brandondawson.org

The solution would seem to be quite simple: present Wikipedians with something that cannot be neatly classified, and watch the semi-anonymous digital bloodsport ensue.

Randall Munroe, the creator of the webcomic XKCD seems to have accomplished this by coining the joke word “malamanteau“, a parody of Wikipedians’ never-ceasing zeal for categorizing wordplay into ever-narrower segments and assiduously incorporating those obscure linguistic distinctions into every article.

The resulting brouhaha, whether Munroe intended it or not, has laid bare the truth of essentially every charge anyone has ever laid against the “Encyclopedia that Anyone can Edit”, as can plainly be seen on the resulting talk page, a hilarious swirl of earnest editors spewing the lingua franca of Wikipedia’s bureaucracy and “deletionists” and “inclusionists” bickering over the linguistic and encyclopedic merit of the newly-coined word.

Nice work, Mr. Monroe, you’ve successfully pulled in grand fashion that most righteous of pranks: the kind that makes people think. Too bad both the joke and any hope of rational thought seems lost on the Wikipedia hivemind.

This is why the principles of net neutrality and universal access to the internet should be enshrined in law.

Remember those commercials, the ones that ran on national TV, proclaiming some nifty thing you’d be about to do through “the nets” in years to come? I’m speaking of the ones that went on to add, “….and the company that’ll bring it to you, AT&T”.

Those ones?

Most folks aren’t aware that they’ve been paying for those nifty things for twenty years now, and only half of them are getting anything closely resembling the commercials.

Why couldn’t the Gods of Baseball have held off Dallas Braden’s perfect game until the A’s next faced the Yankees? That would’ve been epic, watching Alex Rodriguez scrunch into his “mad” face for nine innings of futility.

This Braden guy seems pretty special. I hope we see a lot more of him for years to come. Baseball needed somebody like him, somebody with some color, after a decade or two of doing everything they can to “package” the game to the greatest extent possible.

As a hilarious footnote to Braden’s perfecto, his grandmother was quoted as saying “Stick it, A-Rod” when approached for comments after the game.

I’m guessing that grandma would pitch A-Rod high-and-inside, too.