Go, read this old article about the ex-gay movement. 
Wikipedia article of the day: The Spirit of Truth.
My phobia 
I have pill phobia. I've had numerous instances where I've just had to stop taking medicines because I can't swallow pills or capsules. This is particularly annoying where you aren't supposed to stop taking pills - antibiotics, for instance, where it's essential that you take the whole course.
For me, it's not just a phobia of actually taking the pill - but the on-going anxious fear that I will develop a medical condition that will require that I take medicine in pill form.
Worst job ad ever?
I was browsing Fark this morning, and for some reason clicked on an ad labelled "Creative Web Head Needed". Welll, I think I'm all three of those things. The result is that it takes you to an ad from 13WMAZ in Georgia (a CBS affiliate station).
I think you'll agree that this is possibly the worst job advert for an Internet-related position ever. If it isn't, then it certainly is getting pretty close to the title.
The amazing thing is that it doesn't actually state any technology or skill that the person needs to know - nor even what discipline they should be in (eg. whether they should be a designer, programmer, media person). It could be anything from an ASP programmer through to the guy they send to the local zoo with a MiniDV camera. It doesn't state whether the person needs to be local or whether telecommuting is an option (if they really want "super smart" technology people, I'm pretty sure that they are slightly better concentrated outside Georgia).
Just think about this at another level - this is a media company advertising - a television station. What should a company in the media industry know how to do? Communicate. All this communicates is cluelessness.
Note to self: when startup business gets off ground and you are in position to hire others, use this advert as a model of how not to advertise vacancies.
History may matter, but could you blog off?
Yesterday was the day nominated for the History Matters campaign - so that people could go and post "your blog" which will be recorded forever more. The idea is to people from across the UK to come along and post a diary entry describing what they did on the 17 October 2006.
Only they call it a "blog", which I find intensely irritating, since it's a single, one shot entry - with no comments, no interaction, no continuing posts, no nothing. I know that blog is not strictly defined, but it's well defined enough for us to say that the History Matters scheme is not a blog.
Why? Well, part of something being a 'log' is that it is continual. I've blogged continuously here since the 25th of December, 2005 - meaning that I've posted something new every day. Before that, I've been blogging on and off - and in different places since 2003, at least. Not bragging, just saying.
Isn't there something important about the fact that one has made a conscious decision to blog frequently? One can look at how the person's writing develops and at the interplay of links, news and diary style entries.
But it seems that the word blog - like podcast - is sentenced to a life of misuse by a clueless media. For instance, one of the London newspapers (the terrible freesheet, London Lite) has started using 'blog' as a catch-all word for "anything that a professional journalist doesn't write". So reports Frankie:
These bits of user-generated-content are scattered throughout the paper in columns which all seem to pun off the word 'blog'. So there's 'SPiBLOG' for celebrity sightings ('all your gossip from Lite's army of citizen reporters'), 'B@CK ROW BLOGGERS' for film reviews, 'B@CKSTAGE BLOGS' for theatre reviews, 'ART BLOG', 'GIGBLOGS', 'CLUB BLOG', the list goes on...
Each of these 'blog' columns share the common trait of being nothing to do with blogs or blogging whatsoever, but instead just contain a mish-mash of poorly written review copy supossedly sent in by readers. The idea that somehow the paper needs to be modern, and thus internet-savy, permiates the newspaper, but it somehow manages to get it all so wrong.
The overall impression the paper gives is that blogs are a low form of bedroom diary writing and over-opinionated review writers. There's no attempt to build a conversation or any kind of continuity whatsoever.
When blog means anything at all, it means nothing at all. Every day, the old media prove this.
