I’m in the process of upgrading to the latest version of Movabletype (my blogging software.) Once it’s completed, it should fix the problem that was stopping people from posting comments.
But the upgrade process isn’t completed yet, so please bear with me if even bigger problems pop up in the meantime (like the fact that my front page is now a big, white wasteland.). I should have it fixed soon.
I recently saw somebody ask, “Who makes more–the top-paid novelists, or the top-paid screenwriters?” I thought that was an interesting question, so I did a little number crunching. Here’s what I found.
But first, a warning: what follows is based on anecdotal data, rather than statistical. And the anecdotal data tends to consist of media estimates of private wealth. If those estimates are off, my conclusions will be way off base.
Now, with that out of the way:
A couple of people have informed me that they are having trouble adding comments to Yankee Fog posts. I’m looking into it, and hope to have it fixed soon. In the meantime, my apologies.
I hate to scare you, but I think you should know.
President Bush has declared war on zombies.
And there may be human sacrifice going on in the Justice Department.
I’ve just noticed a new feature on Amazon:
“Tag this book for Amazon search.”
It’s a way of telling Amazon, “When people search for a certain phrase, this book should come up in the results.”
So–just to pick a random example–suppose you feel that people who read Harry Potter might also enjoy reading The Government Manual for New Wizards. Yet you know that hundreds of millions of people read the former who have never heard of the latter. Night after night, you lie awake, worrying about the millions of poor lost souls who will never know the simple joy of buying one of my books.
Fortunately, thanks to Amazon’s new feature, you can finally sleep soundly at night. All you need to do is:
1. Go to The Government Manual for New Wizards on Amazon.
2. Scroll down until you see “Help others find this product–tag it for Amazon search”, and click on “suggest a search.”
3. You’ll be taken to a screen that says, “When someone searches for [BLANK] on Amazon, show this product and explanation in the results.” Put “Harry Potter” in the blank. Then answer the question, “Why is this product relevant to Harry Potter?” (You don’t have to be fancy–a few words should be sufficient.)
4. Click “Preview.” Then click “Submit.”
5. Voila! You’ve done your part for the betterment of mankind.
For anybody who does this… thank you in advance!
I just got in from some errands to find about 2000 spams waiting on my server.
There were so many, they crashed my e-mail program.
The crash corrupted my inbox.
The corruption of my inbox meant that when I thought I was deleting a bunch of spam messages, I accidentally deleted an unknown number of non-spam messages.
So if you e-mailed me anything in the past 24 hours, you may want to re-send it.
If you keep up with Yankee Fog via Bloglines, or any other RSS reader, you may have noticed some weirdness yesterday.
First, you may have gotten a flood of old articles, marked as new. No idea why that happened.
Second, you may not have seen the “What if FDR Had Been Like George W Bush?” short that I included in the post. If you missed it, you can see it here.
Recently, one of President Bush’s few remaining supporters told me, “If the media had been as hard on FDR as they have been on President Bush, we would have lost World War II.”
I thought that was an intriguing analogy. And it started me thinking… What if FDR had been like George W. Bush?
Fortunately, thanks to the miracle of high-tech alternate historical analysis, I can give you the definitive answer to that question…
Me: What’s in the “Vegetable Extravaganza?”
The Waiter: Vegetables. And, um, “extravaganza.” That’s a kind of Italian cheese.
Thanks to the arrival of discount airline Zoom Airlines, there’s a fare war going on for flights to the US. Just in case low fares aren’t enough of an incentive to travel, the UK version of the travel website Travelocity has just sent out the following e-mail advertisement:
On the 4th of July the USA celebrates everything that’s great about their homeland. When the people who live there love their country so much, it’s probably worth heading over to check it out for yourself.
I can’t figure out if we’ve just been complimented or insulted.