Divinest Sense

Didn’t have much time this weekend to deal with the template - between unsuccessfully shopping for x-country ski bindings (apparently these well-to-do DC folks are more interested in wearing cute sweaters at the lodge in Aspen than in slogging along going nowhere fast in the snowy backcountry - pfft!), contemplating the arrangement of the new furniture, shoveling snow, cooking meatballs, setting the kitchen on fire, trying to figure out the difference between champagne silk shantung and light harvest gold silk dupioni, and coming down with some sort of lung-filling illness. I have got to start getting my priorities straight. So, what’s on the internets today? Best thing I’ve seen so far, Medley responds to a post from long-dormant John Perry Barlow. Very important stuff there, go read.

Well, as you can see, I’ve got my past entries imported from Movable Type into Wordpess, but I haven’t managed to bring over my fabulous stylesheet yet. So you’re looking at the wretched Wordpress default theme. Hopefully I will have some time this week and/or weekend to work on it. The gallery will now be at jenniferbishop.org, and I’ll be attempting to bend “gallery” to my will and make it look like an interesting online portfolio rather than a generic repository for my many, many kitty pictures. That’s what Flickr is for. So anyway…. hang in there! Things are going to be looking a lot better Real Soon Now.

Hi everyone, I have decided, after a 4-year relationship with Fatcow that just ain’t got no magic no more, to move over the Dreamhost, which has much better support and flexibility and lots of cool stuff you can do automatically. These people are smart. Anyhew, I’m also attempting to convert my Movable Type weblog to Wordpress, so we’ll see how that goes. Hang in there, my beloved audience of 3!

Another hapless denizen of bizarro-world unmasked, tarred, and feathered by the relentless guardians of Wikipedia. Oh, why must we insist on the facts when the fiction is so much more entertaining? - Andy Carvin has the story.

A young man identifying himself as Caspian James Crichton-Stuart IV, 5th Duke of Cleveland, visited Stillwater Area High School in Minnesota three times trying to enroll as a transfer student. He had a “spot on” English accent and insisted on being called “your grace.” Students at the school had their doubts, so they began researching him on the Internet…student research exposed Gardner to be their so-called Duke of Cleveland; he also happened to be a 22-year-old registered sex offender.

All right, so it’s definitely for the best that the erstwhile 5th Duke of Cleveland was discovered in his lie, as he could have endangered the lives of high schoolers with his sexual predation. But think about it - with our pasts and personal histories becoming increasingly transparent, does anyone really have a chance to retire with dignity by becoming a harmless fringe-dwelling eccentric, without some plodding fact-checker pointing out to everyone that you are really just a former stock manager for Safeway, and not a terribly good one? I guess my life plan of moving to the backwoods of Kentucky, changing my name to Costanza, Duchess of Umbria, and collecting dried-out deer droppings in various-sized velvet-lined boxes and breathlessly showing them off to visitors as the “family jewels” will have to be modified a bit.