Activate Streisand Effect: Donald Trump’s hair needs attention

trumphair

Peter Thiel, the obnoxiously rich right-winger and Trump-supporter who sued Gawker media into bankruptcy over unseemly stories about Hulk Hogan’s sex tape, is not satisfied. He’s now going after specific Trump stories he doesn’t like, and is bankrolling lawsuits about a couple of other Gawker stories.

In other words: A Thiel-funded attorney is helping a man sue Gawker Media over an article that comes nowhere near invading his privacy, concerns a clear matter of public interest, and explicitly states that the subject is not guilty of a crime.

You know what this means: we have to promote the news story that’s being attacked. And it’s actually a rather interesting story, unlikely news of Hulk Hogan’s infidelity and bedroom antics — it’s an article that tries to untangle the mystery of what the heck is going on with Trump’s weird, unnatural hair. It makes a pretty good case that what’s going on is that it is a very expensive, rather finicky specialized hair weave by a company called Ivari International, which costs about $60,000 to install and $300-$3000 a month to maintain. (You might want to file that information away for the next time someone complains about the cost of Clinton’s trips to a hair salon, because you know the media won’t ridicule a man for spending that much on vanity).

Ivari is suing for defamation, which is peculiar. Accurately describing the technology used to stitch hair extensions onto a balding man’s head is not defamatory, and the only thing I can think of that might be defamatory is that Ivari might not want its name associated with that creepy skein of floss everyone can see in every appearance of that Republican slimeball. I know that if I were in the market for fake hair, telling me that their technique produces the thinning dead animal that Trump wears would not be a selling point.

Maybe Ivari should sue Trump for flaunting his handiwork.

Welcome Siobhan to their new home

One of the blogs here, New Frontier, is experimental: we bring in people who want to try their hand at this bloggery thing, and put them in that group blog, and give them an opportunity to see if it all works out for them. It’s a way to try out people who may not have much of a track record yet, but look promising.

Those of you who’ve been following the prolific Siobhan on that blog will be pleased to know they’ve been bumped up to their own independent blog: check out Against the Grain.

She’s persistent, I give her that

Today has been blog maintenance day. I’ve been tidying up some things behind the scenes here at FtB, and I’m also almost done with a chore over on ScienceBlogs. Some of you who’ve been around for a while know that 5 years ago, National Geographic took over the management of Sb (it’s one of the things that prompted Ed Brayton and I to move out, since they were going to have some new policies), and one of the first things they did was update the blogs there to WordPress.

In my case, they botched it. My site was so huge and full of comments that their scripts weren’t able to cope, and while they got my posts updated, mostly, they butchered the comments: an unknown number of comments were outright lost (I estimate somewhere around half a million to a million; don’t be surprised, we’re approaching a million comments on FtB Pharyngula soon), and another 750,000 were erroneously flagged as spam, and hidden away in the spam queue. Easy to handle, right? Just approve all those mistakenly filtered comments, and voila! Done!

Except…I don’t have direct access to the database, so I can’t just charge in and approve all those records through MySQL. No, I have to do it through the WordPress interface, which is limited to doing 250 comments at a time. It’s 3 clicks of the mouse to approve 250 comments, but 750,000 comments? You do the math. So what I do is once or twice a week, I sit down and plod through a thousand or two comments. When I feel like it. It’s really boring, so there are long lapses where I just let it go. But today, I got it down to just 20,000 comments held up, so I was going to power through and get ’em all done at last.

But…boring. Easily distracted.

So anyway, while doing all of that stuff, I ran across this old post of mine that made me chuckle. I’m writing about this woman who has been stalking me for decades. Decades, I tell you! Since 1957! It’s amazing how much similarity there has been in our lives. And then I realized that post was written ten years ago…and she’s still here.

Shhh. She’s in the next room. Don’t make a noise or she might notice. My knee is acting up, or I’d try to sneak out and make a run for it. Maybe you can get away for me and come back with help.

She just went into the kitchen. There are knives there. I’m so afraid.

Funsies

I just thought I’d mention that Convergence is coming up — I’ll be there the whole weekend and will be having a grand time. We usually go with the whole family, but this year we’re scattered and we’re just coming off an expensive reunion/wedding in Korea, so it’ll just be me and my son Alaric.

I’ve also just now learned that there will be another NerdCon in October. I went to the one last fall, and it was excellent — a very writerly sort of event, all about getting those creative juices bubbling. I’ll probably go to that, too.

If you see me, say hello! I’m always happy to meet you all.


As long as I’m planning ahead, how could I forget to mention Skepticon in November?

You know where you can find good writing?

snoopy-good-writing-is-hard-work

Right here on FtB! If you’re looking for something to cleanse the palate after this mess, I recommend…

There. Much better.

My favorite threat ever

Do you know what Obama is going to do as he leaves office?

The Viacom, CIA-run weapons system is activating the Beyoncés and all the rest of the folks to say, ‘Go out and kill the pigs.’

That sounds awesome. It’s so awesome, I confess that my brain locked up solid for a moment as I imagined it. So Obama has an army of Beyoncés? Please let them loose.

Unfortunately, this wonderful prediction comes from Alex Jones, so you know exactly how credible it is.

Apsan

Yesterday, we saw this big green area, Apsan Park, on the map, and it was in walking distance…so we started walking. And then we discovered that the flat oval on the map was actually a mountain. A mountain in the middle of the city. So we gave up and went back to our hotel.

But today, we got a cab and got driven up to the cable car that takes you to the top, so that’s what we did.

apsanmountains
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