From the GREAT STATE OF MAINE…
"It's #1! It's #1!"
Since we sit our butt down here on the web every day, and since we're always looking for an excuse to pop open a bottle of bubbly, C&J plans to raise a glass (or two) this morning to the first web page, which appeared 22 years ago today, courtesy of Tim Berners-Lee at CERN in Switzerland:
Info.cern.ch was the address of the world’s first-ever web site and web server, running on a NeXT computer at CERN. The first web page address was info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/TheProject.html, which centred on information regarding the WWW project. Visitors could learn more about hypertext, technical details for creating their own webpage, and even an explanation on how to search the Web for information. There are no screenshots of this original page and, in any case, changes were made daily to the information available on the page as the WWW project developed.
A snip from the copy that appeared on that first site:
The computer that Tim Berners-Lee used
to invent the World Wide Web at CERN.
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The web contains documents in many formats. Those documents which are hypertext, (real or virtual) contain links to other documents, or places within documents. All documents, whether real, virtual or indexes, look similar to the reader and are contained within the same addressing scheme.
To follow a link, a reader clicks with a mouse (or types in a number if he or she has no mouse). To search and index, a reader gives keywords (or other search criteria). These are the only operations necessary to access the entire world of data.
Today the world revolves around the web. It's a workplace, a marketplace, a learning place and a playground. It's an activist's dream organizing tool. It allows us to keep a close eye on government, and allows the government to keep an even closer eye on us. (Special shoutout to Bart, my assigned NSA tracker---
sup, Dude!) It's changed the way families and friends communicate, the way business is conducted and the way we educate ourselves. Plus:
OMG Free Asteroids! And blogs, too!
So, on behalf of the porn industry, pootie lovers, and all five million widows of Nigerian foreign ministers who desperately want to give you millions of dollars if you'll just give them your bank account number, I'd like to say to Tim Berners-Lee, the first man on the webmoon: T...
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Cheers and Jeers starts below the fold... [Swoosh!!] RIGHTNOW! [Gong!!]
Cheers and Jeers for Tuesday, August 6, 2013
Note: Thank you for all the birthday wishes yesterday. I particularly enjoyed the Garfield socks President Obama sent to me in the envelope marked "Return to Sender." Thanks, man.
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10 days!!!
By the Numbers:
Days 'til the NYC mayoral primary:
35
Days 'til Maine's
Machias Wild Blueberry Festival:
10
Ratio by which left-leaning Super PACs have raised more money than right-leaning Super PACs in the first half of this year:
2-to-1
(Source:
USA Today)
Number of "yarn bombers" who knitted the
18'-by-21' blanket for the 100th anniversary of Portland, Oregon's Broadway Bridge:
150
Number of bridges in Pennsylvania that will have
new weight restrictions put on them because they're getting so fucking rickety and there's no fucking money being coughed up to fucking fix them, which is fucking insane pardon my French:
1,000
Percent of married women in their 20s and 30s who are keeping their own last names, versus 9% of women in their 60s:
35%
(Source:
The Week)
Years the Mars rover
Curiosity has been on the reddish planet as of yesterday:
1
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Tuesday Words of Wisdom from the Right-wing Blogosphere:
Durbin needs to replace the "r" in his name with "st" -- and put himself IN IT!
---Devsham at World Net Daily
All together now: 1…2…3…
Wordplay!!!
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Puppy Pic of the Day: Hot wheels for Groby…
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CHEERS to barnstorming by the border. Fresh off his 52nd birthday, President Obama will risk another finger-wagging by Governor Jan Brewer as he takes his Traveling Caravan of Economic Magic down south and west a bit:
"I ain't as think as you
drunk I am, sailor!"
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Obama chose Phoenix---the epicenter of the U.S. housing bust that wiped out $7 trillion in homeowner equity---to make the next speech in his ongoing summer road tour in which he has been spotlighting the progress the U.S. economy has made under his watch, while hammering Republicans for not working with him to help bolster a still lackluster economy. … Obama will follow up his housing speech on Wednesday with an online interview on the real estate website Zillow where he will expand on his ideas for keeping the housing market on a winning streak.
Among the ideas for a stronger housing market: don’t let Republicans anywhere near the housing market. And also a moratorium on Chinese-made ticky tacky.
JEERS to Big Apple bullcrapple (a phrase on which I call "Dibs"). You know you're in the dog days of summer when the stories dominating the media are the fate of a sexting New York City mayoral candidate and the fate of a doping New York City baseball player. At C&J, we refuse to focus on those distractions, choosing instead to turn our attention to something with equal or greater news value:
Top that, Jeff Bezos and your
new Washington Post. I dare ya.
Hell is war.
And vice versa.
JEERS to the kind of mushroom we hope no one ever has to eat again. In all the history classes I took in school, World War II always seemed to end when the Germans surrendered. It was like we studied all the details up until May of 1945, and then we were given a quick, "Oh, and then we dropped the atom bombs on Japan and our troops came home to ticker tape parades." Well, the mushroom-cloud-producing bomb that fell on Hiroshima 68 years ago today
killed 140,000 people. Shame on us for glossing over for so long the horrific deaths of so many innocent civilians. But more shame on the Japanese war criminals for not throwing in the towel when they knew were licked. Let's not do it again, shall we?
CHEERS to keeping track of what's on our tracks. The number of oil tankers riding the rails these days is way, waaay up from even a few years ago. And a disaster of epic proportions near the Maine border a few weeks ago is prompting some action:
Not a desirable outcome.
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Less than a month after a runaway Maine railroad train carrying crude oil derailed and exploded in Quebec, leaving 47 people dead, the Federal Railroad Administration on Friday issued an emergency order aimed at preventing a similar disaster in the United States. … The Federal Railroad Administration's order is a mandatory directive to the rail industry, and failure to comply will result in enforcement actions, he said. …
Canadian transportation officials continue to investigate how a parked, unattended train operated by Hermon-based Montreal, Maine & Atlantic crashed in Lac-Megantic, setting off explosions that destroyed the center of town.
Wow, I'm shocked. This is almost unbelievable. America has a railroad commission that Republicans haven't defunded???
WHATEVER to the last gasp of Caligula's crowd. Two hundred and seven years ago today, on August 6, 1806, the Holy Roman Empire went belly-up. It was a pretty quiet affair except for one thing: the Going Out of Business toga sale at Filene's Basement was in-SANE!
Priebus makes
his statement.
JEERS to sour grapesies.
Bwok bwok bwoooook!!! Reince Priebus must be scared. So scared, in fact, that he's willing to stick his political nose into the sacred free market's business and tell NBC and CNN what they can and cannot produce. Not very conservative of him, eh? But it's true---he's afraid of
a couple movies about former first lady, senator and Secretary of State, but
not 2016 presidential candidate (yet) Hillary Clinton. And if the networks go ahead with their productions (one a movie for NBC Entertainment, one a documentary for CNN), Reince says he'll take his debates away from them and go wee wee wee wee all the way home. Or as it's better known: Fox News.
P.S. CNN responds to Reince Priebus: Drop dead, teabagger. I appreciate their restraint.
CHEERS to great moments in human dampness. On August 6, 1926, Gertrude Ederle became the first American woman to swim the English Channel. It took her 14½ hours. Because she kept stopping to check her makeup. Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha! This misogynist message brought to you by the National Consortium of Republican-Controlled State Legislatures, whose members just snorted milk out their noses.
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Five years ago in C&J: August 6, 2008
JEERS to the second wave. Thank god our plunge over the subprime-mortgage waterfall is over, eh? Now we can all take a deep breath and...Whoaaaaaaaohhhhh!!!
What could go wrong???
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The first wave of Americans to default on their home mortgages appears to be cresting, but a second, far larger one is quickly building. ...
The percentage of mortgages in arrears in the category of loans one rung above subprime, so-called alternative-A mortgages, quadrupled to 12 percent in April from a year earlier. Delinquencies among prime loans, which account for most of the $12 trillion market, doubled to 2.7 percent in that time.
Mommy, I don’t like this ride anymore.
CHEERS to possessors of off-the-charts courage. Alexander Solzhenitsyn wrote about the horrors of Stalin's work camps at a time when to do so was---to put it mildly---a "nyet nyet." So, while we're sad he died, we're happy that he spent nearly 20 happy years here in the states and returned to Russia a hero. But if I may add a bittersweet note: I got docked more points in high school and college for misspelling his name on tests and reports than I can count. Alexander Smith would've had such a nice ring to it.
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And just one more…
CHEERS to great moments in blogger history. It was the first full week of August, 2007. The Great Orange Satanists were assembled in Chicago. Over 40 state and national candidates showed up, along with all the presidential candidates except the one who's now our damn fine Vice President, but not before Bill O'Reilly tried to scare them off by calling us "Worse than the Nazis." Oh, and Saturday night the hotel bar ran out of booze. It was only our second netroots convention, but it was the last one to be called Yearly Kos. What a time. Some of my highlights from the archive:
Familiar faces at
Yearly Kos 2007.
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• The Nazi roundtable was boring. Herman Goerring IV kept hogging the agenda (and the doughnuts). Apparently the answer to all of America's problems is more Messerschmitts.
• Next year I'm bringing my slingshot. Anyone who stands up to ask a question but instead makes a bunch of preliminary comments and then bundles four questions into one will get a Milk Dud in the back of the head. This also applies to anyone who fails to turn off their cellphone.
• The congressional candidates who attended are seriously cool people. Almost makes me feel sorry for their opponents. Almost.
• Don’t taunt the Teamsters. Don’t taunt the Teamsters. Don’t taunt the Teamsters.
• And, as I suspected: Kos has bird legs.
In terms of sheer star power, YK07 is the one on which all others are judged. Convention #9---now called Netroots Nation---is happening next July in Detroit. To keep costs down, every year organizers host an online auction, with cool items up for bid that have been donated by the netroots community. This year's starts on August 15th. I'll have some goodies on the block, and if you have a treasure or two you can donate,
click here to send in a description (with a photo or link to a photo, if possible). If you have questions or need help uploading your item, e-mail Karen Kolber at
Karen [at] netrootsnation.org. Thanks in advance for helping out. I always liked you best.
Have a nice Tuesday. Floor's open...What are you cheering and jeering about today?
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Today's Shameless C&J Testimonial:
Burger grown from Bill in Portland Maine stem cells in laboratory put to taste test in Cheers and Jeers
---CBS News
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