Oppressive, condescending, opinionated claptrap.

Yes, I agree, Nada, blogs are generally oppressive, condescending, opinionated claptrap. I thought that was the point.

Go and catch a falling star,
Get with child a mandrake root,
Tell me where all past years are,
Or who cleft the devil's foot,
Teach me to hear mermaids singing,
Or to keep off envy's stinging,
     And log
     What blog
Serves to deserve an honest slog.

If thou be'st born to strange sights,
Things invisible to see,
Ride ten thousand days and nights,
Till age snow white hairs on thee,
Thou, when thou return'st, wilt tell me,
All strange wonders that befell thee,
     And snap:
     "On the map
Is a blog that is not oppressive, condescending, opinionated claptrap!"

If thou find'st one, let me know,
Such a pilgrimage were sweet;
Yet do not, I would not go,
Though at next door we might meet;
Though you were hot, when you were venting,
And high, coldly commenting,
     Yet you
     Will shew
False, ere you came to smite, aiming true.

Phooey!

There's nothing *wrong* with Oulipean techniques, but, like the hairs on men's heads, they get awfully thin over time.

The fact is, the problem of anemia isn't going to go away unless we force ourselves to eat lvier.

Of course I meant LIVER.

Oh well, back to HOUSECLEANING.

"This is no time for moderation."
--Medea

Phooey yu tu!

What Oulipian technique are you talking about?

DWHs lauded masterwork.

Anyway, if he doesn't groove on our (not yours, Brian -- I mean "our" quite vaguely) personal little non-geeky weblogs, he shouldn't read them!

Or he should personally pay my tuition to go to whatever school it is he believes would teach me how to use the web "to best advantage."

"Successful" -- what is *that* supposed to mean?

OBJECTION to subjective opinions not being recognized as such and then handed down "from above" as absolute "expert" judgments.

It's not so much that it makes me feel threatened -- I'll go on with my petty banausic amusements notwithstanding -- but it GETS MY GOAT.

Didn't we just have the same flap over Steve Evans' Flaubert quote? And didn't he wriggle out of that one diplomatically?

p.s. I happen to have a pregnant mandrake root right here in my pocket, and it wants to kick up a ruckus! Way cool poem, BKS.

Oh, oops, mea culpa! I got DWH mixed up with CB, author of _Eunoia_.

Bad bad overgeneralizing me.

My objection stands, tho.

Nada, you often seem confused about whether you admire people who are opinionated or not. So Steve is the bad guy for "wiggling out... diplomatically" but Darren (or Christian, whoever) is bad for being opinionated. Darren's written over 4 books on internet culture so in some sense he's as "expert" as anyone I know (and certainly within our field of poetry).

There are other blogging poets out there who are not in "our" immediate circle -- I think DWH is casting a wider net (so to speak), and both of us are trying to at least consider possibilities for the medium with some sense of conviction and, high-falutin as it sounds, urgency, which I realize is just not the way people (not necessarily you) like to think of things anymore.

Which is why the short, attitudinizing -- and in my opinion "oppressive" -- phrase is in as a mode of discourse, but the more considered (and criticizable) paragraph is out?

When the machine compiles your code, however, it does a little bit of translation. At run time, the computer sees nothing but 1s and 0s, which is all the computer ever sees: a continuous string of binary numbers that it can interpret in various ways.

Let's see an example by converting our favoriteNumber variable from a stack variable to a heap variable. The first thing we'll do is find the project we've been working on and open it up in Project Builder. In the file, we'll start right at the top and work our way down. Under the line:

The most basic duality that exists with variables is how the programmer sees them in a totally different way than the computer does. When you're typing away in Project Builder, your variables are normal words smashed together, like software titles from the 80s. You deal with them on this level, moving them around and passing them back and forth.

Let's see an example by converting our favoriteNumber variable from a stack variable to a heap variable. The first thing we'll do is find the project we've been working on and open it up in Project Builder. In the file, we'll start right at the top and work our way down. Under the line:

But some variables are immortal. These variables are declared outside of blocks, outside of functions. Since they don't have a block to exist in they are called global variables (as opposed to local variables), because they exist in all blocks, everywhere, and they never go out of scope. Although powerful, these kinds of variables are generally frowned upon because they encourage bad program design.