Putting the semi- famous Serious Cat on a campaign poster says . . . something about the political process. Was the creator of this image lampooning the innate stupidity of so much of modern politics? Was he just trying to create something snarky and funny? Is there really that much difference between the two activities? I don’t know.

Anyway, earlier yesterday, I was looking at the local paper‘s story about the rain we got Thursday night. It had a bit of text that went something like this:

Under Arizona’s Stupid Motorist Law, motorists who disregard road barricades or take down those barricades can be fined a minimum of $2000.

(The Wikipedia link was not present in the original, it’s just there for background.) About 15 minutes later, I looked at the same story, and the text had been amended to read something like:

Under Arizona law, motorists who disregard road barricades can be fined a minimum of $2000

This is a minor edit, on a story that’s pretty non-controversial. It still raises some questions. What is “public record” when article text can be changed at any time, for any reason? How will this affect historians? When text goes through a ton of revisions, all of those revisions are published, and only one of those revisions is saved, is it possible to get a good idea of what the people who only read one or two of those non-saved revisions saw? Wikipedia actually saves all revisions to every article, so if you really wanted to, you can read the wombat article which had its middle ripped out and replaced with a bizarre set of paragraphs that said that all wombats are homosexual. (It was a few years back; I couldn’t find the precise revision, sorry.)

A more relevant question might be “Does anyone care?” The answer to this might very well be “no”. Histories of this time will almost certainly have some pretty “Rashomon”-like qualities.

We all went out for lunch since it was Friday. Yay! I was thinking about seeing “Hellboy II” on Saturday, but I’m wondering whether giving the MPAA any more of my money is a wise choice. “Iron Man” was well worth a matinee ticket, though. . . .