Category Archives: Discourse.net

Make your own at obamicon.me.

I get all sorts of strange email. Recently the volume of email asking what I'd charge to run an ad, or sell “sponsorship” has gone up from every-so-often to several per week.

Today's was a little odder than usual:

Hello Michael,

My name is Alex [surname] and I am the manager of the project for [erotic lingerie web site].
And I would like to buy the text link advertisement on your blog https://www.discourse.net for my website [erotic lingerie web site]. Can you send me the monthly rates for the blog-wide text link on your blog ?
I would appreciate your reply.

Sincerely,
Alex [Surname]

This doesn't seem like a form letter – it has my name. On the other hand, what is this “blog-wide text link” he speaks of? [Update: forgot to add, and why if it's not a form letter, does Alex think I'm about to run an ad for his stuff?] I always say “no thanks” to ad solicitations for the reasons set out in Blogs, Ads, and Insurance. Then again, maybe this deserves a custom reply…

I'm more than a little behind on my blog reading, so I've only just discovered that something I wrote was in the running for the South Florida Daily Blog's “SFDB Post Of The Week”. Had I but known, I might have asked readers to stuff the ballot box or something.

But it seems I won.

Oh, wait, the voting is only for “Post of the Month” — so it seems you'll have a chance to do that Miami/Chicago voting thing later.

One of the great parts of this blogging thing is that smart and funny people send me email or leave comments about the stuff I post. Case in point was the funny, if cruel, remark about Boris Johnson left by “eric” on the post below, How to Complain in British.

“eric” turns out to be Eric Fink, a law professor at startup Elon Law School in North Carolina, and he too has a blog with the cheerful title of Debris. And poking around there, I found a link to this wondrously funny deconstruction of the most prevalent and awful commercial I seen since I acquired satellite TV, the “Snuggies” ad. But it does make me wonder if getting a TV was such a great idea.

Krisol's NYT column, Will Obama Save Liberalism?, finishes with this note,

This is William Kristol’s last column.

I can't say “another national nightmare” just ended, because he's too small beer for that. Maybe “our national stomachache is over”?

I just hope they don't replace him with Karl Rove.