What If We Threw a Blogocalypse Carnival...and the GNF Came?

To show that the WAAGNFNP is all about the transparency as well as the splitting and the fusing, I have a question for the relevant Party Ministries. How about making The Unofficial Carnival of the Blogocalypse official sometime this fine winter season? Or does the notion have more of a spring feel to it, April being the cruelest month and all? (Yes, April 1 it must be. Don't you just love the decisiveness and inclusiveness of the Party's decision-making process?)

Which is just to say that perhaps we ought to consider another cage match or something. You'll no doubt have noted that the Apocalypse Scale I linked twice to a few days ago ranks the GNF rather low among the range of doomsday scenarios--and that bloggers who shall not be named here have derided the WAAGNFNP for ignoring the threats posed by viral and ecological forces. (Remember when Floating Head Professor deleted some Christian Identity apocalypse spam from his comments? Ah, those were the days.) Such challenges must not go, uh, unchallenged!

Can we do it? Yes, we can! (But what do you think? "You" in the most inclusive sense, no Party oaths or confessions required for commenting here!)

[Update 2/2/07: Rough Theory updates our scorecards for us! 2/3/07: Twice! 2/6/07: High, Low & in-between nominates blogocalypse for new word of the year! Thanks, I like it, too--and even thought I was being original when I "coined" it--but that's another Sadly, No! moment for me, it turns out. Too bad. Still, I'm hoping we can count these folks in for our 1 April 2007 carnival. 2/7/07: Here's some hot piping Schoolhouse Apocalypse from one of The Valve's newest BWAers. Is this the best way to set up a survey course you've ever read about, or what?]

Tiger Woods Wins Seventh Consecutive PGA Tournament, Blogs About WAAGNFNP

Which part of my title do you think is true? Check out his blog--or at least one that purports to be part of "The Official Tiger Woods MySpace," although I'll bet anyone anything they name it's maintained by a fan who went here and registered the same way I just did--to find out.

Just to annoy Oaktown Girl (who starts her first day at her new job soon--gambare!), I'll also share two quick Tiger stories:

(1) I was at some tournament Tiger didn't win awhile back at Oak Hills (a course I got to play once as a college golfer, but I played the wrong ball on the third hole and never recovered from the shock) and walked within a few feet of his wife as she was sitting on a golf cart. Although earlier I had had the guts to say a few words of encouragement to Shigeki Maruyama, whom I followed for a few holes after Mike Weir got off to such a terrible start (yes, I do like short golfers--why do you ask?), there was no way I was bothering her, so I just walked on by, trying to find a place on the 18th fairway to get a good view of the approach shot of the guy who minutes later sealed his victory with it. Got about as good a view of it as I did of Tiger all day, which is to say not very. While I enjoyed the chance to see a major live, I found myself missing the tv coverage. May have to invest in the kind of cell phone I have here if/when it becomes available in the US and pay for the wireless access to multimedia, just to be ready for the next tournament I attend.

(2) Although Tiger gives the most boring interviews in the history of sports to the U.S. media, he is more relaxed in Japan, so I've really enjoyed the few times he's been on Japanese tv while I've been in the country. I'll check in with my tsuma to see if she has time to search YouTube in Japanese for a clip; I couldn't find anything in English easily, so I gave up. In any case, he lives up to his reputation of being funny in Japan, so here's hoping he drops by Mostly Harmless to find out what the hell the WAAGNFNP is.

And while I'm wishing upon the stars, here's hoping Charles Howell III (another short guy!) keeps playing so well, and that others on the PGA try to make like Lorena, Ai-chan, Karrie, Cristie, Mi Hyun, Se Ri, Jeong, Natalie, and Meena--all of whom I think have a realistic chance to catch up with and maybe even surpass Annika this year on the money list and Rolex Rankings--and bring some great competition to men's golf.

Signs o' the GNF (2)

Just as Le Blogue Berube was becoming one with the GNF, two big themes emerged in the blogs I read most regularly--what I've called elsewhere Blogging While Academic and what I'll call here Blogging the Apocalypse--both of which I tend to think of as tributes to Floating Head Professor and efforts to theorize the WAAGNFNP.

For those with way too much time on their hands, or better things to do that can stand being put off just a little bit longer, or who just may want to stage a suitable Party intervention, High, Low & in-between provides a nice summary as of 1/20/07, which Rough Theory rightly praises, The Kugelmass Episodes promisingly responds to, and I cite doesn't-quite-cite, which prompts questions from the modestly-named The Weblog and gives pas au-dela a needed opening to not pass up a chance to go go go Blanchot on her (and to think I didn't know what "il y a" meant during my second grad school language exam). The Xenofiles ignores the entire discussion yet manages an excellent sequel to a 1985 Louise Erdrich essay.

Since I am nothing if not a fabulous procrastinator, here are the funnest results of a little search I did to track the progress of The Unofficial Carnival of the Blogocalypse outside the realm of cultural theory. If you're interested in radical ecology, check out adaptivereuse.net or The Fourth World--or both, for the cognitive dissonance. If ponies are more your style, check out the YouTube link to Moral Orel's improvement on My Little Ponies in Bridlepath (which, so far as I can tell, has no connection to The Poor Man Institute or their now-concluded 2006 Wingnut Awards). Oh, and even though Jamais Cascio created an Eschatological Taxonomy, I'm linking to Warren Ellis's Apocalypse Scale link, because he's Warren fucking Ellis, dammit, and now he's on the blogroll, too. And even Bud may be getting in on the act. Because nothing sells like the GNF, baby!

[Update: Baltimore's Radio Station for New and Significant Music has come up with the most predictable top 10 Songs of the Apocalypse imaginable. Surely the WAAGNFNP can do better! Clearly there is an aching need for GNF 101: Welcome to the End of the World. This summer course gets us started, but there's so much more to be read/seen/heard. Are we being nihilistic--or annihilistic--enough?]

Signs o' the GNF (1)

All right, so gin up Prince's "Signs of the Times" (I don't have Roxanne's skills at creating intertubesque playlists), get your Pratchett and Gaiman's Good Omens out and ready for bed-time reading, and check out this sign that the Giant Nuclear Fireball is on its way: the convergence across the political "spectrum" of concerns about "domestic militarization."

Check it: warning about the costs and dangers of domestic militarization is not the province of Angela Davis, Henry Giroux, Christian Parenti, Bad Subjects, and ColorLines alone anymore--in the past couple of years, we've seen the Cato Institute raise red flags of their own, most recently with a 100-page report called "Overkill: The Rise of Paramilitary Police Raids in America."

Read parts. Oh, and my questions: what's up with this convergence? what is fueling it? Katrina? The Siege? What?!

[Note: edited several times to appease the little voice crying out, "Stop, in the name of all that which does not suck!" And the other one going, "Heh heh. Heh heh heh."]

A Paler Shade of Fire

.FNG a ni demusnoc kcurt a yb revo nur saw enoyreve ylnedduS

***BREAKING*** *** Web Only Exclusive*** ***BREAKING***

By KIRBY ALTHOUSE, Associated Press Writer

PALO ALTO - Cyber-researchers at the Hoover Institution on Massively Redundant Sucking and Blowing confirmed the discovery of an Internet White Hole in a rarely visited corner of the blogosphere. Long postulated, but never previously observed, researchers traced the source of the White Hole via Internet tubes to a much more significant Internet Black Hole that had developed several weeks prior (see comment #287 here.)

Experts puzzled over the interesting transformations that the content being emitted from the White Hole had undergone. While certain images and in-jokes were unchanged, other content was not: danger had become harmlessness; hockey, golf; French, American; and 2001: A Space Odyssey emerged as Star Wars. Other key elements and content appeared to be missing altogether. A pair of shoes was found as well.

The significant mismatch in size and information content between the two suggests that the connections between them have split and fused repeatedly, and that this particular White Hole probably represents a mere fraction of the total energy consumed in the Black Hole. This led some to predict that other White Holes might pop up elsewhere on the Internet in the near future.

The discovery caused a ripple of excitement among some of the giants of Internet lore. When some Pseudonymous guy who sounded like indigenous people who had been portrayed in Earth Island Jo heard of the development, his face, at first just ghostly, turned a whiter shade of pale, and he skated off without comment. An earthtone clad Al Gore, however, greeted the news warmly. “Hot damn”, he sighed, “This is the kind of thing we were looking for back at the start. Now we’re cooking with gas!” Internet tubemeister Ted Stevens (R-Dementia) responded by rushing an emergency Appropriations Bill to the floor of the Senate to fund construction of several hundred bridges to locations in his home state where new White Holes might or might not appear.

There is a very loud amusement park right in front of my present lodgings.