blogs & bloggers

just a couple of months ago, i believed that if obama won the election it would start us on a nonstop trajectory of improvement, energy and sustained hope. sure, in my smarter head i knew the road would be rough — so much has been broken, so much — but i had a vision of us marching and jogging and climbing that road bravely together, helping one another over the potholes and the boulders and the foot-wide cracks.

but now, even before he’s taken the oath of office, it’s quite clear that my naive expectations were exactly that: naive expectations. oh, it’s not all obama’s fault — i am sick at heart and completely disgusted with him over rick warren, but i am still glad he’s going to be our president, and i still believe he’s going to be able to do a better job than anybody else who threw their hat in the ring. i guess i just expected him to be a bit less “political”, a bit more ballsy. like this business about including evangelicals in the inauguration proceedings. naming warren is nothing but a political maneuver to curry favor with the far right, and can’t be seen or rationalized as anything but that.

what did i expect? i expected obama to be very clear about the fact that if you want a seat at the table and a voice in the room, you’re going to have to do some housekeeping first; that hatemongers and exclusionary organizations are NOT welcome — this is THEIR time to change, to catch up with the times.

i want change i can believe in. that’s what i voted for. there’s nothing about putting a homophobe on a national platform that speaks of change to me.

and i am sick, completely sick, about the ongoing slaughter at gaza. i am not saying two words about the rights or the wrongs or the justifications or the whys and the hows. i recognize that the history of israel and palestine is a complicated one, and people who understand the details of it much better than i do don’t seem to agree about any of it themselves.

but i don’t have to understand the whys and wherefores to be sick at heart about this. it doesn’t matter who did what to whom, who is right and who is wrong: bombing people in their homes is murder, pure and simple. mass murder. mass murder now goes on every day in the middle east and the fucking talking heads nitpick political details. i don’t care about the political details right now, i don’t care about the history or the justifications: i just want it to STOP.

when i am heartsick in this way, it’s hard to blog. i tend to take refuge in writing poetry and music, and i don’t put those things out here, they have their own place. with only so many hours in the day, i have chosen to go to the arts of comfort, rather than to the art of confrontation. i’ve lost some faith, some confidence, some energy this last month, and i suppose having to survive the holidays at the same time wasn’t any help. so it’s been a little quiet on this blog.

oh, i’ll get my mojo back. i always have before and i expect i always will.

but right now? it’s hard. really, really hard. i am afraid for us all.

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getangrywithme is a self-hosted wordpress blog. wordpress gives you the software for free, you take care of getting your own domain name and webhost. so there’s a little more to it than just setting up a free blog on the wordpress site, and i admit to being a bit of a technological wuss.

what? a technological wuss? but you’ve run an online zine for ten years, jack. you’ve built websites for other people. you fricking work in the IT department of a dotcom! you can’t be a techwuss!

oh, yes i can. i get by with a healthy dose of RTFS and BTB — read the fucking screen and buy the book — as well as wordpress’ fantastic support forum. (i still don’t get how they do all this for free. somebody’s gotta be making some money somewhere to support all the servers and programmers and so forth, but i don’t see where it’s coming from. i must be even worse at business than i am at tech.)

anyway, the wordpress upgrade instructions were pretty daunting, all FTP and gz files and god knows what else. i mean, i’ve used (don’t tell anybody) microsoft frontpage (!!) to build all my nonblog sites. using frontpage is like admitting that you don’t tie your own shoes.

by virtue of going to bed stupidly early last night after a long and somewhat unsuccessful day in the studio, i woke up at 2am. going back to sleep didn’t seem to be an option, so i made some coffee and hit the computer. had no intention — not even a thought — of doing the upgrade today, but WP has this annoying helpful habit of reminding and reminding and reminding you so, half asleep, i started backing up and deleting and uploading files like a madwoman, using an ancient freebie FTP program which is the only tool i have for managing this installation. (break down and buy a real FTP client, OK? or ssh. or something.)

i missed one line of the instructions, which i realized too late to do anything about. seemed pretty important, this business about making sure to protect your config.php file. figured i was doomed, and would have to rebuild the whole site from scratch IF i could even get WP up and running again at all. but no!

the fact that you are reading this means that the upgrade was successful, and nobody’s more surprised about it than me. didn’t even have to tweak much to get it all back in shape.

which doesn’t mean that everything is AOK. so do me a favor, if you’re reading this blog (THANK you for visiting!) and something either doesn’t work as it should or just seems wierd, please let me know. even if it’s not a WP upgrade problem — i want this site to be the best that it can be, and your ideas and suggestions (or rants and raves!) will be a great help in whipping it into shape.

now i’m going to find something much less stressful to do. like sorting out my sock drawer.

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if you find the title of this post somewhat baffling, you probably don’t have a twitter account. i’ve had one (now two) for about six months, and twitter is slowly but surely becoming the heartbeat of my online life. and if it hadn’t, the mumbai terror attack would have sealed the deal. where else can you learn about an event as it unfolds, without filters? unless you’re there, it’s impossible. twitter takes you there.

if you’re already into tweeting, you probably know about darren rouse’s new blog, twitip. darren already runs one of the best blogging resources on the net, problogger, so when he fell in love with twitter, twitip soon followed.

now you know i don’t usually blog about blogging (how self-referential can you get? it’s like writing a poem about poetry) but darren recently posted a top-ten must-follow twitlist, and invited his readers to do the same. i thought well, maybe i’ll write a top-ten political twitlist if nobody has done it yet. scrolling down the comments in that post (where most people left their lists), i quickly found a political list…but it was – horrors! — written by a conservative. (i mean, the wall street journal? are you kidding me?)

so here’s my must-follow list for liberally minded political tweeters, in no particular order:

@rachelmaddow
@wonkette
@nprpolitics
@glenngreewald
@crooksandliars
@dailykos
@instapundit
@cnnbrk(cnn breaking news)
@democracypress
@tpmmedia
@feministe

i would also recommend following @twitscoop for a quick way to find out if something big is going on in the twitterverse. alternatively, you can search tweet trends (twends?) directly at twitscoop.com - no twitter account required.

and of course you’ll want to follow @getangrywithme, whoever she may be…

seriously, check out the original article at twitip, there are a lot of interesting lists and suggestions there. the thing about twitter is that the more you use it, in terms of posting useful information and responding to questions from the group, the more benefits you’ll receive — such as having your questions answered and maybe getting some new readers at your blog (just don’t be annoying! people who post nothing but self-promotional tweets are soon unfollowed, and never recommended.)

thanks to darren and the twitip community for inspiring this morning’s post. frankly, the biggest political news on my mind today is the fact that scumbag saxby actually won the georgia runoff, which just blows chunks and is too fucking sad to write much about. big kudos to jim martin for giving that SOB a run for his money, though. next time, jim, for sure.

but i’m still smiling over the fact that, however briefly, this custom-made “impeach bush” ornament was hanging on the white house christmas tree. you really cannot make this stuff up!

impeachball

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nope, this isn’t about the bailout. just a sunday morning quickie.

ON THE MONEY SIDE, i want to remind everybody that today is the last day of the getangrywithme contest — you can win a $25 amazon gift certificate, to be awarded tomorrow, 12/1. the competition so far is not very steep (sob, sob), so why not give it a shot?

all you have to do is read this short post and leave me a suggestion or two on how i can improve the design of this blog. that’s it! i look forward to hearing from you, because I NEED HELP!

ON THE IDIOT SIDE we have idiotinc.com. it’s my very favorite business blog, delivering only short, pithy posts about companies that are on their way down the tubes. their titles are hilarious, like Gawker-style hilarious (example: Land America Lands its Ass in Bankruptcy), so i read idiotinc regularly even though i’m not a business-blog-reading kind of a girl.

so there you go, two quick things to enjoy with your morning soy latte.

then get out from behind that computer and go take yourself for a walk in the park or something. like, in case you have a little extra turkey stuffing that you wouldn’t mind burning off…

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yes, after a bit of post-election decompression i have re-entered my life, dragged out the old goals list, and am getting very, very busy.

i’ve wanted to redesign the site for a while now. yeah, the original template was cool, but also a little buggy, and i’m no back-end CSS expert: i needed a template that would work for me, not against me, so i invested in chris pearson’s Thesis theme and you are looking at the preliminary results.

what does all that have to do with you getting free shit? everything! two contests are in full force and effect on getangrywithme right now.

WANT TO WIN A $25 AMAZON GIFT CERTIFICATE? then take a few minutes to browse around this site then leave a comment here with your best suggestions for how this design can be improved and the best suggestion wins! only two rules — the comment must appear on this post, and it must be at least somewhat within the realm of possiblility. for example, “make this site more like huffington post” are not within that realm, as i am one non-programming-professional blogger, not a cadre of geeks like what they’ve got working at huffpo. that’s it! easy, right? so put on your most critical and creative thinking cap, take a couple minutes to browse around the site, and make a suggestion or two. the winner will be announced on this blog on december 1st.

FOR BLOGGERS ONLY: COMMENTLUV IS GIVING AWAY iPOD SPEAKERS, HEADPHONES, MEMORY CARDS AND CASH! and they’ve made it really simple to enter. here’s what you have to do:

• register your blog at CommentLuv.com and get the url registered and verified (registration is free, of course)
• be sure to fill out a profile description
• you do not need to have CommentLuv installed on your blog
• then leave comments at any or all participating blogs – that’s it!

once you’re all set up at CommentLuv, visit the contest tab for a full list of prizes and participating sites. you can leave comments at ANY of the contest blogs, not just this one. the more (non-spam) comments you leave, the better your chances of winning. this contest continues until all the prizes have been given away. and it’s a good way to find interesting blogs that you might have come across otherwise.

of course, commenting daily here on getangrywith me increases your chances of winning! if you do win, of course, it would be mighty kind to leave a hat-tip for getangrywithme.com on your blog.

IF YOU HAVE BEEN READING CAREFULLY you will realize that leaving a comment here about the site redesign ALSO gets you an entry in the CommentLuv contest. nice, huh? just be sure to register your site at CommentLuv before commenting here, and then you’re off.

regular readers know that this is very new territory for me. a contest rather than a rant? giving away a gift certificate rather than drilling AIG a new one? likely not the kind of thing i’m going to do on a regular basis, but it did seem worth a shot, especially if i can get some great suggestions on how to improve this site and you can get some swag out of the deal. besides, as John P says in one man’s blog, ”specialization is for insects”.

ready? set, go!

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when i stop to think about this treasure that is the internet, i whisper a little word of thanks to the universe. sure, there’s spam, and malware, and hate sites, but these are completely dwarfed by the brilliance that can be found. unless the atlanteans had some really cool shit going on, there has never before been such an intense and readily available collection of creativity, initiative, talent, and genius such as this.

almost every day i find artists who absolutely knock my kneesocks off, and marcus kwame is one of them. marcus is a poet, a blogger, a musician and a seriously talented painter. i met him a month or two ago (well, it was one of those ‘virtual’ meetings) when he left a couple of very intelligent comments on this blog. intrigued, i headed over to his home base at Bloggin Out and just got floored by his very, very original talent.

this painting was posted under the title “Staff meetings at work make me feel like…” and BOY can i relate to this. i may have to print it out (if that’s ok with him — always, always ask the artist’s permission before using their work for your personal pleasure, however innocent your intentions may be– most of the time the artist is happy to say yes, pleased that you value his work and respect his artistry enough to ask before borrowing the image.)

marcus gets political, too, as in this post about the election, which includes a wonderfully imagined and expertly executed painting of our president elect, on the theme that there has never been anything false about hope. he also maintains a whole separate site devoted to his visual art, where you can buy prints or even some of the originals. i like the fine art gallery best, but you will also find illustrations and even a section for comics. but his very greatest masterpiece, he tells us, is his daughter, born just this past august. congratulations to you and your wife, marcus.

you can subscribe to the Bloggin Out RSS feed or just bookmark the Bloggin Out home page. if you’ve got a blogger account, you can also follow him that way and get updates right on your dashboard. just scroll down to the bottom of his sidebar for the link.

one thing’s likely to be sure: you won’t want to let him out of your sight! rock on, marcus — you inspire me.

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i had the opportunity to meet arianna yesterday (and i very embarrassingly did NOT have a card to give her when she asked me for one! note to self, get this DONE). she was keynote speaker at a conference for media buyers.

note about the beginning of this talk: just before arianna took the stage, yahoo played a very entertaining video about the internet that featured several children, one of whom said she want to be a “mermaid fairy” when she grew up. arianna incorporated several mermaid fairy references into her talk.

she pulled no punches, speaking about everything from sarah palin to 9/11 to arthur schlesinger (who, she says, with his accent “made incomprehensibility acceptable” — she’s very funny, and her accent is not THAT bad).

i love what she says about accountability in journalism. if something is said that isn’t true, we are obligated to mention that when writing about it. if two people are debating, for example, whether or not the earth is flat, it is incumbent on the writer to note that the earth is not, in fact, flat. she incorporates this thinking into debates over such things as creationism and global warming.

the talk is about thirty minutes long; i posted it in four separate videos on youtube. you can find them individually on my channel if you prefer. if you’d like to listen to the talk straight through, you can watch the playlist below.

would love to hear what all of you think about this talk. as for me, i liked and respected arianna quite a bit before — i think i’m in love with her now!

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it’s a sad day when amnesty international issues a press release about your own country

gloria steinem rips sarah palin a new one in the LA Times

best-titled blog this week: fred thompson with his head up his ass smoking a crack pipe

caribou barbie says “sambo beat the bitch!”

alicublog weighs in on Ace O. Spades and the flag-trashing spat

what is the proper use of childeren during a campaign and when is it namecalling?

the media apologizes to john mccain

when can judges force women into surgery against their will?

threats and retribution in alaska

when politicians play god

why the police go wilding the way they do

a site for all the twitterers in the house: govtweets

last but certainly not least, a correction to yesterday’s post on charles rangel — while the details are still being sorted out, it seems that the earnings were $75k over the whole 20 years, not $75k a year as originally reported, and all of it went straight to the holder of the mortgage, rangel didn’t receive any checks. he may still have some tax obligations associated with that, but it’s a whole different story. sending MAD LOVE again, chuck!

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this is the first post in a weekly series on my favorite bloggers. i’ll give you two at a time, hopefully two that make some kind of sense as twins. pairing these two ballsy ladies for starters was a no-brainer.

given how in-your-face many of her posts are, it makes sense that Angry Black Bitch maintains personal anonymity on her blog — and the way she does it is one of the many delightful things about her writing style. you gotta love a line like “This bitch was fascinated by the mommy bloggers who were out in full force at BlogHer” not only because it introduces BlogHer (a fantastic resource for shebloggers) but because watching the Mommybloggers through the eyes of an Angry Black Bitch is a bit like dropping acid at a Carpenters concert. in this post, as she often does, This Bitch reflects on her own background as she thoughtfully evaluates the matter at hand and quietly delivers a deft (and sometimes ballbreaking) summation like “I’m left wondering where the line is between wanting the best for your child and running your child’s life as if it were a new product launch.” i be reading that bitch daily since i found her on the Majikthise blogroll. a rant “inspired from the internets” that she posted on my brother’s birthday is one of my favorites so far.

at the other end of the blogging bitches spectrum is Bitch, PhD., a mommyblogger with a seriously strong tude and for all i know an uzi in her pantry. her comments policy, which is WAY up front & center on the blog, sets the tone: “Comments are great; obnoxious comments get deleted. Deal.” this is HER house you’re visiting, and if you don’t like it, there’s the fucking door. i could fall in love with a no bullshit bitch like this (except its ABB, not PhD, who’s with me over here on the queer side) (wouldn’t be hard to fall in love with ABB neither, come to think of it). anyway, BPhD’s blog is a nice salad of politics, home-ec, book & movie reviews, web reviews (not just aggregation) feminism and social crit. on days when she’s a little too busy with Anonymous Kid (my assumption; her name; check the photo on her home page — is that AK giving a version of her mother’s single-finger salute to the world?) she may serve up a post like this one, a little treasure map to follow to put some fuel on your liberal fire. her post on abortion, along with some followup information on just how much it can suck at times once your blog becomes well-known, is required sheblogger reading.

both of these gals are long-term bloggers, with archives that date back to around 2004, they both post frequently — while each may skip days here and there, they also have occasional multipost days (like today, when ABB’s brother, whom we already know and care about from other of her posts, landed in the ER after a pretty serious accident; she gave her readers an update once it was clear that he’d be OK.) they are both responsive to comments — though you got to get past BPhD’s guerilla moderation tactics before you’ll get any comments from her.

i’ve been taking these two regular as vitamins with my morning coffee lately and i gotta say that there are few things better than starting your day with a Bitch.

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