Category Archives: Blog stuff

My dogs are sweet and also I have a Facebook page now for the blog

Primo was already in bed last night and I went to belly-scratch him one last time, when Firefly came climbing up all over everything, including Primo’s face. He grunted at her once and then put his head back down in defeat while she flung herself back there and settled in for a snuggle. Primo isn’t snuggly or cuddly but he’s definitely stoic, and generous with his bed.

…………

If you’re on Facebook, I’ve just created a this morning because I take a stupid amount of pics and have a stupid amount of shallow thoughts that aren’t worth actual blog posts and it’s crazy-easier to toss that stuff up there than here. I’m still trying to blog more because it’s fun and because most of the people who still read this blog, I consider friends so I don’t want to lose contact with you, and I know you don’t all have Facebook accounts. Again I write a sentence that I’m not sure makes sense to anyone but me. Derrr?

Anyway, if you want to come see me there, .

I’m not asking anyone to “Like” my page or “Follow” it or anything; I don’t care about numbers, I just want to have the community and the conversation, and it is vastly more easy to do that in the Facebook framework than it is with a blog, in my opinion. Over the last several years, I’ve reconnected with old friends and made new ones through FB that I never, ever could have found otherwise, and I’d like to get to know some of you better but it’s just really difficult with the blog. It’s harder to reply to comments here than there, for example. It’s harder to access my blog with my iPhone and iPad, even with the best apps, than it is to access Facebook. Etc, etc. The point is, the page is there if you’re interested. You can just bookmark it instead of “liking” or “following”.

And there will be a lot more dog pics there. I’ve just started the page today so there’s only one pic so far, of Firefly, but I have SO MANY IT IS STUPID.

And, I’ll probably post more about politics there for some reason, I don’t know, it just feels like less pressure to make FB comments than to construct entire blog posts about politics.

Primo is now on Instagram, and also, is tired.

I take a lot of pictures with my iPhone and iPad that I want to share but I don’t here because they take up a lot of bandwidth, and aren’t very good quality even by my mediocre standards, and also, they’re mostly of my dog Primo and no matter how charming he is, I don’t want to cram my blog full of him (until I get a decent new SLR camera). Also, I’m gonna be honest, it’s kind of a pain in the ass to upload/synch pics to my laptop, resize them, upload them to the blog and then think of a title for a post, just to show some snapshots of Primo at the park, or any other shenanigans I see around Turin.

You don’t have to create your own account to see the photos; you do have to in order to follow anyone, but that process is about as easy as it gets. Anyway, I only have about 5 pics there now, since I just have been testing it for a few hours.

Oh god this whole thing sounds so narcissistic, “blah blah, follow me on Instagram!” and I hate myself for it, but damn, I know 15-year-olds with Instagram feeds and it’s just fun. Mock all you want, I deserve it for something in any case so it’s all good karma.

I won’t stop posting pics of the magnificent Primo here, though. Here he is earlier today at Parco di Valentino, which has huge open areas of grass where everyone lets their dogs off-leash, and Primo loves it so much he can’t even stand himself. There’s also a fenced-in dedicated dog park there, but it’s solid dirt plus I’ve noticed that’s where the people who can’t control their dogs go. Which, good for them, but Primo and his little friends need more freedom and fewer out-of-control canine maniacs.

Here’s a sweet little one he met today, name I didn’t get, but they really enjoyed smelling each other’s butts. A lot. Like, human observers were starting to get uncomfortable. Then they sniffed and nuzzled each other’s heads for a while, again so much it was startling, even so much that the other dog’s ears got flipped back and that’s why I took a picture, because, really Primo? Do you need some private time with this one?

And here he is with his very favorite playmate, Sancho, who’s the same size but only 1 year old so Primo can’t keep up with him but that doesn’t stop him from trying.

Sancho!
Sancho!

He chased Sancho around like that nonstop for 20 minutes, with a tennis ball in his mouth the entire time, while barking. Have you heard a dog attempt to bark while running top speed with a tennis ball in his mouth for 20 straight minutes? The other owner and I laughed so much that we got cramps.

And then Primo finally got tired.

“What can you suggest in relation in your article that you pretty much made some days in the old days? Any certain?”

Alternate post title: Why I Love My Akismet Spam Filter.

Those of you with your own blogs already know about the hidden linguistic gems in a certain subset of spam comments. I’m not talking about obvious spam consisting of a link followed by “BUY CHEAP VIAGRA ONLINE” or the ones that are a nonsense string of letters and numbers, making you wonder if your spam folder has been designated as a CIA code-busting training tool. Here’s a screenshot from my spam folder this morning that showcases a nice sampling of that classic and predictable genre:

Whatever, boring. The only thing that interests me about that sort of spam, the kind that is obvious as rank spam from fifty miles away even if you’re drunk and brain-damaged, is that it exists. It is astonishing that somebody somewhere makes enough money producing that shit to make it worth their time to continue producing it. I’m genuinely curious: how does it pay off? Are there even more stupid humans on earth than are already accounted for? Wouldn’t an almost impossible number of bona fide grade-A brain-damaged mentally-deficient diagnosably-subliterate imbeciles have to click on those links to give them any value? I presume that’s how profit is made, because I presume there is paid advertising on the other end of that link, which I further presume takes you down a whole new maze of spammy horrors. I will never sleep well again if I let myself accept that there are that many stupid, stupid, stupid people in the world.

(I know there are. I’m trying to be in denial. HELP ME.)

Anyway. This post is about that extra-special type of blog spam that I’m almost grateful for because it’s so entertaining, so packed full of phrases that you could put on hipster t-shirts, making them even more stupid. It’s the spam designed to look like it’s from a real reader, if your real readers are (1) creepy, (2) not native speakers of your language and (3) use Google Translate to tell you how much they like your blog. This kind of spam is the primary reason my blog’s settings make all first-time commenters go straight to moderation. I feel bad when it snags nice normal new readers but let me show you why it’s necessary. Here are several that my Akismet filter caught this morning, all at exactly 12:54 a.m., all linking back to the same website, and each with a different fake email address and a different IP address.

The one I got this post title from is from the second page in my spam folder this morning; here’s a screen shot but these masterworks of over-reliance on Google Translate or some other horrifically bad auto-generator of human language really deserve the blockquote treatment:

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You have to wonder if the same people who craft those comments also do the signs for Japanese tea rooms. Finally, for reasons.

Forum!

It may or may not work out, because I’m not sold yet on the software, but I installed a Forums page today to see if it might be fun.

There are tons of things I have to say every day but I don’t want to make a whole blog post about them. I just kind of want to throw them up on Facebook or something, but then I remember that 99% of my Facebook friends hate politics, and even the ones that don’t hate politics have nothing to say, or they say something stupid. I can’t handle it anymore. I have to stay away from Facebook.

But the bigger reason I’ve been wanting a forum function is because I hate having to start every discussion myself, especially with the quality of the commenters around here, most of whom are funnier and smarter than me, and I would love it if some of you regular commenters could at-will start your own conversations without the concern of hijacking a comment thread or going off-topic or whatever.

I have no idea if anyone else is interested in this; maybe everyone who already comments wants to stick with just comments on posts. Fine with me but I want to try this. So if you’re interested, click on the FORUMS tab up at the top left and register (it’s just your name and email, same as comments) and play with it please. I’ve only created a few categories and threads so far but would be happy to add more if anyone wants.

I was just thinking it’d be fun to exchange food recipes, talk about daily-life stuff, and of course politics, without it all being on the front page of the blog. Less pressure but all the fun of talking to each other, you know? Also you can add photos and videos and stuff, which is more than you can do in comment threads.

Really am not sure if this is the Forum plugin I’ll stick with though. It’s the Mingle plugin, easy to install but I don’t love the way it looks – it’s confusing to see who’s written what, or to figure out how to find new threads or to create new ones, etc. I tried installing Simple:press because that’s supposed to be the best, but I could not make it work after 4 hours. I also tried BBpress this morning but it broke my site so I deleted it with extreme prejudice.

A grim, terrifying morning

Because I’m backing up, updating, upgrading, and changing the design theme on my blog.

I used to enjoy this process. I did it for other people, for free. Now, years of wrist damage and a few arthritic fingers later, spending this much time with a mouse makes me want to swan-dive into an active volcano.

Anyway, I’m doing it now while America sleeps so you wouldn’t think I got hacked (because there is zero doubt at some point today this page is going to look like roadkill), but if you do visit early in the morning, please forgive the mess.

In the meantime, I can’t stop listening to this song called “Little Talks”, which I know isn’t new but I only discovered it last month when I was in Virginia, driving around in the car with my 15-year-old niece and 24-year-old nephew, who both love it and told me I had to download it so I did and they were right. It makes me happy even though the lyrics are actually horribly depressing and make me really homesick for my family if I focus on the words instead of the sound of the whole thing (I dig the horns). I don’t love the video but this is the easiest way to shove this song in everyone else’s faces, so here. Listen?


Balactica spam

"This will-power also be the concept of topics I sound judgement be winsome up in the next handful weeks."
"This will-power also be the concept of topics I sound judgement be winsome up in the next handful weeks."

The following comment was caught by my spam filter yesterday. I know it’s one of those auto-generated things, or possibly is a software-generated translation into English from something written in another language and which actually has an almost-cogent political argument buried deep in there. I mean deep. And almost.

Anyway, it achieves something beautiful: it sounds just like one of the .

“Leave to all men be aware how barren and obtainable is the power of kings,” Canute said, “quest of there is not a woman creditable of the promontory, but He whom nirvana, mom sod and hoard do at narrow steady laws. Upon the weekend I develop two articles close to the problems with the Massachusetts dock victual for system.

Because Obamacare was modeled after the Massachusetts script, the failures in Massachusetts are a portent of things to come. I solely like the stand-in article, partly because I like Samuelson, and partly because he agrees with me (I reflect on he reads my blog).

If you include impute to my form posts, there is nothing artistic in these reports. The Massachusetts sketch, which includes an Obama-like indemnification mandate, has increased the crowd of insured, in mixed in the mid-point vigorous unfinished adults. Notwithstanding, it has also resulted in crowded predicament rooms, increased waits, and higher costs. Strong lobbying efforts be experiencing blocked politicians from mordant fees paid to doctors and hospitals. Increasing costs observe resulted in higher effrontery premiums which experience mortified companies can no longer donate, greatest to patients being dumped into the state system. The body, already in the throes of a descent, should group of with these increased costs.

The authority is attempting to limit indemnity premiums on fiat, but in the consequence can on the contradictory preponderate in the informal sitting, and want at long last be unsuccessful. At length single-payer/government takeover on be the on the unaccommodating substitute, which I pattern wishes as converse about later. The synopsis of events is very like to the pr‚cis I have in the whilom outlined in venom of Obamacare.

No consequence how patrician the underlying expiration, actuality commonly prevails. This will-power also be the concept of topics I sound judgement be winsome up in the next handful weeks. I commitment be examining in mind the crash of Obesity, drugs, juice, ferociousness and smoking on healthcare outcomes and costs, and appraise to instigate a chat more what part important encumber should grant in healthcare. I resolution also be examining an momentous and hardly still discussed complexion of American healthcare the striking amount of resources, epoch and high-strung travail Americans appropriate to disposable or impartial noxious practices, what I resolving label the obligation of theurgy in healthcare. More to come.

Wow. More to come. I hope it involves an FTL jump to another solar system so we can escape the humans.

…

Meanwhile, my impatience grows. It’s 2:30 p.m. here so still only 10:30 a.m. on the East Coast; polls not even open yet on the West Coast. I’m getting stupid-excited about camping out on the couch all night to watch election shenanigans and commentary. We get FoxNews, CNN, CSPAN, and a Bloomberg channel. No MSNBC, ha. But the BBC and EuroNews should be fun tonight. They aren’t big fans of the Tea Party. Do try to contain your shock.

Normally we’re 5 hours ahead of EST, but the UK does the daylight-savings clock change a week earlier than the US, so we’re only 4 hours ahead this week.

My privileges should be revoked.

Don’t try this at home, in public, or especially on the internet

I came back to my Internet Web Site Blogging Apparatus a week ago, thinking it’d be a way to kill some time between grad school and employment. Made a couple posts, got some linkage from Twitter linkers and people who’d never deleted me from their feeds….and then I exploded my blog in a blaze of glory yesterday in a harmonic and destructive spasm of ignorance, bravado, and incompetence.

Someone should have me euthanized or at least prevent me from ever going near the internet again. But once again patiently repaired my self-inflicted wounds (my WordPress theme was ancient and I was uploading random plugins and tweaks to it, and they said that’s bad mkay).

But within five minutes of them fixing my blog, I broke it again. No joke: I did exactly the opposite of what I was told to do, within less than five minutes.

I’d like to express my feelings about myself interpretatively through a cat:

Too ashamed to ask Annette and Stacy for help again so soon, and with my husband in Denmark for work so not here to talk me down from the ledge of HTML/PHP/CSS-coding rage, I wisely decided to drink wine, eat enchiladas, and watch Fringe on the DVR until I fell asleep, knowing I had a busted-up blog but too weary to care.

And then I woke up this morning to see that Instapundit to me. So I thought maybe I should fix my blog.

For that purpose I spent the last 7 straight hours figuring out why I’m so stupid, how I can stop being so stupid, and how to fix my stupid. The answer to all questions is: don’t “play” with your WordPress theme if you aren’t prepared for system-wide failure and personal humiliation.

I think everything’s under control now. But if you see any lingering format errors, please let me know. People said there were blank white pages coming up for comments and permalinks last night. Hope I fixed that. Also, dig the new threaded/nested comments feature – if it works right, you can now reply right under another comment, to that person, and it should go three levels deep.

I’m going to back away from the internet very slowly now, don’t want to startle it…

It’s alive

I finished grad school. Trying to revive dead blog. Design edits make it show up in old feeds so people might arrive here, wondering what the hell.

Need some time to remember how to work blog software. Forgot how to use the personal pronoun.

Added: Annette and Stacy at are the reason my blog works now. For weeks I’d been staring at the code trying to figure out what I did last January to make my LOLdog page be the main page, and wondering how to make posts go to the main page again.

I’m not intelligent enough to remember anything I did 10 months ago so I tweeted Stacy in my despair, and she was all, duh, just send us a note at HM and we’ll help you, so I sent a note to Hostingmatters and a couple of hours later (on a Sunday morning, no less), everything was fixed and they’d even upgraded my WordPress software. I’ve been with HM for 7 or 8 years and have loved those women for a long time in a really inappropriate way, and if they want me to stop they need to quit being so awesome.

Further added: I detest Internet Explorer with every ounce of myself. If you use IE as your browser, please don’t expect any site on the entire internet to work properly. God, it’s crap. You know that, right? You have to know that.

I’ve just spent three hours trying to make some new comment software work (so we can have threaded/nested commenting here) and was so thwarted by how it looks in IE that I completely screwed up all of it trying to fix, became terrified, and have now given up and gone back to the old template. I am defeated.

There are wonderful, beautiful things out there named “Firefox” and “Chrome” and “Safari”. I implore you to download one of them and forget you ever heard of IE. Your life will instantly improve and I’m not trying to be funny or to overstate things.

Totally unqualified to run a blog.

I need to upgrade my WordPress installation, but you’re supposed to do a backup first, which I have attempted four different ways (MyPHP thingy, WordPress’s little backup feature thingy, etc) but frankly I have zero confidence that any of them worked. I don’t feel like explaining. Suffice to say half the zip files it CLAIMS its making are 0 bytes. And I don’t have the ten years it would take to back the whole thing up via FTP. Remember I am on not on broadband speed here.

All I want to say is that if this blog goes tits-up in the next few hours, you’ll know why.

P.S. added later: I just mean that it might get wonky, and I might lose some old posts or a database if I’m “lucky” – but no matter what of course I’ll get something back up resembling a proper hillbilly blog. Because you know I make tons and tons of money with this thing. Like, enough to send back home to my parents for dog food. We don’t want Sunny to starve now do we, so don’t worry, the blog ain’t going anywhere. Hey my birthday is coming up. Cash is the best present. Love, Rachel.

BT is a son of a bitch.
UPDATED

We still don’t have broadband. Got the modem but…wait for it…it doesn’t work. OF COURSE IT DOESN’T.

It’s 4:15 pm here already and I am too pissed off about my slow-ass internet to be of much use to this blog. So you should do open thread or something. Maybe post links to snorfly dog videos?

Or, hey how about this, we got a new crockpot and I am looking for delicious slow cooker recipes. You give me them please.

UPDATE: Ohmygod. Usually when I drool while reading the comments, it’s simply a function of being a mouthbreathin’ hillbilly.

This thread, however, oh baby. Come to mama.

Thank you all so very much for the slow-cooker recipes; I’ve spent the last several minutes this morning reading them and occasionally shouting out things like “BEANS! YES!” and “SAUSAGE! IN THE CROCKPOT! SAUSAGE IN THE CROCKPOT!”

Rupert is disturbed by the shouting but pleased at the prospect of sausages and beans and roasts and many other tasty crockpot delights. He doesn’t have time to do any cooking over here (every work day he either commutes at least an hour each way or commutes further and has to stay there overnight; he’s pulling 12-hour days most of the time), so it’s all on me and I’ve never been much of a cook so I do need help. I have a couple of cookbooks from home but I prefer personal recommendations on what is good or not, so I prefer getting recipes from real people. Thus I thank you. I’ll keep you updated on which of your recipes I tried and how badly I do or do not botch them.

Write a tagline.

No, BT did not in fact make our internet happen today. I cannot even speak of it lest I blow a cerebral artery.

I am thrilled otherwise, because it finally rained. I’ve been waiting for this. Don’t judge me; I like rain. I also like crocuses, and they’re everywhere. This is from a cemetery off the High Street:

Anyway, so just now I noticed, when I clicked on my site to navigate to some blogs on my blogroll, that I am horribly sick of my banner. It’s been the same for way too long. I am too lazy and uncreative to come up with something new, so I say let’s have another contest. Do it. I’ll give Chuck Norris Hidden Gusset praise to the best, and you can’t wait.

(I’m doing our tax return this week. It is making brain hurt. Hence the short choppy bossy rude post.)