Factor that

I used to watch "The O'Reilly Factor" regular, if not religiously. I now haven't watched it in many months, and I don't miss it.

One thing that always put me off was the e-mail segment, where some approaches in presenting viewers' e-mails bordered on the dishonest. Most annoyingly, two nutbags with foaming, diametrically opposed complaints ("Bill, you're a card-carrying leftie!" vs. "Bill, you're a conservative kook!") about the show would be presented side-by-side, and then Bill would profess a mystified, head-shaking hopelessness about how both viewers "watched the same show," implying that people who wrote to complain were rabidly ignorant. He'd then dreamily conclude that hapless ol' Bill was just a regular, middle-of-the-road Joe who couldn't catch a fair break. This smarmy feint became quickly tired to everyone but Bill and his producers.

I wonder if they still do that. Not bad enough to start watching again, but I do wonder...

Don't spank it in the county jail

Giving you more of what you read blogs for, I'd like to point out some trivial but humorous news:

Man sentenced for spanking the monkey in county jail.

My nomination for quote of the week: "During jury selection, McHugh looked at 17 prospective jurors and asked how many among them had never masturbated. No hands were raised."

What a great news day...

Manteca Bulletin: still inferior, but in a whole new way

Kudos to the Manteca Bulletin for updating the lame design of its old online presence to the slightly less-lame new look.

Razzes to the Manteca Bulletin online newspaper for feeling it necessary to offer a "How to Navigate Our New Site" link. "Click the links at top and side to go somewhere. Click the headline, read the story." That shit should be intuitive, and pretty much is for anyone who's ever read a web page. Duh...

Let's hope the new and improved website includes a full-time proofreader, because even worse than the old design was the regular and simple grammatical and spelling errors.

Meet the new blog, same as the old blog

New place, new delivery system, same old blog.

I've been blogging for years at my domain, tombickle.com, using handwritten code and DreamWeaver, which has come to strongly resemble the ease with which Daniel Lewis wrote and painted in "My Left Foot." If the technical equivalent of my left foot was the only avenue available to me, this might make sense. With other means at my easy disposal, however, I feel more and more like a wingnut as I struggle along with this odd and unnecessarily difficult method of blogging.

No more. I've stopped hemming, and slowed precipitously on the hawing, and chosen a dedicated blog forum on which to hang my yammerings. I researched it myself, and couldn't find a significant difference among the choices available. Thanks to Greg Crist for his Google-based opinion that blogger.com is the way to go.

Trust me to listen to the opinion to one of the few people I know who doesn't have his own blog. This oddity is precisely representational of how I make all my decisions - badly.

So, on with the show. My goal as I strike out in this new area is to blog at least once daily, aiming for at least one post that is of interest to the world at large once per week. Blogger promises to facilitate with entry methods including text messaging and audio blogging - how exciting.