"Rooted" may be a better choice of words. What you see above is the top of an actual fence post that used to sit on my property.

The photograph above represents what I eventually came to see whenever I paid it a visit. So I brought it to life with my camera and some computer software simply as an exercise in creativity.

I can only attest for the 23 years I have lived here but local historians believe it's a good bet this post was probably placed in the ground over a hundred years ago. The general consensus is that it was set where it shouldn't of been; just outside my property line.

So last spring when the city of Alpine was reassessing it's property the location of my errant post was duly noted.

When I took down the fence [by demand] this post was so stubborn I had to pull it out with a tow chain hitched to the chassis of my truck. Apparently it was placed in the ground when it was still alive and as a result of an apparent "last gasp" effort, it sprouted roots. Seriously, a fence post with actual roots.

My wife has labeled me as a know-it-all (and as she is one herself she must certainly be correct). Know it or not it's her rhetoric reference to the the fact that my opinions are rooted in 62 years of experience. The fence post story illustrates the fact that right or wrong, in the end, even the most established and rooted of "whatever" can be dislodged with proper persuasion. So please feel free to attempt to dislodge any of my opinions that follow if deemed necessary.

Sunday, October 25, 2009

Basic Laws of The World Wide Web

Here's a few important laws you need to be aware of when surfing the web and especially when reading blogs:
  • Skitt’s Law - Expressed as "any post correcting an error in another post will contain at least one error itself." It is an online version of the proofreading truism of Murphy’s Law, also known as Hartman's Law of Prescriptivist Retaliation: "any article or statement about correct grammar, punctuation, or spelling is bound to contain at least one eror."
  • Pommer’s Law -Proposed by Rob Pommer on rationalwiki.com in 2007, this states: “A person's mind can be changed by reading information on the internet. The nature of this change will be from having no opinion to having a wrong opinion.”
  • The Law of Exclamation - First recorded in an article by Lori Robertson at FactCheck.org in 2008, this states: "The more exclamation points used in an email (or other posting), the more likely it is a complete lie. This is also true for excessive capital letters." It is reminiscent of the claim in Terry Pratchett's Discworld novels that the more exclamation marks someone uses in writing, the more likely they are to be mentally unbalanced. According to Pratchett, five exclamation marks is an indicator of "someone who wears their underwear on the outside".
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