Archive for the ‘Metablogging’ Category:
25 Aug
One of my local free papers–the Philly City Paper–recently ran a sort of bitch-fest story about the city sending a $300 bill to a local blogger, Marilyn Bess, after Marilyn, presumably, registered her blog as a business on her federal tax return. The $300 bill is a business privilege tax and it applies to blogs like Marilyn’s because, according to the city:
Therefore, for federal income taxes, an individual who claims these earnings as a business can receive deductions for their computer or web hosting as a business expense.
I assume this is a true and accurate statement, because, uh, the government would not lie to me, no sir. I file my taxes online every year, utilizing whatever free service I can find, and go for maximum speed, deducting nothing. I assume I make so little that whatever errors I render won’t cause the IRS to beat me too handily in the event of an audit. So even though this blog does not carry advertisements and it certainly costs me money (thus firmly qualifying as a hobby), I wonder: what kind of discount could I have gotten on this here MacBook? And how much can I get reimbursed for my Interwebs hookup and my GoDaddy bill? Anybody out there have a clue?
According to the City Paper, the actual point of the article was “to question the propriety of making people who earn practically no money have to pay a $300 fee just because they chose to report those earnings to the IRS”. I do wonder, though, if what you’re doing earns you practically nothing, but your reporting it gets you slammed with a $300 business bill, well, you’re probably doing it wrong.
27 Sep
In high school, I was a budding grammar Nazi. I blame this on an ex-girlfriend’s grandmother, who, despite her advanced years and Alzheimer’s, had an ear for the same violations that once gave Strunk&White the howling fantods: ungrammaticality. Dottie’s favorite game–one I adopted, to the chagrin of virtually everyone I knew–was to count incorrect usages of the word “like” in speaking. She would say nothing while doing this. Dottie would simply listen serenely to whatever you said to say, raising her fingers, one at a time, until the speaker realized the correlation. “They’re decorating it with, like, this like jungle theme with palm trees and like tigers everywhere.” Three silent digits extend.
This game generated one of two effects on speakers: either you slimmed your sentences and removed a great deal of your chaff (as the ex- and I both did, quicksharp), or the stress of avoiding “like” became so enormous that smooth sentence completion be impossible: pausing, backtracking, violent re-words and stuttering were the new modus operandi.
Of course, I went to public school, and in public school, they don’t teach you things like the nominative/accusative/dative/genitive/locative cases, what a preposition is, how polarity words work, and so forth. Thankfully, SOMEBODY learned all these things, and are willing and able to share them all with us. Without further delay, a few more language-oriented blogs to recommend you to:
LANGUAGE LOG
Perhaps the biggest and brightest and best of the language blogs, this site is run by Mark Liberman, a professor in UPenn’s well-esteemed linguistics department. He get’s plenty of help from a number of other linguistic luminaries, and the blog covers plenty of ground from Dan Brown’s prose and Van Morrison’s swearing to Beatles gibberish and Google books critiques.
MOTIVATED GRAMMAR
This charming piece of webspace is occupied by Gabe Doyle, a UCSD linguistics grad student. His sub-header and motto apparent is “Prescriptivism Must Die!”, which is funny in such an inside-baseball, grammar-nerds-only sense that the time it would take to explain the joke would render it unfunny. Timing, as they say, is everything. Perhaps his hallmark post thus far (for me, at any rate) is his thorough argument, with ample evidence, of why the singular “they” is perfectly grammatical.
WORD ROUTES
Ben Zimmer spends a lot of time moonlighting at Language Log or filling in for William Safire. When he’s doing neither, he keeps his own site, tracing words and their usages back through history. Most notable in his recent work, perhaps, is his debunking of “Cronkiters”.
25 Jul
An important element of the young traditions of blogs is to give credit where credit is due. Instead, however, of simply laying off upon you a seemingly inexhaustible reference of what I am reading or have read, I will attempt to introduce each and every link that I provide in the sidebar. The inaugural class will be documented here, and each update will be, similarly, recieve a short, summary post in its honor.
Bad Astronomy- Former NASA scientist Phil Plait shares and explains space, while advocating for reason and skepticism. NSFPeople-who-think-the-Earth-is-6000-years-old.
Bitten- Mark Bittman’s easy and wonderful recipes in the NY Times.
Gary, Landlord of the Flies- Documentation of the landlord you’re glad you never had to deal with.
Chocolate and Zucchini- Clotilde Dusolier’s discovery of food, made simple. Also with a French version.
The Criterion Contraption- Matthew Dessens is going through the Criterion collection very, very slowly. But whenever he advances, he leaves one of the most comprehensive reviews to be found written by anyone on any film on the internet.
Democracy in America- Economist columnists blog on American politics.
The dish- Sportswriter Keith Law’s blog on literature and food.
Farm to Table- Food made from local, fresh ingredients.
The Genius in All of Us- David Shenk’s blog on genes and talent.
Glenn Greenwald- Salon columnist whose tone is over-the-top but whose point–accountability in government–is invaluable.
Joe Posnanski- Columnist for the Kansas City Star and Sports Illustrated. Baseball guy, lover of Skyline Chili, and in equal parts eternally optimistic and totally baffled.
Jonah Keri- Canadian baseball writer and Expos fan on baseball and society.
Last Plane to Jakarta- John Darnielle’s ravings about death metal, and sometimes, other music.
Lexington- Economist’s Lexington columnist’s take on American political news.
Malcolm Gladwell- Gladwell writes about, seemingly, whatever he wants, and it’s always interesting.
On Language- A longtime NY Times columnist’s weekly take on usage.
Philebrity- Philly area gossip, concerts, and drink specials.
Said the Gramophone- Blog with mp3s and the weird essays that accompany them.
ShysterBall- Lawyer from Columbus, OH ignores judges, lawsuits and paralegals in an effort to sustain an already admirable baseball obsession.
Smitten Kitchen- New Yorker with tiny kitchen (like NYC has any other kind) makes hearty comfort food into foodie porn.
Wordpress.org- this is the hosting service for this blog. Essentially, they make everything on this site possible, even though the content is all mine, and the design is mostly BOB’s.
xkcd- Stick figures! Jokes about math and sex, quite obviously written by a nerd.
24 Jul
This blog is authored by TC Shillingford, a white male, who does not use dots when spelling his initials. He is getting married in October. The author is virtually blind, and coping with it poorly. He is also going quite bald at a young age, and is delighting in that. He dropped out of college at least once, depending on how one chooses to count, and will return to higher academia in the fall with specific designs of getting a piece of thick paper with signatures and fancy typeface.
He has broad interests, which will be reflected in the content of this space. Mostly, a reader should expect posts on baseball, outer space, music, fiction, cinema, religion, skepticism, politics, food, drink, and language. And probably not in that order.
The author cooks for a living, and blogs not for fun but out of habit. He lives in Philadelphia. He lies about his birthday. He has an enormous family, an adopted cat, and a very rare dog. He gets dizzy in hot weather.
Blog posts will occur almost everyday, he hopes, but the reader should interruptions for vacations, weddings, balky internet access, and other shiny things.
