Housekeeping
Our last article generated enough discussion that we felt we could sit back, relax, and get a bit of housekeeping done. We’ve moved the February articles to the new version of Sten Gazette and added a couple of new features just for fun.
The new features are Your Star Wars Quote of the Day, and Your Shrub Quote of the Day. Look for SWQOTD and SQOTD under Pages, in the sidebar on the right-hand side of the screen. They’re not really quotes “of the day,” just random quotes from a database you will will see a new one each time you visit the page or refresh it.
The quote pages really are “just for fun” although we realize that one person’s fun is another person’s political commentary. The latest in the Star Wars saga, Revenge of the Sith, has been widely compared to the current state of politics in the U.S. and disclaimers by George Lucas have been somewhat half-hearted. The quotes, however, are from all six episodes and mostly do not have any relevance to anything.
That said, it was an allegedly political Star Wars quote that led us to the Bush quotes. We wanted to find the president’s actual words and compare them, but got distracted by library after library of “Bushisms.” Our president has a tendency to make up the language as he goes along, and some of his off-the cuff disassemblies are genuine howlers. Before you write to us complaining that referring to him as “Shrub” is an insult or shows lack of respect, please be advised the Shrub is a family nickname for the “little Bush” and long pre-dates his prominence in politics. And in this context we are emphasising the human side of the man. It would have been more disrespectful to identify these as quotes from the President of the United States, or the Leader of the Free World, whatever. OK, with our selection of that photo and the Mencken quote, we have crossed the line between humor to commentary.
The update process has been proceeding slowly, because there is a good bit more involved than we expected. That means, we misunderstimated the job. Because of formatting and cataloging considerations it is not simply a matter of cutting and pasting the original text. Links have to be corrected, image files have to be relocated, and the comments need to appear in the right order.
Rereading some of the articles has been interesting and generally supportive of our main reason for the upgrade– the ability to get away from a purely chronological ordering and get the articles organized on the basis of their topics. We’ve resisted the temptation to engage in revisionism, apart from fixing the odd typo.
The work continues, and we hope your patience will too.
–SG
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