8 Ways to Sunday

Since it’s Halloween and the witching hour is nearly upon us, it only seems right to break out an e-mail exchange from last October that I was going to post for Halloween 2003 but never got around to.

Last year, just before Halloween, a friend of mine got an annoying evangelical/fundamentalist Christian chain letter from a coworker who had been busily praying for her (presumably damned) soul. This friend passed the chain letter on to a couple of people, myself included, with a request to help get the fundie off her back. What follows is my response, in equal parts serious philosophical exploration, a search for common ground on the topic, and unrepentant fundie-baiting with the best anti-fundamentalist tool in the world: the Bible itself.

The people involved in this exchange both have careers in religiously conservative Kansas to worry about, so their names have been changed. As for myself, I have the benefit of working in the relatively sane and reasonable environment of a college campus where debate and free thought are encouraged.

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Eminem has released an anti-Bush song and video from his upcoming album that, according to MSNBC’s “The Scoop,” even has his nemesis Moby cheering.

Eminem’s “Mosh” can be seen on Guerilla News Network and is also hosted by Internets Veterans for Truth (who also have the lyrics). It’s an amazing tune, product of an impressive verbal stylist turning his talents on one of the biggest and most controversial targets of the day.

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A group calling itself “Internets Vets for Truth” is offering scads of video for download that incriminates George W. Bush & Co. and boosts John Kerry. Kerry’s congresional testimony at the age of 27, full versions of Fahrenheit 9/11 and Going Upriver, the John Stewart / Crossfire smackdown, music videos, and more more more…

From the “About” page:

The Internets Veterans For Truth are a group of long-time bloggers, designers, and techies who decided (in slackerly fashion, around the end of last week) that some of the clips that’ve been floating around online needed to be seen by everybody.

A few catchy slogans, registered domains, and a mess of volunteered hours of encoding, design, dev, and server wrangling later…

Also, we served alongside George W. Bush in the hot, dry Texan jungles of the Internets Deltas.

Full of stuff that is very worth watching before you cast your vote on Tuesday, this is a must-visit site. Pass the link around via e-mail and weblog to help make sure that as many people as possible see these vids!

Some choice samples:

• Representative Tim Ryan (D - OH) speaks out against accusations of a left-wing conspiracy to frighten young Americans about a draft. It’s Bush’s foreign policy and record of lies that are doing the frightening, he says.
• A chronicle of the Bush administration’s flip-flops on whether or not Saddam had wheapons of mass destruction
• A Viet Nam veteran who threw his medals away during the same veteran’s protest where Kerry tossed his ribbons discusses the reasons behind the protesters’ actions — “For each one of us it was a terribly difficult thing to do. The decorations… represented a very intense and difficult period of our life, but it was vitally important to do something visually symbolic showing our rejection of this war.”
• The infamous John Stewart Crossfire smackdown, and Stewart’s own post-smackdown spin on The Daily Show.

All videos in QuickTime format.

(Hat Tip: Photomatt, who lead me there)

I just discovered an outstanding resource for the WordPress user community: the WordPress Reference Centre.

For the last three hours or so, I’ve been struggling with Movable Type 3.11 over the following error:

Can't call method "id" on an undefined value at lib/MT.pm line 770.

It appears every time someone tries to post a comment to my photoblog, or when I try to post a new entry or rebuild the individual archive pages. Not the monthly or category archives, mind you — just the individual entries. I’ve scoured the templates for the three different archive templates looking for some difference between them that might be causing the problem. I’ve updated my plugins to the most recent, sure-to-be-MT3-compatible versions. When that didn’t work, I deleted all the old plugins that I’m not really using from the plugin directory and uploaded all the ones that didn’t have an update available… just in case. I re-uploaded mt.pm in case it got corrupted in my transition from 3.0D to 3.11. Still, no change.

Google tells me that there are some other people who’ve had the same problem, but I can’t find any specific advice on how to fix it. Well, Ken Edwards over at Breaking Windows fixed it by scrapping all his templates and starting from scratch, but I’m not up for that. Besides, it’s the specialized templates that make it a photoblog, as opposed to a regular blog, or an Ashlee Simpson fansite, or a toaster oven.

Can anyone out there help me? I’m submitting a trouble ticket to the TextDrive support gods as well, but if there’s some kind reader out there in the blogosphere with the answer to my questions I’d much appreciate an assist. I’m eagerly awaiting WordPress 1.3 in the hope that I can move my photoblog to it and solve some of these problems permanently…

Updates:

• TextDrive support has confirmed that this is, in fact, a bug with MT that can be fixed by upgrading as suggested by Brad below. Thanks, everyone, for your help.
• 11/17/2004, about 5:30pm — Finally made the upgrade. Photoblog is alive and kicking just in time for my new camera to arrive tomorrow!