Maybe it’s just me, but it seems as if this development is a job for the Super Best Friends. Alternative observation (to be read in the voice of General Disarray): “South Park did it! South Park did it!”
What will happen to Scorpios, the star sign most influenced by the erstwhile ninth voting member of the solar system? We asked Maria Uva , an astrologer at Inner Peace Connection — and received grim tidings. “There will be a greater turn to the negative,” Uva warns, “such as promiscuous sex or drug abuse. Stay in the light and keep a perspective.”
So maybe I’m crazy, but I thought it was pretty clear. The very descripion of Rage Burgers says it is “an ongoing narrative exploration of hamburgers in Portland, OR.” And it only gets more explicit.
Its inaugural entry says along the way that people are being invited to “[t]ell your burger stories” and reiterates the site’s description, which sits atop the left-hans sidebar on every page.
The guidelines for the site open thusly: “The single most important thing to know about Rage Burgers is that it is not merely a food review site.” The document states that the site “is meant to be a narrative exercise”. It goes on to say that while stories should include the basic information a reader might require about a given venue and its burgers (price, value, options, etc.) “submissions which overly skew towards the merely informational will be rejected”.
Near the end, the guidelines make the point clear and concise: “Failing to be a story about the burger you had and the circumstances of its having? It will be rejected.”
So, when someone submits what is little more than a sterotypical capsule review, with no narrative whatsoever, and is sent a response pointing them to the guidelines, and ending with a “thanks” — well, the proper response in turn is not to get bent out of shape, tell me the site will fail because I’m asking too much of people, and tell me to be nicer.
Honestly, I think sending back a note which simply and unemotionally kept to just pointing out the relevant part of the guidelines was pretty nice.
If I had wanted, I could have asked why someone would submit material to a site without first reading any of the repeated explanations as to the site’s intentions. But I didn’t. I kept it direct, to the point, and professional.
Can’t follow the rules? Then don’t whinge at me when you’re submission is rejected and you receive a short — and nice — explanation of the reason.
Local fans of Kristin Hersh need volunteers for Team Throwing Music, their entry into the Cascade AIDS Project’s 20th Annual AIDSWalk.
So that new, incredibly dorky, food-related, weblog-based project I mentioned in my last item. That would be Rage Burgers, an ongoing narrative exploration of hamburgers in Portland, OR.
Anyone want to fund the $10 to register the domain for a new, incredibly dorky, food-related, weblog-based project? I’ll put you in the site credits.
I don’t hate skatepunks. I hate greasy and dimwitted skatepunks, who can barely hold a conversation with themselves let alone with me, who think I ever in a million years would want anything whatsoever to do with drinking beer with them at their loud and moronic party house across the street.
So it’s all well and good that I re-launched Portland Stories, but neglecting to turn on the “share” email address through which people can submit stories made it somewhat more pointless than intended. That’s fixed now, and in addition, you also now can share you story by filling out a form instead of sending email.
So, let’s continue to set aside the open question as to whether or not terrorists are out to get us because they hate our freedom, and let’s accept for the sake of argument that this indeed is their motivation. If we do that, the peculiar thing is that we still win the argument against the GOPresidency.
If the problem, for the terrorists, is our freedom, then why do politicians set up “free speech” zones blocks or miles away from their appearances? if the problem, for the terrorists, is our freedom, then why do we force people to take off t-shirts with Arabic writing on them before letting them onto airplanes?
Where is the $1 billion a year for the Department of Education to launch a massive campaign of civics education in the nation’s public schools, teaching kids to know, understand, appreciate, and exercise their freedom of speech, their freedom of assembly, their right to petition the government for a redress of grievances, the political process, the three separate and counter-balancing branches of government, their right to privacy?
If the problem, for the terrorists, is our freedom, why isn’t it a national mission, led by the GOPresidency itself, to celebrate our freedoms here at home? Why is it that even if we accept the GOPresidency’s terms for the debate, they’re still wrong about what America’s response should be?
If the problem, for the terrorists, is our freedom, isn’t the proper response for America to look them in the eye, tell them to fuck off, and do everything we can to use those freedoms, as often as possible, as fully as possible?
If the problem, for the terrorists, is our freedom, why is America’s response to stop using it?
While our world is graced with Golden Girls and Punky Brewster on DVD, we remain in the deep, dark hole that is a world without DVDs of Max Headroom. Official ones, anyway. But it seems that ZDTV/TechTV a “ZDTVMultimedia” user has posted four episodes in their entirety on YouTube — three of the U.S. version and the original UK version.