the thin end of the Long Tail

Looks like I made an Amazon Associates sale:

First Vegetarian Meal:


“Moosewood Restaurant Cooks at Home: Fast and Easy Recipes for Any Day” (Moosewood Collective)

Well, I’m a lousy cook, but decided to have a go at it today.

Two days ago, my Moosewood cookbook arrived per Paul’s suggestion. I have decided to make corn scones and black bean soup for dinner tonight.

I made the scones early, and they turned out really well. Actually, they taste great, but look funny. I couldn’t quite get the shape right.

I’ll just have to heat them up for dinner. I’ll start the soup in a few hours.

Thought I should go check up on my Amazon account and see how I’m doin’.

Hmm. Looks like the $.49 from that book sale is my total for 2006. Go, me.

I guess I’ll take my satisfaction from the thought of someone broadening their horizons, food-wise, that getting rich off the web of intertubes.

piling on

Awkward Dance – New York Times:

Last Christmas, I took my grandchildren to “The Nutcracker,” a ballet I love. My enjoyment was severely marred by the appearance of a black snowflake and then, even worse, a black Snow King. The aesthetic incongruity was inconceivable. The entire ballet was spoiled. It is analogous to a one-legged midget playing Tarzan. Does this make me a racist?

Why, yes. It does make you a racist. The idea that one’s racial heritage and appearance is crippling says a lot: the analogy should have made that clear as soon as he or she wrote it down.

I saw this in my morning paper as well, and couldn’t believe someone would ask. But they did have the sense to have their name withheld (or perhaps The Ethicist took it upon himself to shield this person from the tide of indignation they were sure to get).

On The Ethicist: does he ever get any really challenging questions?

Time congratulates itself?

Hoisted from comments:

Most of us will never actually get a look at this silly magazine issue, so its cover story clearly isn’t referring to all of us.

Which means that Time’s Person of the Year really refers to “the readers of Time Magazine,” a group that, taken collectively, was certainly not more significant than a lot of other people I could mention.

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links for 2006-12-17

links for 2006-12-16

word

Genderification of Genre:

Genre fiction seems to be a tool to lock in to a specific segment of the audience, but it’s also an effective way to lock out an even larger audience, because we’ve all got these biases.

I have mentioned this once or seven times: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7

Starting to bore myself with it. I can only imagine how any regular reader must feel.

problems, forewarned

Intermittent Network Problems:

If you’ve been using Flickr today, you might have noticed intermittent problems: slow loading, pages failing to load complete, strange or incomplete results and things like that. These are the result of networking problems at our primary data center which have been recurring all day. And all day, we’ve believed those problems to be at the point of resolution, but then they turn around and bite us again. Ouch!

Flickrrecentgne-1

I read Stewart’s warning before I had a problem: what exactly is a “flickery recent Gen?”