This is the obligatory I just got a digital camera and here’s a picture of my cats posting.

Well, it’s a picture of one cat, Joey. The other cat, Suzy refuses to poses for a photo.

However, you may relax. There will be no further cat photos. Instead, I plan to run photos of protests, gatherings of peaceniks, and whatever else seems interesting.

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Miami challenges Los Angeles?

Judging from Dave Barry’s New Years Day desciption of his beloved South Florida, I’m a’feared Miami may consider itself to be the mayhem and nutcase capitol of America, rather than Los Angeles.

From Dave Barry (in italics): 

DRIVING: South Florida traffic operates under international standards, under which each motorist obeys the laws of his or her individual country of origin. The proud motto of the South Florida motorist is “Death Before Yielding.”

Ah, but do you have 500+ miles of freeways, all of which can be impassable any time day or night for no apparent reason?  Or mass transit on a scope and grandeur to equal that of, oh, a town of 100,000? I think not.

MASS TRANSIT: Miami is blessed with a modern, interconnected light-rail transit system. If you figure out how it works, please let us know.

HA. Los Angeles has subways that start nowhere and go nowhere. Beat that! AND at one point we built a new freeway that inexplicably stopped just short of the airport, thus sabotaging the primary reason for building the freeway. A veritable masterstroke of incompetent planning!

 So just kick back, have fun, and remember: Your pace should be 75 miles per hour, and your doors should be locked.

During the last L.A. riot/uprising (and we’ve had several!), people were doing 110 on the freeways, stopping for nothing, and the little old lady from Pasadena had a  .357 under the seat. You probably think I’m exaggerating.

You’ve heard scary things about Miami. You’ve heard that it’s a wild, crazy, dangerous tropical place where everybody has a gun, the traffic is insane, crime is rampant, the politicians are corrupt, the voters have the intelligence of eggplants, and the cockroaches are the size of Shetland ponies.

Hmmm. Maybe you are as nutty as L.A. after all. However, consider this. Imagine a county the size of the State of Connecticut that is as crazy and wacky as Los Angeles and you would have - Los Angeles!

You can keep your cockroaches!

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Thank you.

Yeah you! The one reading this. Thank you for reading Politics in the Zeros. I appreciate it.

I started PoliZeros in April as a homegrown weblog, then switched to Radio UserLand software a few months later. Currently, PoliZeros averages over 500 user sessions a day, with spikes up to 700. Plus, the internal Radio UserLand rankings consistently shows it in their daily top 100.

What fascinates me is 1) how fast news travels on weblogs, 2) how weblogs frequently lead the mass media in breaking stories.

One example: The recent exposure of Trent Lott’s past racist statements was done by weblogs, not the mass media. Major media picked up the story only several days after blogs had done the serious digging and research.

Another example: The attempted coup in Venezuela last spring. While the mass media was uniformly saying Chavez resigned voluntarily and had left the country, little NarcoNews got the real story out on their listserv, where it spread within hours through blogdom. A few days later the mass media retracted their stories printing, essentially, what NarcoNews had reported days earlier.

These are crazy times we are in. I suspect 2003 will be seriously nutty. A shaky economy. At least one war. A populace who, basically, is losing faith in their leaders. Ah well, danger and opportunity are sometimes the same thing.

I heard Ron Kovic speak recently. He said, we are living in historic times and what happens now will for better or worse be spoken of for decades to come. And no one I’ve mentioned his comment to has disagreed.

A few weeks back at a meeting, Arianna Huffington said, we can’t rely on our leaders, they are part of the problem. We have to do it ourselves.

Blogs, I think, are part of the solution. And thanks again for reading this one. 

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Word Oddities

From a wondrous website about words comes -

• “It is said that no word rhymes with ORANGE. There is a musical recording Rhymes With Orange by Mario Grigorov. There is a comic strip with the same name by Hillary Price. Witchiepoo sang There Ain’t No Rhyme for Oranges on H. R. Pufnstuf. Glenn Anderson reports a Canadian band called Rhymes With Orange had two hit recordings, Marvin and Toy Trains.

However, BLORENGE (a 1,833 ft. hill near Abergavenny, Wales) is given in O. V. Michaelsen’s book Words At Play.

• 
  
  SET is the word with the longest entry in the OED and W3. In the OED2, the verb set has over 430 senses consisting of approximately 60,000 words.

• 
  
  PNEUMONOULTRAMICROSCOPICSILICOVOLCANOCONIOSIS (45 letters; a lung disease caused by breathing in certain particles) is the longest word in any English-language dictionary.
   
  The following appeared in a post in alt.usage.english:  
   I conjecture that this “word” was coined by word puzzlers, who then worked assiduously to get it into the major unabridged dictionaries (perhaps with a wink from the editors?) to put an end to the endless squabbling about what is the longest word.”

Lots more fun stuff on the site too!

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