I love how so many of these assume that I have things like a cooked chicken or an angel food cake lying around. Oh it's easy, *after* the angel food cake is done. Got it.
posted to MetaFilter by Mo Nickels at 10:35 AM on July 3, 2008

Casting votes against the ignorant mob because I am unswayed by the opinions here:

Teresa Nielsen Hayden is one of the best parts of the Internet. She's wise, funny, and good at things that many other people want but fail to achieve.

Although I think Cory's hype often obscures the value of his output, he's also one of the good parts of the Internet. He's got a good eye for injustice and insitutionalized and corporate stupidity.... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Mo Nickels at 6:10 AM on July 2, 2008

Taz, it wouldn't be the first time my stuff was deleted on Metafilter. I had the opportunity a couple of months ago to apologize to Matt personally, after nine years, because my very first post ever on Metafilter was a self-link. He deleted it and shut down submissions for a while.
posted to MetaFilter by Mo Nickels at 8:12 AM on July 2, 2008

Fine, preserve it as an historical landmark. That's fine and probably a good thing. What's appalling to me is the moaning and whining and gnashing of teeth over someone renovating part of New York City. How is this a surprise, or anything even new, or different from what's happened over the entire history of that city?

The moaning and gnashing is a necessary part of the fight. We fight to preserve what we can because we can sometimes win.... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Mo Nickels at 2:26 PM on May 29, 2008

A classic work on graffiti is Allen Walker Read's Lexical Evidence from Epigraphy in Western North America: A Glossarial Study of the Low Element in the English Vocabulary (1935), now sold by Maledicta as Classic American Graffiti (1977). The original title was meant, I believe, to obscure the contents: most of it was compiled from the walls of bathrooms across America.

From a review in the Journal of American Folklore, Jan.-Mar,... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Mo Nickels at 5:07 AM on April 17, 2008

More or less a double post.
posted to MetaFilter by Mo Nickels at 8:20 AM on February 18, 2008

Oops. A mistake. Damn.
posted to MetaFilter by Mo Nickels at 12:11 PM on February 18, 2008

Bicycle activism? So does that mean descansos are car activism? It's about people, "wfrgms," and their disrespect and mistreatment of other people.

There's a ghost bike two blocks from my house, which is why I did an entry in my dictionary for the term a month ago. Coincidentally, that entry has been getting a lot of play on Craigslist today, ardgedee, which makes me wonder if that's where you came across it. In any case, it's neat when circles of influence on... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Mo Nickels at 6:37 PM on October 7, 2007

I've long held a pet theory which I call the Background Noise Theory. The background noise theory is quite simple: stupid people, violent people, and people who are emotionally damaged need to have background noise in their lives at all times to drown out their internal critical dialogue. Have you ever been to a bad part of town and listened? You hear shouting, children screaming or crying, car horns, excessively loud music, sirens, all on top of each other. It's more than ordinary city... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Mo Nickels at 4:19 AM on September 5, 2007

See also: The Way We Age Now, by Atul Gawande, in the April 30, 2007, New Yorker. It's a blow-by-blow account of what getting old does to the body.
posted to MetaFilter by Mo Nickels at 5:07 AM on May 13, 2007

Well.
posted to MetaFilter by Mo Nickels at 2:54 PM on May 8, 2007

What's the deal with the word "going" and the Republican candidates? Is it simply an abundance of forward-looking statements?
posted to MetaFilter by Mo Nickels at 6:30 PM on May 4, 2007

Funny, I thought about writing a similar article almost two years ago

The topic is a favorite of alt weeklies and college newspapers nationwide, though I suppose it doesn't lose much in the retelling.
posted to MetaFilter by Mo Nickels at 4:50 AM on May 2, 2007

This was a planned protest, not a spontaneous one.

Was it planned by Daisey? Seems...odd. The whole circumstance has an odd odor.
posted to MetaFilter by Mo Nickels at 5:05 PM on April 22, 2007

Thanks for the link, but it is a double-post, as Language Hat points out, which means it should be killed.

Before that happens: seagull as a verb isn't really transitive. You don't "seagull someone" or "seagull yourself."

Neologisms do not follow Moore's law. They have always been abundant. We merely pay more attention now.

If it makes you feel any better, it's not that you're a genarian that makes so... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Mo Nickels at 9:35 AM on April 4, 2007

Regarding the link to my site and the question of why some of the entries in Austin Bay's Los Angeles Times column are very similar to mine at Double-Tongued Dictionary. I spoke with Austin about this a couple of weeks ago. It seems he put a call out on his blog for military slang and some readers submitted words and definitions they lifted wholesale from my web site without credit or attribution. Austin assumed they were original to the submitters and didn't vet them thoroughly. He's going to... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Mo Nickels at 4:13 AM on April 2, 2007

A frowny emoticon always makes me think extra hard about the seriousness of a viral epidemic.
posted to MetaFilter by Mo Nickels at 7:22 AM on January 17, 2007

Linguist Mark Liberman at LanguageLog has debunked the BBC's language-related factoids, in a summary of posts that he and other members of the group blog have been making for quite some time. Turns out, the BBC's reporting on language matters is for shit.
posted to MetaFilter by Mo Nickels at 12:58 PM on December 28, 2006

I'll tell you the main reason IT and user relationships go to shit: because IT only sees people in their worst days when things aren't working. Rarely are the IT staffers present for the successes and they're almost never invited for the champagne celebrations.
posted to MetaFilter by Mo Nickels at 5:44 PM on August 28, 2006

Lovely woman, uninteresting and technically deficient show. She can do better.
posted to MetaFilter by Mo Nickels at 1:50 PM on July 5, 2006

Anyone find it suspicious that this is the only post on a web site named www.spam-blocker-resource.com? And the site is also selling anti-spam software/books? No one?

Yes! Hyphens in a domain name are a dead giveaway that something's fishy here. And I think there are more reasons this is fishy. Let's review:

--no name is given in the caught-a-spammer article
--no location is given
--the domain hosting... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Mo Nickels at 1:17 PM on June 23, 2006

Biblio's right: the "Russ" at googlecache.com show up as one of only THREE people that have linked to this story. Here's the googlecache.com link to the spam-blocker-resource.com page. It was also the FIRST place to link to it.

Besides Metafilter, the only other site to link to the stupid story is at enemieslist.com. That domain is registered to

hesketh.net
hesketh.net hostmaster
5400 Glenwood... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Mo Nickels at 2:16 PM on June 23, 2006

Sonofsamiam, it's probably not a coincidence that jstaub became a member of Digg only yesterday. So it looks like this:

Jones creates a crappy site with a false story, has his coworker post the link on Digg, then Jones digs the link and posts it on his own blog as it belongs to someone else.

The question still remains: how'd you find it, brownpau? Digg? You've got great credentials here and elsewhere so I don't think you're in on it. (And it is,... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Mo Nickels at 2:24 PM on June 23, 2006

...as if it belongs to someone else...
posted to MetaFilter by Mo Nickels at 2:25 PM on June 23, 2006

Not to sound callous (because I feel for New York), but isn't Manhattan among the most wealthy areas in the world (per square mile)? Why aren't taxes covering this expense?

Because New York City is a net loser when it comes to taxes. NYC pays more to the state and the federal government in taxes than it receives in services, aid, military protection, highways, etc. Both governments treat the city as a cash cow. Wikipedia has numbers that jibe with what... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Mo Nickels at 6:39 AM on June 2, 2006

I'm with Jen Chung at Gothamist on this: "It sucks."
posted to MetaFilter by Mo Nickels at 7:28 AM on May 19, 2006

Nearby airports! Lame. The airport in Philadelphia is nearby to New York City? Stupid.
posted to MetaFilter by Mo Nickels at 10:44 AM on April 20, 2006

I'll have a Coffee Coolatta and a half-dozen of the chocolate glazed bungs with sprinkles, please.
posted to MetaFilter by Mo Nickels at 4:09 PM on April 19, 2006

Insomnia, your original 11 points are bullshit. Eight of them are slippery slope if/could arguments that are classic Internet-style fear, uncertainty, and doubt. Your original premise is flawed, your evidence is a crock, your rebuttals are disingenuous, and your conclusions are without merit.
posted to MetaFilter by Mo Nickels at 1:51 PM on April 19, 2006

Anil always gets away with everything.
posted to MetaFilter by Mo Nickels at 4:04 PM on April 19, 2006

Link from A Dress A Day.
posted to MetaFilter by Mo Nickels at 4:12 PM on March 11, 2006

To me, the main thing of interest about MySpace is that it simply puts makes more people visible on the Internet. That's it. It's no different than all those people having a web site of their own, or a blog of their own, or a plan file of their own.
posted to MetaFilter by Mo Nickels at 7:45 AM on March 9, 2006

Two of the letters on the big FOODWORLD sign near my house have been dark for months!!!!! It just says FOODWOR!!!!!
posted to MetaFilter by Mo Nickels at 6:19 AM on March 8, 2006

All mentions of race don't make a written work about race: it's a sad story about two people dreadfully unprepared for the responsibility of a child about to have one anyway.

So there's nothing racist in that paragraph. Or classist. Or xenophobic. Or anti-African. Or anti-biracism.

It surely has some kind of strong anti-stupid sentiment, however, which the posts in this current thread also need.
posted to MetaFilter by Mo Nickels at 9:31 AM on February 14, 2006

Flashback six years: Ohmygod! Whatever will we do about Moreover? Somebody should sure shake that Nick Denton fellow, and hard.
posted to MetaFilter by Mo Nickels at 10:16 AM on January 19, 2006

FYI, the oil spot strategy was used by the French in Indochina as far back as 1895. (self-link to a dictionary entry of oil spot strategy.)
posted to MetaFilter by Mo Nickels at 10:12 AM on January 19, 2006

The rarely seen Kitten Frog rises off his fat little belly in protest.


posted to MetaFilter by Mo Nickels at 8:20 PM on January 18, 2006

A friend has the movie Wriscutters in the festival this year.
posted to MetaFilter by Mo Nickels at 1:56 PM on January 18, 2006

This is great. Now we can find lost animals. Soon we'll start seeing missing cows on milk cartons.
posted to MetaFilter by Mo Nickels at 7:29 AM on January 12, 2006

Ugh. Thirty-seven more horrifyingly ugly coins in my pocket. The United States has some of the ugliest, least-interesting money in the world.

I'm actually embarrassed to spend the New Hampshire quarter. They put rocks on it. Rocks.
posted to MetaFilter by Mo Nickels at 5:37 AM on December 24, 2005

This is obviously creepy, freaky, perverted, illegal, and weird—BUT IT'S NOT NEWS.

The Times writes, The scale of Webcam child pornography is unknown, because it is new and extremely secretive.

Only the scale is unknown. Anyone who's been on the Internet for more than a few years knows that the scale of cam-sex with minors is huge, it's been going on practically since webcams first appeared (Usenet posts looking for... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Mo Nickels at 7:59 AM on December 19, 2005

and this was in 1848!!

I love this response every time I see it or hear it. The core of language changes much, much less rapidly than we think. Even most slang is persistent. I like to tell people to go look up "crib" in the Oxford English Dictionary, where there you'll see it has a long history of being used to mean "house."
posted to MetaFilter by Mo Nickels at 5:56 PM on December 17, 2005

Last week the White House held mandatory briefings on how to handle classified material.

Interesting. Those are described elsewhere as ethics training. Also here.
posted to MetaFilter by Mo Nickels at 5:27 PM on November 15, 2005

Couldn't they pair up with other unwed mothers and share resources?

Having lived next to a home for single mothers, let me tell you: they don't pool their resources, they pool their bad decisions.
posted to MetaFilter by Mo Nickels at 8:58 AM on October 7, 2005

Having looked at your "Homepage URL" I doubt you're a total dimwit, but I'd still like to know what makes you an expert in this field please.

Well, for what they're worth, one, I use to be a music journalist, albeit small-time. Two, I used to be a disc jockey at a student radio station where I started its first international music program--not "world music," when I could help it, but music made in foreign countries for a domestic... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Mo Nickels at 3:13 PM on October 6, 2005

(O, that second to last paragraph doesn't parse.)
posted to MetaFilter by Mo Nickels at 3:26 PM on October 6, 2005

Whoa, dhartung, brilliant find. I don't feel like I'm wrong, but that article (as opposed to the CSM piece) is waaaay out in front with facts and ideas I don't have and have never considered.
posted to MetaFilter by Mo Nickels at 8:51 AM on October 7, 2005

Cool, but I wish it had a full-text search for everything in the ads. There's a lot of text there that's unindexed.
posted to MetaFilter by Mo Nickels at 8:01 PM on October 6, 2005

I'm resigned to the fact that the odds are very high that I will drown with thousands of other people in a subway train in a tunnel under the East River halfway between Queens and Manhattan because someone has left under a seat a bomb with a detonator triggered by a change in atmospheric pressure. The odds of succeeding on the first attempt at this are almost 1:1.
posted to MetaFilter by Mo Nickels at 3:24 PM on October 6, 2005

(Those odds ass-timated by comparing the number of times I've seen police at my morning subway station--2-- with the number of times I've had my bag searched or have seen ANY bag searched--zero--plus the number of police I have seen on the platform at Queens Plaza--zero.)
posted to MetaFilter by Mo Nickels at 3:26 PM on October 6, 2005