…but we’ve been nominated for a “Fallaci” out on the world-famous Little Green Footballs site.

The nominations for the Idiotarian (Fiskie) and Anti-Idiotarian (Fallaci) Awards for 2007 are now open!

…Remember, the Fiskie Award is for the most moonbattish, obtuse, deranged, or duplicitous person or group of the year. Past “winners” of the Fiskie have included Jimmy Carter, Rachel Corrie, Cindy Sheehan, Michael Moore, and Kofi Annan.

The Fallaci, on the other hand, goes to the person or group who best exemplified the fight against the heartbreak of moonbattitude. The Fallaci was just introduced last year and our first winner was former UN ambassador John Bolton.

Just to be clear, it’s the second of those two for which we’ve been nominated.

Don’t know if this will go anywhere, but we’re plum pleased to have made the list.

I upgraded our new television package to the next step up. You know how all these things work, right…they start out with some number of channels that sounds like a lot when you say it out loud, but the basic package just includes Fox and CNN and Cartoon and local and a big ol’ bunch of jewelry on sale at 1 in the morning…and On-Demand…but if you spend another $20 you can have some of the good stuff. Well, we spent the $20. I was teasing my lady about how wonderful it was to put out just a little bit of cash, and be able to surround the love of my life with a bunch of man-bashing crap to remind her what towering assholes us guys are. No WAY can this turn out to be a mistake. She knows I don’t really mean it, that I understand she has the intellectual wherewithal to filter that crap out when she sees it. She also understands my feelings about television in general — I think it’s fair to say that since the 1950’s, it’s lost its luster as a “hub” in the living room, around which family members can gather and share a common experience and grow closer together. It’s become more of a wedge, in my opinion, that drives families apart if they allow it to.

It’s the programming. It’s just plain hostile. And not by accident. Men are idiots, unless they wear neckties at night, in which case they’re evil and might still be idiots. Women are only concerned about one thing, and that’s getting what they want out of life, hell with everybody else. Girls are concerned that everybody isn’t paying attention to them all the time, and boys are aspiring to grow up into sad, angry, sullen men with dirty consciences. Those are the straight people. The gay people are whining about how oppressed they are by the straight people, when they aren’t showing off how much more fun they are than those stiff-assed straight people. Ethnic minorities, well, they live in a whole different world. They seem a lot less integrated in the boob tube than they are in real life. I’ve come to see television as a hundreds-of-channels endless menagerie of different classes of folks, just spoiling for a fight, but presenting themselves as if they aren’t. As un-integrated as different classes of people can possibly get without heading for the hills away from each other as fast as their little legs can carry ’em.

That’s what I’ve come to expect. But during my one marathon of television, nodding off and waking up and nodding off and waking up like a real December-25 lazy-man…I saw something else. Maybe this isn’t as bad, but I dunno. What I described above, you can escape. This stuff you can’t.

I’m referring to the de-commercialization of Christmas. I think it’s gone too far. Way too far.

Time after time after time, I saw these modern “Christmas stories” as having something to do with how evil material things are. Oh, I understand what is intended here, and I still think highly of the motives involved. But it seems there is a terrible misinterpretation taking place, perhaps even a usurpation.

The common thread I keep seeing is that there is a regrettable evil involved in simply earning the money. When I was a little kid we delighted in observing Ebenezer Scrooge to be a pitiful man on an errant path; we understood financial solvency was the least of his problems. But he was a parsimonious miser. He got his money by making people suffer, and he renegotiated his contracts with just as much ruthlessness as an independently-wealthy old man as he did when he was a skinny kid just getting started. And as that wealthy old man, his life was unhappy. He didn’t know what to spend the money on; he was just an empty shell, going through the motions.

And now? Every new Christmas story I see — someone needs salvation, a kick in the butt from a wiser all-knowing ghost, or simply to do some growing up. Because they made a life choice involving money. It can be something that doesn’t hurt anybody. Just taking a high-paying job. Our modern Scrooges are scolded, and then put through some melodramatic spiritual-cleansing process, after having indulged in a purely victim-less crime of getting rich.

Maybe I’m reading too much into it. But it bothers me tremendously when I see the same old story, but this time it appears someone’s been very careful to trim away any collateral damage. The whole point to “It’s A Wonderful Life,” for example, was not the welfare of George Bailey, but rather the welfare of everyone around him. People he spent his entire life helping, not even fully understanding how awful life would have been without him. The spoiler to Frank Capra’s classic is that the titular “Life” is not his at all, it’s everybody else’s.

I believe we are in the process of losing that. One made-for-TV that disturbed me greatly had to do with a gorgeous young red-haired lady who ditched her fiance and got a high-paying job in New York City, ending up spending Christmas alone because she had started an affair with her boss who it turned out wasn’t as quick to divorce his wife as she was led to believe. At the story’s conclusion she was able to mend her ways and ended up married to her boyfriend after all. Except — without any consequences. She was still rich. Richer than before, if I read the ending right. Everything was good now because she was the center of attention, and at the beginning, was not…and what about everybody else? Looked to me like all their lives were the same, one way or t’other.

All about her, her, her.

And it wouldn’t be fair for me to look that one up so I could single her out. It seems every single modern effort to re-tell “A Christmas Carol” makes the same, of what in my view is, a mistake. Something has been sacrificed for wealth, and with the help of some spiritual adviser a “new way” is found that undoes the sacrifice. The wealth remains. Nobody else is hurt; nobody else is helped.

It’s like the necessity to trash capitalism came first, and within that framework all the holes were filled in. To as scant an extent as could be possible. It’s like the television networks want to tell us the story of Scrooge, and at the same time, show us what he looks like.

There is another angle to this that I think needs to be considered. We happen to be living in an age in which we enjoy a number of opportunities to bring injury to one another, by capitalizing our various efforts inadequately. Yes, if you don’t spend enough on Christmas presents you might see some long faces when it comes time to open them. But there are other things. Drive without car insurance, you might change someone else’s life for the worse for a very long time. Grow old with debts and no coverage plans to take care of them, you make problems for your heirs. Fail to cover your burial costs, someone suffers. Get a divorce, your kids will have to grow up in a broken home.

And so to define poor spiritual health as a willingness to generate money, that and nothing more, in an age where spiritual health has so little definition — seems to me a recipe for disaster. We need money to survive. Money is supposed to be…and it seems to me, for the most part still is…a measure of what kind of help we are extending to our neighbors. Because whether we like to admit it or not, our nature is to take care of our own stuff — write blogs, watch television, go shopping, whatever. We’d just do what we want all day long, not helping others, if we could get away with it. If only someone would make us sandwiches and put a roof over our heads. But we aren’t here to do that, so sooner or later we need to go to work and do something FOR somebody else.

And get paid to do it. Well, hey — there’s a fine line between observing what people do when they aren’t paid to do it, and observing what people do when they think nobody’s watching. If we’re going to be so quick to judge each other, and I have many reasons for thinking that an unwise thing, I’d much rather see us judge each other according to the second of those two things than according to the first.

I guess what it all comes down to is, we’ve left ourselves open to manipulation for making Christmas into a season for the boob tube to be preaching at us. And as a middle-aged man, I’m just doing what middle-aged men do, which is to carp away about how much better things used to be. But in this case, I find it hard to sympathize with any other viewpoint. We’re being preached at by our television sets to not make any decisions that might result in money for ourselves…through programs that, I suspect, generated no small amount of money for the folks who put ’em together for us. But the message from yesterday, had more to do with a lesson that we shouldn’t be dickholes to each other.

Maybe it’s because I like money, but I liked the lesson of old a lot better. Don’t make money…don’t be a dick. I wish, nowadays, there were some recently-made productions offering the lesson to potential viewers that they shouldn’t act like dicks. Maybe this is closing the barn door after the horse has left, but my Christmas television viewing has left me with the impression this is a lost art. It’s put something of a damper on my holiday, if only for a minute or two. Maybe my Christmases should all be television-free from here on in.

So I say, Happy 2008. Say please and thank you, even to people who are paid to be doing things for you. Hold doors open for people. Donate to worthy causes, put heavy suitcases in overhead bins for other people, pull over and help jump-start that guy’s car. And make as much money as you want, as long as it’s through honest means, and you aren’t taking advantage of people in their unfortunate economic circumstances or lackluster intellectual abilities. Just don’t screw people. They’re your brothers. Is that message so hard to get across that we have to simplify it for new generations?

I’d really like to think that is not the case. I’m convinced there are people who disagree with me about that…I’m just hoping that I’m right and they’re wrong…

The Blog That Nobody Reads (oops, I guess you’re reading it now, aren’t you) has a funny “blogroll” off in the sidebar. It is hundreds and hundreds of items long, and classified according to a short list of categories. We’re obsessive-compulsive filers/categorizers over here at The Blog Nobody Reads. We make lists and we categorize them. It is how we see the world.

Now, in the blogger world it has become commonplace to get hold of tools that will do all this for you, but such tools usually lack this filing-by-color-code feature so we opt to do it ourselves. The color codes are patterned after precious metals. They are important…although very few people understand what the scheme is, how it works, and what the vision is behind it.

Which has brought forth an onslaught of inquiry, usually by e-mail. The questions stack up and stack up, so at some point we decided we’d go ahead and provide some answers. And point to a “creme de la creme” layer in that monstrous, snaky blogroll so that those with a demanding time schedule will know what is really worth clicking. So you will find all is answered here…see, again, it turns out there is a method to our madness. Bronze, silver, gold — things, one learns when one takes the time to inspect, have meaning.

Hmm, I don’t really know what to make of this…

…we’ve “arrived,” somehow?

There’s some awfully big names up there. Makes me wonder about the tabulation/voting method. Don’t really have time to research it at the moment.

What is the point to The Blog That Nobody Reads? And what is up with that name nobody can pronounce? Howssa Verra Toss The Knees? ‘Sup wif dat? How come it’s got that funny logo you see to the left?

The late Dr. Carl Sagan explains all. Well, not really, he didn’t know anything about The Blog That Nobody Reads. Doubtlessly, if he did he’d disapprove of much of what we say & do. But he tells the story about what the name really means, at least, what we have in mind for ourselves when we use it…

You see, Eratosthenes walked what is, today, a very fine line. He didn’t think like everybody else, but neither did he make a “grunge” fashion statement out of trying to think differently. He thought for himself and conducted himself according to The Oath.

He took note of something — in this case, a mundane detail that one would show perfectly sound judgment in not noticing at all. Something that didn’t mean anything until he pondered the ramifications, at which point it meant quite a bit more.

He used logic to eliminate possibilities. And then he used fairly simple mathematics to nail that sucker shut.

Scientist? Not really. We do know Eratosthenes had the training, but we also know his day job was as the administrator of a library. Which, back in those days, one might say was more-or-less the same thing. But my point stands — we call Eratosthenes a “scientist” because of what he did and how he thought things out, not because some accrediting institution saw fit to slap some kind of label on him.

Actually if that were the case, smart money says said institution would revoke such a seal of approval, or threaten to do so, the minute he published the findings Dr. Sagan is describing here.

The Blog That Nobody Reads strives to preserve a tradition of thinking…which is dying off. The kind of thinking where you look at things as they are and figure out what they mean for yourself. Simply put, nobody’s going to pop up behind your shoulder and tell you what keys to press. The kind of thinking that says life is a puzzle for you to solve, big-kid-style, without help. Peek into the water well, not at the paper belonging to the smarter kid sitting next to you.

ca∙boo∙si∙fy (v.):

To kill off a designated individual, demographic class, business endeavor or political ideology, slowly, by sequentializing it behind a bunch of other trivial stuff and ahead of absolutely nothing.

In such a strategy, the plausible deniability involved is just as important as the eventual outcome. The tactics are achieved incrementally. On any occasion where it is seen that the target requires (or may require) a resource, something else is argued to be in conflict with that resource and, for one nagging reason or another, sporting a superior claim to the resource.

The caboosifier is identified easily but only to those who take the time to diligently inspect. He is the one who consistently argues the designated target should take a back seat to other things, and never a front seat to anything. But if he confines his strategy to caboosification, and never actively attacks the target, to those who only observe the situation casually the entire situation is undetected and therefore non-existent. He may even seem, with only a cursory review of events, to cosmetically support the thing he seeks to kill off.

A short list follows of things modern America has seen “caboosified” in modern history, including those that have been starved to the point of demise, and those that have only been nudged in that direction.

1. Men, masculinity, venues of entertainment men like
2. Cancer research
3. Guns, gun rights, the right/obligation to defend one’s self and one’s family
4. War on Terror and the memory of the September 11 attacks
5. Boy Scouts
6. Stay-at-home Moms
7. Belief in God, monotheistic rituals, Christianity, Christmas
8. Talk radio, blogging, any medium of communication that combines ideological independence with potential for reaching masses
9. Capitalism, private property, feelings of individual achievement, personality in children, competitive games
10. The formation of entire industries, in the high-tech sector, in someone’s garage
11. Moonshots
12. …pretty much everything that, sometime in the 20th century, either gave America the building blocks to become, or entrenched America’s reputation as, a nation that kicks ass.

It should be noted that with a few statistically-insignificant exceptions, everybody who has done their bit to weaken the above items and bring them closer to extinction, has been left in a position to say they never intended to do such a thing. And who is to say they are wrong? Caboosification, ultimately, is the coupling of homicide with deniability, simply by taking things slow. It is inherently cowardly and craven.

Inspired by yesterday’s rant.

I came up with a thirty-ninth thing I’d like to do if & when I start running this place. This place, means the country. America. Except I don’t have it in mind to be President…two years of being made to apologize for the fact that I think killers should be killed, and I think unborn babies should not be, telling the entire country about my tax returns and late payments and out-of-wedlock children just to share power with Congress, ain’t my cup o’ tea.

My thirty-ninth thing goes like this…

I will introduce Premium Do Not Call. When you go to the Do Not Call Registry, you can bill a recurring or non-recurring subscription to your credit card or PayPal account. For a nominal fee, you can then make it really, really super-illegal to call your phone number, rather than just kinda-sorta illegal…If a telemarketer makes so much as one call to a Premium Do Not Call number, everybody responsible is subjected not only to fines, but to personal indignities. Something involving nakedness, smearing with syrupy confection products, bondage, sexual fetishes, live television.

Guess what inspired that. It happened three times tonight, twice last night, three times Tuesday night, once Monday night, three times on Sunday. I caught one of them on Sunday. I did it by screaming into the phone as I was answering it. If you don’t do that, the assholes hang up on you. They hang up before you ever get to talk to a person. Yeah — they got machines, calling the wrong number, hanging up on people. The humans don’t operate with enough efficiency to piss off enough people per hour.

I’m going to go out and get some air horns. Put one by each handset in the house.

We’re one plate of sandwiches away from making that monster-sized Thanksgiving turkey into history. This weekend we’re going to cut ourselves a tree. Whatever autumnal allergies I’ve suffered with the annual demise of daylight savings time, have also become a memory. I can see my breath. I can’t work my day-job early enough to head home without my headlights on, and I’m just about acclimated to that.

There are three other things I notice persistently happen this time of year.

1. I get closer to car accidents. By that I mean, I see them, or I hear about them close to where I live, or relatives suffer because of them. I think I can explain this, since back in ’96, it actually happened to me. We’ve all become accustomed to sixteen hours of daylight, and a pleasant climate to complement our driving chores/leisure activities. Mother Nature has other ideas for us and we’re sluggish in our efforts to adapt.

2. It seems year after year there are always the makings some kind of a budgetary crisis because a vehicle decided to demand attention during the Christmas shopping season. Seems every little part that can ambush me with mandatory replacement, does. I think I can explain this one too. Cars are plastic, aluminum, and…rubber. I blame this on the rubber. My sinus cavities aren’t terribly cheerful about the transition from August to December, so why should the rubber seals greet the climate change with any more enthusiasm. Things are generally chilly, and they’re also dry. Rubber doesn’t like dry and it isn’t real fond of cold.

3. For this one, I have no explanation whatsoever: I have to start hitting whocalled.us to find out what asshole is calling my home and/or cell phone and hanging up. This has slowly devolved over the years from a festering irritant to an enigmatic ritual. The turkey carcass goes in the trash, the Christmas list goes up, my phones start ringing because some dickhead programmed a computer somewhere to make ’em ring.

I would like a logical explanation for #3, almost as much as I’d like cessation of #3…almost.

Just today, I got two new phone numbers to place on my “asshole” list. This is a real list. My cell phone is supposed to ring with an innocuous and subtle “chirp chirp chirp” sound when it gets a call from an asshole. This is a most satisfactory solution, but I still have to question the sanity of a universe in which I have to play these little games with my phone.

This is where technology gets us? It’s a powerful argument for taking up the lifestyle of a 12th-century goat farmer and living in a straw hut.

Buck says Aiiieee! in response to the scoring method for the Morgan Personality Test. And he’s right, so I came up with some Visual Basic Code you can use to create a spreadsheet in Microsoft Excel, 97 or later (probably as far back as 5.0, although I don’t know that for sure).

Whoever doesn’t have some kind of tool like that, will have to put up with the nightmarish manual scoring method. For now.

Here’s my result:

Here is The Honey’s after she gave the answers herself…a little different from what I had done for her earlier…

…and here is The Boy’s. It should be noted that questions 38 and 52 have questionable relevance for ten-year-olds, and probably don’t apply to children of any age.

Please note, if you want to do something similar and have the colors saved off and hosted on a site like that, you need to use 24-bit RGB (TrueColor) format, or a “lossless” compression format…which means JPG usually isn’t going to cut it.

Well folks, he went and did it to me again. Last year, blogger friend Buck went and observed his first anniversary blogging and we over here went and joined in the applause…and then thought, hey, waitaminnit when did we get started doing this? So we checked the archives and figured out the date is November 12. That is the date. November 12, 2004. which means we’re one year older than Buck. Uh…his site, not him. But anyway, we resolved we weren’t going to forget next time.

And we kept that resolution for eleven and a half months.

Well…it’s that time again. Buck earlier this week put up a post dutifully observing his own second birthday. And with all the memory retention of a cat napping in the sunbeam, we joined in the applause — silently, this time — and thought to ourselves, well that’s really neat. Buck’s blog just gets better and better and he’s developed a real following. Say, I wonder when our…?

Well, it’s simple math. And human nature, apparently. Hey I got some swell excuses…there’s the anniversary I met the sweetie, my kid’s birthday, my own birthday, all them holidays, the day I gotta pay child support. I only gots memory for so much.

See you next year, Buck.

Via Duffy:

I’d consider it a personal favor to me if you can just think a kind thought about the folks who are connected in some way to Granzella’s in Williams, CA. The place is about 90 miles North of here. It is known to me as one of very, very few places where ol’ Bessie let me down.

A little background. In late ’96, Bessie was seven years old and had just a little over 200k on her. I rewarded her for her faithful service by wrapping her around a tree. Bessie is a plastic-and-aluminum Toyota that weighs a little over a thousand pounds with a full gas tank, so when I say the tree was no bigger than it needed to be, I’m not talking very much tree at all. Big around as a rake handle. It split Bessie down the middle, sparing the engine but destroying everything else including the radiator.

The mechanics who put her back together, while dedicated, are best off looking elsewhere for a recommendation. They made her whole against some trying circumstances, some of which were my doing, others of which were decidedly not. But I’m displeased at the mechanical problems that cascaded from that event, and our adventure in Williams some fourteen months later is the prime example of that.

Bessie’s new radiator was the wrong one.

I found this out when a geyser of hot water erupted under the right headlamp housing while I was trying to pass a semi. In January of ’98. Right by Williams.

As luck would have it…”Kidzmom” and I had rented this classic the very night before, in which Kurt Russell’s wife is abducted when his pickup truck breaks down and he goes to get help. I limped ol’ Bessie off the freeway and shut down the engine, which was protesting this sudden expulsion of coolant — probably all of it in half a second, I would guess — through ominous temperature gauge readings. The first ride I flagged down, was a mechanic who owned his own shop.

The boy was seven months old. The intent was to go all the way to Bellingham, 800 miles further North, and introduce him to his grandfather for the first time. Didn’t happen. I figured, and figure still today, that Bessie’s “hiccup” was a cheap lesson, the first warning shot that the hasty repair job a year previous wasn’t all it was cracked up to be.

Anyway, with a hearty “we’ll be right back!” I left with the mechanic to get his tow truck. We were back within twenty or thirty minutes, I think. The baby was laughing his fool head off. “Kidzmom” was crying her eyes out, hysterical. All would have probably been okay, except for having seen that movie the night before. This was like frosting on the cake.

We “crashed,” in the innocuous sense, in Williams. One of the last chores before the evening retirement was a hasty call to the grandpa, explaining that after everything was ship-shape we were looking at admitting defeat and turning back, making another attempt later. He was understanding about it…disappointed naturally.

This was an epochal event, the first time Bessie had failed to fulfill all of our transportation needs in this mission or that one…my own foolishness fourteen months prior notwithstanding. It was a harbinger of a dismally exciting maintenance record ahead. Which…well…no, she’s mostly been as reliable since then as she was previous. But we didn’t know that at the time. We had a small baby; we were concerned. Granzella’s was a huge help in softening the blow. Mom, boy and I were in much higher spirits as we retired for the night, even though we were a hundred miles from home with our transportation scuttled for the time being. I still have the “Granzella’s” miniature wine goblets we got that night.

I’ll always be the kid’s dad, but I’ve found it necessary to change women. That’s a story with considerable detail to it, that I’d rather not explore here…but I don’t think I can let Granzella’s sampling of misfortune pass by without comment, since they didn’t let my own misfortune pass by without their much-valued hospitality, which made all the difference in the world that evening.

If you have ever passed through Williams, you’ll have the beginnings of an understanding of what a bitter blow this must be. Williams, CA is Granzella’s. There is that…a gas station, a bank machine, a few streets, and that’s about it. Colusa is twenty or thirty miles down the road, and they’ve got stuff there. But economically, you do not want to be the guy who works at Granzella’s, and wakes up to find himself without a job.

For the human-interest angle, exploring the rich history of the place, you can go here.

Oh and Bessie? She’s put together a rich history of her own. Another decade, and a total of 338,000 miles on the odometer plus something (picture to the right was taken a few months ago). Kidzmom and I didn’t make it, and much of this has to do with a predilection for issuing distress calls toward her knight in shining armor, when the situations warranted, as well as when they did not…I think she’d agree with that. This was one of the occasions when, emotionally at least, it was warranted, because the poor woman was a complete wreck. I’ve often felt bad about that since then. But with the passage of a few years, well, it got funny. How could it not? We were watching a movie about a freeway breakdown, on the very night before we left on a nine hundred mile road trip in real life. Seemed like a great idea at the time.

This blog’s third birthday is coming up, and in all that time we’ve managed to make a lot of friends for something that calls itself The Blog That Nobody Reads.

Some of the folks who pop in and hang around regularly, commenting in the comment section, or maybe going through the trouble to send an off-line, have expressed something without really expressing it. It’s a read-between-the-lines thing. Let’s see if I can paraphrase it here.

This Freeberg guy, I’ve read enough of his stuff now that I’m pretty sure how he’s going to handle any given subject, without being really sure what he’s going to say. He’s got some kind of method he keeps applying. He’s always scolding people for not thinking things out, and obviously he’s such a compulsive list-maker, it seems odd that he doesn’t have a list of things he does when he writes the things he writes and thinks the things he thinks.

I admit it. I do go to some lengths to keep my phrasing and word selection fresh and non-repetitive…with mixed results, at the very best, it seems sometimes. But if it is possible for a thought process to become boring — that’s really the big question right there, isn’t it? — I must be a repeat offender on felony levels. We have rules at this blog; how to do your thinking, not so much what kind of thinking to do. As I sometimes tell these pop-in, pop-out liberals who occasionally stop by to speak their “truth to power”: This is the House of Eratosthenes. This is not the “House of some guy who thinks whatever he’s told to think by others”; that little mud hut is out there somewhere. Not here.

The Oath of Eratosthenes can be found here, and it is reproduced in this post in full:

For the matter under discussion, and throughout the course of that discussion, I pledge to apply my thoughts to all of it and my feelings to none of it; to know what I can personally prove, nothing more and nothing less; and to believe what I can solidly infer from what I know, nothing more and nothing less. I will not be told what to think. Not by those who have power over me, who claim to have power over me, who aspire to have power over me, by persons possessing honors, credentials, pedigrees, awards or fame.

I understand the difference between an article of faith and a logical inference. I shall withhold both of those, from whatever beliefs directly contradict known fact. My power of inference will be applied only to those questions that can be decided by inference alone; and my inferences shall be decided as if my personal fortune, and other things precious to me, depended on them.

I shall admit my error quickly when demonstrated to be in error, but I shall harbor no ambitions toward being erroneous. I claim no monopoly on truth, and will grant no such monopoly to others.

I will not bully, intimidate or coerce, nor will I modify my own viewpoints because of someone else’s bullying, intimidation or coercion. I will lend no greater weight to a statement just for being concise or amusing, or lesser weight to a statement just for being bloated or monotonous.

I will apply the most vigorous scrutiny where I perceive others have failed to do so. But I understand scrutiny has nothing to do with actually disclaiming anything. Scrutiny is a process and not an outcome.

I shall comprehend, at all times, the critical distinction between proving A, and failing to prove !A. I shall not assign benefit-of-doubt to one side of a dispute, or to the other side, in order to please others, nor will I try to bludgeon others into doing that.

I shall faithfully distinguish between the subjective and the objective, between knowing things and believing things, and between feeling and thought.

Above all, I will know for myself without anyone else pointing it out, that if I should violate any of the above, I will no longer be standing in the House of Eratosthenes.

…but this LiveJournal user stumbled across our list of Things We Know, and made a comment that we’re “worth a look.” Or that the list is, anyway. He liked TIKs #37, #65 and #78.

It would seem from the resulting traffic blip that a few peers agreed with him.