Ishbareaders will remember the sleuthing work that Alex B. did in uncovering the Misleading Water Filter Comparison Chart, which ranks "Aquasana" as number one but hides the fact that it's sponsored by... Aquasana. There's been some back-and-forth between President of Sun Water Systems, maker of the Aquasana water filters, me, and various other folks who feel that Mr. Strand was not being above board.

Yesterday a satisfied Aquasana customer, "Miguel," posted here about his wonderful experience with Aquasana.. "After all, I wanted a water filter that would do the best job, not the one who I thought had the best marketing team," says "Miguel."

Curious, I looked up where "Miguel" was posting from. Hmmm -- his IP is 67.152.98.19 in Fort Worth, TX, home of... Sun Water Systems! And it's the same IP used earlier by.... Charles Strand, President of same!

As Henry David Thoreau said, "Some circumstantial evidence is very strong, as when you find a trout in the milk." Ladies and gentlemen, we have a Sock Puppet. This from a man who wrote here: "I've always been suspicious of people who make defamatory remarks, but use aliases to do so. If you feel good about what you are saying, why use an Alias..."

You lose! Good day sir!

Update: He wrote again, still claiming to be Miguel, and clearly not understanding what an IP address is. I've closed the thread, since I really have better things to do than argue with a sock puppet about water filtration marketing.

FWIW there's now an Ishbadiddle group on Facebook. For authors, readers, and fans. Let me know if you want to join.

I just got back from Philadelphia and I noticed an ad for Ishkabibbles’s, home of the original chicken cheesesteak. I rembered there being some discussion of this blogs name (but an internal search showed no mention of “iskabibble”. A yahoo search had many hits, including this one:

ISHKABIBBLE A dismissive statement. This slang expression came into existence in the USA quite suddenly around 1913 with the ostensible meaning “I should worry!”, which means, of course, “Don’t worry!” or “Who cares?”. It had quite a vogue for a decade or two and was the name of a character played by Merwyn Bogue on a 1930s radio show called Kay Kyser’s Kollege of Musical Knowledge (they don’t make titles like that any more).

Mike, maybe your grandparents got Ishbadiddle from here. Maybe they really invented the chicken cheesesteak?

Created with the Seal Generator that Trip just wrote about.

(German, of course, for "The Spammers, The.")

Sorry I've been light on blogging as of late -- v. busy at work. Plus Ish was hit by spam commenters. It's been a couple of years since our last major invasion. Then, as now, the ironic thing is that their attempts to hijack this blog to boost the Google ranks for their real estate, airline ticket, and education scamsites are completely and utterly useless. Since the nofollow attribute is added to every hyperlink in comments, Google will ignore it. So at least I can take some comfort in the thought that the SEO firm (I assume they've paid someone to do this) is wasting their money. In the meantime, I've been plugging the leaks, deleting comments, and banning IP addresses (they are all from ThePlanet.com in Texas, which means either our friends are in TX and hopping IPs or someone is using a proxy through them; thanks guys!). This may take a while.

In the meantime, enjoy some pulp fiction popups courtesy of Cynical C.

Hey, Ishbadiddle is in an article on neighborhood blogs in the latest Park Slope Reader, available in fine stores everywhere. Well, not everywhere, but here. PDF version here in case the Community Bookstore is too far away.

The full uncut "interview" is below the fold. Some of it will look familiar.

It seems that Ishbadiddle is blocked in China. You can use The Great Firewall of China to test any site's availability. More about Chinese Internet censorship here.

I finally got around to it... www.ishbadiddle.com and www.ishbadiddle.org now both redirect here.

Updated the templates so the tags should be working again. Also, update the links section, pruning some dead sites and others I don't read as much. Feel free to leave corrections and suggestions in the comment box.

Yesterday, in addition to being Martin Luther King, Jr.'s birthday and the 88th anniversary of The Great Boston Molasses Disaster, was also Ishbadiddle's six-year blogiversary. Oh, and some time back we passed the 4,000th post. Howzaboutthat?

Lack of posting as of late was not merely due to vacation; some folks in Russia decided to slam Ish with traffic, perhaps in an attempt to breach MT's posting engine and start partaking of our delicious PageRank. Our good host has taken the proper countermeasures and posting has resumed; posters, I'll get you the details soon. It will take a bit until we have things back in full order and we resume the quality Ishbadiddle experience you have come to expect, and we hope, enjoy.

Seems that things are working again. Carry on.

Ishbadiddle's own internet confessional has now surpassed 1,000 comments. I could close comments, I suppose, but the thing's taken on a life of its own. And hey, every day we send a few more people to seek professional help so perhaps we're doing some good after all. A strange chapter in the blog's history -- my gosh, has it really been 5 and a half years?

As previously blogged, ishbadiddle.com and .net were snatched up by domain resellers. I think I emailed one asking for a price but never heard back.

Now I've got an offer -- the owner of ishbadiddle.com has the domain listed on his site for the low, low price of $2,999. However he made me an initial offer of only $750! How could I pass that deal up!

Ummmm, easy. I offered $50, take it or leave it. It's not like anyone else would really be interested in the domain, and since I make no money off of this, it's not really worth it for me to pay more. He countered with $100, but I'm sticking at $50. On principle, you know.

Hopefully, Dr. Wang (M.D., Ph.D. Dermatologist and a researcher in medical mycology.) will be smart enough to see that this is the best return on his investment he's going to get.

Update: I guess my mad negotiation skillz worked, and I'll grudingly give him $50.

I'm on vacation for a little while, and will stay far far away from computers, the Internet, the news, etc. So I leave the blog in the capable hands of my fellow Ishers. See ya soon!

I've rewritten the Ishbadiddle: Different Trains and The Devil of History post -- hopefully it's a bit more coherent, and not as grossly cynical as it sounded the first time around.

Over the weekend, at our host's annual fete, several friends came up to me to express their opinions on some recent posts here on Ish.

Recently, another friend emailed me a comment on a recent post.

Folks, there's a comments function here. Please use it.

I know not everyone feels they have something to say. Heck, I read lots of blogs and don't always comment on them. Lurking is a time-honored activity on teh internets, at least as time-honored as anything is for a medium that's two decades old. But I try (especially on less-trafficked blogs) to leave the occasional comment, even if it's "hey, funny!" or "interesting post!" or "buy Cialis here!" (OK, not that last one.)

Why? Call it Egoboo or Whuffie or what have you, the comment is a way to "pay" your friendly neighborhood blogger. It's the quarter tossed into the busker's open hat. It lets the blogger know that yes, people are reading the damn thing, that readers give a damn, and that the effort is worth it, dammit!

You don't need to write an essay. Spelling does not count. But if you feel the need to say something, if you have an opinion about something that's written here, or even if you just want to say "hey, that link totally made my lunch hour," then speak your mind. Thank you.

PS Curious, I ran the numbers -- at 1939 days of this blog, 3581 posts have been written, making 1.85 posts/day. 6420 comments have been left, an average of 1.79 per post, although a full 11% of those comments were left on the Post Secrets post. Removing that post takes the historical average down to 1.60 comments / post.

New to the blogroll, Ms. Frizzle! She's one of the blogs taking part in the Blogger Challenge -- check out the new leaderboard which just went live yesterday.

Unlike, say, rating movies, I find rating books to be difficult. Is there such a thing as a "three and a half star" book? Perhaps if I were as widely read as some people I could rate books that way.

I think in general, movies are easier to rate because our experiences of a movie are more or less standardized. You sit and watch, either at home or in the theater, and your ~2 hours is pretty much the same as anyone else's ~2 hours. Music, on the other hand, is situational. There's the song that was playing on the car radio as you drove over the bridge, the album you played over and over again your junior year of high school, etc. And books are similar. The book you read when you're 15 is not the same book when you read it at 35.

So while I've been gleefully rating movies here, I've declined from attaching stars or letters or cute stickers to book reviews. However, I am inspired by the Anvil and Sprocket Rating System which classifies films as "Keeper," "Renter," and "Bomb." Similarly, I am going to classify books (from this point on, I don't think I have the stomach to retroactively go through all my old book reviews) as:

• Books to Buy. You'll want to keep this book. Maybe to re-read it. Maybe for shelf appeal. Maybe as part of the mental furniture.
• Books to Borrow. Worth reading, but you need not buy a copy. Borrow it from the library. Or from me.
• Now the third category I'm having a little trouble naming. Bomb works well for movies, less so for books. Books to Burn? Far too Savonarolian. Bleahh? Blecch? Book to Bin? Books that are Bad? Books that I will Bookcross? Suggestions welcome.

And hey all, what're you reading these days?

Update: I decided to go with Books to Eschew. It's just fun to say.

Lots of blogs have "What I'm reading now," ususally with a picture of the cover. Same for music. Here on Ish we have the Conspicuous Consumption mini-blog. I figured, why not have little pictures there? I mean, shouldn't Ishbadiddle be as visually distracting as possible? (Note to self: redesign?)

Started putting pictures in by hand, then realized that was a PITA. I'd seen this site on coding Amazon images, including his weird results. Using his techniques, I came up with a quick regex that will produce images automatically for us.

<amzimg>1896597718</amzimg> will now code to:


It's 100 px wide with a drop shadow. The regex is looking for the 10-digit ISBN (or the ASIN, the 10-character ID assigned to every item in Amazon). Don't forget the end tag!

If the item isn't square, the shadow will look, well, stupid. So use <amzimgns>B000E1NXJ0</amzimgns> to produce:


Same as above, but no shadow.

In case you're interested, the code is below the fold.

I read about this on pesky' -- this guy is putting a million blog icons on one page, and selling them off for a buck apiece. It's called, shockingly, One Million Blogs. Not too dissimilar to the Million Dollar Homepage, but bloggier. There's some complicated advertising giveback scheme he says he'll do if he gets to $1m, but heck, for a dollar, I'm in regardless. Look! We're #175! Above the fold!

Also in Ish news, www.ishbadiddle.org will now send you to this site. (The .net and .com versions are taken by unscrupulous types. [Shakes fist at unscrupulous types.]) Also, if you must have a .com address to go to, ish.badiddle.com should also redirect here, per our host's suggestion. (May not work this moment, but should soon.)

Only two readers have given to the Ishbadiddle DonorsChoose challenge so far. One of them: my mom. Thanks, Mom! (And thanks Kerim!)

Seriously, I need your help -- not so much for the donations, but to a) test out this technology we're building, and b) prove to my bosses that this whole Blogger Challenge thing is actually going to work. Ten bucks, five minutes of your time, that's all I ask.

Thanks!

The On Our Blogs category here was originally meant to be used on the sidebar, for brief links to the latest posts on Ishbadiddlers' Other Blogs. It wasn't used so I took it out, but Colin asked for it back, so back it is! The most recent 2 items will show up in the sidebar; don't use the "On Our Blogs" category if you want your item to show up in the main blog because it won't appear. I'll up the number of items from 2 if anyone other than CJ uses it.

What would be really kewl would be a way to throw in RSS feeds for those sites directly, so no actual intervention would be necessary -- you would automatically see when (and what) Colin, Chris, Emily, Ennis, et al. have posted on their sites. (After doing a minimal amount of research, this seems like the best solution given that these pages are currently .asp not .php -- unless anyone [Tk?] has other ideas.) Since this would require work on my part, I'd only move forward if you, our readers, were really interested. So speak up if this something you're interested in, otherwise it'll get put in the "interesting project I might do on that mythical day when I have lots of free time on my hands" list.

The Links section has been updated.

Last week I had lunch with Forrest Bryant, a friend from the Pennsylvania Governor's School for International Studies. He was in town for the International Association for Jazz Education conference, and we caught up over some pastrami. He's a DJ at KZSU and a fellow blogger. And now (drumroll) he's the newest member of Team Ishbadiddle. Welcome aboard!