In which I propose a competition.

Who among us remembers our search for the saddest man on the internet? Why do I bring this up? Well, firstly because I find myself idly wondering whatever happened to dancing Mario man ..... ah, good times ..... and partly because I wish to propose another race through the dregs of humanity.

Where else should we begin such a race than on the blog of the great man himself? I propose two categories for this endeavor:

1. The funniest act of crazy-baiting/affirmation. The leader in this category is currently 'he who shall not be named', and for an example I would advise moseying on over to that blog that doesn't exist.
2. The more challenging category. The prize here shall go to whoever manages to get published the  craziest piece of opinion in broad agreement with the blog's author. The winner here should ideally write something more glaringly insane than 'serious' posters..... but we must be probably prepared to waive such a condition on account of its setting the bar way too high .... You must, however, get at least one 'serious' or 'real' poster to agree with you.

Any takers?

A real call to arms.....

Up until this very morning I had thought that my favourite Wikipedia article was the entry on the neenish tart, which wins this accolade for its public interest, accuracy and the obvious wealth of research that went into it (click on the one cited reference ... it's awesome).

After reading the latest xkcd, however, I have another one. That no-one on the talk page appears to notice the obvious, if unintended, satirical humour in the fact that the pre-amble has tags stating that "This article may require cleanup to meet Wikipedia's quality standards" and that "All or part of this article may be confusing or unclear" is itself, I think, note-worthy (although, I really must tip my virtual hat at whoever left the "It seems to me that the added publicity won't hurt this article -- in fact, nearly any edit to it will have no choice but to improve it. For example, the entire "Logocentrism" section could be replaced by "PENIS PENIS PENIS LOL" and it would greatly improve the overall clarity." comment)

What really brings a sense of sorrow to my heart as regards this article, however, is how disappointing the history section is. I was rather hoping that a "find: 'vandal' " type search would reveal a little more than it actually did. To be sure, there have been some noble efforts¹..... only not, I feel, nearly enough. For the most part, the 'vandalism' history appears mostly to refer to people trying to link to the xkcd comic in question, or something similar.

And then I thought to myself, well, that something can be done about this.... and, damn it, we're the people to do it. We have but to take the energy we put into our chalking war on that retarded 'we killed god: you don't care' campaign by these people and combine it with both our prior wiki-vandalism cunning and the fact that it's really, really hard for wikipedia to ban ip addresses that correspond to entire frickin' universities. What say you, dear reader? Shall we fuck this page up or what? I dream of a day when it becomes untenable for wikipedia to maintain a 'deconstruction' page consisting of anything more than a brief entry such as:

Deconstruction is a term used in contemporary literary criticism, philosophy, and the social sciences. Originally coined by Jacques Derrida, he apparently took the actual meaning of the word with him to the grave.

A single tear makes its way down my cheek as a contemplate the possibility that my blog may now become a force for good in this world.

¹Others .... not so noble, exactly, but cheers Gemma just the same. And who are 'we' to talk here, anyways (I'm talking to you, here Martin)

An elaborate form of petty theft

People who know me know that I have various modest goals in life. I'd like to be the first person to circum-navigate the moon on a pogo stick. I'd like to beat Gary Kasparov at a game of Battleship.¹ I'd like to actually finish reading Don Quixote. I'd like to organise for Kevin Andrews to be made a contestant on the next episode of Survivor: Africa and, further down the line, I'd like to take that stab at world domination - preferrably in a manner involving an elaborate extortion scheme and a death-ray in space. These are all long-term goals, but in the mean-time I think it'd be cool to be able to steal people's wallets by hypnotism. This last goal, apparently, is eminently achieveable. All manner of further hijinks can be found by typing in "Derren Brown" to Youtube. Apparently he has a show on UK tv.

¹ I don't know if anyone got this reference to a scene from Bill and Ted's Bogus Journey parodying a scene from The Seventh Seal, but I totally dug it.