You know... the word is wieldy, not wheeldy.

All hail spell checkers, without them eye don't gnaw what eye wood do!

It seems our trust in all sorts of areas has been deteriorating steadily since 9-11. We have less and less reason to have trust in more and more things. We can't even trust skating judges! I am amazed that this is what has replaced the silly news stories of 9-10. Maybe it is too naive to think that news post 9-11 would be filled with good, caring, loving, altruistic, positive, helpful stuff. Dennis Miller's rant from 2/8/02 on Trust is a particularly thorough and well thought out exploration of these issues.

Now, more than ever before, trust is crucial to our lives. When people go through so much turmoil in their public and private lives, there is a natural "flight to trust," a yearning to hold on to certain things as bastions of hope and signals of possibly better times. On this Valentine's day I think we should all take some time to think about those things that really matter, our loved ones, and make sure we are doing our best to uphold our ideals of trust, honesty and love with all those we come into contact with.

By the way, there is an obvious tangent here, in regards to the nature of blogging as hopefully truthful thoughts from sincere people. I may do that tomorrow. Right now I just want to say that we should get along and trust each other. If you must be led into a 'trust in blogging' tangent, listen to David Weinberger's recent commentary on NPR by clicking here. You can also catch up with the fascinating blogversation on authenticity between David, Tom, AKMA and Dave.

What follows is an abbreviated transcript of Dennis Miller's rant.

"Now I don't want to get off on a rant here, but the events of the past few months have certainly diminished our ability to trust each other. We have government leaders who are more bought than a hooker's enthusiasm. And you can't even get on a plane these days without worrying that the seemingly harmless passenger sitting next to you could actually turn out to be an Enron executive. Over the past year, our confidence in the basic institutions of society has suffered blow after blow. The dotcom collapse taught us we can't trust the stock market. Enron taught us we can't trust the regulators who are supposed to supervise it. And the recent terrorist attacks taught us we can't trust violent, heavily-bearded religious fanatics who want to bring about the total destruction of our country. Where can we turn?

... But some of these employees should have known not to put their entire nest egg into one stock. They should have diversified. Put a little into good solid blue chips that can withstand any storm, like I did. You know, the dependables. K-mart, Lucent and Captain Joey's House of Room-Temperature Chum.

... I love watching politicians like Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle fulminate over how Enron and Arthur Anderson deceived the American people. Daschle is the same guy who supported bailing out the airlines after September 11th, but never once mentioned that his wife is a paid lobbyist for them. That's a bigger conflict of interest than Star Jones clinging to a marshmallow raft. We trusted that the airlines would protect us; they didn't. That skyscrapers would stand forever; they didn't. That our shores were safe. They weren't. That our bosses would tell us the truth about our companies. They lied. That we could retire on the funds we saved. We can't. That I would have a funny ending for this paragraph. I don't.

... Using the Internet necessitates a certain level of trust. Every time we log on, we've just got to have faith that our e-mails aren't being read, our credit card numbers aren't being stolen, and our occasional foray into a chatroom as mixed-race transvestite hooker "Honey Dijon" is regarded strictly as a sociological experiment and not a justification for our wives to only allow computer usage when we're wearing the court-ordered penis clamp. Who's with me?

Hey, the bottom line is, the fundamental nature of mankind never changes. Trust will always be a magical commodity that is difficult to earn and easy to lose, and a healthy skepticism will always be needed to help you avoid getting conned, because mankind will always produce more bullshit than a herd of Holsteins grazing in a prunefield. I believe it is not enough to point fingers. We must learn from Enron as well. That's why, from now on, any jokes on this show that fail to get laughs will be immediately transferred to a dummy talk show I've created called "Mennis Diller" which airs out of Costa Rica.

... Of course, that's just my opinion. I could be wrong."

Update to previous entry: Matthew Haughey has a cool blog and in a recent posting he spoke about his own little experiment in meme propagation, which was very successful. Someone who has, as the last line of their site, "I could have used a little more cowbell" has got to be one of the coolest people around. For those who don't know what that refers to, sorry. And for those who do know what it means, you may be interested to note that some people say I look like Christopher Walken.

Speaking of a different kind of meme propagation (or huge buzz or massive word of mouth or any other buzzword synonym): I am sure that many people who upload their creative works to my full-time-job site, GAZM.org, hope that it becomes the next hot thang. And many times, I thing what is uploaded deserves just that. For example, this recent upload obviously took a lot of time, effort and thought to create and deserves some attention. Maybe when GAZM.org gets more traffic the uploads will get the attention they deserve. Word of mouth is definitely important. For example, this upload was used by ABCNews for a story about humor in current events. That's pretty cool. There are also a group of sites which regularly link to new and interesting uploads. I think the fascinating thing about this whole topic is that its not an exact science. The ever-elusive formula continues to intrigue us all. Thoughts?

Every little thing some people blog is magic:

I am curious about how certain links skyrocket to the top of blogdex's "top 25 recent links in the weblog community." Is it really because those links are genuinely interesting to the majority of blog readers? Is it because they are interesting to the majority of blog writers? Is there a difference between what readers and writers of blogs find interesting? Does a blog writer serve or lead her readers?

It is intriguing when a site seemingly devoted to talking about getting high on blogdex actually gets high on blogdex. Is the cart leading the horse? Is the tail wagging the dog? Is this a circular argument?

If I link to the top 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 entries on blogdex, will my traffic increase? Maybe I also need to mention their titles, so that search engines will index me: Diary of a Start-Up (Ars Digita), Guess what one of our Senior Exec's did to his palm (Pic's inside) 56K users - Topic Powered by Infopop, Guardian Unlimited Observer | Observer site | Armed to the teeth, old bits of nothing (Critical IP), and Hoopty Girls Webring.

Are we really to believe that the 21 people who, as of this writing, are linking to the number one entry on blogdex all found it by themselves? Probably not. Maybe one or two of them found it and all the others simply heard about it from those first two. Does this mean that there are a few elite blogs which set the stage for what becomes popular online? Probably.

Do you think it would my cause if I listed some of the 21 people who are linking to the top entry right now? Let's find out: dane carlson, mark paschal, cris dias, boing boing and synthetic zero, among others.

You get popular by having lots of people linking to you. You become the tastemaker by getting others to link to what you choose to link to.

But how do you decide what to link to? How did those few tastemakers find out about the current top link of blogdex? Maybe this is the bottom-line question. How do the tastemakers find what they decide to link to? I am not sure how to answer this question since many times the top links are specific stories in newspapers or weird personal homepages or quirky experiments by unknown people. That's what the Internet has always been about - dancing hamsters with no publicists or marketing campaigns becoming extremely popular.

So maybe this whole topic comes down to the same thing we always think about online - small, weird things becoming extremely popular. I may be writing the most amazing blog entry today, but how do I get 100 million people to read it? Maybe the harder I try the less realistic my success becomes? Maybe that's crap. The best way to get to Carnegie Hall is practice, practice, practice. Or is it really being best friends with the blogdex elite?

The elite of the elite, blogdex's creator, Cameron Marlow, keeps a very interesting blog of his own here. In it he talks about some of the things I brought up here. Read those blog entries here and here.

May all your blogs be dexed!

If you miss my usual sense of humor I apologize. Recuperating from asbestos.

In the mean time, check out a funny new upload to GAZM.org satirizing the need to keep calm while living under the constant threat of badness from bad people: Living In Terror.

I think recuperating from a run of the mill illness (i.e. cold) is like removing asbestos from an old office building.

Stay with me.

Some people say you have to fight through illnesses. Work hard, work out, take care of yourself, be vigilant, yadda yadda yadda.

I think you should do nothing. Firstly, an illness has a certain amount of work it has to do (i.e. 100 units of hurt). Secondly, your body has a certain limit of work it can have done per day. Thirdly, everything you do counts towards your body's limit of work.

So, if you do something, there will be fewer "spots" available for the illness to do what it needs to do. That said, you should do as little as possible by giving everything in your body the day off and allowing the illness to do what it has to do.

It's like removing asbestos from an office building. If you keep your workers in the office while you are removing the asbestos it will take much longer and may lead to additional problems. However, if you give your workers the day off you'll be able to remove all the asbestos while your employees enjoy the free time.

I now return to bed; still have a few more units of hurt for my cold to work through.

Golden words he will pour in your ear
But his lies can't disguise what you feel
For a golden girl knows when he's kissed her
It's the kiss of death
From Mista Goldfinga