Keeping the ‘I’

Not very much going on in the Odd Empire these days.

I would like to point out, Paul Kimbball is doing a fascinating thing on his weblog. Over the years he’s interviewed many people for his UFOlogical videos. Most of this material ends up on the cutting-room floor but in this wired-digital age the ‘“floor”is an indexed hard drive somewhere.

On Paul”s blog is a growing list of short video snippets from some of the luminaries of UFOlogy. It’s (quite frankly) fascinating stuff, I highly recommend it.

Alfred’s quieted down for the moment. He’s screeching about John Ford again (not the director John Ford but some other fellow.) Ford apparently pissed off some elected officials in his home town by hauling them into court over and over again for ……. wait for it….. UFOs!

Ford was a court reporter who (according to some sources) had a penchant for suing people. He litigated over an alleged shot down alien mother ship in New York–made a pretty big nuisance of himself (allegedly of course.)

What happed next is unclear; Ford was arrested and possibly committed over a bizarre plot to plant radium on said elected official. What’¢s unclear is exactly what he was arrested for, and apparently, he had a bunch of guns. Maybe, just maybe he made some threatening remarks. Nobody’s really sure, not because some nefarious government agency is keeping aliens a deep dark secret, not because of some Not because of a dark cabal of twisted pale faced scientists. Not because of Ctulhu’s minions or the Men in Black, sinister oozings or your mama! No one’s sure because no one really gives a fug. Not even Alfred apparently. He’s never really researched this guy (if one were to believe the stuff on his weblog.) Alfred’¢s sure that Ford is pure as the new driven snow but, it’s pretty hard to make heads or tales of any of this, other than Alfred’s ranting there’s not much to go on.

The UFO-iconoclasts are back, in the persona of the old RR group. (or perhaps the RR group in the persona of the UFO-Iconoclasts.) Nowadays s they are munging rhetorical about quantum physics as if this is the magic bullet for UFOlogy. I suppose it COULD be if we could get a real understanding of how QP works in the macro world. Just slapping the label quantum physics on something and going “ah ha! See SEE! when you really don’t have the foggiest idea how it works and what it’s implications are is like replacing physics with bunny rabbits. ‘SEE? That UFO is using a super-sekrit BUNNY POOP DRIVE!” or That UFO is using quantum physics.” Both statements are identically absurd.

If you don’t understand it, don’t toss it out because it sounds good!

Red Queen lost several of her blogs again, (oh pity-poo!)

I’d be more sympathetic but Red Queen’s (when she’s not running around sending poison-pen letters) is pretty boring. She does lots of indirect criticism on whatever she thinks is a hazard to UFOlogy, this translates into more or less ‘“You skeptic! just shut UP! Shut your stupid mouth, you lousy shtik drek!”

I’d invite her to comment here but it remains that she cannot have a conversation with anyone unless she’s in complete agreement with them. She’s fearful of being made into a boob, she lost every argument she ever had with me, shot down in flames. She’s never understood how to really debate stuff. It’s too bad really. Red Queen’s got some interesting ideas but they become downed out by her continual hatred of any thought that disagrees with her beliefs.

Anyway this is really more about Blogger. Blogger’s been pushing updates on it’s system (like everyone else) and sometimes the updates just don’t work. The only reason I bring this up is, I”m fairly certain that no free service will last more than a few years. Somehow, some way these companies must put services like Blogger, Yahoogroups or My-Space on a paying basis. Either by pushing advertising or by fees, it really doesn’t matter but it must happen or the service will eventually vanish. That’s just a fact of the computer age.

In my not-so-humble opinion, anyone depending on a Blogger account or any free service is being foolish. Nothing on a free service account really belongs to the author. They must follow a set of legally binding guidelines as a term of use. They are, in short at, the mercy of whatever company is serving as their patron.

Now, I don’t think Blogger et-al are bad systems, I used Blogger for a time and found it was easy, reliable and even allowed me to post material on the Imperial Hosting Service as apposed to free services like Blogspot. This meant that, even though I used Blogger to post my material, I was posting in a place that I owned. One that I could backup when needed.

I switched to WordPress (which runs on my servers.) mostly because it simplifies things, allows me full control of my content and full ownership of the material. Someone else owns the material published on a non-paid server. That means the people out there squawking about copyrights etc really don’t have a foot to stand on. Sure they can put minimal copyrights on their stuff but they are not publishing it, Blogger and Blogger (or My-Space for that matter) retains first refusal for the material.

Somehow, that seems to make a world of difference.

BTW, if anyone is interested in learning how to set up one of these things, I would be more than happy to help.