Month: July 2003

Fellow capper amycamus shares this unconfirmed statistic: “there are more than 3,000 homes in the U.S. built as exact replicas of the Brady Bunch home.”

I don’t want to keep talking about Michael Savage — in my opinion, the man deserves to be forgotten — but I thought it was worth noting that, in his official statement about finally getting fired from MSNBC, he writes: “I especially appeal to my many listeners in the gay community to accept my apologies for any inadvertent insults which may have occurred.”

Savage had viewers in the gay community? Isn’t that like saying the Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan had friends in the NAACP?

This isn’t just a problem with Blogger, but: why offer “details” on an error message when all those details amount to is basically a unhelpful “there was an error; we don’t know why”? I need to know what’s causing the error, not just another reminder that it exists. If I see a “Publish error” in Blogger, I’d like the “details” link next to it to tell me more than “There Were Errors in Publishing.” If you can’t help me resolve the error — and I understand if you can’t, since sometimes these things simply require patience and persistence and don’t necessarily mean something’s actually broken — why offer me a link or window that indicates you can?

This particular case is a minor issue, may not even be on Blogger’s end, and will likely resolve itself momentarily, but I’m generally much happier with technical help that admits it can’t help me up front than with the offer of help that…well, isn’t helpful.

In this post about computerized voting (and the frightening possibility that it might be extremely easy to manipulate), Bob Harris writes:

Which I found amusing. The computerized voting software, however… Well, I can’t feign expertise either — unlike Harris, I was a writer first and would, I think, make a lousy engineer — but, if implemented in its current form, it looks like it could be the worst thing to happen to American politics since…well, since our current president was “elected”. As Atrios writes: “Can this stuff possibly be the real software?! It’s not some cheesy demo?”

Our long national nightmare is over. Thanks to the discussion board at Angels from Another Pin, I’ve just learned that Michael Savage has been fired. This, I’m sure, comes as a great blow to the five or six people watching his show every week (it helps to have a big family, don’t it, Mike?). The rest of us can just be happy that MSNBC finally came to its senses, or at least realized what most everyone else knew from the get-go: putting Savage on the air was a mistake.

I really do go out of my way to avoid cable news programs, but Savage’s presence on MSNBC has always pissed me off. As I wrote in my comments on a Salon profile back in March, “Savage is just a hate-mongering nutjob. The Salon article is interesting in that it suggests this is just the latest in a string of personas, a guise adopted by a man who wants to be noticed at all costs (and spewing hate and inane rhetoric is as good a way as any). But it’s a guise that has no business on national television.” On the rare occasion I’ve stumbled upon his program, however, what struck me most was not the hate and rhetoric but the ineptitude with which Savage spewed it. Say what you will about Bill O’Reilly (and I’ve said more than I’ve ever wanted to here), the man at least knows how to entertain his target audience. Michael Savage wasn’t just a nutjob; he was a boring nutjob. It’s genuinely nice to see him gone.