so that's why...

A couple of days ago I linked to and commented on a Wall Street Journal article on RSS. In my comment I noted that the article was low on hype (and high on substance). It did sound kind of weird, after all, while accounts of weblogs have been showing up more and more in the mainstream media, it's still common to see the usual mantras repeated (you know... "just personal diaries".... "journalism is dead"... and so on), so it did strike me as interesting that this account was well written, and well-informed.

There's a reason: Jeremy Wagstaff, who wrote the article, has a weblog, and although it seems it might have been set up relatively recently (the archives go way back, but the old posts contain --as far as I can see-- only versions of his newspaper columns), so he actually knows what he's talking about from first-hand experience.

And here's a link to an entry he wrote related to the article, where he mentioned cactus. :)

woody's quote of the day

There's an old joke: Two elderly women are at a Catskills mountain resort, and one of 'em says: "Boy, the food at this place is really terrible." The other one says, "Yeah, I know, and such small portions!" Well, that's essentially how I feel about life. Full of loneliness and misery and suffering and unhappiness, and it's all over much too quickly.

The other important joke for me is one that's usually attributed to Groucho Marx, but I think it appears originally in Freud's wit and its relation to the unconscious. And it goes like this--I'm paraphrasing: "I would never wanna belong to any club that would have someone like me for a member." That's the key joke of my adult life in terms of my relationships with women.

You know, lately the strangest things have been going through my mind, 'cause I turned forty, and I guess I'm going through a life crisis or something, I don't know. I, ... and I'm not worried about aging. I'm not one o' those characters, you know. Although I'm balding slightly on top, that's about the worst you can say about me. I, uh, I think I'm gonna get better as I get older, you know? I think I'm gonna be the balding virile type, you know, as opposed to say the, uh, distinguished gray? Unless I'm neither of those two. Unless I'm one of those guys with saliva dribbling out of his mouth who wanders into a cafeteria with a shopping bag screaming about socialism.

in the land of guantanamo

From the New York Times: an in-depth article on the prison camp the US has created in Guantanamo, how it's managed, and how it has evolved since it began as "Camp X-Ray".