On blogging

Found an old article from The New York Review of Books (February 2008) by Sarah Boxer on blogs and blogging. Here are some memorable quotations:

"In late 2007, the count passed 100 million. (The largest number of blog posts, some 37 percent, are now in Japanese, according to a recent Washington Post article by Blaine Harden, and most of these are polite and self-effacing—"karaoke for shy people." Thirty-six percent of posts are in English, and most of them are the opposite of polite and self-effacing.)"

"Now that fame and links are one and the same, there are bloggers out there who will do practically anything— start rumors, tell lies, pick fights, create fake personas, and post embarrassing videos—to get noticed and linked to. They are, in the parlance of the blogosphere, "link whores." And those who succeed are blog celebrities, or "blogebrities.""

"In 2002 it was bloggers like Joshua Micah Marshall of Talking Points Memo and Atrios (a pseudonym) of Eschaton who first publicized Trent Lott's racist remarks at Strom Thurmond's 100th birthday party, leading to Lott's resignation as Senate majority leader."
"For many bloggers infamy is better than no kind of famy at all. "

"To go unnoticed in this democracy is to not exist. This kind of existential pressure, naturally, ups the ante on language. Invective—hilarious, acidulous invective, often served up with false apologies—is everywhere. The law of the blogosphere is Hobbesian: survival of the snarkiest."

"Of course I can't prove it, but I'm pretty sure that bloggers have fouler mouths, tougher hides, and cooler thesauruses than most of the people I've read in print. Here's a sampling of words gleaned from some of my favorite blogs:

anyhoo, bitchitude, fan-fucking-tabulous, hole-esque, nastified, alternapop, coffin-snatching, YouTube-ization, touzing, Daddio, manky, nutters, therapised, Boo-Ya Nation, dildopreneur, dudely, flava, haz-mat, nut sac, sexbot, underwearian, fugly, vomit-y, consciousness-jumped, tear-assed, fetbryo, grapetastically, mommyblogdaciousness, Nero-crazy, Engrish, pidginized, votenfreude, angsty, malgovernment, bejesus, JumboTron, man-dresses, babe-aliciousness, droit de senny."

"Bloggers are golden when they're at the bottom of the heap, kicking up. Give them a salary, a book contract, or a press credential, though, and it just isn't the same. (And this includes, for the most part, the blogs set up by magazines, companies, and newspapers.) Why? When you write for pay, you worry about lawsuits, sentence structure, and word choice. You worry about your boss, your publisher, your mother, and your superego looking over your shoulder. And that's no way to blog."

"Blog writing is id writing—grandiose, dreamy, private, free-associative, infantile, sexy, petty, dirty. Whether bloggers tell the truth or really are who they claim to be is another matter, but WTF. They are what they write. And you can't fake that. ;-)"

Sorry to NYRB for the kind of plagiarism but I had only the article on my computer, not the exact reference to get to it - and was too lazy to google for it...

Making a fool of myself

This will be a personal entry for a change: I just learned that intellectual property rights are taken very seriously on the German Wikipedia. I put in a translation of an article from the Catalan Wikipedia on Moisès Broggi, a surgeon born in 1908 with an interesting biography that I found relevant, and it was removed within minutes. The moderator found it superflous, I think, and then I found out on his discussion board that you cannot just translate articles from other Wikis. First, you have to ask for permission and name the article you want to translate. Then, they decide if they let you - and import all of the original article's history into your translation - if they finally accept it...
So, not a free for all, but a highly organized and hierarchical system. I then went to the English Wiki to see if my articles where still there, e.g. a partial translation of a Catalan article on Maria Barbal. It is still there but they want more references. But how to find references for an author who has not been translated into English yet?
I feel foolish to have invested an hour of my spare time into a little translation that was then just erased...

Audi Q3

By now every Catalan will have heard of the planned Audi Q3. For weeks its name was on the news every day as the Audi headquarters in Germany studied in which of the many Volkswagen production sites this model would be produced. After the workers of Seat agreed to a salary freeze for the next years and the regional Catalan and central Spanish governments chipped in a few hundred million Euro in soft loans the Seat factory in Martorell won the internal competition so that from 2011 this new model will be produced there. It will be the most expensive passenger car ever to be built in Spain (at least in modern democratic Spain as the history of Hispano-Suiza and similar models is long over).
It will be so expensive that probably none of the workers building it will ever drive one. And it will probably be so "dirty" that it would not qualify for new subsidies about to be given to car buyers who trade in their at least ten year old former cars for new ones that contaminate less.
And it will not free Spain from its slave-like relation with international car companies, such as Ford, General Motors or Renault, that build small passenger vehicles in not really efficient plants (compared to those by Japanese carmakers; due to low educational standards) at various Spanish locations and squeeze out subsidies from all layers of government whenever there is a crisis and a reason to threaten with massive job cuts.

Village life (I)

This might become a series of entries talking about the pros and cons of living in a small village of 400 inhabitants as I have done for more or less of the past six years now.
One basic fact is that everybody knows everybody else, at least by sight. This brings a lot of security as every "foreigner", i.e. everybody who is not known to live here, is watched closely. On the other hand, it makes it difficult to keep great parts of one's life private as one is watched constantly even though one belongs.
Another basic fact is that a lot of the villagers are pensioners who have enough time to sit outside their houses or walk around and watch what is going on.
Small villages have the disadvantage that they lack shops and services, though ours has a small food store, two coffee-bars, a butcher's, and a beautician's. Even the county capital seven kilometres away does not have a decent supermarket or a laundry service.
Due to the lack of industry and big roads, the air is clean; and apart from tractors in the morning and the motorcycles of some irritating mechanics on Sunday afternoon the atmosphere is quiet.

Grow your own lemon tree

It is really easy to grow a lemon or orange tree at home. You just have to put the seeds that you find inside your citrus fruit into a small flowerpot filled with earth. The seeds just need a thin layer of earth over them. Pour a little water into the pot, then place it in a warm, sunny space and wait. Never let the earth dry totally. Once the seedling has a height of a few inches you can replant it into a bigger pot - or just let it grow. Cut off the lowest leaves now and then, otherwise the tree will not grow very much. Dust off the other leaves so that they can breathe. And never ever expose the tree to frost as it will die.
And do not expect fruit on your tree, with the exception of the case that you live in an area where there grow a lot of citrus trees - but then you probably would not read these amateur instructions.