hesitate to contact us.
Our best wishes in the new year and again our deepest gratitude for your participation in Pajamas Media.
Sincerely,
Roger L. Simon
CEO, Pajamas Media”
It seems that quite a lot of other blogs which were initially a part of PJ Media are also being kicked to the curb, as regards the advertising revenue. When PJ was first put together and the Daily Brief invited to join, it seemed like one of those ideas whose time had come; there would be an enormous range of linked blogs with all kinds of interests and specialties, and in a position to negotiate for serious advertising opportunities and the income arising from it. At least, there would be enough coming in to cover the hosting fees, and a little over. This didn’t last at the Brief for more than a couple of years: about three years ago, I was informed that the Brief didn’t get enough page views to justify any revenue for running the ads – but if page views went up, then the Brief would have that revenue stream restored. So, I went back to paying the hosting out of my own pocket, and kept the PJ ads in place, partly in hopes of eventually getting some revenue out of it and partly for the association. Because of sticking with the PJ ads, I couldn’t place ads from another agency, since PJ had the top place: so, nothing out of having them there – and nothing from anywhere else, either.
I will remove the PJ ads with the greatest pleasure, possibly even before the drop-dead date. I haven’t gotten much out of the association at all, save for PJ including my books on their “Christmas Gift” page throughout December. Frankly, it looks to me that PJ Media has become what they professed to counter – Big Media, in all it’s glory. A handful of the top blogs, all linking to each other, and the rest of us pretty well shut out. All things change, and often not much for the better.
I might as well have a bigger ad for my own darned books. I’m a little tired of looking at that Joe the Plumber picture, too.
We seem to have survived the short trip over to a new host… but lost all the entries for the last week. Sorry… maybe they’ll be along later, or perhaps they are drifting out among the currents of the internet, like some kind of pixilated Flying Dutchman…
I’ll repost mine, anon.
Michele Catalano is writing…again…over at Pajamas Media. Her first post is on the Lori Drew Cyberbullying case. She makes some good points that some of us here need to consider…including me.
Hopefully this will be a regular thing. This blog here was the first one I ever read and hers was a close second or third. While she’s gotten away from her snarkier rants, she’s still one of my favorite writers.
Among my regular chores as regards maintenance of this site is that of emptying out the spam queue – which, unless there is more than a couple of hundred entries in it – I feel obliged to do a quick pass-over just to make sure that no ones legitimate comment has been caught in the spam torrent. This does happen, on occasion, although the program that Timmer plugged in more than a year and a half ago is supposed to be self-regulating. It learns, in other words. But the most marvelous part is that none of the automated comment spam has ever “leaked” into the blog, thus depriving our many readers of a handy link with which to purchase or download a dizzying variety of pharmaceutical products, porn, online games of chance and cell phone ring tones. Every once in a while, there is a spam which looks like a completely conventional and legitimate business; a spam with somewhat of an embarrassed look to it, as if not being able to figure out how it got into such disreputable company. But such are very rare – and since I do not click on the links, I have no way of knowing if they are indeed legitimate – or just generated by someone who is a little cleverer about disguising themselves.
Most of this stuff is so inept, so very bad at even looking like a blog comment that I wonder what they are getting out of generating it to start with. Sometimes it comes in Russian, sometimes Italian and Spanish, but most often in fractured English. Last week, it came with topic headings like this: “Cartoon Alien Porn” “lindsay lohan razzie” “limewire 2008 free download” and “Celebrity Cartoon Porn”. Some of the most curious comes with a two word comment that looks like someone has been playing a random matching game with a thesaurus. It results in such madly poetical conceptual pairings as “shooing inosculate” ” trimmed pestiferous” “dilutions hernial ” “fecundated anticorrosive” “surfeit psychoanalyze” “adumbratively tawdries” ” insolvent joists” “nettlier intarsia” “glutinously cosmos”. Yes, those phrases came from last weeks spam haul – I copied over the most hilarious for your delectation.
Some spam comments have just a random string of letters as text: thusly – “qjkdgtvf tdelpfnq ngwakhqb phkm ncyflb jhgikz ykwlqrcvp” but others have made a go of inserting a sentence – or at least half a sentence. All the following examples came as text for links to various porn sites. At least someone is trying. Not very hard, or with much success, but at least they are trying:
An English-language quarterly magazine targeting professional
Suzanna Gratia Hupp (born 1959) is a former Republican member
Jon Tester is a third-generation Montana farmer who understands
Hyperlinked encyclopedia entry provides a personal and political profile of the US Senator for
The last variety of spam is a real head-shaker: that’s the one that comes as a couple of hundred lines of text with links embedded in every two or three words. These go on and on and on, to the point where one wonders where the hell whoever generated it has been for the last couple of years. I believe most blog spam-filters kick back comments with more than one or two embedded links. One would think one with two or three hundred would be kicked back so far it would come out the backside of whoever sent it out – but hey, I don’t know anything at all about the thought processes of whoever generates this stuff. I just deal with the results.
Continue reading
Topmost on my list of such thoughts is oh, god, its good to be home! Its good to be able to sleep in ones own bed, to stretch out and not have cold feet, cold hands, cold-whatever-body-part-winds up pressed against the side panel of the Montero and is just a thin sheet of metal and some miscellaneous plastic bits removed from the frigid, wind-whipped New Mexico or West Texas weather.
Oh, yes, it was bloody cold out there; there was no snow to show for all that cold, but some nice patches of blowing dust and sand. The winds kicked up the day before we left Mom and Dads and made such a racket we couldnt sleep that night anyway and followed us all the way across three states. Nothing says I want to go home quite so much as vacating the area at 2 AM.
The best thing about departing in the wee hours on New Years Day no traffic, once you finish dodging the drunks. There was one suspiciously careful driver, weaving gently down the Valley Center grade, which Blondie felt obliged to try and call 911 about but all we got was it ringing about twenty times and then an answering machine. On 911; I guess they had their hands full. And the driver we were worried about didnt look to be the reckless sort of drunk driver.
The Starbuckifaction of the coffee-drinking element has spread its what some would claim is an insidious influence far and wide, yea my brethren even to the truck plazas and gas stations along the interstate highway system. The Flying J/Pilot stores provide a surprisingly excellent selection of coffee and have half-and-half on tap. Not just exclusively that ghastly powdered chalk non-dairy cream muck, thankyouverymuch. Extremely drinkable and for about a third of the cost of an equivalent at a Starbucks. No demerara sugar, though, but I expect that to appear by the next time I do a long, long road trip.
Oh, and speaking of coffee in the wee hours, I must pour scorn and derision upon the Carls Junior, just off the 1-8 in the eastern suburb of San Diego where we attempted to purchase some handy breakfast comestables and coffee at 4 AM. Yes, I know it was 4AM on New Years Day and the single unfortunate young person running the place was so junior as to make drawing fuzzy end of the lollipop and working that shift inevitable but still; no breakfast items? We were told that only lunch items were available oh, and sorry, the coffee brewer wasnt fired up. And payment could only be made in cash. Yeah, so he wasnt senior enough to have the keys to the debit-credit card processor or the coffee urns, but lunch items at 4 AM? Jesus jumping key-rist on a pogo stick, the whole damn reason for 24 hour fast food places is to dispense coffee!
Gas prices not to shabby once outside California, and Blondie’s Montero got very good mileage on the highway. We filled to the top four times and came in well under budget, having allowed for gas at $3.25 a gallon when we planned the trip. Most gas stations along the interstate in Texas, New Mexico and Arizona had it within a nickel of $2.90, either way.
What to call the road-kill count Bambi Bits? Bambicide? Whatever it is, the deer population takes a hell of a beating; that stretch of 1-10 through the Hill Country is a veritable holocaust for them. As a stratagem to keep ourselves awake and amused after coffee ceased having the required effect, we counted road kill from Mile 300 to Mile 511 in the median, on the roadway and off on the shoulder. Not counting various nasty looking smears and blots on the paving, our grand total was 49 deer, 8 raccoons or opossum, 3 skunks, 3 large birds (turkey or guinea-fowl of some sort) and 23 U-L-O-M, which is our acronym for Unidentified Lumps o Meat. At that, we probably missed about a third as many, off-sight on the opposite side of the highway.
So were home and when I get home, the first thing I find is that Eric at Classical Values posted a lovely review of To Truckees Trail and Da Blogfaddah linked to it. With a resulting uptick in sales through Amazon. Maybe I should go away more often. Oh, never mind provision of good bloggy ice cream will commence as soon as I finish going through my email in-box.
So, we went to the radio stations annual staff Christmas party last night; generously catered with comestibles supplied by some of San Antonios finest. There were also, as Blondie described it, a fine assortment of tasty adult beverages, but no this is public radio, so the drunken revelry was at a fairly well-controlled level. I bored the socks off a couple of hapless spouses by telling them more than they possibly ever wanted to know about Republic-era Texas and the entrepreneurial scheme and the perils of POD publishing and book-marketing. Blondie renewed acquaintance with that handful of staff members who recalled her as a high-school student volunteer working in the phone room during pledge drives.
The nearest we all came to a riotously party-hearty atmosphere was during the gift exchange, which was the white-elephant gift Bad Santa exchange. Everyone brought something of small value and occasionally dubious taste, suitably gift-wrapped. At the height of the evening revels, we each took a turn and drew a gift from the pile. The hope is that you go home with something a little more desirable, or at least, not as hideous and/or useless as what you brought, but this is a chancy preposition.
The rules of Bad Santa are open to negotiation, but the general custom is that someone drawing a gift can exchange it, unopened, for something that someone already has opened. Sometimes there is a limit on how often a desirable gift can bounce from person to person and there are occasionally rather desirable items salted in among the white-elephants, which can make for a very lively exchange. At one unit I belonged to which did this, a set of lottery tickets, and a pair of hearts and teddy-bear printed boxer shorts proved to be in demand whereas an awful plant container of hand-painted cast plaster in the shape of a tree stump with a squirrel on it had been around the Christmas exchange block for five or six years in a row. The unlucky soul who got stuck with it, returned it for subsequent Bad Santa exchanges; for all I know, it may still be in circulation, unless someone struck a blow for good taste in decorating and smashed it into little tiny bits..
The most popular items last night was a game of Texas Monopoly, a pair of Lord of the Rings bookends and a universal remote in the shape of a calculator the size of a roofing shingle yes sir, try and misplace that puppy sometime. Least popular? Id guess that was the 2005 road atlas. Well, the rules do say white elephant I lost two boxes of gourmet dog treats and came home with a metal bowl trimmed with antlered deer heads. Not the least sure what I will do with it, although it might make a jazzy pet dish for Weevil or Spike.
Blondie and I are heading out to California tomorrow to spend Christmas with Mom and Dad and the rest of the family. Were taking Blondies laptop, but Mom and Dad are not anywhere near being in tune with the internet age. I may be able to check in from a wifi spot alleged to be located in the public library in Valley Center or I may not. Have a Merry Christmas, happy New Year and all that. Well be back after New Years, at the Same Old, Same Old.
(In the meantime, could someone occasionally approve comments and empty out the spam queue? Thanks Sgt Mom)