journal features
movie reviews
photo of the day

rss can be dang finicky

the journal of Michael Werneburg

twenty-eight years and a million words

Toronto, 2011.12.13

It looks like my website's updates aren't getting to Facebook or Twitter again.

I've tweaked the timestamp on my rss feed because the W3C validater I use has, for some reason, decided that things are no longer OK with a time zone set to -0500. I think it's because it was taking my server's time (of course) and that server is set to UTC. Every time I tweak my RSS feed's creation, it causes a raft of spam to go out. So.. enjoy a rehash of things that weren't being fed to Facebook in any case.

rand()m quote

I have a foreboding of an America in my children’s or grandchildren’s time — when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what’s true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness... The dumbing down of American is most evident in the slow decay of substantive content in the enormously influential media, the 30 second sound bites (now down to 10 seconds or less), lowest common denominator programming, credulous presentations on pseudoscience and superstition, but especially a kind of celebration of ignorance.

—Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World (1995)