For a lot of reasons, I have wanted to move Rad Geek People’s Daily from MovableType to WordPress for quite a long time. For a lot of other reasons, I have sat around and done nothing about it for quite a long time. But the day is here at last, and I’ve put quite a lot of effort into moving from one to the other. The migration is not, in itself, very hard or time-consuming; but one thing that I wanted to do, which has been time-consuming, is to make very sure that more or less nothing breaks in the transition (URIs, syndication feeds, etc.). So I hope you’ll pardon my dust for a few days while I sort everything out, but I hope that most of the major work is already done. If you notice anything that was working as of yesterday and is working as of today, please give me a holler, so that I can track it down and fix it.

We now return you to your regularly-scheduled extended quotations and political diatribes.

(Hat tip: Max Jones 2006-11-10.)

Write your own caption.

Today’s question comes via Lorna Grisby and Mark Guarino

Playing the role of a rap Casanova, Federline, who is seeking sole custody of his kids with Britney Spears, leaned into the crowd to touch the hands of women who were reaching toward him. Several songs into the set, he referenced his breakup with Spears. Hey, I see a lot of fine ladies in here, said the rapper. You know I’m a free man, right, ladies? You wanna dance with a pimp?

A: No.

Here’s a nice follow-up to your Independence Day celebrations, out of the web comics archives. This is an early strip from Cat and Girl, but it makes me think of nothing so much as an even older Calvin and Hobbes:

This is what the revolution looks like. Freedom doesn’t mean ballot boxes and it doesn’t mean barricades. Freedom is made up of direct action. We will know we have won when we can walk away whistling and just ignore the bellowing blowhard brigade.

Further reading:

• GT 2006-04-16: Direct Action

Well, maybe not as geeky as It’s a Gandalf hat! But it’s up there, and it involves more work. Here’s today’s FoxTrot:

Here’s the spoiler, for those who want instant gratification. Code the short taps as dots and the long taps as dashes. You get the following sequence:

... --- -- . -.. .- -.-- .. .-- .. .-.. .-.. .-. ..- .-.. . -.-- --- ..- .- .-.. .-..

Using International Morse Code, with word breaks inserted at the appropriate points, the taps actually do spell out:

SOME DAY I WILL RULE YOU ALL

And that’s why I love FoxTrot.

Another great one from the Calvin and Hobbes reruns today:

Calvin (chewing a huge wad of gum): I need to get a heart rate monitor.

Hobbes: What for?

Calvin: To make sure I’m chewing at my aerobic threshold! Every day I want to see that I’m chewing more gum faster, harder, and longer!

Hobbes: What’s the point of attaching a number to everything you do?

Calvin: If your numbers go up, it means you’re having more fun.

Hobbes: Science to the spirit’s rescue once again.

Where else in the funnies can you find, in nuce, the Austrian critique of the GDP and other econometric mummeries?

Further reading:

• GT 2006-04-16: Direct Action
• GT 2005-01-02: Vulture Economics
• Laurence Parks, Mises Insitute (October 1997): Burn Your House, Boost the Economy