Thinking Unenslaved

It’s the last Wednesday of the month, which means we’re holding a small contest for blog submissions on the topics noted below. This month is a little different, in that I’ll be going to be soliciting some of the big-name atheist, humanist, secularist, and/or liberal bloggers for permission to reference some of their material. Where relevant, each segment of the show will lead off with such content.

In addition to those authors, our panel will read (excerpts of) the entries aloud and discuss (no, not necessarily eviscerate if we don’t agree) them on the air in our Round Table format. We’ll choose one or two recent blog posts from each of the following categories:

Submission Categories:

1. Atheism or Agnosticism (note the change from last month)
2. (Secular) Humanism
3. Religion
4. Sociology
5. Philosophy

Minimum Requirements for Consideration:

1. Article is “recent” (within the past three months ~ exception might be made in deference to kick-ass authorship)
2. Article is comprised of at least 600 words
3. Article contents contain at least 75% unquoted content

Pretty simple, huh?

Authors of the selected articles will be asked to come on the show for a brief interview and to read and discuss their articles. Show participation is not mandatory. There is no monetary award for being chosen.

Submission Guidelines and Deadline:

1. Submit link(s) to blog post(s) in the comments below
2. Maximum of 5 links per contestant
3. Deadline is 10pm EDT April 26, 2011.
4. Selections will be announced by 10am EDT on April 27, 2011 via unenslaved.com and @Synthaetica (twitter).

Join us Wednesday, April 27, 2011 at 10pm EDT for some unique and dynamic show content from great authors around the Internet!

I want to thank all our contributors and co-hosts for a great show last night. The content selected was wonderful, and sparked some great discussions. We even managed to gang up a little bit on Zach, but we still love him, and as usual, the conversation was diverse even between a bunch of people who basically agree.

So, that means it’s linky-link time!

Me and The Gang:

• Dawnne Gee ~ @Synthaetica | Until Again | un:enslaved
• Kile Jones ~ {no twitter, sniff} | Kile Jones | State of Formation (contributor)
• Paul Fidalgo ~ @PaulFidalgo | Near Earth Object | music
• Zach Garland ~ @Zachsmind | ~vyou | ~blogspot

Guest Callers:

• Guy ~ @TheGuyGD / @AtheistsStudio
• Packard ~ @PackardSonic

Selected Articles:

I’ve created gawd.us links to these, which are the same as bit.ly links, by the way. That way I can give you guys “metrics” on the “tremendous clickthroughs” you’ll get from being linked here….

1. @TheGuyGD ~ Watson Vs. House M.D.
2. @PackardSonic ~ Mooove it right along
3. @PaulFidalgo ~ Un-Americanizing Atheists
4. @JenTheHumanist ~ Humanism Does not equal Atheism
5. @rnistuk ~ What to do with the Religion Sized Hole in Your Life when You Become an Atheist…
6. @Pribbzilla ~ Let’s begin this conversation

The March Blog Party Episode is below (this is really the “most recent” episode player ~ they don’t make one for each episode):

It’s the last Wednesday of the month, which means we’re holding a small contest for blog submissions on the topics noted below. Our panel will read (excerpts of) the entries aloud and discuss (no, not necessarily eviscerate if we don’t agree) them on the air in our Round Table format. We’ll choose up to three recent blog post from each of the following categories:

Submission Categories:

1. Atheism (note: this category is not open to Agnosticism)
2. (Secular) Humanism
3. Religion
4. Sociology
5. Philosophy

Minimum Requirements for Consideration:

1. Article is “recent” (within the past three months ~ exception might be made in deference to kick-ass authorship)
2. Article is comprised of at least 600 words
3. Article contents contain at least 75% unquoted content

Pretty simple, huh?

Authors of the selected articles will be asked to come on the show for a brief interview and to read and discuss their articles. Show participation is not mandatory. There is no monetary award for being chosen.

Submission Guidelines and Deadline:

1. Submit link(s) to blog post(s) in the comments below
2. Maximum of 5 links per contestant
3. Deadline is 10pm EST on the day before the show airs.
4. Selections will be announced by 10am EST on the show date via unenslaved.com and @Synthaetica (twitter).

Join us Wednesday, March 23, 2011 at 10pm EST for some unique and dynamic show content from great authors around the Internet!

On next Wednesday’s segment of Thinking Unenslaved, I’m holding a small contest for blog submissions on the topics noted below. Our panel will read the entries aloud and discuss (no, not necessarily eviscerate if we don’t agree) them on the air in our Round Table format. We’ll choose one (possibly two if it’s too close to decide) recent blog post from the following categories:

Submission Categories:

• Atheism (note: this category is not open to Agnosticism)
• (Secular) Humanism
• Religion
• Sociology
• Philosophy

Minimum Requirements for Consideration:

• Article is “recent” (December 1, 2010 or later ~ exception might be made in deference to kick-ass authorship)
• Article is comprised of at least 600 words
• Article contents contain at least 75% unquoted content

Pretty simple, huh? Authors of the blogs chosen will be asked to come on the show. Show participation is not mandatory. There is no monetary award for being chosen. Submission Guidelines and Deadline:

• Submit link(s) to blog post(s) in the comments on the Segment Website
• Maximum of 5 links per contestant
• Deadline Tuesday, February 22, 2011 at 10pm EST.
• Selections will be announced Wednesday, February 23, 2011 by 10am EST.

Join us Wednesday night for some unique and dynamic show content

Greetings, twitterholics, blogheads, twittervillains, and blogophiles!

O, was that redundant? O well….

On next Wednesday’s segment of Thinking Unenslaved, I’m holding a small contest for blog submissions on the topics noted below. Our panel will read the entries aloud and discuss (no, not necessarily eviscerate if we don’t agree) them on the air in our Round Table format. We’ll choose one (possibly two if it’s too close to decide) recent blog post from the following categories:

Submission Categories:

1. Atheism (note: this category is not open to Agnosticism)
2. (Secular) Humanism
3. Religion
4. Sociology
5. Philosophy

Minimum Requirements for Consideration:

1. Article is “recent” (December 1, 2010 or later ~ exception might be made in deference to kick-ass authorship)
2. Article is comprised of at least 600 words
3. Article contents contain at least 75% unquoted content

Pretty simple, huh?

Authors of the blogs chosen will be asked to come on the show. Show participation is not mandatory. There is no monetary award for being chosen.

Submission Guidelines and Deadline:

1. Submit link(s) to blog post(s) in the comments below
2. Maximum of 5 links per contestant
3. Deadline Tuesday, February 22, 2011 at 10pm EST.
4. Selections will be announced Wednesday, February 23, 2011 by 10am EST.

I believe it is relatively clear that our European allies, especially Great Britain, live in more secular societies than we do here in America. Especially where Great Britain is concerned, there’s a significant amount of irony involved in such progressivism: our founding families fled such places because of religious oppression at great personal risk, and a couple of hundred years later elements of our own government desire a steadfast adherence to religious edicts, and already have systems in place by which non-Christian business and organizations are disallowed participation in certain government-sanctioned areas of business. It’s ironic, and of course from my perspective, it’s considerably depressing. I believe the story of the American Revolution—pretty much all the stories of the American Revolution, in fact—is a grand tale of personal commitment, courage in the face of imminent threat, and indeed, the fundamental precepts of honor, perseverance, and integrity.

Of those, it is integrity which bothers me in this seemingly continual struggle for religious domination of our government. For the desire for religious domination is promoted as Americanism when it is, in fact, one of the most extreme of un-American acts that can be perpetrated on the populace outside of mass murder. The lack of self-integrity that it constitutes is also troubling for me, because the individuals who promote the redefinition of America as a “Christian Nation” are those who set themselves as examples of good behavior to the rest of us. Setting aside the fact that dogmatic belief in biblical stories is a nefarious form of delusion (and self-delusion, to boot), they cherry-pick their own religious doctrine in the attempt to make their desires real.

I once considered running for a local political office. After two days of discussions with local Party officials, I was finally contacted by the State Democratic Party and told in no uncertain terms that they would not support me as long as I refused to attend church. In other words, unless I was willing to violate my sense of self-integrity, I wasn’t a solid enough candidate in their minds to support. I lacked the personal funds (and the time, to be honest), to aggressively compete against the individual who sponsored the anti-abortion legislation that was so controversial on the national circuit (South Dakota’s Proposition 6), and even though the state party abhorred both the policy and the man, they simply weren’t willing to fight him from the opposite religious extreme. And as an already-established dynamic member of my community, heaven forbid that I would have brought some logic, critical thinking, and personal insight to the matter (the personal insight being that I was adopted and had a child placed for adoption and was in contact with my daughter from a previous relationship, whom i didn’t get to raise).

While I found this personally offensive, the concept wasn’t hard to understand. Even a cursory view of politics today shows how intrinsically it is tied to religion. Political candidates take great pride, it seems, in opportunities to speak at churches, and are generally careful to show themselves as supposedly-honorable members of their religious communities. Beyond that, in many locations, voting is done at the local church, although I don’t protest this too much, for in many small communities, the local church also serves as the community center, and hosting elections there is a more than just a matter of convenience or even preference. And yet, as a self-proclaimed agnostic atheist (I don’t view atheism as a religion, in other words, nor do “practice” atheism dogmatically), one of the things that I wish candidates wouldn’t do is pander to this presumed need. There are, after all, over 30,000 separate Christian denominations in the world. Pandering to one offends another, and I think, shows a that a supposed leader is incapable to effectively lead, resorting instead to the appearance of conformance to a relative minority of the voting public.

If candidates approached this issue logically, I don’t think they’d stoop to the church-hosted photo-ops. To the critical-thinking crowd (many of whom, in certain terms, actually exist in the religious crowd, too), the demonstration of a limited world-view, a relatively intolerant mindset, and a dependency on rote superstition should be quite unattractive. As well, the explicit deference to a minority (and active, participating Christians ARE a minority in this country) should be no more acceptable to the logical mind than the undue influence by any other political lobby. And the critical-thinking crowd shouldn’t be afraid to ask pointed questions to their candidates. Why should we allow such candidates to lead us? Why must we invest our own forms of faith in the good behavior and ethical conduct of those who show, time and time again, the willingness to defer to delusional thinking? Should we ever have to define the “best” candidate in terms of the admirable qualities that they lack? In many ways, those are unfortunately rhetorical questions. The status quo, after all, is a difficult thing to circumvent, let alone redefine. But I fear that if we do not manage to do some day, that even under progressive or liberal control, we will find ourselves living in a Christian State, rife with intolerance and dedicated on converting the world. And when that day comes, we will have no one to blame but ourselves.

And to bring this back to the title, the real problem with this is basically just visual. On the left side of the political aisle, you know these aren’t the types of people hell-bent on changing the Constitution to make this a Christian Nation, or even personally dedicated to “saving” all the people of the world. But as such, the very appearance of their deference to these ideals, the very appearance that they take the teachings of their religions seriously, creates a logical disconnect from which it is almost impossible for the likes of me to step aside. I respect and even admire their personal faith, but the mere appearance of a need to even make religion an issue in today’s world is simply silly to me. Even when I was a steadfast, devout conservative Christian (yes, I was, once upon a time), I still had many questions and problems voting for candidates whom I didn’t think I could trust to uphold our rights and protect our freedoms simply on the basis of our citizenship, which is exactly how it’s supposed to be.

Technorati Tags:
1. blog against theocracy
2. anti-theocracy
3. religious hegemony
4. separation of church and state

cross-posted to Mock, Paper, Scissors under my other pseudonym, “commander other”. coming up next: Easter celebrations in the otherwhirled!

i had three posts in the works for the March 19 Blogswarm, and as it happened, i neglected to have them saved in the WordPress database. thanks to some beta software on this computer, when i hybernated the computer because three realtors were bringing prospective buyers through our house yesterday (one of whom didn’t call first like he’s supposed to, no less), the system didn’t wake up. the resulting hard reboot lost me a bout two hours of blog-work. go figure. i ALWAYS save drafts, or draft in a text editor. but not yesterday (or night before last, for that matter). i think this whole selling-the-house-and-preparing-to-move shin-dig has me pretty scattered. never a dull freakin’ moment, anyway.

i feel compelled, though, to follow up with some notes on the day, because as inferred yesterday, the current Iraq war hits a bit close to home for me as a Gulf War veteran. not that i think my personal considerations on it are any more important or dynamic than those who have served or are serving in the current war, but that i had given my word to support the blogswarm endeavor, and failed to adequately do so. the chagrin-meter leans heavily to the right.

so naturally, when the realtors were done traipsing through the house and not giving us an offer immediately, and when the children were finally tucked into bed, and after i’d finished up some client work, i at least managed to get out and do some reading. one of the things that quickly struck me was that {insert almost any other blogger’s online identity or blog name here} writes better than me, and i’m not just talking about the presumably-appropriate use of capital letters. i still had a lot of what i’d written in my head, and i could have theoretically replicated my previous efforts, but after an hour or so of reading, i realized how redundant that would have been. great minds think alike after all, although putting myself in their company is probably a bit dishonest. so instead, on the off-chance that you might have missed some of these fine posts, allow me to serve you by including a brief synposis and link to their thoughts, witticisms and insights.

some notes from my overnight readings

The premier liberal/progressive blogging event of the year is just EIGHT SHORT DAYS AWAY! If you’re interested in participating, catch the details over at BlueGal’s site or at the blogswarm’s blog. And if you haven’t already, make sure you bookmark the Blog Against Theocracy website so you can easily stay in tune with the swarm throughout the event (and after!)

The logo above is provided courtesy of Tengrain at Mock, Paper, Scissors. He also has a presized “sidebar” version for your convenience. Tengrain reminds us:

The theme, like always, is the Separation of Church and State — we are for it. But the variations on the theme are many, and we scored the widest range of responses. This is not a bashing of religion – peeps can believe what they choose, however they choose — but it is a reminder that the Government should keep out of religion, and Religion should keep out of the government. A great resource for ideas can be found at our good friends, First Freedom First. Many of you know FFF already. They are not sponsors of the Blog Against Theocracy swarm, but they should be beneficiaries.

I will go one step further to point out that the anti-theocratic movement is one point of agreement between atheists, agnostics, humanists, and persons of various religious beliefs, all of whom recognize and appreciate the need for government’s firm separation from specific religious doctrine and preferential treatment. Not only do I firmly support the premise that this blogswarm is not about bashing religion, but I hope to see a strong community grow out of this endeavor over the years: A global community of like-minded critical thinkers who can respectfully, but adamantly, argue against the practice of inserting any form of preferential treatment for any religious belief into our governments.

I will be participating in the blogswarm from the otherwhirled with my usual image-based snarkery (because it’s okay to be snarky about this, provided the snark isn’t meaningless or antagonistic), from perpetual dawnne (with some real-live bona-fide actual thoughts written down and stuff that I’m already working on because it takes me that long to write meaningful stuff), and I am also hoping to participate photographically from Synthaetica Digitography (because, seriously, why do anything but blog? blogging is all there is! blog!!! blog!!!) Some of my contributions will be cross-posted to Mock, Paper, Scissors, but I am also hoping to write at least one unique thing for the mighty SCISSORHEADS.

I hope that you all will make some time to participate and read the many insightful posts that the swarm will have. You’re welcome to use the button below to subscribe to the blogswarm’s feed!

(cross-posted to the otherwhirled and Synthaetica Digitography)

…or not…

that some basic things have changed over at the otherwhirled—that other meta-incarnation of Dawnne that keeps him from going crazy.

as a result of coming out of the closet in terms of my atheism over there, some things are going to change over here, just probably not at the same level. one reason for the difference between the two is that functionally, in my personal life, my agnostic atheism is of no tangible import. in other words, between myself and my family, who share my worldview, it’s “eh, big deal”, and rarely ever discussed.

on the other hand, my agnostic atheism is exactly what drives my quest—my philosophical investigation, in truth—for better self-understanding. and that’s largely because i recognize the need for self-understanding before one can feasibly attempt to understand others. but you could also exchange the word “philosophical” above for “spiritual”, and that sentence would basically read the same, in my eyes.

and i’m tired of not including that quest here. it has only partly been because of the inherent juxtaposition between time allocated to blogging and time allocated to work. but the reality is, my work life isn’t very likely to get any less time-consuming within the next decade or more, so i might as well just schedule some time in and devote it accordingly.

which, i have done.

the snarkery side of it will remain on the otherwhirled, but given the diverse readership and the gross amount of visitors on the otherwhirled compared to perpetual dawnne, the otherwhirled was the proper place for a formal announcement of the matter. however, as i begin sharing my path to this point, such posts will be here on perpetual dawnne, because of their relevance to who i am, and their general lack of cathartic expression.

make sense? i hope so.

i imagine, because of the depth of time involved (a near-eternity in comparison to her normal communications when i have managed to contrive a what-the-fuck moment), that i have managed to offend at least one long-time reader and friend of these blogs. sadly, all i can offer in that regard: please try to think beyond what you’ve accepted as truth, because you know there’s little basis for it as “truth”.

seriously.

but i will continue to love, admire, and respect you regardless of how you ingest what i wrote over there.

SEO principles have long reminded us that blogrolling doesn’t parse well for search engines, which have conveniently been configured to ignore blogrolls. The code which WordPress, Blogger, Typepad, et al use to generate blogrolls automatically gets ignored by spiders. That’s why, whenever i add someone to my blogroll, i try to do a couple of things:

1. announce it. you saw me do that yesterday. announcing it ensures that your expression of endorsement, friendship, commonality, or whatever, is made visible to spiders.
2. click it. providing a link isn’t enough. if you want that link to show up in that blogger’s statistics, clicking the link you just made is essential. the spiders may eventually discover the link you provided in your post about blogrolling said blogger, but that can be up to three-to-four weeks later. after someone else has clicked the link in your blogroll. repeatedly. faithfully, even.

one thing that spiders do recognize is link titles. link titles are a handy way to increase the visibility of your site through your blogroll, and to increase the visibility of those whom you blogroll. link titles are a win-win for everyone involved. WordPress’ blogroll system, for example, uses a “Description” field that is rendered as link titles in the blogroll. what i do when i blogroll someone is use their blog’s tagline as their blogroll description. this results in very nice links in this particular theme, which provides a specially-formatted popup for link titles. so, if for example, your blog has a tagline of “i like to eat live chickens”, anyone who does a search on “eat live chickens” will find not only you, but by association, me—provided, of course, that the link from me to you is clicked on.

intrigued? want to learn more, but your index finger holds you back? click it with your other hand!

Sundays, if you were not aware, are the days I set aside for “blog maintenance”. I don’t usually post on Sundays, but I did happen to notice a few photographs that I couldn’t resist today, so I went ahead and posted a few. At any rate, Sundays are the days when I typically run plugin updates, wordpress updates, and occasionally even go into the server configurations and make sure everything’s running smoothly. Besides my own four blogs, I also manage a few others, and the plugin updates alone would take too much time to do piecemeal. For those interested, the following are a list of the main plugins that I use on all the blogs I manage, and thus find incredibly helpful, in order of what I perceive to be their helpfulness:

1. Cforms II (runs all contact and comment forms on all my blogs)
2. NextGen Gallery (less so here than on my other blogs)
3. Shutter Reloaded (less so here than on my other blogs)
4. All in One SEO Pack
5. Global Plugin Update Notice
6. Google XML Sitemaps
7. KB Robots.txt
8. Simple Tags

Those are by no means all the plugins I use, but they’re in use on each of my blogs, and I think my blog-work would be far more difficult than it has to be without them. I will say this, however: I wish that some of the plugin developers would be a little more conscientious about update frequency. One of the plugins up there has been updated three times in seven days.

Now, on to more fun stuff. Sundays are also the days I set aside for checking out new things. Quite often on Sundays, I’ve got one computer tied up sending out print orders to my print lab, so I might as well do something useful and try to expand my horizons. Of course, the problem with an ever-increasing blogroll is the amount of time it takes to go through it each day, but I don’t mind, really. Doing what I do for a living, I quite often have one or more computers running a batch or upload process, so I might as well do something that’s relatively intellectually stimulating.

So, here are some new additions to my blogroll:

1. Little Bang Theory ~ okay, this is actually not a new stop on my blogroll, but i had screwed up my RSS feed to his blog and fixed it a couple of days ago, and i’m thoroughly enjoying reading his posts
2. The Nefarious Lair of LGPPP, Inc. ~ i really don’t know how i missed blogrolling Dr. Zaius’s better half running mate.
3. Blue Gal ~ i was honored to have received a link through her blog last night and immediately put Blue Gal on the blogroll. thank you, Blue Gal. you’re one of my favorite reads, and probably my biggest blogging inspiration.
4. Yikes! ~ great posts and commentary. i love it when i “discover” something that’s been around far longer than my blogs!
5. Bay of Fundie ~ i think Ron Britton may well be Bing McGhandi’s long-lost twin.
6. One Pissed Off Veteran ~ i’ve subscribed to his feed since the last Blogswarm Against Theocracy. Dunno why
   i hadn’t linked to him before now. maybe it’s because i’m actually quite stupid.

And that’s sadly all I could do today. With our house on the market, you never know when some realtor is going to call, and naturally, one just did! I’ll be SO happy when this crap is done with.

UPDATE: two more added. one has been in my google reader since google reader came out. however, since so many things are in my google reader, it all begins to blur sometimes. i actually just asked the guy which blog was his. gah. somebody please buy my damn house. i’m tired of being this scatter-brained.

1. Neural Gourmet ~ excellent brain food, even for the brain-weary like me.
2. Carnival of the Liberals ~ i will be hosting the June 4 edition. haven’t determined a theme yet.

i am updating several plugins this morning across the seven blogs i manage. comments may be disrupted by my doing so, because the new version of cforms ii (see link in the footer) no longer requires hand-coded integration with the wp core files, and i may have to back out the existing hand-coded integration code and such. just bear with me, please!

{update 2/15 9:45} it appears that the resident quality tester can never get away from testing things. indeedy, there was a bug in upgrading the forms processor, but i have got it fixed now. whoo-hoo! and it’s even faster! wheeeeeeeee…..

photo credit: Cake Dots’ Wedding Cake, Ltd, Columbus, OH.

…just for your birthday, Freida Bee! Here’s hoping your…er…29th…birthday is the creamiest, most-deliciously finger-lickin’-good bestish birthday ever!

Go visit the party everyone!

h/t to Dr. Zaius

what? you expected me to use a different cake image?

commander other was pleased to discover that he is not the only individual possessed of schizoblogophrenia. well, that’s not exactly accurate. i knew that Romius T had a couple or three blogs, but what i discovered was that he had linked to me from Bathos for the Misanthropic as well as his Self Help Center. the name alone is worth linkage, in my humble opinion, but his writings are entertaining, informative, and just plain fun. so, welcome to the blogroll again, Romius! and of course, i encourage you to blogroll and read your favorite Romius identity as well!

…Super Tuesdays around the globe, Commander Other will now proceed to point out to the Washington Post that using Flash to “protect” your images, a) is but a minor annoyance, b) doesn’t really work (even for those who don’t have the CS3 Master Suite), and c) is a stupid thing to do to people who would properly cite attribution..

a little bird in the comments informs me that i got blogrolled at Stringer, and sure enough, i went over there and what did i find? a pretty nice blog from “down under” that i am blogrolling from both the otherwhirled and perpetual dawnne. thanks for coming by today, Stringer.

well, actually, thanks for coming by tomorrow, Stringer, it already being well into Wednesday in your part of the world and all….

says she: “I work for a daily newspaper here in Australia. I’m gay, left of centre, like conversation, smart women, long legs and TimTams. Smart men are good too, although I don’t really care about their long legs.”

methinks Stringer might find a friend in Cap’n Dyke.

apparently, i got jammed today.

what i mean by that is that someone named “C.J.” (hrm….i wonder what C.J. stands for….), who is “just a small town girl living in a lonely world”, over at Current Jam blogrolled me today. i went and visited C.J.’s site and found it an enjoyable read. a nice mix of commentary and music, even. Current Jam is definitely worth spreading around.

so, uh…feel free to do so!

i seem to get more hits when i don’t post. so, obviously, i felt it prudent to post about this subject so as not to get too many hits.

of course, if i really cared about hits on the inside, i wouldn’t blog. some of my friends mention off-hand how many hundreds of hits they’ve had on some days, and all i can do is chuckle at my consistently-less-than-a-hundred-per-day.

but i still find it funny that i get more hits on a day like today: today being the day after a day on which i didn’t post.

conversely, until i met Mrs. Other, i always managed to attract the weird ones, so it shouldn’t be surprising that i continue to do so.

~~~

i am typing to you today from a new computer (about which i should theoretically be happy, but i’m not, because i’m an ungrateful bastard), sitting in an office in a house we are now trying to sell. i detail the gory details of the details here. sorry, after watching the past several primary thingies, i figured some intentional redundancy would be redundantly redundant, so i got all redundant about it. anyway, in a fit of temper this morning, i even compiled a short list of my fine art work that was taken on or from this property. because even though i’m starting to get caught up in Mrs. Other’s excitement about the move and her new job and all that, the very idea of moving again is about as thrilling to me as slowly inserting a corkscrew into my frontal lobe while listening to republican campaign speeches and standing on a fire-ant hill with honey spread all over my genetalia.

on the plus side, however, i got a new computer, i guess.

i am now looking at some of these photographs — especially the bulk of them from off Yahoo! News, and i can’t help but think to myself that holy shit, these bucking fastards seriously need to bump the resolution on the photos they make available for public consumption. gah.

but fairlane, DCup, if you thought Chuck Norris’ hairpiece was intolerable on whatever monitor you’re using, you should see how it looks on a 30″ widescreen. holy crap. actually, in this detail, i have a sneaking suspicion it’s just a bad haircut, but still….he goes out in public. kinda scary.

~~~

at any rate, there will be light posting here for a bit. i have more software to get installed, calibrations to run, data to transfer, and, well, a house to sell. which means that i should occasionally have to disappear whenever a realtor has someone to bring over, and we all know that will only happen at the most inconvenient times. i’ll be sure to leave select blogs open on the monitors (five of them) when they do.

at least, so long as they don’t impede any would-be buyers. it’s not exactly like the grand central station of progressive thought out here….

~d~

…that you hadn’t noticed, the transition to BlueHost, as mentioned here, is finally complete on this domain and dawnne.com. i refrained from posting yesterday during the DNS transfer, much to my chagrin, given the happenings in New Hampshire. some minor tweaking will be done throughout the site over the next several days. i just replaced a bunch of images i had forgotten to pull over during the interim between when i started this and finally managed to get done, for example. i have to make a new post template, but that’s not a big deal.

with moving eleven domains to BlueHost, i’m now fairly well versed in content migration, especially where WordPress is concerned. if you need some help with that kind of thing, hit me up. also, if you’re thinking of moving to a service like BlueHost, talk to me, and if you decide on BlueHost, use the link over there on the left. doing so would help keep commander other blogging! okay, so it’s like the only thing i’m going to pimp.

and yes, i used that graphic, because she’s got pretty eyes. click her! click her! BUY NOW!!!!

The folks at First Freedom First (they’ve been ad-linked from my sidebar almost since the beginning) have some powerful new advertisements out, posing some interesting questions to be considered during this election cycle. I include a couple below, because I think they’re both worthy of listening to.

Here are some of the questions FFF believes we should be asking candidates when they come to our areas. These are just suggestions, of course.

Here are suggested questions that you can use at Town Hall meetings or other locations where candidates for office will be gathering. You can copy and paste them into an email message to the candidates. Or, use these as suggestions to help formulate your own questions to candidates, to find out their views on safeguarding separation of church and state and protecting religious liberty.

1. Leaders on the religious right often say that America is a “Christian Nation.” Do you agree with this statement?
2. Do you think Houses of Worship should be allowed to endorse political candidates and retain their tax exempt status?
3. Do you think public schools should sponsor school prayer or, as a parent, should this choice be left to me?
4. Would you support a law that mandates teaching creationism in my child’s public school science classes?
5. Do you think my pharmacist should be allowed to deny me doctor-prescribed medications based on his or her religious beliefs?
6. Will you respect the rights of those in our diverse communities of faith who deem same-gender marriage to be consistent with their religious creed?
7. Should “faith-based” charities that receive public funds be allowed to discriminate against employees or applicants based on religious beliefs?
8. Do you think one’s right to disbelieve in God is protected by the same laws that protect someone else’s right to believe?
9. Do you think everyone’s religious freedom needs to be protected by what Thomas Jefferson called “a wall of separation” between church and state?
10. What should guide our policies on public health and medical research: science or religion?

Questions that I might ask:

1. Status Quo is often cited by the religious right as a reason for continuing the nation’s “business as usual”. Would you support the “Status Quo” after the example of the current administration, even when “business as usual” over the past seven years has proven harmful to our economy?
2. Our nation is comprised of many peoples, religions and creeds. Do you feel that politicians should be allowed to campaign on specific religious issues and promote specific religious platforms while continuing to draw benefits from the government (security details, etc) while campaigning?
3. Do you believe that when a veteran’s service is over, the government’s responsibility to the veteran ends, or do you believe that the government shares an ongoing obligation to veterans to provide qualified health care and psychological services to all veterans with no strings attached?

So, as the videos say, “What Would You Ask”? If you have a blog, please include one or more of these videos on it and ask your readers this question. If you don’t have a blog, feel free to ask your questions in the comments. And naturally, I encourage you all to visit the First Freedom Foundation and sign their petition in support of the separation of Church and State and religion liberty.

(as in “soon”, as in “starting with the next post”), i will be using some different sources of “snarkography” for my posts. while this is not exactly momentous or anything, i have never really been thrilled with the size of images provided on Yahoo! news, nor with the limited selection. so, i’m no longer limiting myself.

okay, that was highly informative, i’m sure. carry on!

…i have been on temporary hiatus due to preparations for a move and the fact that my new provider has not yet been able to respond to my support ticket for getting this blog imported at the new location, which also adversely affects the move of synthaetica.com and the draft of our business site. there has been very much i have wanted to snarkerize, but i’ve been partly trying to balance out duplicating the work between two installations of the same blog (the last time i tried importing it on the new system, it stopped at October 1), and there’s a lot of clean-up work for us to do before we drag a realtor out here to see what we need to do to this house before we put it on the market. we’re not the messiest people in the world by a long shot, but we’re not exactly neat-freaks either. and Mrs. Other and both the Otherlings were apparently remarkably proficient pack-rats in previous incarnations.

anyway, i guess since filing a support ticket during the middle of the holidays was a bad idea, i’ll just continue on here. there’s a lot of crap to do today, but i’ll try to get some good snarkery up later tonight. it would certainly be good stress-relief.

be careful out there, ‘mong the English (i don’t know why i just thought of that line from ‘The Witness’. i suppose i should actually take offense at it since i’m Scotts-Irish).

….i’m just waiting to see if a support ticket with my new provider, regarding the failed imports of the contents of this blog into the location of its next incarnation, will be rectified in the near term. elsewise, you’d've already been redirected to the new digs (with a fancy-shmancy new theme, i might add). in the meantime, be patient. i’m trying to be. but as mentioned here, i may just do it the database way and have done with it, at which point or shortly thereafter, you’d already be at the new digs, anyway….

In the extreme off-chance that you were not aware, presidential super-contenders Dr. Monkey von Monkerstein and Dr. Zaius have joined forces to present the Zaius and Monkerstein’s Simian Secret Santa project. The interesting thing about this project is that you don’t have to be a simian to sign up for it! Even Homo Sapiens are allowed to participate!

So, what are you doing here? Go participate!

And whatever you do, don’t click on the sexy Santa here. Don’t do it! NOOOOO!!!!

geez, that was almost painless

if the feedburner feeds do not automatically revive themselves after i get the theme and plugins uploaded (i will also double-check it through feedburner), then if the few of you who subscribe to the feeds will let me know, i’d appreciate it. that seems to be all done correctly now, though.

i forgot that WordPress’s export/import process wouldn’t retain images. i’ll try to get the images back in. sadly, i didn’t do a very diligent job of ensuring that i kept images i uploaded to here all in one concise place. they’re probably not that big of a deal, but i’ll get that fixed a) if you ask to see one specifically, or b) if not having it up here just really bugs me.

i have to re-upload the one gallery i had up here and configure the gallery plugin. that can probably wait a bit, since you family members, according to my previous statistics, had pretty much looked at them all.

i’ve got to reconstitute my blogroll and tweak the sidebar as well, so for those of you who were on it, i apologize for the sudden lack of linkage. i’ll get that fixed next, while i’m batching out some client photos.

if you’re wondering, i changed hosting to bluehost.com, one of the most reputable national hosting systems available. i found very few negative reviews, and their price is literally a fraction of what i’m being charged from my local host. i do think i should make it clear, however (and not just because they might be reading this), that i greatly appreciate my local provider (see the footer of the otherwhirled for details). i have learned a lot from them and have appreciated the efforts of especially one individual there (Isaac). the bottom line here is, frankly money. money, and the fact that support, while effective, is often rather slow. bluehost’s system is so comprehensive that in many ways the need for active, personal support is moot. i was able to get dawnne.com transferred and running, setup with email, ftp, and statistics, over here without talking to anyone. and the few questions i had before signing up were answered within 30 minutes in person, via telephone, in response to questions from a guy who pretended like he couldn’t read a website, no less. very impressive.

enough about that. moving on….

well, i’ve got to do some work for a bit.