Minor Celebrity!

by hilzoy

Look what Amanda Marcotte at Pandagon did:

"I was so amused by the fact that Muir showed up at Hilzoy’s place in an attempt to defend himself and failed miserably that I decided to recaption mine so that the dialogue is all from that thread. Muir is played by the gray-haired fellow and Hilzoy by the red-headed lady."

Suddenly, I feel I've really arrived as a blogger. Now I just need to work on getting my back to talk.

Comments

[rilkefan]

Let me guess - as a child you internalized
years of authority figures saying "Don't talk
back".

[life]

I'm proud to say that I, too, feature in that new 'toon.

In the last panel, Muir is quoted saying "Hah! Life-get a life".

That was addressed to me.

You see, in his first appearance, he said "y'all need a life".

So I wrote a rude, jeering reply, and signed it "Life", using the email address "[email protected]", just to let him know that, speaking for mysef, I have a life, and it's great, thanks.

So then Muir, the master of getting the joke three beats after everyone else, responded to me by saying "Life--get a life", as though my real name were Life and he had *just then* thought of the *incredibly* witty fact that someone named "Life" might need to "get a life"!!! God, that guy is so swift!

Okay, you can stop laughing now.

Anyhow, I think this makes me, say, a nano-celebrity?

[rilkefan]

Femto-.

[spartikus]

The YouTube music video of all this is merely hours away....

[life]

dude, that's harsh! You just demoted me by, what, 10^6 celebrimeters or so? (celebrons? celebriquanta?)

That hurts almost as much as the time one of my books fell from Amazon rank 1,568,348 to 1,632,441. I instantly hated all 64,903 of the other authors.

[hilzoy]

rilkefan: ask any authority figure who knew me as a child: I am quite possibly the last person on earth you'd say that about. My wonderful parents having always answered any questions I asked, and given me to understand that asking questions was what one did when one was curious, and also that saying that one disagreed was what one did when one disagreed, I found relations with my more authoritarian teachers sort of trying, all the more so since I had no idea what I was doing wrong.

Also, I was the sort of kid whose second grade report card actually says: Hilzoy's willingness to sit still in class has suffered since she has learned to whistle. (Except that it doesn't say hilzoy, of course.)

[hilzoy]

life: I had never actually checked my book's rank on Amazon, since of course I knew that it would be unbelievably low. Apparently, it;s no. 691,267.

Pout.

[rilkefan]

Sorry life, hilzoy, thought this was a "say silly things one doesn't believe" thread.

[life]

don't worry, hilzoy--just have a friend buy a copy and it will zoom up overnight--maybe into the 5-digit range!

But what will really get the copies moving off the shelves is that revised edition, with the picture of you on the beach drying yourself off with a towel....

[Anarch]

Hilzoy has, indeed, got back.

[Harald Korneliussen]

hilzoy, don't worry. Amazon is a long-tail phenomenon, half the books they sell today didn't sell a single copy yesterday. 691267 isn't bad, and life is quite right that a single sale would probably boost it by a couple of thousands or so...

It's just that I can't find your book. I can't even search for it, because I don't even know what name it's published under. And I never even saw a link from here. Come on, a little self-promotion is OK.

[platosearwax]

Looking at Amazon, I may just purchase Hilzoy's book, as it sounds terribly interesting. And I can't seem to get enough of her writing here, so I might as well read some more of it in book form. We'll see what happens to the sales rank if I do purchase it.

Gotta wait until I get paid though. Damn bills and food for children.

[cleek]

Hilzoy's willingness to sit still in class has suffered since she has learned to whistle

that's awesome. it sounds like it could be the caption on a Family Circus.

[page]

harold--that's so unimaginative of you!

All you have to do is look through Amazon's list of the top 70,000 best sellers, and--

oh. They don't post one?

Okay: all you have to do is look at each book on Amazon in turn, keeping an eye out for one with that sales rank.

Except that this would take you several decades, during the course of which its rank will most likely change.

Hmm....what if someone just pointed out that freedom and responsibility both figure largely among hilzoy's concerns?

[Andrew]

Neatly done, hilzoy. Although I'm still curious if that really was Muir...if so, how unfortunate for him.

[Slartibartfast]

Femto-.

Atto-? Zepto-? Yocto-?

The first one I actually knew; had to look up the others.

[cw]

$50! Let me guess, it's used as a textbook?

[Francis]

Hil: Every woman in California who wears a bikini is required by law to have a tatoo on the small of her back.

It's the tatoo talking.

Are we sure that it was the real C. Muir who visited here?

[Doctor Science]

As for whether it was the real C.Muir here -- does this site log IP addresses for comments? If you don't, you should -- it's a crucial sock-puppet-suppressing tool. You can use the tools at http://www.dnsstuff.com/ to figure out where Muir is located (geographically) and where those comments came from, which will give you at least a first guess about whether it was really him.

[Sebastian Holsclaw]

Yes we log IP addresses. I haven't really tried to figure out if it was the real Muir.

[Scott Lemieux]

Don't forget your neck--if you're going to be a Muir character, you'll have to talk out of a lot of strange places...

[Andrew]

hilzoy,

No wonder your book's ranked so low. It takes 4-6 weeks for them to ship it. What's up with that? (And for $55, it better be good. ;)

[Slartibartfast]

You can download it for much cheaper, Andrew. I have, but I still haven't made it much further than a few pages.

Mostly because it demands a bit of attention span, and I've been eminently distractable.

[Slartibartfast]

Oh, and the reason it takes so long is the scribes have to copy it all by hand.

[Andrew]

I like a book I can read in my hands. Although I suspect that I might be wiser to leave well enough alone with hilzoy's, since it would establish her mental superiority so clearly I'd never post again out of sheer embarassment. Or envy. It's tough being a CDAT. ;)

[Doctor Science]

Sebastian --

Once he's being mocked at another site for something someone under his name says at your site, I personally would try to find out if it was really him, because it starts moving into the realm of sock-puppetry. YMMV. Email me if you need investigative help.

[Slartibartfast]

I can do it; the question is should I?

[hilzoy]

Andrew: in re book: think long and hard before you try. My Dad, who is a pretty good test case for "intelligence, yes; philosophical training, no", tried heroically before giving up somewhere in chapter 2, and said: I can't understand it; and yet the odd thing is that I can tell that it's very clearly written.

Be warned.

[Paul]

Wow. What a total rush to get my own degree of pepto-celebrity out of this. You like me! You really like me! Hey, Chris, baby, it was great working with you! Let's collaborate again sometime.

[sock]

"Once he's being mocked at another site for something someone under his name says at your site, I personally would try to find out if it was really him, because it starts moving into the realm of sock-puppetry. "

But on the other hand:
Once he's being mocked around the blogosphere for all these comments attributed to him *and not registering any protests about it anywhere* then I have fewer and fewer doubts that it really was him.

I mean, after all--if the liberals really were ganging up and putting words in his mouth, wouldn't he just trumpet that as further proof of their Kantian nihilism?

And by the way--I'm really starting to resent your constant stream of derogatory remarks about sock-puppets. We have feelings, too!

[Andrew]

hilzoy,

I'll probably hold off at least until I grind my way through the stack of philosophy texts already on my reading list. I'm working on Hume's Enquiry into Human Understanding at the moment.

It's frustrating to realize that there were so many interesting things one could have learned in college, but never bothered to look at.

[Sebastian Holsclaw]

Hmm, I looked at the IP address, and it is the same for all the people with the name Chris Muir in the comments. When I tried to check it, I got Melborne Beach, Florida 3 times, Creedmoor, NC 1 time and a city I forgot to write down in Virginia once. I don't have any idea where he lives, so I don't know if that is even close.

[Doctor Science]

Sebastian -- the chances are pretty good that's actually him, because Melbourne Beach, FL, is just the next town over from Indialantic, FL, where the daybydaycartoon.com domain name is registered.

[hilzoy]

Andrew: I'm decent at Hume. If anything doesn't make sense, just ask.

Seb: interesting.

[Andrew]

hilzoy,

I will take you up on that, thank you.

[matttbastard]

Sebastian: According to this interview with Dean Esmay, as of March 2003 Muir lived in "a small beach town in Florida, between the ocean and the lagoon."

[rilkefan]

Andrew, seems to me all one needs to know about philosophy is here and here.

[Andrew]

rilkefan,

Well, that would save me a lot of time...

[rilkefan]

Andrew, throw away your ladder!

[Doctor Science]

sock:

Darn it!