SMorg

http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/ Very cool site that dissects the daily verbal foibles of the media and those dependent upon it. Earlier today in a speech about his relationship with Louis Farrakhan, the leader of the Nation of Islam, at the National Press Club, Jeremiah Wright, the controversial pastor of the church that Barack Obama attends, said (transcript) (video): Louis Farrakhan is not my enemy. … Personally, I don’t think that there’s anything wrong with being black.

He clicks his BlogIt button and a page selector appears…he highlights the paragraph he wants (the software is looking for h1 and P tags or even a div) and within a moment his blog applet or program opens with the entire post ready to go. … Some of the tags that could be embedded than retrieved by reader browsers: license: (gpl, gnu, text, disallowed, attribute only, none, trackback) tags: (humor, politics, vomit, german shepard, ball bearings) cost: (free , $1, $5, lifetime, 90 days, full attribution with image and link in the top fold, etc.) description: Could be the posts summary, which could then be used as the intro on the second posts entry…) There are some obvious reasons this would be useful, but the most obvious to me is that we could get past the current situation wherein sites are plagiarized and mutilated for posting the same old crap from a press release and trying to ‘lighten it up a bit’ or put a sinister spin on the story.

This morning at work, we were listening to offensive things on the internet (as part of a websense install, I swear), and Allen mentioned there was a number you could call to get an ‘inspirational message’ from the KKK. Stupidness ensued and I intoned: “Thanks for calling the KKK. … We then realized that the Hispanic cleaning crew was outside the conference room.