by Kieran Healy on February 3, 2006
“Brett”:https://crookedtimber.org/2006/02/03/friday-fun-thread-rock-out/#comment-142750 just left the one hundred thousandth comment here on CT, at least as far as I can tell. Not bad for a couple of years work. Making the estimate precise is tricky because of the bad old Last Days of Movable Type when comments were often left in duplicate or triplicate (or worselicate) because the software couldn’t keep up. A further complication is the spam we routinely get. I’m confident there is basically no spam in our comments, as we’ve always aggressively weeded it out, but while it sits in the moderation queue waiting to be deleted it gets a comment id number and so makes the total tick up by one. The difference between the number of comments in the database and the ID number of the latest comment tells you how much spam we’ve gotten (and deleted) since March of 2005, when we moved to WordPress. As of now, it’s almost forty three thousand.
At any rate, a hundred thousand comments is a lot of chatter from the chattering classes. Thanks to all our readers and regular commenters for their contributions.
by Kieran Healy on February 3, 2006
“WTF???”:http://www.apple.com/trailers/weinstein/doogal/trailer1r/
Doogal? Zeebad? What? Then there’s “this”:http://www.the-magic-roundabout.com/ which seems to suggest that it was perpetrated on the U.K. last year.
by Ted on February 3, 2006
Most popular songs end with a reprise and fade-out, or a tiny jam session/ git-ar solo. Nothing wrong with that at all. But can you think of songs that do something different and end especially well? I’ve found it harder than I would have thought.
[click to continue…]
by Belle Waring on February 3, 2006
One Lee Harris, quoted by Glenn Reynolds, on Iran and its nuclear capability:
There is an important law about power that is too often overlooked by rational and peace-loving people. Any form of power, from the most primitive to the most mind-boggling, is always amplified enormously when it falls into the hands of those whose behavior is wild, erratic, and unpredictable. A gun being waved back and forth by a maniac is far more disturbing to us than the gun in the holster of the policeman, though both weapons are equally capable of shooting us dead. And what is true of guns is far more true in the case of nukes.
Reynolds: “A corollary is that the United States probably needs to be scarier and less predictable itself.”
Umm, not to dispute the basic point, which is sound enough in its way, but how much scarier and less predictable is the U.S supposed to get?