Felix.

They're talking about Felix the Cat over on Metafilter (with lots of good links). Don't you like Felix the Cat?

Can I get a feminist?

Remember back last February when Kevin Drum wrote about why there are so few women in political blogging? He guessed that "men are more comfortable with the food fight nature of opinion writing — both writing it and reading it." I had occasion to think about that yesterday. One thing Kevin failed to note is that male attacks on women are not so much of a food fight as a sex fight. Blogosphere-strength fighting with a woman takes on an outrageous sexual tone, aggressively declaring that that this is a boy's game. Are there any feminists around to see when it's happening and say a little something?

UPDATE: Kevin Drum asks whether my observation is specific to the LGF comments section -- in which case, who cares? -- or whether it applies elsewhere, including at at Washington Monthly. Lots of good comments from readers.

MORE: Drum also gets his word in about OSM:

Open Source Media — formerly Pajamas Media — had its big rollout yesterday, and it was an odd affair. I never really understood what OSM was about, but I figured they'd explain themselves at their launch party and then I'd get it. Except that they didn't. The main site is here — bankrolled by $3.5 million in venture capital money! — but all it contains is a couple of posts, some newsfeeds, and an explanation (as of noon on Thursday) that they are actually OSM, not Open Source Media, so no worries over Chris Lydon's trademark over "Open Source."

Everyone else is as befuddled as me, which is an odd reaction to a product launch, but perhaps OSM is just running behind schedule and decided not to put off the party just because there was no actual product yet. It wouldn't be the first time in the high tech biz.

YET MORE: Enough folks have misread my intention in writing this post that I feel compelled to add that I am not whining about needing someone to help me out of a jam because I'm a victim. I actually am concerned about the larger feminist issues identified in the post.

"The Avery Bill."

That's the name given a bill, passed by the Wisconsin legislation, designed to guard against the criminal conviction of the innocent:

His name was dropped from the legislation after he was arrested last week and charged Tuesday with killing and mutilating a young woman.

Avery really did not commit the rape for which he spent years in prison before being freed as a result of the legal work performed by the Wisconsin Innocence Project. The goals of the legislation his case inspired are sound.

But maybe it's not such a good idea to name legislation after living human beings. They do not remain in stationary, symbolic form for you.

Actually, this reminds me of Cindy Sheehan, who served as a symbol for the anti-war movement for a while, but who also did and said things that she saw fit to do and say. She helped the movement for a while but then she turned out not to be so useful.

Martha's "Apprentice."

Did you watch Martha's "Apprentice" show tonight? There's so much more emotional dysfunction among the contestants on this show than on Donald's. Everyone seems to be scheming to bring someone down, and they conspire and gang up on the one they perceive as weak. I loved the way that played out tonight, especially the scene where Jim gave Marcela a talking to. That was one of my all-time favorite "Apprentice" scenes. Jim kind of rules, don't you think. Oh, and Amanda crying? We laughed a lot chez Althouse at that. Spoil away in the comments.

Audible Althouse, #21.

Here. Drugs taken and not taken, dispensed by doctors and friends; lobotomies; whom to cast in the various roles if they ever make a movie of the new biography of Sandra Day O'Connor; not wanting to eat in an empty restaurant; how scary "Rodan" and the eagle owl are; and how a few stray words about Open Source Media (the erstwhile Pajamas Media) led to a spew of comments calling me things like "a Berkeley house whore." 41 minutes.

I was on "Open Source."

Is the name Open Source Media too close to Open Source Radio? (You know, I was on Open Source Radio a couple weeks ago, the night the Alito nomination was announced. You can listen to that show here if you want -- Cass Sunstein, Charles Fried, and Eric Muller are also on.)

UPDATE: Open Source Radio complains (incredibly meekly):

In May we named our show “Open Source” and we named our non-profit production company “Open Source Media.” In fact, this used to be our URL until we decide to scrap the “net” and look for an “org.” But here’s the actual legal-type description of what we are:

A joint production of Open Source Media Inc. and the University of Massachusetts-Lowell, Open Source is presented by WGBH Radio Boston and distributed by Public Radio International (PRI).

What this means is that we are seven people in a rented office with, incidentally, a rather bold mouse who does not yet have a name. We make a radio show four times a week that uses bloggers as local and topical experts; this show is distributed to public radio stations by Public Radio International, and to truckers and early adopters by XM satellite radio.

So this morning I got an email from a listener with the following subject header:

did someone steal your name?

Hm. A company that used to call itself Pajamas Media now calls itself Open Source Media, which is — scroll down to our legal notice — kind of exactly what we call ourselves. They’ve collected $3.5 million in venture capital, and, to celebrate their re-naming of our already-named name, they’re holding an event at the Rainbow Room.

Imagine if you were the venture capitalist who forked over this kind of money and now know, on day one, that they mismanaged step one.

Okay, I'm not going to talk about OSM for a while. I'll observe a circumspect silence out of sheer pity... the sheer pity of "a Berkeley house whore." Ah, listen to the podcast if you don't know what I'm talking about.

Taking off the Pajamas: now, what do you see?

Kevin Alwyrd is present at the revelation of Open Source Media, the erstwhile Pajamas Media, and he's a little distracted (by one of the speakers), but he "still [doesn't] completely get it." He links to Mike Krempasky ("It’s a pretty flashy event - but I don’t think they’ve done much to explain their business to the attendees") and Jeff Jarvis ("Now I’m even more confused").

Jeff Goldstein is live- fake-blogging the event beginning with a trip to the hotel bar:

I found Tim Blair, Roger Simon, and Ed Driscoll bunched around a small table near the restrooms. Ed and Roger were nursing Gibsons, while Tim (who at 5’1" is much shorter than I thought he’d be) was drinking what looked to be IPA out of a pilsner glass inscribed with the legend, "Bloggers Do It In Their Pajamas." "Heh, cool," I said, motioning to Tim’s glass. "You have those made up for the launch?" "What do you think, genius?" Blair asked, not looking up. "I maybe had it printed up special for myself?"

Would you drink a fluid out of something that said "Bloggers Do It In Their Pajamas"? I think of bodily fluids. But no matter, now the bloggers can do it in their Open Source Media. Or as somebody already quipped: Open Sores Media. Swapping semen for pus, bodily fluids-wise.

UPDATE: Did they notice the "Open Sores" pun? I see that back in June, Roger L. Simon raised the question of what to rename Pajamas, and "Open Source" came up in the second comment, got repeated a few times, and then drew this:

Open Sores News--
"Band Aiding the World"

So they had to know the joke was there.

But what do you think of the new Open Source site? Is it fun to use and workable? I notice a lot of flabbiness in the writing. The home page currently features this block of text to draw us into the blog opinion on a top news story:

The historic Gaza border deal reached yesterday between Israel and the Palestinian Authority (Associated Press, Christian Science Monitor), brokered by US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice in marathon negotiations, has been received by the blogosphere with a far greater amount of skepticism than it has where the mainstream media are concerned. Blogger Joshuapundit seems quite unhappy: he says that Israel was pressured by Rice, the Eurooean Union's Javier Solana and Middle East special envoy John Wolfensohn to accept the agreement with little, if any, safeguards. The deal, whose full text can be found at the State Department website, would allow Palestinian authorities to take control of the border between the Gaza strip and Israel, notably in Rafah, and would open links with the West Bank. Both Time and the Washington Post have all the behind the scenes details on how the agreement was reached. War to Mobilize Democracy is "nervous" about security, but notes that the deal will ease the international pressure on Israel; Heavy-Handed Politics write that history makes them simply skeptical. On the other side, Anything They Say not only cautiously welcomes the new situation, but is pleasantly surprised by Rice's deal making skills, at least compared with her "terrible performance as National Security Advisor."

"Has been received by the blogosphere with a far greater amount of skepticism than it has where the mainstream media are concerned"? You'd think they'd write their very first sentence crisply!

And why should anyone care what these bloggers think? Who are they? Unless you're already sold on blogging, the teasers are laughable: "Blogger Joshuapundit seems quite unhappy," "War to Mobilize Democracy is 'nervous,'" Anything They Say "is pleasantly surprised."

There's nothing snappy or exciting in any of that, no sense that these bloggers are likely to come out with anything more interesting than whoever was sitting next to you in the living room where you watched the evening news.

"Eurooean," "Heavy-Handed Politics write" -- so much for professionalizing the image of blogging.

And this on the day when you are asking for attention, trying to hook new people.

ANOTHER UPDATE: If I were an insider to OSM, would I mock them like this? Isn't much of the value of bloggers that we are on the outside? Rolling up together in a group to make money -- is that worth the sacrifice of independence? Everyone who signed on is now stuck with the presentation on that website that we were not able to see when we were asked to sign on to 18-month commitments.

STILL MORE: I'm told Jeff Goldstein wasn't even at the OSM launch, which surprises me, because I began reading it on the OSM home page under their heading "live-blogging." That's an awfully strange way to introduce people to their service. Aren't ordinary people being asked to trust the OSM portal?

Also, Charles Johnson linked to this post to note my bad taste -- the "fluids" wisecrack -- and this set off his commenters who just started wildly insulting me -- hilariously assuming I'm a big lefty and using lots of bad taste insults against me. How does that make sense? If they are outraged at my bad taste, as Charles suggests they be, then why aren't the comments primly proper? They must be insulting me because they assume I'm a lefty. Ha, ha. Somebody tell Armando! Anyway, Charles's fans end up hurting him on the day when he is trying to make an impression as an elder statesman of blogging, by making his site look all trashy. And the irony is priceless: he is complaining about my bad taste. Yet "semen" and "pus" are both perfectly sound English words, not slang at all, and pointing out literary images is quite high tone.

AND NOW THIS: Wonkette links, and it's not to the semen-pus thing.

THURSDAY MORNING: One day after the launch, Jeff Goldstein's fake-live-blogging is still the only blog post quoted on the home page, under the heading "BEST OF THE BLOGS." In all this time, that's all they've found? The highlighted post ends with this line: "Or as my friend Bill Bixby once said to a French prostitute (god rest his soul), 'bonjour, you plump little tart!'" How they can think it's a good idea to open the site with such writing? Who does that appeal to? And if it didn't appeal to you yesterday morning, but you kept going back to give them another chance, what would you think? The site is stupefyingly inactive and as yet devoid of sharp commentary. There is only this obscure insider humor about the founders of the site getting drunk and talking about a prostitute.

Awards season.

The 2005 Weblog Awards are gearing up.

The icepick lobotomy doctor -- a little too " stubborn" and "impervious to criticism."

The "King Lear in medical garb" who lobotomized 3,000 persons, including some as young as 4 (to nip schizophrenia in the bud) and some for nothing more than youthful sullenness (the stepmom said he didn't want to take a bath and turned the lights on during the daytime).

UPDATE: Here's the link to the NPR audio reviewed at the original link.

"We have free speech too, don't we?"

Judge Posner asks, rhetorically, ruing the demise of Article III Groupie:

"If he does it on his own time and does not compromise his official duties in some way, I don't see the problem," the judge said in an e-mail message. "We have free speech too, don't we?

"If Lat appears before judges whom he's made fun of in his blog or who may be offended by the blog (the humorless judges), then there might be a problem, though only a problem if he is 'outed' - and he outed himself!"

Counting on other people to have a sense of humor is a very dangerous business.

"A government investigation hung completely on testimony from journalists, with journalists turned into witnesses ... a scary notion."

Have you really thought through what Scooter Libby's defense is going to be like for the press?

Lawyers for I. Lewis Libby Jr., the former White House official indicted on perjury charges, plan to seek testimony from journalists beyond those cited in the indictment and will probably challenge government agreements limiting their grand jury testimony, people involved in the case said Tuesday.

"That's clearly going to be part of the strategy - to get access to all the relevant records and determine what did the media really know," said a lawyer close to the defense who spoke on condition of anonymity....

In interviews, lawyers close to the case made clear that the defense team plans to pursue aggressively access to reporters' notes beyond the material cited in the indictment and plans to go to the trial judge, Reggie B. Walton of United States District Court, to compel disclosure as one of their first steps....

The prospect of another legal battle over access to reporters' records "could be worse for the media" than the Miller showdown, said Lucy Dalglish, head of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press. "You now have a situation where you have a government investigation hung completely on testimony from journalists, with journalists turned into witnesses, and that is a scary notion."

Ms. Dalglish said that unlike the special prosecutor, Patrick J. Fitzgerald, who was restricted partly by Justice Department regulations on subpoenaing reporters' notes, Mr. Libby's defense team will not be bound by those same rules.

"This is a very unsettling case, and it could take years in the courts to resolve," she said.

"I acquire quite a few medications and then dispense them to my friends as needed."

Says Katherine: "I usually know what I'm talking about." This is, apparently, a big trend:

For a sizable group of people in their 20's and 30's, deciding on their own what drugs to take - in particular, stimulants, antidepressants and other psychiatric medications - is becoming the norm. Confident of their abilities and often skeptical of psychiatrists' expertise, they choose to rely on their own research and each other's experience in treating problems like depression, fatigue, anxiety or a lack of concentration. A medical degree, in their view, is useful, but not essential, and certainly not sufficient.

They trade unused prescription drugs, get medications without prescriptions from the Internet and, in some cases, lie to doctors to obtain medications that in their judgment they need.

Oh, these young people. They used to just smoke marijuana.

Academic blog controversies.

Slate has a big piece today, written by Robert S. Boynton, about the dangers of blogging when you're an untenured academic. It's loaded with material about Dan Drezner, but there's not a peep about Jeremy Freese, recently tenured in the Sociology Department here at UW, who wrote and still writes an unusually quirky blog that is dotted with pithy applications of his expertise.

From the Slate piece:

In many respects, Drezner's predicament was merely a cyber-version of an age-old dilemma. Whether online or off, the kind of accessible and widely read work that brings an academic public recognition is likely to draw the scorn and suspicion of his colleagues. Furthermore, so-called public-intellectual work won't count for much when it comes time to decide whether one gets tenure. In most disciplines at large research universities, tenure is directly related to the number of peer-reviewed books and articles one publishes. Teaching and community service are factored in but are usually far less important than one's publishing record. "For the time being," says John Holbo, an assistant professor of philosophy at the National University of Singapore and the founder of a group blog called The Valve, the most academic bloggers will receive is "a bit of 'service' credit, for raising the department's profile."...

But in another sense, academic blogging represents the fruition, not a betrayal, of the university's ideals. One might argue that blogging is in fact the very embodiment of what the political philosopher Michael Oakshott once called "The Conversation of Mankind"—an endless, thoroughly democratic dialogue about the best ideas and artifacts of our culture. Drezner's blog, for example, is hardly of the "This is what I did today …" variety. Rather, he usually writes about globalization and political economy—the very subjects on which he publishes in prestigious, peer-reviewed presses and journals. If his prose style in the blog is more engaging than that of the typical academic's, the thinking behind it is no less rigorous or intelligent....

The current antipathy toward blogging may have something to do with the fact that universities have no tools for judging blogs. And most people agree that blogs would need to be evaluated through some kind of peer-review mechanism if they are to be taken into account. "It is utterly absurd to propose giving someone credit for activity with no barriers to entry," Holbo says.

One thing missing from this article is the recognition of the fear nonblogging academics have about bloggers. For one thing, they don't understand what the bloggers are doing and worry that we'll do something damaging or dangerous with our power (such as it is!). But they also don't want to know that it's good, because that unleashes the other fear: Will I be required to blog? If blogging is good, are they going to be judged deficient for not blogging. And they are probably already at least a little jealous about ther colleague's heightened profile. It seems a little unfair that the ability translate expertise into blog form brings prominence that nothing ensures will be proportionate to the quality of the traditional written research. Of course, the actual quality of the traditional research has never been precisely calibrated to an academic's prominence, but blogging lets different individuals use different paths to prominence. Most notably, it gives new power to persons who don't teach at elite schools and don't have elite connections. It's a new way to get connected. It's threatening! And since it may be intertwined with political power and a kind of pop culture celebrity, it can be infuriating!

In any case, I agree with Holbo that most academic bloggers really deserve service credit for what we're doing. Most of the on-topic things we write are communicating our knowledge to the general public, which is a worthy old tradition, long categorized as service, not research. It is possible for some parts of blogs to count as research, but that, of course, would need to be judged to count in the tenure process.

If various academic departments are looking for a way to judge writing published in places that are not peer reviewed, I have some advice: Look to the way law schools do their tenure process, because most of what law professors publish is not peer-reviewed. Here at the UW Law School, our tenure process goes through the Social Sciences Divisional Committee and is judged by committee members who serve in departments like Political Science, Economics, and Sociology. You can image how these folks look at the student-edited law reviews where lawprofs publish. But we've developed ways to interact with them. Adapt these techniques for blog-writing that deserves to be treated as research.

Snow!

There's a light dusting of snow this morning, the first of the season. It brightens things up, like confectioner's sugar on a doughnut.

At last, a jaunt to NYC is possible!

Finally, a non-stop flight between Madison and NYC:

The flight will leave La Guardia at 3:40 p.m., arriving in Madison at 5:10 p.m.. The flight is then to leave Madison at 5:40 p.m., arriving at La Guardia at 9:01 p.m.

This might make a quick weekend trip to the city attractive. Having to pass through O'Hare, with all the potential for delays and missed flights, takes all the fun out of the idea. Thank you, American Eagle!

Back from my post-operative haze.

I guess there are about six procedures involved in dealing with my foolishness in waiting so long to do something about a tooth that turned out to be cracked. Yesterday was the fourth one: screwing an implant into my jaw. The procedure was not harrowing, because I opted for the IV-sedation, but it caused a good deal of snoozing the rest of the day: a nap in the recovery room, a nap at home on the sofa, and an 8-hour overnight sleep. I wasn't in pain or nauseated, just useless.

I'd thought I'd watch a lot of television, but that turned out to be too challenging. I put on an old episode of Saturday Night Live, the one that begins with Wayne and Garth enthusing over the first Gulf War -- "Oh, she's a scud!" -- then I fell asleep during Sting's monologue. Later, I tried to watch "Special Report With Brit Hume," but it was over my head. Much later, getting into bed, the new "South Park" was just starting, so I let that go for a while.

Old people keep accidentally driving their cars into crowds of townsfolk, the citizens finally come up with the remedy of taking away the driver's license of everyone over 70. "How will I get to the drug store to buy my medicine?" "You belong in a nursing home anyway. We'll help put you there." The old people call in the AARP, which parachutes in hordes of old people with machine guns. I had to switch it off and conk out, so I don't know how the battle played out. I'm going to guess that in the end the townsfolk realized that taking every old person's license away was an overbroad remedy.

Now my long post-operative mental haze is over. I think. Time for some blogging, newsreading, CivPro-teaching, job-talk listening, article editing, etc. Or am I supposed to spend the day reclining, as it said on the sheet of paper the oral surgeon gave me, the one with all the advice about salt water and soft foods? I could have my painkiller prescription filled, make a groggy mess out of myself for a second day and lounging about sampling the contents of the TiVo. Wouldn't you?

Or am I still a groggy mess and too blurred to see it? If this post lacks my usual cogency and clarity, let me know. I could call in sick for the first time in twenty years.