“Ugliness is so grim. A little beauty, something that is lovely, I think, can help create harmony which will lessen tensions.”
— Lady Bird Johnson

Just as the plethora of billboards ruined the skylines of Route 66 and other great highways of the past, advertising today in its most blatant forms has invaded any mental domain imaginable. Nowhere is safe, definitely not Twitter. It’s no surprise that online marketing and advertising would pounce on a free medium to promote their wares. To a point, I don’t blame them. Publicity is king; notoriety can be manufactured into benefit. Like I said, to a point.

Squarespace understood that point. They offered a free iPhone (actually a $199 gift card at an Apple Store). Each mention, each day, constituted an entry. Soon enough, the density of messages that had the #squarespace hashtag became deafening. Even their statement that one entry a day was enough was not enough for some some people. So Squarespace decided to reduce the noise even more and said that one entry serves in perpetuity.

(Continue reading…)

Whatever it is you may blame it on, lists posts have muhsroomed out of control across blogs. I hate majority of them, and here’s why:

1. You have to think of a conventionally acceptable number for your list. Fourteen seems off.
2. They’re usually bite-size chunks of nonsense.
3. This list item is here so I can hit fourteen. (See #2.)
4. List posts turn HTML unordered lists into disordered lists.
5. They tend to serve as linkbait, in spite of, or in accordance with, the author’s intentions.
6. The comments sections of these posts are full of sycophants.
7. Markup freaks like myself have to worry over OL, UL, or DL when Ps work just fine. (See #4.)
8. Lists don’t generally lead to discussion.
9. Santa Claus is the O.G. list writer. You’re all unoriginal.
10. Everytime I come across a list post, I think of Jakob Nielsen. In fact, this post makes me think of him now, eew.
11. The Book Of Lists fom the 1970s had more interesting stuff.
12. They don’t offer anything new about the author who put it together.
13. Lists generally get repeated into memes so much so that they drown out other quality stuff out there.
14. And the final, and most serious reason: lists tend to enumerate, but they don’t usually elucidate.

The Maryland Daily Record has a report on one Yvonne Boughter, widow and former mother of two (now one). She has moved on from having settled her lawsuit with the Days Inn Hotel in Ocean City to suing the city’s fire department, and by extension, the city itself, to the tune of twenty million dollars.

The facts I gather from the report are disturbing, not so much in what she alleged to be negligent behavior on the part of Days Inn or that of the agents of the city, but she seems to act like she has no responsibility in the incident whatsoever. After spending the night in the room where she and her family fell ill, experiencing respiratory illness, she called the department at 9:43AM. She then called at 2:00PM to follow up. What happened in those four hours? Why did she not move her family out of the room? Why did she not elicit the help of the hotel staff, or strangers? After her 2:00PM phone call, her suite alleges she “lapsed back into unconsciousness.”

These, I’m certain, are questions that should be raised should this suit come to court. I still can’t get the idea that she, her husband, nor her two children had the conventional wisdom of leaving the hotel room and not coming back. I can’t imagine why she, in the absence of an EMS, did not try to hail a cab. I can’t imagine what kind of conversations went on in that hotel room. I hope for Ms. Boughter’s sake that it was not her words and deeds that kept her family away from a hospital that day.

911 calls, for all that they’re made out to be, should not be the only thing that a person in danger needs to be responsible for. If your house were on fire, after you call 911, do you just stand there and wait? Or do you crawl to the nearest exit? Miss Boughter’s story is a cautionary tale of over-reliance on public service.

Cross-posted on ICC.

Having been around for a while in the blogsophere, I thought that nothing would surprise me, until I came across an article about the FTC wanting to regulate bloggers for reviews they write. The shock is in the seemingly-dubious data about how some reviews can run up to thousands of dollars in compensation for a short, 200-word post. James Joyner is skeptical of the data, and comments further, from a libertarian perspective on how this can affect free speech for bloggers. We who tend to write political commentary (though, I, personally, have shied away from it) are very wary of any government attempt to circumvent our right to free expression. Aaron Brazell replies in the comments to Joyner’s post that there is a community of these so-called mommybloggers, and apparently among them there is an epidemic of paid endorsements that lack clear and proper disclosures. To which I say: these hags are really ruining the field for a lot of people.

(Continue reading…)

Growing up, my memories of the 1986 EDSA revolution that overthrew Ferdinand Marcos were hazy. I was, after all, only six, and my mom and I spent all of a day on the streets before fleeing to the boonies in case the demonstration became violent. Later, while attending private Catholic high school, our resident priest would regularly look back on the events of that week and attribute its success to the prayerful nature of the demonstrations. The verbiage was that “God was with us.” I’m all for triumphalism from the faithful, but sometimes the smugness can cross the line. As our priest would continue his diatribe about the power of faith, he would contrast it to the failure of the Chinese demonstrations at Tinanmen, attributing to the godlessness of the Communists and ancestor worshippers. Years later, I’ve realized just how messed up that mentality is.

(Continue reading…)