With that in mind, I'm posting now to explain that, if all goes well this evening, this blog will be converted to WordPress (so William and Ken can post comments). The practical importance of this is that those of you reading via RSS feeds will need to point to a new location. I'll attempt to keep the old links working via a symlinks, but given my modest technical abilities, if you see posting on this blog drop to zero, you might wanna check your feed, as it is very unlikely that I simply had nothing to say.

If, on the other hand, you've been looking for an excuse to drop my feed, now's your chance.

Why don't I simply use BugMeNot? Because it's a violation for me of a pretty simple and quite effective principle of effective and sustainable human interaction. They've got something I want, and they ask for something in return. If I don't want to give, I've no reasonable expectation that I should get. Why has this simple ethical principle, which is so usefully expected and honored in our face-to-face interactions, been so freely abandoned by such a large segment of the 'Net community?

Look, a little sheepish BugMeNotting is no huge deal. This isn't like genocide or something. But I'm frankly amazed at the brazen argument the BugMeNotters make (laid out in arrogant detail in a comment thread over at Poynter and in their own FAQ) - registration is bad - "waste of time," "annoying as hell," "breach of privacy." But rather than just walk away from the deal, they argue this justifies cheating.

That's a bad basis for sustainable human interaction.

Me: "Have you decided who to root for in The Series?"

Them: "Sox. For Jim."

They said it with a tone that suggested the choice was obvious, and needed no further explanation.

Our friend Jim is one of the best baseball fans I know, with a reverance for a good changeup and a great pick at second base. He's also from the south side of Chicago, a White Sox fan deep in his childhood, in his genes, from the days (do these days still exist?) when The Ballgame on the radio was the soundtrack of summer. This matters to him in ways that most of us could never understand.

When the Sox made the series, he began calling around, hunting for tickets. There were none to be had in Chicago for anything less than a second mortgage on the house. But he called me yesterday afternoon to tell me he'd scored a pair for tonight's game 4 in Houston.

I harbor no illusions about the baseball gods. They are not as one Almighty, choosing sides, that we might pray they choose Jim's. They're more like the Greek gods, squabbling and divisive. To watch a World Series is to watch their struggle play out.

Tonight, I will pray to those among the baseball gods who have seen Jim's worthiness lo these many years, who understand what it means to see him sitting field level, 13 rows back down the right field line.

When he told me where the seats are, he said, "Foul ball territory. I'll have to keep my head in the game." I've never known him to do anything else. Baseball gods, I beseech thee, in the name of thy loyal servant Jim.

Here's another I recently ran across (via Secretly Ironic, another good one) that I particularly admire: Team Moose and Squirrel.

(Updated 2: 22 p.m. to cure some horrid prose)

Other fun search strings in the logs include "dakota 3.9 firing order" - something to do with auto mechanics, as near as I can tell - and "clean dishwasher tang".

There is nothing wrong with doing this. All of us are entitled to have opinions on important public policy questions, and he should be thus praised for taking a stand. But he does it in a way that illustrates much that is wrong with political discourse. Here's my favorite recent example, on the blog of British climate researcher William Connolley:

Sorry to be candid, but as far as this debate goes, all of you are dishonest and intellectually limited political activists.

He's not alone in doing this. In fact, this is a style of rhetoric common to talk radio and the blogosphere, and represents a common way of thinking and talking about all sorts of political and policy debates. It's frankly intellectually lazy. It allows one to dismiss the arguments of one's opponents without ever having to take them seriously. But in any sufficiently interesting political or policy debate, as I discussed elsewhere recently, there are sincere and reasonable people on both sides.

That doesn't mean that some of your opponents aren't venal and stupid, and that you shouldn't call them on it. But if you don't recognize two other things, you're missing the boat. If you don't recognize the venal and stupid people on your own side of the debate, you're not paying sufficient attention, because they almost certainly are there. (Note to Lumo: you need to give Michael Crichton a closer read. Note to all those enthusiastic greenhouse gas reduction advocates who emailed me Ross Gelbspan's hurricane piece: You shouldn't be quite so attached to Gelbspan.) And if you aren't seeking out and trying to understand the reasonable people on the other side of the debate, you're not thinking the question through very well.

Just as a print of your fingerprints, palms, soles, and ears tell a story, so does your rump. The lines, crevices, and folds of your fanny.... can, to the trained eye, reveal your personality, fate, and future in luck and love.

In its richest manifestations, real life is truly funnier than The Onion.

Yes.

Years ago, at a seminar on investigative journalism, a veteran reporter suggested that the most underrated tool for digging out information is the phone book. Everyone's in there, more or less. For years I took that to heart. But lately Google has proven much more valuable for the same sort of thing.

But in my recuperation from knee surgery, I've needed a book of a certain heft. It has to be the right height to stand on, stepping up and down over and over to strengthen my quad.

Google can't do that.

book: Just finished Lee's Ferry: A Crossing on the Colorado, by Evelyn Brack Measeles. How to say this politely.... There are many times when I'm taken aback reading, thinking, "I wish I'd written that." This was not one of those occasions. But it did give a good overview of the basic facts of John D. Lee's establishment of the river crossing, with some fun stuff about the intersection of Lee's and John Wesley Powell's paths in 1872, when Powell was preparing for his second run through the Grand Canyon.

books: Been playing with Google Print, their digitized library project. There's clearly no way to read a book this way, but it seems a potentially useful research tool. Is there anything Google can't do? (Well, yes. More on this later.)

science: For a story I've been working on at work, yesterday I read the famous 1935 Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen paper. I am not a physicist, so it's not easy going. But, equations aside, the paper's central point is made with remarkable clarity. But there was this moment when I read one of the key paragraphs, and looked up at the author's name. Einstein wrote this. Shivers. From his brain to mine. Insanely cool.

Religion and art — A June 19 Opinion article said performance artist John Fleck received taxpayer money for a piece featuring a toilet with a picture of Jesus on its lid. The National Endowment for the Arts denied Fleck funding in 1990, and the Supreme Court upheld its decision in 1998.

My colleagues who are down here are warriors. There are a half-dozen of us living in a small house on a side street Uptown. Everyone else has been cleared out.

We have a generator and water and military C-rations and Doritos and smokes and booze. After deadline, the call goes out: "Anyone for some warm brown liquor?" and we sit on the porch in the very, very still of the night and we try to laugh.

Some of these guys lost their houses -- everything in them. But they're here, telling our city's story.

And they stink. We all stink. We stink together.

more reading: Global Water Resources: Vulnerability from Climate Change and Population Growth, from Science, July 2000. Its point is that, much like the discussions of hurricanes and climate change of late, it's growing human population, not global warming, that is the driving variable in understanding the potential future impacts of drought.

music: The Bonnie Raitt Collection. I've got this riff to write about Bonnie Raitt and Casablanca, and the nature of carefully executed craft. (It's one of those blog items I've thought through enough times on bike rides or while driving to work that I'm always amazed that I've never written it down.) Suffice it to say that I can always return to this album or that movie and never be disappointed. And if I were not happily married, I might chuck it all and follow Ms. Raitt from town to town, listening to her music and hoping against all hope to bump into her in the hotel lobby.

the bike: There is a simple pleasure in washing down the bikes.

code: It's never as simple as I think. I've run up against the IE/Win Unscrollable Content Bug. Must .... test .... more .... browsers....

As I was doing the dishes, a shaft of light from the setting sun shot through the back door, over the kitchen sink and into the pantry, illuminating for a brief but shining moment a jar of Solana Gold organic applesauce.

It was the return of Househenge.

I think we've got a new corporate slogan here: "Inkstain. Serving up weird cheap shit since, like, 1999 or something."