Below The Beltway

Can you name all 50 states in 10 minutes ?
Take the quiz and found out. Spelling counts, by the way
It took me 5:51 to get through all 50.
H/T: Vivian Paige

Take the Pew Center’s Survey and find out.
Here’s my score:
Here’s Your Score: You correctly answered 12 of the 12 possible questions along with approximately 3% of the public. You did better than 97% of the general public.
Well of course I did.
H/T: Yankee Philip

As you can tell, things have gotten quiet here recently.
There’s a lot going on and blogging has taken a back seat.
I’ll be back in a week or so but I need to take a break.

Back when I first started reading blogs, and then blogging myself, blogrolls were a pretty big deal. It was, bloggers believed, a way to generate traffic and an extension of the reciprocal linking that is unique to blogging.
That was three years ago, and it seems that times have changed substantially:
Once upon a time in the [...]

Things were pretty much screwed up around here Internet-wise for the past two days, so blogging has been pretty much impossible.
We’re back to normal now, it seems.
Which is good, because the dog is getting tired of listening to me comment on the Presidential race.

It’s been three years since I started blogging at Below The Beltway.
After starting out on Blogger, I moved to a real server, and real blog software in April 2006, and, notwithstanding a very dry spell during September and October of last year, it’s been nothing but writing, writing, writing since then.
And people actually seem to [...]

Outside of a few short things today, I’ll be returning from the self-imposed blog exile tomorrow.

As if it’s recent efforts to define what constitutes “fair use” weren’t bad enough, the Associated Press now says that it intends to charge bloggers for quoting even small portions of AP articles:
The AP’s disharmony with bloggers may have only just begun, as the alternative it’s now offering to being served with takedown notices involves [...]

Markos Moulistas links to and reproduces an Associated Press story about the gay marriages in California, and then has this to say:
The dinosaurs at the AP think they know what the “spirit of the internet” is, and they claim it has nothing to do with copying pieces of information from other sources for purposes of [...]

Not surprisingly, there’s been a lot of discussion among bloggers about moves by the Associated Press to define what constitutes “fair use” of it’s articles by bloggers:
The Associated Press, one of the nation’s largest news organizations, said that it will, for the first time, attempt to define clear standards as to how much of its [...]