Yay, me! I just caught up on eighty back posts at grapes 2.0, dating back to before we left for Jordan/Egypt in March.

bloglines lets me know just how far behind I get on the umpty ump RSS feeds I've stashed away here.

So, I go away for a while or don't hang out on the computer for a while and before you know it, a blog I track has EIGHTY POSTS I haven't read yet with more added each day.

Fine. Caught up on grapes2.0.

Next up Sara Zarr's blog: 116 posts behind on that one. ...

Labels: blog, life, people

   posted by Sal Towse at  4:04 PM|| |

Internet Resources - Writers Resources - Writing Links & Writers Links for Writers

And, turns out, the count didn't zero. Rather, added another digit.

I'm *still* going to swop in another free hit counter. Maybe Site Meter. I'm not too fond of how the current hit counter delivers data.

A MILLION HITS! I can't believe it.

Labels: app, blog

   posted by Sal Towse at  8:47 AM|| |

Kensington, Melbourne, Victoria, Australia

Brilliant blog.

Labels: blog, photographs

   posted by Sal Towse at  1:25 PM|| |

Have I mentioned that Archer is back? Yeah, he was all of six weeks into his "Adios to the Web" retirement when he came back.

Why hadn't I noticed? Well, to tell the truth, I haven't been keeping up with my Bloglines gang and he'd only been back for two weeks when we left for most of March. Then March slipped into April and here we are.

If I hadn't kept Archer on my Bloglines list (even after he said farewell on Jan 2, 2008), I never would've known he was back. But I did, and when I checked the Bloglines list an hour or so ago, there he was! New content! Outstanding! Happy day. Archer's jumble of sense, nonsense, blatant lies, and outrageously gross humor is intact.

For those of youse others on the list, I may need a while to catch up. I mean some folks have a hundred posts I haven't read yet and even HCC has a backlog.

A belated welcome back, Archer. Good to see you.

Labels: blog, politics

   posted by Sal Towse at  3:56 PM|| |

If Hillary Clinton loses, does she know how to lose? What will that be, if she loses? Will she just say, "I concede" and go on vacation at a friend's house on an island, and then go back to the Senate and wait?

Is it possible she could be so normal? Politicians lose battles, it's part of what they do, win and lose. But she does not know how to lose. Can she lose with grace? But she does grace the way George W. Bush does nuance.

[continue ..."Can Mrs. Clinton Lose?" -- Peggy Noonan]

Labels: blog, politics

   posted by Sal Towse at  11:18 AM|| |

The FAIL Blog

Must be seen to be believed. (Lots of ouchies here!)

via his nibs.

Labels: blog, culture, yikes

   posted by Sal Towse at  1:40 PM|| |

The Library of Congress Adds Photos To Flickr, Encourages Tagging

This is very very cool news.

[via Laughing Squid, natch.]

Labels: blog, history, photographs

   posted by Sal Towse at  7:21 PM|| |

Daily Kos: Steering into the skid: Books for the End of the World.

Be sure to read the comments.

Labels: blog, books

   posted by Sal Towse at  11:24 PM|| |

In spirit I'm with those Blog365 folks, but I won't be signing up because (1)I'm not a signer-upper for the most part and (2)I don't want to be so engaged that I freak when I get hit by a bus and wind up in the hospital and can't blog for a couple days and spoil my up-til-then-pristene record.

And for those keeping track, I'm still 100% as of Day Six of the year. My "blog" entries between Jan 1 and Jan 6 were in the form of tweets, which get pasted up over there in the righthand sidebar.

Just soze you know.

Labels: blog, life

   posted by Sal Towse at  1:14 PM|| |

Better late than never.

Last May, in honor of its one-year anniversary, The Rap Sheet organized The Rap Sheet's ONE BOOK PROJECT.

We invited more than 100 crime novelists, book critics, and bloggers from all over the English-speaking world to choose the one crime/mystery/thriller novel that they thought had been "most unjustly overlooked, criminally forgotten, or underappreciated over the years."

Interesting list. Steve Hockensmith, author of Holmes on the Range and On the Wrong Track, nominates THE DOORBELL RANG (1965) by Rex Stout and explains why. J.D. Rhoades, lawyer, blogger, and author of Safe and Sound nominates Katy Munger's MONEY TO BURN [1999]. Linda Fairstein, author of Bad Blood, chose Robert Traver's ANATOMY OF A MURDER.

... and the list goes on.

If you're a crime fiction fan, this list will keep you in reading material for a long, long time.

[via The Rap Sheet]

Labels: blog, books, mystery, people

   posted by Sal Towse at  3:18 PM|| |

Cute Overload! :)

The wonders of the Web. Why, I was just off reading In Praise of Sardines and Brett mentioned Cute Overload and I clicked through.

The world is cracked, you know? A bit of cute might help mend things.

Or not.

Labels: blog, yikes

   posted by Sal Towse at  9:16 AM|| |

Check out Geoff Manaugh's BLDGBLOG: Architectural Conjecture, Urban Speculation, Landscape Futures.

A plethora of goodies.

Geoff Manaugh has a book (BLDGBLOG) out from Chronicle Books in Spring 2009 and moved to this fair ville in September to become a senior editor at Dwell.

More about Manaugh here.

Labels: architecture, blog, books, people, San Francisco

   posted by Sal Towse at  2:01 PM|| |

Eric, over at Transbay Blog, is running a series of informational posts on the Central Subway, which I've ranted about on occasion here and elsewhere.

Transbay Blog is one of the most focussed, least axe-grinding blogs covering "News and thoughts on public transportation and city planning in the San Francisco Bay Area." If such be your interests, check it out.

Labels: blog, politics, San Francisco, SFMTA/Muni

   posted by Sal Towse at  1:44 PM|| |

Entertaining blog with news tidbits.

The Consumerist: Shoppers Bite Back

You can find such gems as a post about Batter Blaster:

Occasionally we see products that make us wonder how we got to this late day without them. "Batter Blaster" (which is pancake batter in a Cheese Whiz or Redi Whip bottle) is one such product.

Will we be buying this? No. Are we happy the it exists? Yeah. Actually, we are.

I think the product's an abomination (How hard is it to add water to your Krusteaz mix?) but about half the comments are in a "hell-yeah, I've been waiting for something like this" vein.

Labels: blog, culture, shopshopshop

   posted by Sal Towse at  11:40 AM|| |

Word out in today's SFChronicle that Sara Zarr -- whom I met many many moons ago at a WTQ gathering of misc.writers, back when she lived in this fair city, before she moved to Utah -- is a finalist for the National Book Award for The Story of a Girl in the Young People's Literature division.

Yippee! Yahoo! for Sara!!!!!

Sara's Web presence: The Stories of a Girl

Sara is published. Sara is a finalist for a National Book Award.

Sara no longer engages with folks on misc.writing.

Hmmm. Is there a connection?

(A slight one, perhaps. Her success is primarily due to ... Sara is talented, and determined, and focussed and ...)

Yay, hooray for Sara!

Labels: blog, books, URL, writing

   posted by Sal Towse at  10:04 AM|| |

"From Tenderloin Housing Clinics own court records and you thought YOU had bad neighbors? "

Yikes.

[via Curbed SF]

Labels: blog, life, San Francisco

   posted by Sal Towse at  12:15 PM|| |

Entertaining blog entry over at Page 3.14:

Page 3.14 : "What May Happen in the Next Hundred Years," circa 1900.

Earlier today, a friend sent me a link to this old-ish post from the excellent history/art/cultural curiosity blog Paleo-Future. It's a document written by John Elfreth Watkins, Jr., for Ladies' Home Journal in 1900. It is entitled "What May Happen in the Next Hundred Years."

I couldn't resist reading the whole thing (see the big version here), and am compelled—as a person of the future—to log a few replies.

Entertaining snippets from the December 1900 LHJ article and replies from Katherine Sharpe.

Read the article yourself or just dip into Sharpe's blog entry.

[via science blogs from Seed Media]

Labels: blog, science

   posted by Sal Towse at  1:20 PM|| |

Typographic Collaboration | Typophile

Typographica a journal of typography featuring news, observations, and open commentary on fonts and typographic design.

typography a photoset on flickr

viaLetter Spell it out

Jules Vernacular Lettres oeuvrières & incongruités typographiques. French signage and lettering from Jack Usine.

Triborough's photos of NYC Transit Authority Graphics Standards Manual = a flickr photoset

Zuzana Licko and Rudy VanderLans at Emigre

Typetester - compare screen type

FontFeed a font blog

Labels: blog, design, URL

   posted by Sal Towse at  4:32 PM|| |

[via the brilliant collection of advertisements at I believe in advertising]

Labels: blog, culture, media, URL

   posted by Sal Towse at  3:30 PM|| |

Another excellent bit from Patti Digh and 37days: Burn Those Jeans [PDF].

Labels: blog, life

   posted by Sal Towse at  10:10 AM|| |

The video this post links to is dashing around the Web this week even though it was taken four years ago.



Made me cry. I'm sure the young woman singing the National Anthem still remembers that night and the kindness of Mo.

Check out this article, written not long after the video was taken in 2003.

*sniffles*

Also check out Patti Digh's blog, 37days, which is where this all came from.

Labels: blog, life, people, video

   posted by Sal Towse at  9:39 AM|| |

Need to go fix breakfast/lunch/whatever and step back away from blogs like The food pornographer

Labels: blog, food

   posted by Sal Towse at  12:57 PM|| |

Is it getting to that time of year again? I wouldn't know, lacking a (sniff) sunny space to raise zucchini.

But for those of you who do have a sunny space and are using it to raise zucchini, Heidi Swanson offers up My Special Zucchini Bread Recipe at 101 Cookbooks.

(Added bonus: Today's 101cookbooks blog entry features Quinoa and Grilled Zucchini.)

Bon appetit!

Labels: blog, food, San Francisco

   posted by Sal Towse at  8:47 AM|| |

Zen rotates quotes through the top of his blog. This one showed up today: From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs! Marx

Reminded me of the on-the-street-reporter-types who ask people, do you agree with this? who said it?

Seems about half of Americans asked think that this credo is from the U.S. Constitution.

Should it be?

I was checking to confirm that my "50% of Americans" memory was accurate and found this current ref: Does America need to update Constitution? Renowned political scientist believes it's time for big changes. by Ed Williams.

Interesting read.

Labels: blog, politics

   posted by Sal Towse at  9:07 AM|| |

Someone found the blog with an ask.com search for /elephants and luck facing window/.

Note the lack of "".

I'm wondering what the person was in search of.

Labels: blog

   posted by Sal Towse at  10:09 AM|| |

Pretty, eh? That's the blog in living color. I could swear I'd done this before, a year or more back, but I can't find it, if I did indeed do it, so I've done it again.

Aharef provides the applet. You provide the Web page you want him to graph. He 'xplains it all here and also shows some mega sites and how they look with the app: cnn.com, apple.com &c.

Color code:
blue: for links (the A tag)
red: for tables (TABLE, TR and TD tags)
green: for the DIV tag
violet: for images (the IMG tag)
yellow: for forms (FORM, INPUT, TEXTAREA, SELECT and OPTION tags)
orange: for linebreaks and blockquotes (BR, P, and BLOCKQUOTE tags)
black: the HTML tag, the root node
gray: all other tags

Flickr has a collection of pics.

Nice.

Labels: app, blog, webstuff

   posted by Sal Towse at  5:13 PM|| |

Whilst off looking for a description/definition of Ambient Intimacy, I came across Leisa Reichelt's blog: disambiguity.

Just reading disambiguity makes my brain feel polished and shiny.

Labels: blog, design

   posted by Sal Towse at  2:35 PM|| |

Spinning is the blog of Susan Marie Rose Maciog Gibb.

Who?

Interesting look into the life of a reader, someone self-defined as "Learning life through Writing, Reading, Traditional Archery, Nature and Harvest, Computer Hardware, and watching people."

The Web is a wonder these days, providing loads of opportunity to watch people act, roleplay (perhaps), wig out, gracefully sail through upsetting circumstances, overreact, underreact. ...

Find someone on a newsgroup, in a blog, posting comments in reaction to an article. Imagine that person as a character in the story you're writing. What you see on the Web gives you the barebones, the skeleton of the character. It's up to you to flesh out the motivations, insecurities, craziness, saneness and make the character your own.

There's been discussion here and elsewhere about whether (or not) dooce is a blog worth reading. I think so. Talk about finding someone who gives you loads of opportunity to peer into their lives!

"but she whines and whines and I'm tired of her whining about her boring life," some say. Well. I'm tired of bombast and vicious rants, which is why I stopped reading certain blogs. I don't read dooce daily. I do pop in every month or so to get a flavor of the personality. She would make such a good character in a story I haven't quite cooked up yet.

What a brave new world this is, where no matter what sort of person we are or wish we were, we can read about others like or unlike us (and others can read our ramblings and dish with friends about how witless we can be and so on ad infinitum).

Labels: blog, writing

   posted by Sal Towse at  6:00 PM|| |

Not for the first time, Hawk has been roughed up by security guards and/or pseudo-cops while photographing San Francisco from the sidewalk.

Read Thomas Hawk's Digital Connection: Photographing Architecture is Still Not a Crime, Police Harrasment at 45 Fremont Street and ask yourself

• what you would've done if this had happened to you
• what you would've done if this happened to family or friend
• what can you and I do to insure that this just does not happen again.

Hawk takes nice photos too. Go check them out while you're there.

Labels: blog, life, photographs, San Francisco

   posted by Sal Towse at  8:07 PM|| |

Interesting read in the Bostonia that came in the mail last week re Parker's donation of his archives to the Boston University Howard Gotlieb Archival Research Center, his writing methods, his PhD thesis ("The Violent Hero, Wilderness Heritage, and Urban Reality: A Study of the Private Eye in the Novels of Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, and Ross Macdonald") and more.

The article got me poking around on the Web and I came across his blog and an interview by Eric Berlin (3.2005) which included this bit of advice:

EB: Thank you. Classic question to any author: any advice to aspiring writers out there who are looking to become novelists?

RBP: Write it, send it in. There isn't anything else to do. Somebody asked me at a signing the other day if I have any tips for a first-time writer and I said, "Yeah, try and write good." There isn't anything I can tell them - there are no tips.

There are very successful writers who don't write anything the way I do. John Updike, who I know, and who is a nice guy and a great writer, does not write in any way the way I do. So you can't say, "You better write like me!" I mean, you can write like Updike, that will work..

If you need tips, it's almost too late for you. If you can't fix it, you can't send it to me and have me fix it. You write it, you send it in, and if somebody at a publishing house thinks they can make a profit by publishing it, they will. And if they think they can't, they won't. And I can't make them do it, your Uncle Harry can't make them do it.

I suppose Michael Jackson or somebody can write a bad book and somebody will publish it at the moment. His life story would be swell. But other than that kind of celebrity hogwash, actual writing...

[At this point, we're interrupted by Mr. Parker's PR rep. We're told that that we have five more minutes, and we're asked how everything is going. Mr. Parker deadpans, "We're doing my favorite thing. I'm talking about myself."]

So no, I don't have any advice. There are still publishers who will read unsolicited manuscripts. They'll read them all, but they may read five pages in and say, "Ooh..." And I think that works. I think that if you have a manuscript, I can read one page, or maybe half a page, and know whether you have any talent or not. But the odds are long, most people don't have it. And you're competing with a lot of other submissions, but some of them are written in crayon. I mean, some are so apparently tripe that you read one sentence and throw it out.

There are also agents listed in the Literary Marketplace. I got published without an agent. You need an agent to get read at some houses, which require agent's submission - they're listed in one of those books, Writer's Marketplace or Literary Marketplace. But they can't get you published if you can't get published yourself, except that they can get you read places where you might not get read otherwise. And they've done the initial screening: if they take you on, the publisher will give you more attention. The publisher saves the trouble of bothering the initial editor.

It's been so long since I've been a beginning writer that I don't really know what it's like anymore. I don't know what the market is like. I don't know whether it would really be better to find an agent or just get published and then get an agent. If you get published, you can get an agent easy enough. And you need one: an agent is very valuable.

But the one thing you have to do is to write it. With non-fiction, you may be able to get a deal on a sample chapter and an outline, but with fiction, it's made on the writing. Non-fiction can be the idea, the story, or whatever. Fiction is in the execution. Write it, and send it to somebody who can publish it. Not me!

Labels: blog, writing

   posted by Sal Towse at  6:09 PM|| |

For my legions of IE-using fans. Well, at least for one very special one, that is.

A swell fambly member, who reads the blog, told me that she was getting a glitch (and probably always had but was too polite to say so) that was cutting off the lefthand side of the center column -- yes, the column that contains the guts of the blog.

"What browser do you use?" I asked.

"MS Internet Explorer," she replied.

I fired up IE, which I only fire up when something won't display on Firefox (a most excellent browser, btw, and one I highly recommend) or when I'm trying to make sure some Webby thing I'm working on will work for the IE user. ...

Turns out if you scrunch your screen down to a certain size, the lefthand and righthand columns scrunch down okay, but there's a big blob of space that blocks out the leftmost portion of the center column -- just the symptom the fambly member reported. I'm suspecting she uses a laptop and, hence, has a smaller screen but I can't remember.

Someone back when had mentioned the same thing, but after much tweaking at that point, I couldn't find a fix.

Times change. I created a Web site last spring that used a header, a footer and three columns to display and, after much torking around, found a way to make it work with IE, unless you squished the screen down far smaller than most people do. An older and wiser soul today, I took that experience and tweaked the blog template today so that the swell fambly member can read the blog using IE.

You'll notice more space between the columns but everything squishes down okay with IE now. (Unless -- goes without saying -- you squish the screen down far smaller than most people do, at which point the sidebars pop out from the edges and down onto the bottom.)

I had to remove the MyBlogLog stuff because it doesn't compress gracefully and caused the lefthand column to overrun and scoot down to the bottom of the page when using the smaller screen size in IE.

Barring those minor changes everything remains the same.

Un regalo por mi cuñada. Hope it works!

Labels: blog, webstuff

   posted by Sal Towse at  12:18 PM|| |

The Daly Blog

What is it with Chris Daly?

He moved his Chris Daly blog off the City servers because he wanted to be able to post the unvarnished truth about Gavin and Aaron and others.

You go, Chris. More power to you if you think this is the way to prove your point. I have no idea why you're so angry, but I see a downward spiral that has hit the tipping point. All that bile can't be good for the soul.

Labels: blog, politics, San Francisco

   posted by Sal Towse at  10:43 AM|| |

Fiddling with the Twitter app. (see right sidebar)

Labels: app, blog

   posted by Sal Towse at  1:19 PM|| |

Well, looks like she's serious.

Miss Snark, the literary agent, has retired from blogging. She'll keep agenting, she sez, and It wasn't a specific event. The questions were increasingly ones I'd already answered or ones I couldn't answer.

Adieu, Miss Snark. Bon chance. It's been a grand run.

(Miss Snark promises to keep the blog up with all its tasty bits of knowledge for the foreseeable future. ... and, no, she's not writing a book based on the blog.)

Labels: blog, URL, writing

   posted by Sal Towse at  5:46 PM|| |

I don't think I've mentioned Victoria Smith's sfgirlbybay blog before.

Subtitled "bohemian modern style from a san francisco girl," Smith's blog covers a wide range of interesting design stuff and news.

I love to rummage around, looking at the pictures, clicking through to sites she mentions. She covers everything from concert posters to clothing, interior design to product design.

She's got a mighty fine list of sites on her blogrolls too.

Hey, look at that! 7x7 profiled her on their site last week.

Labels: blog, design, San Francisco

   posted by Sal Towse at  12:30 PM||