I’ve updated the interests listed in my LiveJournal profile, in an effort to clarify it to avoid the appearance that I am soliciting or encouraging illegal activities. —If we were all to revise our interests lists with a modicum of care and consideration, we might avoid situations in which community-moderating media companies, badgered by self-appointed defenders of the innocent, find themselves forced to “suspend reported journals that do not clearly and substantially object to these a reasonable person would think supported these activities. while at the same time portraying them.”

Do consider clarifying your own LiveJournal interests, won’t you?

Tomorrow (yes, it’s past midnight; so what) is my 38th birthday. —Tonight (yes, for it is still tonight), I thought I was heading down to the Bowery to watch the second disk of the second season of Veronica Mars. Instead, a roomful of friends from a bewildering variety of contexts all leaped out of the same room and yelled Happy Birthday, and then some of the best cartoonists in the Western Hemisphere handed me their interpretations of various City of Roses characters.

—Also, spinooti gave me a copy of Lord Breaulove Swells Whimsy’s The Affected Provincial’s Companion, Vol. 1.

I’ll have to figure out how best to share this bounty over the next few days; tomorrow, we’re driving out to the Shire for the day. But until further notice, let me just rather woozily say:

Additional kiplet content available via LiveJournal:

• shortpier: the Long story; short pier feed.
• city_of_roses: the City of Roses feed.

Also, I do want to point out the chapbooks. —What you do with this knowledge is entirely up to you.

So I’m trying an .htaccess redirect for the various RSS feeds for the pier that people might have subscribed to, to keep them from having to resubscribe again, and it seems to have bollixed up the works over at Bloglines, though the redirect itself appears to be working fine.

Maybe it’s just Bloglines hiccupping again. Beuller? Bueller? —LiveJournal, apparently we’ll have to wait till, um, 2006-02-07 02:23:05 on whatever clock it uses to see if it works there or not.

Anyway, all works well, and everything should light back up again. Doesn’t, and, well, maybe you’ll have to resubscribe again.

—The one thing Movable Type let you do that I miss? Let you build your own feeds. Designate the URLs they’d appear in. I like having one feed for excerpts and one for full dress. Gives the audience choices. I like being able to pick where they pop. Gives me choices. WordPress and TextPattern, not so much. In this particular regard.

Okay.

So I was using DreamHost for webhosting. Not a sausage of a problem for a good long while, but the first sign of trouble and they yanked my site without warning. Couldn’t even get at the thing to figure out what the problem was or how to fix it.

Such details as I have been able to glean are available here, if you are so inclined.

I’m in the process, today, I guess, of moving everything; I’ve got backups of the blog’s database in a variety of formats, so that, at least, is not to worry, knock wood. After some little examination and comparison, I’m currently leaning toward A Small Orange. Anybody know any better, please, feel free to speak up.

And heck, while I’m at it, let’s maybe add something else to the plate. I moved the blog from Movable Type to WordPress for a variety of reasons, and it caused (or excused, yes) some of the interminable delays last year; I still haven’t been able to wrap my head around exactly where to start with building WordPress out the way I wanted. So I’m poking Textpattern to see what happens. It has fewer features, perhaps, but it thinks like I think, I think, and so it will be much easier to work with; the irony, of course, being I would have jumped to Textpattern last year had I not in an intemperate moment leaped on DreamHost’s outrageously cheap storage-and-bandwidth-and-easy-WordPress-install. —I just need to work out some permalink issues for the legacy stuff (attempt at which discussed here); I get that taken care of, and we’re off to the races.

So: the pier stuttered back to life for a few short weeks and is now being shuttered again. But for a brief spell! We hope. Watch this space.

Against the law to advocate overthrowing US gov’t.

What do you mean? I’ve never done anything of the kind!

Membership in California Lawyers for the Environment, right? Worked for the American Socialist Legal Action Group, right?

So what? We never advocated anything but change!

Smirk of scorn, hatred. He knew he had me.

I had my second Afghani dinner in as many days with Julia and her husband and her brother in an exquisite little stripmall joint somewhere deep in the wilds of Queens, far to the east of anywhere I’d been before, and the sabzi challow was just as good as she’d said it would be, and when her brother and I caught a subway back to Manhattan I got to remember all over again why you never get on an empty subway car in the middle of summer.

And despite the conventional wisdom about how oddly disjointed it is to meet in the flesh someone you’ve only known online, the only really awkward moment came when it usually did, for me, at least: Why’d you stop? she said.

I shrugged and said what I usually said: I don’t know. I stopped because I’d stopped.

TO: oreilly@foxnews.com
SUBJECT: Your McCarthyite hate-list.

My blog’s been down for a few months, but I’m going to be getting it back online as soon as I work out the WordPress php-stuff to my liking, and so I’d really appreciate it even though I haven’t said anything publicly yet if you’d add it to your hate-list of left-wing internet smear-sites that want you to get fired for inviting Al Qaeda to attack San Francisco. A lot of my friends live in San Francisco and it’s a beautiful American city and you ought to be ashamed of yourself, you pompous, spiteful little ass.

Your Democratic Senator and mine, Ron Wyden, was one of 5 Democrats to vote in favor (!) of the utterly shameful Graham amendment, which strips the writ of habeas corpus from the prisoners held at Guantanamo—a right recently upheld by the Supreme Court, and the only hope those whose only crime was to be sold into captivity by their neighbors have of freeing themselves from two years of captivity and torture.

Write him here and ask him, politely, what the bloody fucking hell he was thinking. (Sorry. Politely.) You could then fax him, at 202.228.2717, and remind him you vote, and tell him what learning this has done to your chances of ever voting for his sorry ass again. (Politely, of course.) Then phone his office, at 202.224.5244, and let him know personally how you feel about his betrayal not only of the Constitution, which guarantees “the Writ of Habeas Corpus shall not be suspended, unless when in Cases of Rebellion or Invasion the public Safety may require it,” but also his own dam’ party, at a time when the Republicans’ bluster about national security stands revealed to all as a reckless farce. (But do so calmly, and with a civil tongue. No sudden movements; don’t raise your voice.)

Do be sure in all of this to point out how he can redeem himself by supporting Sen. Jeff Bingamen’s amendment, which will kill the Graham amendment. —And then ask him to further repudiate his terrible horrible no-good very bad vote by speaking out loudly and often against S. 1088, which will do to all of us what the Graham amendment’s trying to do to the prisoners in Guantanamo.

If your civil mien cracks a little on that one, I think we can all forgive you.