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Open Thread (Feb. 28th 2012) Ron Swanson is the man edition
Erik Kain is a blogger and freelance writer. Currently he serves as Editor-in-Chief of The League of Ordinary Gentlemen and writes a tech blog at Forbes. Visit his politics blog here. He can be found occasionally composing 140 character cultural analysis on Twitter. His writing has appeared in The Atlantic, The National Review, The Washington Examiner, and the now-defunct True/Slant. You can also contact him via email.
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That quote immediately became my new Facebook status. Great moment. He also nailed the line, “That sounds just like me.” In that particular episode, though, I thought Tom was on his game with the “Oh No No’s” and his visceral reaction to Anne’s violation of them.
Deep thought for the day: contemporary culture encourages and rewards half-assery in most aspects of ‘professional’ life. Blogging is not only not a remedy to this phenomenon but may in fact be the vanguard of it.
I’ll merely note that I posted this reply at work.
Isn’t a blog just a half-assed website?
Isn’t a website just a half-assed book?
Isn’t a book just a half-assed painting?
Isn’t a painting just a half-assed photograph?
Isn’t a painting just a half-assed porno?
I would say isn’t porno just half-assed sex, but I think that’s sort of the point of it.
You’re clearly not married…
Well, marriage is just half-assed celibacy.
And celibacy is just half-assed life.
Do not stand too close when you light an ex-wife effigy.
Even after 20 years of marriage I still don’t understand such comments.
Poor saps.
James, I’m being facetious. Having never been married, I can’t speak from experience anyway.
That’s all right, Chris, it gives me the opportunity to brag.
If we didn’t bemoan our married lifes, our wives would know we like it. That would make it much harder to negotiate and bargain.
If you can actually fake a lack of enthusiasm about it, your wife has my sympathy. ;)
It is not faking as much as an intense ability to compartmentalize, which itself is probably a result of working in preschools while going to college and living the typical red blooded American male college lifestyle. If you can compartmentalize that, you can compartmentalize everything.
See, what I do is I think any tiny thing I do miss about single life, even if temporarily so, and I focus in on that, allowing me to generate real emotion around the topic.
Also, we are only on month 6 of marriage, month 4 of home ownership and halfway through year 4 of cohabitation (SINNERS!), so there is still a great deal of settling in still occuring.
Also, marriage jokes are fun…
Years ago, I took tango lessons. Yeah, yeah, laugh if you want. I met an older couple from Spain at that tango bar, the most respectful, loving couple I believe it’s ever been my pleasure to know, superb dancers. They sorta took me into their company.
The secret to romance, they assured me, was to keep a small amount of mystery alive, never to assume they fully understood each other. Cortejo, they called this, courtship.
I propose a new game… first one to come up with a situation where Blaise does NOT have some amazingly profound, almost unbelievable experience that connects with it gets a point. First to one point wins.
You never cease to amaze, Blaise. You have lived a full life. May you continue to.
Tango lessons are hardly amazingly profound.
Er, rather, they may *be* amazingly profound, but it’s not like you can’t sign up for tango lessons in just about any major metropolitan area in America for a doable amount of cash and learn the basics.
It’s not like he took lessons in this:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I4U6T_BB1N8
Yea, any of us can take tango lessons. But not all of us would make friends with an elderly couple from spain who taught us the secret of love.
The couple that taught me the secret of love were a couple of Americans of Finnish/Italian and German/Irish descent (plus some hodge-podge).
Mom and dad?
Nope, me and the wife :)
Congrats, good sir! May we each be so lucky.
You’re all half-assed versions of me. Just sayin’.
This kind of reminds me of how all Wikipedia links lead to philosophy.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Getting_to_Philosophy
That’s fun! A fun game is to have someone give you two random words or things and you have to connect them through wikipedia in as few clicks as possible. As if there weren’t enough ways to waste time on the interweb…
Your new widget on the side blocks a bit of the gift of gab sidebar in IE7. (part of that statement would seem to be my fault, yet it is not).
Nevermind, I am now able to minimize it.
Can you make it stay away? Mine pops back up after each reload.
No, which is why it continues to drive me nuts.
Clear your browser’s cache. It should be minimized by default now.
I can minimize it, but it still drives me nuts.
Vote for Swanson!
I’m the Bobby Knight of government efficiency.
Forget for a second the oxymoron that is “government efficiency.” As a devoted fan of The General, I’ve taken many of his life lessons and applied them in my current position as Director of the Pawnee City Department of Parks and Recreation. My track record speaks for itself. In the last six years in this job, I’ve successfully helped close down Portola Skate Park, the Grice Dog Run, the Morris-Easton Observatory, the Mohanga Native American Heritage Center and most public drinking fountains. That’s the same sort of can-do attitude I intend to bring to the State House.
I meant ALL the bacon.
I wish to complain about this parrot what I purchased not half an hour ago from this very boutique.
He is just resting.
Has anyone else lost the rich text formatting options that used to be here?
This is an experiment:
Can I do bold, italic, underlined or
?
Yes, Dan, I did. Grrr… more nuts.
Well, there’s the answer. You can have rich formatting without the Javascript editor, but you’ve got to do the HTML tags yourself.
Why does the top level page now load, then take me away to seemingly arbitrary locations where the browser hangs. It has hung trying to pull things from linkedin.com, google.com, and currently ordinary-gentlemen.com. Firefox 3.6.27, Mac OS 10.7.3. Restarting Firefox did not help. Safari on the same machine seems to be okay.
Okay, this problem seems to be fixed now. Note that clearing the cache hadn’t helped. FWIW, the URLs that were causing the browser to hang started with the string “wyciwyg://”, which is not a valid transfer protocol so far as I know. Too many possibilities about what it was causing software to do to speculate in any meaningful way.
Duh, check with Google first. “wyciwyg://” is an internal Firefox thing having to do with caching.
Uh, wyciwyg is a sorta protocol, heh heh. It’s the Gecko renderer crapping on itself. It used to be a big hole in Gecko.
I miss the formatting options in the comment box and I loathe the little Share widget in the bottom left corner with a cold burning hatred.
Yeah, me too. The League site wouldn’t even upload earlier, getting stuck on various newfangled thingies. I’ve spent quite a bit of time firing them off the page with adblocker.
The page title keeps showing up as “#comment-stringofnumbers”.
I’ve lost the JavaScript rich text editor, too
[blaisep@fedora ~]$ firefox –version
Mozilla Firefox 10.0.1
[blaisep@fedora ~]$ uname -a
Linux fedora.localdomain 3.2.1-3.fc16.x86_64
The theme of this open thread appears to be appearances.
Watch out. They can be deceptive.
Which is better, a whole ass or an asshole?
PS “You guys have got it wrong! If you don’t like your job, don’t strike! Just go in every day and do it really half-assed. That’s the American way!”
This can be appropriate, depending on the situation.
BPS teachers did this not along ago when they entered their X consecutive year without a contract.
Okay:
1. The rich-text editor was buggy and annoying. Too many mangled comments. Too many problems. I will try to find a better one. Until then, it’s pretty easy to do some html if you need to.
2. I’ve changed the share widget to auto-hide. Let me know if you’re still getting page load errors. I haven’t gotten any at all so far for whatever reason. Thoughts and feedback are very much appreciated, but I do want to make social-sharing easier. We have a crappy social network presence right now and I want to change that.
3. I have some other redesign thoughts and ideas percolating. Feedback is always good. But please be detailed and constructive.
Erik-
Share widget seems to be hiding and looks nice with the little hat logo.
Cool. Well if anyone has issues with screen loading funny or whatever, please sound off here in the comments.
Thanks E.D. ‘preciate it being a little lower key.
No more deep burning hatred? ;)
Well it still causes my browser to hang and delay loading, but I can tolerate that if it helps the site over all.
FWIW, My other machine still gets hung up on linkedin.com.
Can you elaborate? Is this when you load this site or when you try to share to linkedin?
When I load the site. It’s still happening on the other machine. I’ve blocked all that stuff on this one, but as I recall, it was a series of links on the load that stalled: first linkedin, then reddit, then some others.
I just tried again and I think the site loads (it said ‘done’ on the bottom left), and then jumped back out to linkedin. DOn’t know if that’s helpful.
Whatever you did definitely broke my default smartphone browser (Dolphin on the Android OS). The site comes up and I get to see the headlines then it disappears leaving the Reddit widget in the upper left and nothing else. Interestingly on my computer running Firefox I don’t even see the Reddit widget.
Have just tested with my default browser on the Droid and get the identical result. Not sure what the default browser is called, my son who works at Google made me get Dolphin right away and I’ve never actually used the default one till now.
I deactivated the reddit and linkedin buttons. Maybe this will help.
That fixed it! Commenting from the phone :-)
I’m still having lots of issues:
1. Slow / hung loading. When the widget loads, it downloads images from reddit, twitter. If these are slow, the whole page hangs. I don’t know why the images don’t cache, but this happens on every page load.
2. I have an older version of Chrome, that was part of Google Pack (which is no longer offered). On that browser, I get a reddit icon only, and no other content.
3. On IE, loading and rendering is very slow.
It could be that this is related to the cache, which I have cleared and which may need to cache those files still. It’s very quick on my machine with no load issues. What I may do – and I hope this isn’t too annoying – is see if some of these issues don’t just clear up by themselves while I tinker. If that doesn’t work we’ll try something else.
Well, thank god we’re not having another long discussion about commenting culture! ;)
Yeah. Hang on a bit, folks. It will take a while to percolate through the bowels of the server before all the dust settles.
The only thing that kept me from screaming like a little girl was the certain knowledge that E.D. and Bp were on the job! With that said, I’m absolutely sure the entire affair was the fault of demons who are known to consort with commie-Dems!
Lol don’t ever change Bob.
Hello Northie, the missus sends her best wishes, as always!
My warmest and best to her and you Bob. I trust the season has treated you both kindly.
I have nothing to do with this upgrade. I do, however, know more about the nature of the JavaScript beast than is strictly good for anyone. As with any vice or sordid kink, first it’s horrible, then fascinatingly horrible. Thereafter, it’s just fascinating.
BlaiseP – if you know about the programming aspect here – can you illuminate if we’re on a good or bad track with this upgrade?
I think things are just fine. The old JavaScript was causing problems, as you say. You seem to be current on WordPress and I presume your host is keeping your back end up to date. I’d be glad to provide any assistance you’d find needful.
I’ll bet that those Dems have some sort of government program set up for those demons.
(whereas the R.’s simply wish to offer them a tax break)
not a program so much as a crontab entry.
Percolating bowels sounds like a horrible condition.
I think I had that once after siphoning gasoline and getting a big mouthful.
I have the same sensation messing around in other people’s /var/log/ files.
I don’t mind the raw comment form. Pasting is certainly easier.
If we do get something to replace the old JavaScript, keep it brutally simple. Dunno what’s in your version of wp-comments-post.php but I hope it won’t accept mangled HTML, unterminated tags, etc. MarkItUp is awfully nice
dcssb-slick aka the Share Hat is behaving gracefully now. Good work.
New thread: those who engaged in the campaign finance conversation from last week (James, Elias) might be interested in this book review of Larry Lessig’s latest in the Washington Monthly. I definitely don’t endorse all of it, but it’s got a fresh approach to the issue, coming at it through the lens of limiting campaign spending by making it more effective without using the law. It’s worth reading.
Anyone interested in a scholarly approach to the problem with a full backgrounder on the history of money in American politics ought to take a look at Golden Rule by Thomas Ferguson. It’s a bit old but it’s a good text on the subject.
Dan: I have a theory on how we might eliminate the worst parts of campaign financing from gnawing away at what little remains of the democratic process.
We need to close the revolving door between Regulator and Regulated. I’m convinced many of the worst abuses of the tax code, and it always seems to be located in the tax code, subsidies particularly, are nothing more than grubstakes for politicians who hope to end up on the payrolls of those who benefit thereby.
Of NBC’s Thursday night block, I watch The Office (purely for sentimental reasons). I never got into 30 Rock or P&R (largely due to Ron Swanson, and the fact the Amy Poehler is extremely unfunny). I didn’t even test Community, since I detest Chevy Chase (see Amy Poehler).
Oh man, P&R is the best and Swanson is comic gold. Also, Leslie Knope is one of the best characters on television. The Office has been better than it has in years also.
OK, when it comes to TV (if naught else), you are the anti-me.
I wish to complain that the volume of good posts this week is too high. I can’t even keep up with the posts much less the comments, please store some in a rainy-day fund.
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