I installed a WordPress plugin a couple of years ago called Popularity Contest. It keeps track of all views, comments, ping backs and links and calculates a score for each post. I use it to populate that little highlights widget at the top of the page. Trouble is, the widget and I disagree on what is a good post.

By far, most visitors to my blog are searching for either Clown Sex or LOLMouse pictures and my favourite posts never get a look in so, last night, I rummaged through and tagged some of my favourite posts; usually posts that gave me a lot pleasure when I wrote them or that have special significance in my life.

When I get around to it, I’ll update the little widget thingie to cycle through my favourite posts so that new visitors, if they care to know what I am about, can skip over the dross.

Strike another one off the list. I have a new theme (alongside the old theme shown for posterity).

It’s not finished yet and hardly works at all on Internet Explorer and who knows what it will do on an iphone but better out than in, I always say.

When I haven’t blogged for a while I get a pent up desire to blog something of significance. The more thought I put into that significant blog the less likely I am to actually write it. Which makes me less likely to blog for a while.

Blogs that I have not written in the last couple of weeks:

• My evolving political worldview
• My time on a nuclear submarine
• Who are conservatives?
• Some kind of analogy between local maxima in evolution and local maxima in political systems (like democracy, capitalism)
• (related to previous) zero-tolerance of knives/fighting/etc in schools

It’s a shame. They would’ve been excellent. Ask me about them over beer.

New Majority is a site for non-crazy conservatives to plan their route back from the wilderness led by David Frum (a former speechwriter for Bush). It’s mostly pretty good and the crazies are (mostly) confined to the comments.

Frum asked readers to submit their frustrations about the tax code and proposals for making it better. I submitted my T= rI – B proposal:

My proposal addresses both benefits and taxes in one swoosh.

Replace all taxes with a single, flat rate income tax. No deductions. No tax credits. No payroll tax. No sales tax. No distinctions between earned income and income from capital gains, dividends, profits, gambling or inheritance.

Income is income. Income is taxed at a flat rate.

Replace all benefits with a single flat rate benefit. No pensions. No disability No food stamps. No unemployment benefits. No social security. No means testing.

Everyone receives the same benefit. Government may decide to scale the benefit for minors to encourage/discourage children.

To calculate your tax liability, you add up all your income (I) and multiply it by the current tax rate (r) and subtract the current level of benefit (B).

If the number is positive, that’s how much tax you owe. If it’s negative, the government mails you a check.

But they only posted the postscript:

The thing that annoys me most every year, is the idea that I might get in trouble because I don’t understand the tax code.

Tax day was hell for me this year because I had to wade through pages of ambiguous opinions about which state I should pay taxes to when I spent half the year working in another state and the other half working in a state that I didn’t live in.

And because turbo tax has started its inevitable slide from Delight the User to Make them Swear at the Screen.

How cool would it have been if all these visitors had shown up on my anniversary?

Just about every day for the last month I have wanted to blog about something. About half the time I decide that what I want to say is so obvious that it’s not worth saying (Rick Warren, Obama appointments, California budget, Blagojevich, Gaza, anything to do with Christmas, religion, or the lack thereof) and the other half I am ashamed to send my half-formed thoughts naked into the world.

So. No blogging for you.

You know what would be a nice idea for a WordPress plugin…

As a blogger, I want to reduce the number of clicks it takes to quote and cite an article so that I can blog more efficiently.

Here’s how it might work:

1. I am reading a New York Times article that I want to quote.
2. I highlight a section of the text.
3. I alt-tab over to my Write Post window
4. I hit alt-shift-Q (or whatever) and WordPress shows a little dialog allowing me to choose from among my open browser tabs (extra credit for guessing that I want the one with a block of text selected)
5. I type a little preamble, say “Paul Krugman is on form today”
6. And WordPress creates a post like this:

Paul Krugman is on form today.

Forty years ago, Richard Nixon made a remarkable marketing discovery. By exploiting America’s divisions — divisions over Vietnam, divisions over cultural change and, above all, racial divisions — he was able to reinvent the Republican brand. The party of plutocrats was repackaged as the party of the “silent majority,” the regular guys — white guys, it went without saying — who didn’t like the social changes taking place.

Top search term for June:

clown sex

My goal for July is to make it to the top 5 google hits for “mime sex”.

Post script. There is a site about Clown Sex. It’s pretty funny.

Because clowns do not naturally “ride” bicycles, stand on their “heads,” or “jump through rings of fire,” whips, electric prods, and other tools are often used to force them to perform.

The smaller and poorer the blue movie production, the more limited the clowns’ access may be to water, food, and hairdressing care. But whatever the size of a clownsploitation flick, the clowns inevitably suffer

A major milestone in Ragged Clown history.

I’d lilike to thank all my mice for their support and sacrifice.