Not the law about poetry formulated by American poet Edgar Allan Poe; that law was about the proper length of a poem ("The unit of poetry must be fixed by the reader's capacity of attention, and . . . the limits of a poem must accord with the limits of a single movement of intellectual apprehension and emotional exaltation"), but the law about parody and religion discussion on the Internet. The initial formulation by Nathan Poe took place in a discussion thread on August 11, 2005 at Christian Forums.Com. You'll note that the first version refers only to Creationism, but that the final, and most cited version refers to fundamentalism in the sense of all versions of religious fundamentalism:

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A Japanese photographer named Hironori Akutagawa had a pet rabbit named Oolong. In May of 1999 Akutagawa began to take pictures of Oolong and posted them to his Website. He also trained Oolong to balance a variety of objects on the rabbit's head. The photos really are charming; you can see Oolong playing outside, sleeping, and yes, balancing objects on his head. Oolong had regular excursions outdoors, and even liked to play in the snow.

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There are times when those who are prescriptive (and pompous) about language end up looking really stupid. Here's a case in point: Phil Corbett, the New York Times Standards Editor, the guy charged with establishing acceptable linguistic and journalist ethics at The Gray Lady, sent out a memo to Times staffers last week in which he rendered the word Tweet, in the context of referring to the 140 character posts sent to the Twitter micro blogging service, as verbotten. The memo was leaked to the blog The Awl, so we have it to parse, in all its glory. In the memo, Corbett instructs:

Some social-media fans may disagree, but outside of ornithological contexts, "tweet" has not yet achieved the status of standard English. And standard English is what we should use in news articles.

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FaceBook, Privacy, and Content Grabbing

FaceBook has had a habit of arbitrarily changing their privacy policy, and modifying the software that allows FaceBook members to control what they want to share and with whom they wish to share. As the service has grown to, according to FaceBook, 400 million registered users with a privacy policy that is longer than the Constitution of the United States—and more arcane. One of FaceBook's recent changes was making privacy settings opt-in, that is, users' information is considered public by default. If you don't want anything you post or any information you provide to be made public, you need to set the privacy settings. This is fundamentally bad software design. You can see the increasing co-opting of FaceBook's users content by FaceBook here, in this graphic that shows the increasing absence of privacy, and member control over their data.

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Popular music fans are discovering a wealth of available material on the Web because of various projects to digitize the magazines that chronicled the rise of pop music, particularly in terms of rock and roll.

A fan has placed carefully digitized complete issues of KRLA Beat, the earliest American newspaper to cover top-forty music. The Beat which was published by a Pasadena radio station began in 1964 as a small four-page newsletter, but grew to a sixteen page weekly, and then a 24 page bi-monthly before it ceased publication in 1968. You can find a careful, thoroughly documented collection of almost all the issues here.

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PLEASE use that emoticon ONE more timeNow, here's a late-at-night-out-of-my-mind-bleary post for yer :- )

............

Does anybody care to explain why some communities find minimal chatspeak, and emoticons, as annoying as they do.  This isn't a challenge.  It's a request for information.

We were skimming a comments thread at a big M's blog and somebody threw "LOL" into a comment.

Immediately, in Terrence Stamp fashion, another poster icily intoned "please do not use chatspeak here."  (Of course, wtf is acceptable and encouraged.)

............

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Tess Under House ArrestFacebook has been used by possibly nefarious parties to secretly find out the color of your underwear, to take sides in the disputed Iranian election, and is now being used by a 15-year-old to protest being grounded by her parents.

Her crime was simple: she went to a party with alcohol present and was late for her curfew by one hour. Her parents responded quickly to their daughter’s crimes with a swift and possibly harsh judgment: they grounded her for five weeks.


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Google is Unhappy with the Way China Regulates Information in its countryThe U.S. government is going to say something to China about the Google situation. They are going to express concern about the “cyber-attacks” that have brought up the issue of Google leaving China and ending business matters there.

"We will be issuing a formal demarche to the Chinese government in Beijing on this issue in the coming days, probably early next week. It will express our concern for this incident and request information from China as to an explanation of how it happened and what they plan to do about it," said P.J. Crowley, U.S. State Department spokesman.

A demarche is a formal, written message directly from a diplomat to a government- so we are saying we are upset for real.

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Haiti EarthquakeI haven’t watched much of the footage from Haiti, not because I don’t care, but because I don’t have cable tv. This hasn’t stopped me from reading about it, thinking about it, and wondering what responsibility we in the West have for preventing these kinds of disasters or what we can do now to help.

The two most straightforward ways remain the same for every type of disaster. They need donations of either your time or your money. I chose money, but only a little bit and then felt bad about my donation and its usefulness or lack thereof after reading an article on Gawker criticizing the “netiquette” of using social media to promote your cause.


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I like, very much, the concept of "pay it forward."

It's a bit disconcerting to realize that the concept as currently presented, especially in online culture, is most closely associated a slight novel that's so full of saccarine that my teeth hurt just looking at the cover blurb, and a film that's actually even more annoying. Nonetheless, the concept itself is utterly fabulous. Sometimes called "alternative giving," or even "random acts of kindness,""pay it forward" has deep roots in both legal and American culture.

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