Category Archives: Blogging

steal this: don’t block the blog letter

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Don’t block the blogHere is a really quite flawless letter that cjwriter wrote to the Turkish Ambassador to Australia regarding the recent banning of all WordPress.com blogs in Turkey (and, indirectly, Albania, because Albania gets much of its internet access from Turkey). I suggest, as he suggests, that you copy and adapt the text and send it to the Turkish embassy in your own country. Judyb12 has supplied an abbreviated list of them:

Turkish Embassy: USA
Turkish Embassy: UK
Turkish Embassy: Australia
Turkish Embassy: Canada

RE: Freedom of Speech

Dear Mr __________,

My name is __________. I live in ______ and I’m writing to you regarding an action a Turkish court has taken that is of great concern to me.

On August 17th, 2007, the Turkish Fatih 2nd Civil Court of First Instance blocked access to the WordPress.com domain. The ban on WordPress, a blogging platform hosting some 1.3 million blogs, was a response to a suit filed by lawyers for Adnan Oktar alleging that defamatory statements had been made about their client by several blogs on WordPress.com.

The ban has resulted in all blogs hosted by WordPress.com being made inaccessible to Turkey. I feel very strongly that this is an overreaction. I am a blogger on WordPress; I have done nothing wrong, but my readership is being impacted.

Even more serious is the fact that there are many innocent Turkish bloggers on WordPress.com who now cannot access their blogs or are being forced to use other means to access them. It is a violation of their free speech and that of readers from all over the world.

Please understand, this is not about whether Adnan Oktar was slandered, or about the Turkish legal system; I respect your country, as I hope you respect mine. But it has gone beyond that. Now it is about innocent Turkish bloggers being forced into silence, and countless others being denied the freedom to be read. The court could have ordered that the offending blogs and any subsequent offenders be blocked, but instead ordered the complete ban of WordPress.com. It’s the equivalent of closing a library because of a single offending book, rather than just removing the book itself.

Many websites and blogs on both WordPress.com and on other platforms are initiating campaigns in support of Turkish bloggers, and I am writing to you to express my concern, and to ask that the Turkish authorities reconsider their position.

Yours sincerely,

____________.

Steal, copy and paste at will! Vive la Resistance!

god almighty!

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Flying Spaghetti Monster

Seriously, normal service shall resume shortly. But until it does, play with this funky, website-freakinating and bustickating toolbar, via Collin. Don’t forget to pull his finger!

Not Collin’s. God’s!

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the freakiest story I’m too tired to post

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Manta Ray

Seriously weird. Seriously, seriously freaky. Probably fake. “The one that got away” takes on new meaning in this tale of lost loves at sea…

Via (where else would you expect?) the Guardian’s Political Diary.

“Almost everybody in the fishing business has had sex with a manta at some point,” Makeburu asserts.

What!!! A manta??? You mean one of those enormous, intimidating winged things with a stinger on their tail that looks like an aquatic Batman?

Yep. After all, fisherman out on ships spend a loooonggg time at sea without ever encountering a woman, and, well, let’s face it, they can get pretty horny. No, dammit, let’s make that incredibly horny. Even desperate enough to do it with a manta. Right?

“Nah,” shrugs Makeburu. “Coastal fishermen poke them too.”

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normal service shall resume shortly

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but until I am fully recovered (honestly, WordPress outages, locked out of my new blog, poison spider bites, flu, my internet access goes down, and slicing my thumb open on a yogurt container, ffs! And it’s only Tuesday!) here’s a lolcat. I heer u like thoz.

128292638767933750ihaetusohard.jpg

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it’s quiet. too quiet

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SwoonIt may well be quiet around here (that’s the natural aftermath of fighting off a venomous spider…you really just want to go lie down and have food and refreshing beverages brought to you) but I know somewhere that’s simply radiating vitality, having sprung fully-formed from the forehead of Coco Chanel.

Teeny Manolo, my new blog.

What are you still doing here? The other blogger has 15 welcoming comments in her introductory post. Moi? Goose egg. And I’m too proud to invent sock puppets to post paens to myself.

Barely.

It’s a children’s fashion blog with celebrity overtones (because I write for it, y’all), and if you must know I wrote it yesterday wearing stirrup pants and a Starbucks gimme t, with a wad of greasy deep conditioner in my hair, whereas today I wrote it wearing my sister’s overalls (so hot this year, and boy am I lucky) another Starbucks gimme t, and a shaker knit cardigan. I’m not eating pizza, but I should be, to get the look right.

As I said before: what are you still doing here? Go, read, enjoy, comment, blogroll, Technorati Fave and all other assorted Operation Global Media Domination furthering activities! That’s H T T P : / / T E E N Y M A N O L O . C O M, y’all!

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