Odds and ends

In my not so humble opinion, you, of course, belong
in the Picture of Dorian Gray, and do not try
to deny it. You belong in the fashionable
circles of Victorian London where exotic
tastes, a double life, decadence, wit and a
hypocritical belief in moral betterment make
you a home. You belong where the witty
apothegms of Lords, the silly moralities of
matrons, the blinding high of opium, and the
beauty of visual arts mingle to form one
convoluted world.


Which Classic Novel do You Belong In?
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[Quiz via Becky.]


That's funny. Not at all inappropriate since, as of the beginning of this academic year, I've felt a sense of kinship with George Egerton. I think I am a Decadent at heart. Give me my Yellow Book! Give me my Arthur Symons; you can keep your William Blake!


Pastel: Masks and Faces
by Arthur Symons

The light of our cigarettes
Went and came in the gloom:
It was dark in the little room.

Dark, and then, in the dark,
Sudden, a flash, a glow,
And a hand and a ring I know.

And then, through the dark, a flush
Ruddy and vague, the grace
(A rose!) of her lyric face.



- "A 1935 US Plan for Invasion of Canada" submitted by F.W. Rudmin, Queen's University; Kingston, Ontario. [Via Becky.]

All I have to say is "yikes!" So maybe we've got good reason to be suspicious...



- "Google Bomb Them Back To The Stone Age!

If you've ever Googled the word Jew, you may have noticed that an antisemitic hate site, Jew Watch, inexplicably and disturbingly comes up as the top result on what is beyond a doubt the most frequently relied upon search engine in the world. Troubled by his recent discovery of this fact, a staff reporter at San Francisco's j. magazine brought this matter to the attention of Google's executives, who showed little more than indifference towards the revelation.

Offering a convenient (though entirely plausible) explaination, one of Google's representatives suggested that the placement of the hate site is a result of a Google bomb, "A technique through which a group of bloggers working together can make a webpage come up when someone searches Google for certain keywords," my all-time favorite example of this, of course, being "miserable failure."

That being said, I'd like to propose a j-blogger Google bombing campaign, to push Jew Watch, as well as the other questionable high-ranking sites which appear in the search results for "Jew" (such as a Jews for Jesus ministry and Henry Ford's antisemitic tractate The International Jew), down in their Google rankings, replacing them with sites that, well... Jews can feel a bit more comfortable with.

I'm going to suggest using Wikipedia's entry for Jew as the initial (and official) link for this campaign, as it's the most inclusive, non-denominational, and democratic source on the subject. However, if you'd like to recommend additional links, please make sure to spread 'em around, so that we can get the critical mass going that's necessary to pull this off.

Wanna participate? Just drop < a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jew" target="_new">Jew< /a> [*] into your next blog post, or put it anywhere on your website. Be sure to spread this around to your mailing lists and your friends on IM too, so that we may actively engage in defining ourselves, as opposed to allowing others (with vicious intentions) to do so for us."

[Via MonkeyFilter via Becky.]


* = Just be sure to fix the formatting (ie. omit the spaces between the "<" and the "a", and the "<" and the "/a>") so the resulting link looks like this: Jew.