Now listen, I'm not a big fan of the new wave of washed out metal music that's popular and Godsmack is no exception. It's bands like Godsmack that make it impossible for me to listen to the radio these days. Their newest album, with inspired song names like, "Voodoo Too" appears to really tread new ground ;)

That being said recently self-proclaimed Music Cognition Theorist, Xeni Jardin, has decided to post excerpts of an interview attacking Godsmack for allowing them to use their music for military recruitment commercials.

God forbid any American made music inspire pride in the military. Cut the military some slack, Xeni. They originally tried to get the rights to "Dancing Queen" by ABBA but the license was too expensive-- and it inspired the wrong kind of pride in our fighting men and women.

Besides, I don't see you railing on Moby for using "Why Does My Heart Feel So Bad?" in Black Hawk Down. Oh wait, that's because boingboing <3 moby.

If you're like me you *love* it when Xeni can take the time away from giving fellatio to our aristocratic web 2.0 overlords. It's during these moments that she often feels compelled to share science with the bourgeois.

A great example is her recent regurgitation of the synthesized telemetry of Cassini-Huygens probe that some schmuck named Craig sent in.

"But why Quicksilver? Why would you take such offense to such an innocent offering."

Easy. Did you watch the video?

Furthermore the inclusion of this text: "Not only is it interesting from a sicnece perspective, the movie embodies some of Edward Tufte's information display principles to represent and relate the data in context."

Well it may be interesting from a sicnece perspective, but I don't see what Edward Tufte has to do with it. If I'm to believe Wikipedia then Eddie "coined the term "chartjunk" to refer to useless, non-informative, or information-obscuring elements of information displays"

Obviously the video is a homage to such genius. It's unfortunate that Tufte's genius didn't extend to the sound I had to put up with. I think I would rather listen to Xeni singing the binary american national anthem in falsetto...

Xeni encourages fellow tin-foil hats to contact CSPAN to whine about YouTube taking down CSPAN's content from their site, after apparently being unable to field difficult copyright questions from BoingBoing readers, who feared a conspiracy to hide the truth might be in play. Xeni felt the need to email CSPAN to ask if that was the case, following with linking to the "Contact Us" page at CSPAN's site.

Nevermind the fact that there's a fucking link to watch the video in question RIGHT THERE ON CSPAN'S WEBSITE FRONT PAGE, cleverly disguised with the text "White House Correspondents' Dinner". INFORMATION WANTS TO BE ANTHROPOMORPHIZED FREE AVAILABLE ON YOUTUBE, DESPITE THE FACT THEY DON'T OWN THE RIGHTS TO IT, AND DESPITE THE FACT IT'S AVAILABLE FOR FREE AT THE SITE OF THOSE WHO DO!

It tastes like ADVERTISING! From BoingBoing's parent company, FederatedMedia's, "About Our Authors" page, "Authors who join the FM network of sites hold these values in common":

• Voice and Point of View: Strong voices and intelligent points of view drive robust conversations.

Heh, "conversations"? You mean one-sided, commentless "conversations"? About strong points of view that indicate that a comedian's speech not being covered by the mainstream media is, in fact, all part of a vast conspiracy? That's certainly a strong, intelligent point of view.

• Accuracy: Some FM sites are journalistic in nature; others are not. Regardless, FM sites strive for accuracy regarding items we post as facts.

So which is BoingBoing? And wouldn't a cursory examination of the history of the Star-Spangled Banner result in better accuracy than is exhibited here?

• Community: Weblogs are conversations, not lectures. The community that gathers around each site is the essence of its value, and we treat that community accordingly. We listen and respond to feedback, and incorporate it into the way we manage our sites.

BoingBoing. Reader comments. Nuff said.

• Responsibility: We take our role in the community we serve seriously, and feel responsible for our own words. When we make mistakes, we correct them. We do not seek to use our sites maliciously.

Except when Xeni's pissed, then she grabs a copyrighted photo from my band's site, as indicated in the html/htdb code, itself, and posts it, unattributed and without permission, as an update to her entry about xenisucks.com, along with the assertions that I live in Seattle, which a quick WHOIS would have provided more accurate information, as well as an incorrect spelling of my middle name, and my alleged employer's name?

Or except when Xeni's pissed about her goatse dildo cozy posts resulting in web filtering software marking BoingBoing as NSFW, at which point she feels the need to tell the whole world that a dude that works for the company that makes the web filtering software is a freaky-pervy "adult baby"?

• Transparency: We err on the side of disclosure to our readers. If we have an interest in something we're writing about, we disclose that interest. We are as transparent as we can be about our site's statistics, practices and policies.

I'm not even touching that one. BoingBoing needs a "Who's Friends With Who" chart to keep track of all the proverbial back-scratching self-promotion and nepotism going on.

Mmmm, delicious, delicious hypocrisy.

Let's do the time warp again. Let's jump back to, oh I dunno, sometime around 2001. You see apparently BoingBoing had decided to use quicktopic.com as a free and easy way to discuss the entries posted on BoingBoing. We all know that for whatever reason Quicktopics didn't work out for them-- what we don't know is exactly why. Hopefully this will shed some light on the issue...

September 10th, 2003 appears to be the last day that comments officially existed on BoingBoing. Let's analyze the last few posts conveniently made by Xeni Jardin:

*H-Bomb architect Edward Teller dies
*Bill Joy leaves Sun

That's odd. The discussion links no longer work. But Cory's post earlier that day seems to work just fine. And all of Xeni's earlier discussion posts (9/9/03 and prior) appear to work fine as well. What happened on 9/10/03?

Nobody appears to know for sure. In Xeni's wikipedia discussion some people mention death threats, and others, well:

"... BoingBoing used to have open comments and the were pretty much overtaken by criticisms of Jardin. Cory Doctorow eventually turned them off, if I remember correctly..." --Kickstart70-T-C 01:07, 3 May 2006 (UTC)

Fortunately, I've answered the mystery for you folks in anti-xeni land and hopefully this will put to rest the discussion on Wikipedia. Kickstart was already heading in the right direction and this confirms it. There are atleast three references to what may have really happened. Here's a quote of the good stuff:

I also noticed that there were a few people posting comments as Xeni and Cory, impersonating them, and other exceedingly juvenile things. Part of the problem with Quicktopics (thich BB used for comments) is that the only indicator that you're the "real" Cory, etc. is a star next to your name. Since not everyone knows what the star means, the impersonators were sometimes believed to be the real thing. I suspect this is part of the whole deal, too

whoops that's bad, but it gets worse!:

...Someone had spoofed Xeni *with* the little authentication star, and it actually fooled me a first. It's only 2-3 people that are being really vile...

Golly, it sounds to me that quicktopic had quite a flawed system. Who on earth would want to use a system that allowed people to spoof the administrators of their own forums (besides us of course)? Either Xeni's account was hacked or there was a SIGNIFICANT flaw in the quicktopic system. If there was such a huge flaw who would use such a system today? Apparently Xeni would:

From the quicktopic buzz testimonials:

Xeni Jardin, co-editor of BoingBoing: QuickTopic is an indispensable part of every blog project I've been part of, from BoingBoing to kevinsites.net. The ease-of-use for both administrators and audience is unparalleled. Half of what makes a great blog great is what the blogger has to say. The other half? What the audience has to say. QuickTopic rules my blogosphere.

Why such a glowing testimonial from Xeni Jardin? It was their flawed system that allowed those juvenile pranks to happen. My personal speculation would be to assume that it wasn't quicktopic's fault for what had happened... You guys figure out from there.

"Half of what makes a great blog is what the blogger has to say. The other half? What the audience has to say." For once I can say that I completely 100% agree with Xeni on that one. Too bad she didnt agree with it in the long term...

Caught on camera, a surprise cameo showed up to the recent "Day Without an Immigrant" protests:



I tend to agree, Strong Bad, I tend to agree...

Hi, I would like to introduce myself. My name is Andrea James and I'm a transgender activist. You may not have heard of me because you see; I have no legitimate claim to fame other than the fact that I am currently in a relationship with a person named Calpernia Addams.

What's that? You haven't heard of Calpernia Addams?

What about Barry Winchell? You see Barry and Calpernia were in a relationship (not at all gay!) and when rumors began to circulate around the military base that Barry was in love with a transgender showgirl, some transsexual hating bigots murdered him. Calpernia was subsequently thrown in the national spotlight showcasing the military's "Don't ask, Don't tell" policy.

In the true sense of Dr. Frankenfurter we decided "don't dream it, be it". Calpernia and I decided that the best way to profit from help the transgender community was to start a company and take our show on the road to Hollywood. We were able to sell our story of Barry and Calpernia's star-crossed love as a movie called "Soldier's girl".

More recently, Calpernia and I have helped coach Felicity Huffman in her role in Transamerica. So now everyone can see the difference that we have made by profiting bringing attention to the plight of the transgender community.

When I heard about Xeni's backlash, and subsequent smear campaign on the internet, I couldn't help but jump into the fray. Afterall we're fighting all forms of transgender hatred and although even we're not sure which side of the fence Xeni Jardin is on, we wanted to let her know that transgender blogging is OK and that we won't stand for any of this Xeni Sucks nonsense. Transsexuals should have a voice to blog with! Hopefully somebody will buy our movie rights for a story tentatively titled, "Blogger Bigotry: The story of Xeni Jardin"

Shouldn't come as news to anyone who has ever been to the post office. Naturally, the solution is that we give this same big government the responsibility of taking care of everyone's healthcare.

This is lame on a variety of levels:

1) Screen Captures of ASCII Art. Because the ASCII art, by itself, just didn't take up enough disk space.
2) People who used BBSs in the "80s and early 90s" are what we who were using the Internet back then refer to as "lame". Seriously, seriously lame.
3) Appealling to a nostalgia you had no part in originally: ALSO PRETTY LAME.

What's next? BITNET LISTSERV INBOX SCREEN CAPTURES? Maybe they could be "mashed-up" with some seriously hot dildo cozies?

Xeni doesn't know what "freestyle" means. Probably thinks Neil Young pioneered the form, as well. Mashup mashup blah blah blah.