Thank you again, hairball_of_hope, this time for your explanation about reasons not to use “Tiny URL”. I get so much from your posts, and wish I’d read further before putting a (faulty) “tinyURL” in the syrup blog today.

Why a Microsoft Windoze troll would want to waste his time bashing Linux on Distrowatch is beyond me. Certainly Linux fans do enough bashing of one another’s favorite distros (Linux variants) all by themselves. It’s sort of like Methodists bashing Baptists… both are Protestant Christian denominations who believe in the same general theological constructs, but they differ on the details.

I’m starting to think trolldom is a sport, and has little to do with opinions actually held by the troll. What seems to matter to him (and yeah, the Windoze troll at Distrowatch is a male) is that it’s a “little ol’ me against the entrenched wrong-thinking masses” game, and the goal is to score points, extra credit given for personal attacks and general obnoxiousness.

Nevermind that Windoze is the dominant desktop operating system and Linux has a relatively small piece of the desktop pie (figures reversed for big-iron and high-end servers, Linux is running the vast majority of webservers, and nearly every retail SOHO network router on the planet).

I don’t spend any time on Windoze blogs, so I have no idea if anti-Microsoft trolls lurk there, but I’ll bet there are some.

I have been thinking about this because we’ve been discussing whether it is better to completely ignore the troll (whose posts ultimately get deleted by our web dominatrix), or to respond in some way, which as AB put it, “only excites the troll.”

FYI, our troll friend paid an early visit to the maple syrup miracle thread the other morning, and I intentionally didn’t leave my usual orange-haired acronym. His post (well, really two posts, the first one was a test) was relatively mild-mannered and was all about the discussion of trolldom we are having in this thread. His two posts were deleted relatively quickly, so the only hint of response to him is the reference to maple syrup swigging lesbians in shiny blue bras.

Not exactly a scientific test, and for all I know our troll is passed out from too much Passover wine or too many Cadbury Creme Easter Eggs, but I think ignoring him totally and counting on the swift deletion of his posts by The Great Delete Key In The Sky is the best way to go.

I also think our web dominatrix should be capturing the troll’s IP addresses, doing a traceroute to identify the ISP, and let them know he’s a pest.

I am not entirely happy with “gay marriage,” though it is a handy shorthand. Many people assume that both partners must be gay, though one or both could be bisexual, or even straight. (As for Dan~a’s quip, why not go whole hog and call it “gay, lesbian, bisexual, questioning, queer, and ally marriage”?) But Ready2agitate is wrong: “gay marriage” only implies that a marriage has a sexuality if you choose to see it that way. Compare: gay tourism (used in this thread), gay rights, lesbian fiction, gay poetry, American poetry, English literature. (Does English literature have to be written by a resident/citizen/subject of England? The term often includes all literature in English, whether from the USA, the British Isles, or Canada; but literature written in English by someone like Chinua Achebe generally seems to be considered African literature, and where does someone like Buchi Emecheta fit in — African born but writing in English while resident in England or the US.)

“Same-sex” was meant, I think, to avoid the ambiguity and cultural limitations of “gay” and “homosexual”, but it doesn’t work. I’ve noticed that queer theorist academics who deploy “same-sex” quickly start using it in an essentialist way, as in “same-sex desires” and “same-sex identity.” There’s no substitute for thinking about what one is writing; no words magically solve the problem. (A lot of people forget that the “sex” in “homosexual” does NOT refer to copulation but to what many people call “plumbing.”)

“Gender neutral marriage” might work as a legal concept, but each case of marriage would be same-sex, other-sex, or something else for transfolk who conceptualized themselves differently.

Thanks for those links to Dee Palmer. I particularly enjoyed the second link with her interview.

I saw Tull in concert only once, in the 1970s (had tickets for another concert but had to cancel due to a death in the family). Haven’t really listened to them in years, my musical tastes having shifted over time to other genres.

These days, my radio is pegged on the local classical and jazz stations, and I get a bit of opera in my ears as well.

Not sure where Palmer’s music fits in the genre pigeonholes. Maybe like gender, sexuality, and handedness, music simply exists at various spots on the continuum, and shouldn’t be pigeonholed at all.

Interesting to note that although all Palmer’s paperwork, including driver’s license, indicates her gender as F, the UK legal system appears to still consider her M.

Your idea of Passover wine must be that sweet stuff that down-and-out types swill from brown paper bags. Yuck.

The only thing the sweet kosher wine is good for (IMHO) is for making charoset. Charoset is the chopped nut/date/apple/wine mixture which represents mortar on the Seder plate. Delicious stuff. It’s one of the few Passover foods I really like.

There’s a whole universe of fine wines that just happen to be kosher, and kosher for Passover. I just sampled a wide variety of them in the past two days. We had fine wines from France, Italy, California, Israel, South Africa, and a few more places I didn’t note.

Yes, it’s possible to get good and stewed on them, but far better to enjoy them sensibly and in moderation. Even better to enjoy them with good folks, good food, lots of laughs, and the retelling of the story of the Israelites’ Exodus from slavery in Egypt.

As Maggie notes, not everyone reacts well to alcohol or wants to drink it, so some folks drink grape juice at the Seder in lieu of the wine, and that’s perfectly fine.

Gut Yontif, Chag Sameach, Happy Passover, Zeisen Pesach, y’all.

(returns to leaving a trail of matzo crumbs in her wake)

Ellen, actually this is not necessarily true. There are states (guess which ones!) that refuse to recognize same-sex marriage to such an extent that their courts refuse to have anything to do with same-sex marriage at all. This includes refusing to perform divorces. My Conflicts of Laws professor told us about one such case; a gay couple got married in state A, then moved to state B which did not recognize gay marriage. They later wanted to divorce, and found that they could not do so. State A, where gay marriage was legal, could not do their divorce because they no longer met the residency requirement. State B refused to perform the divorce because it did not recognize gay marriage. So, they were stuck.

Really, the legal aspects of same-sex marriage are fascinating. Depressing, in many respects, but fascinating.

I stopped drinking in 1984 when the Clean and Sober movement changed the lives of so many of my friends in San Francisco. They didn’t ask it of me, I simply could not come up with a good reason to ingest a substance which I knew would alter my cognition/mood and make me less responsible. I still don’t have a reason. I thought with eating and the great company of the seder, I would get a buzz but not go completely off the deep end as I did. Once I was home, I passed out for several hours. So the first part of the story is funny, but the whole of it is not.

Deland and others, I was trying to address everyone who has been replying to the troll, not Deland only. My point wasn’t that there is anything we can do that is guaranteed to make the troll go away. I agree with you that there isn’t. My point is that responses keep him present, in a way, when otherwise he wouldn’t be. Alison deletes his posts very promptly. Many of us would not be aware that he had been back if it were not for the responses to his posts. The responses make us aware of him when otherwise he might as well have disappeared. In that sense, they keep him present. He could post again tomorrow, but in the meantime he wouldn’t have made any difference to the blog if people hadn’t responded to him.

That is one reason not to respond to him. Generally I do feel it would be better not to respond to him, for that reason and a couple of others. What I was trying to say in my first post, though, is more specific: by responding to him, we keep him present, whether or not he comes back later with another post. If no one responds, then when Alison deletes each of his new posts he is gone, at least for a while. Some of you obviously are seeing his posts, so I thought maybe you didn’t realize that Alison is deleting them so quickly that some of us never see them — even me, and I check in at least once a day.

I hope that makes more sense than my first attempt did. I was not trying to single anybody out. If this explanation does make more sense, I will happily go back to taking my own advice and stop talking about the troll.