perfidy

This is the fifth (or sixth) incarnation of a website that first staggered, drunken and confused, from primordial ooze in the long ago days of 2003. 

Perfidy has had a sordid history of wooing and then discarding hopeful blog platforms. The first victim was blogger, where perfidy masqueraded under modestly clever nom-de-net "Johnny Two-Cents’. It was only weeks before frustration with the limitations (if not the cost) of blogger led to its unseemly abandonment.

Then began the ambitious task of creating our own blog. The first blog that actually had the name Perfidy lived on the expression engine platform. It was rudimentary and frankly rather sad. The second effort saw improvement and actually approached mediocrity. For an absurdly long time, that blog remained visible for the simple if lame reason that we never bothered to export its content. It’s departure into the outer darkness was little noticed. 

The third incarnation of perfidy (and the fourth overall, for those without a program) saw the big move to Wordpress and the kicking-to-the-curb of an increasingly outmoded and unpopular Expression Engine.

Giddy with the possibilities of Wordpress theming and high as a kite generally, the perfidy design steering committee selected an ill-fated experimental design. This was nearly instantly shit-canned in favor of the fourth incarnation (whose own colophon you can read) and by far longest-lived of all perfidy flavors. 

As the demands of work and children took their toll, ministers fell away. Buckethead was the last to fall, and certainly most guilty. The blog staggered on with a single minister. After a nearly four-year lapse a fortuitous (nigh on to miraculous) intersection of increasing skill and increasing time allowed this, the fifth incarnation, to take shape. 

In what is now a dirty habit, Wordpress was left crying at the altar. This new and shiny Perfidy is on yet another new platform: Drupal. This also marks the first time in almost a decade that all of the content is in the same place. Many immigrant laborers, toiling in the code mines deep below the Perfidious fortress retreat suffered greatly so that you might easily read the random thoughts of a passel of overprivileged retards from 2005.  

Though this grand new Perfidy in many regards replicates the look of the old and lame previous Perfidy, it is in fact actually and entirely new. In designing this new theme, there were two primary considerations:

1. Recapture the unique perfidious magic of the previous design
2. Change it so that aging eyes can actually read the damn thing

The Ministry design steering committee believes that both of these objectives have been met. Because no sane developer starts from scratch unless threatened with grievous bodily harm, the perfidy theme was stolen in large part from the work of others. Most notably in this case from the Writer theme by Bryan Braun. From his own description, he valued:

• Brutally simple design
• Fantastic typography
• Support for code snippets

That third item won't likely be a huge factor here, but we liked the first two a lot. If Bryan saw what we did with his menu, he'd probably hate that; but mostly we kept to his excellent design. Some changes include the aforementioned menu (moved to the side in memory of perfidies that have gone before), the very same link colors we've used since the start, the category icons that we love so much, and a few other minor changes. Body text is Merriweather, meta text is Lato. Enjoy, and tell us what you think.

Over the last two years, the Ministry has taken on a new mandate. Aside from our work ensuring that small-time cheats, liars, scammers, skivers, scoundrels, sharps and thieves are well subsidized in their retirement (hey - someone's gotta do it!), protecting the world against bigger human-based threats (dictators, wingers, mimes), monitoring ongoing developments on the nightmare front (zombie infestation, alien invasion, enslavement by giant fighting space robots, enslavement by regular Earth robots, Blue Man Group), we have also founded the Perfidy Home for Wayward Bloggers.

Founding ministers Johno and Buckethead first came upon GeekLethal plinking rats with a .50 caliber frigging handgun and muttering about zombie attack. We knew immediately he would be a great asset. It was only afterward that we found out that his cat was also an emissary to the lords of the Outer Darkness, and an expert in unholy contract law. Bonus! Ross, the most shadowy and mysterious of our number, was the next to join us. We think. There's a room for him in the Ministry Bunker and Catastratorium, and sometimes we hear noises from within. And sometimes the commissary shows evidence of a meal of moose steak and pouteen. But what we can be sure of is, since joining the Ministry's ranks, his coding skills have exploded and all the web applications of the world bear his subtle mark. When Patton first hove himself upon the shattered slates of our courtyard, he was a haunted and hunted creature of skin and bones, barely able to lift his head out of a puddle of his own sick. Now, he is a sleek and powerful creature of plastic and steel, and those who hunted him are just memories, if by "memories" you mean "their skulls are our goblets."

We agreed to let Mapgirl come on board for at least three reasons, leaving aside the fact that until she joined us this place was a total sausage party. First, her incisive wit and probing mind have increased our litigative and actuarial might tenfold. Second, her financial acumen has resulted in a drastic overhaul of Ministry assets. Some of the moldier parts of our centuries-old portfolio saw light for the first time since the age of pantaloons, and the truly stupendous fruits of three hundred years of compounded interest have been rolled into more modern investment strategies such as MITTS, STRIPS, and fabulously complicated Gamma scalping and delta hedging schemes that even Harvard Business School has yet to discover. Finally, she knits. The recent acquisition of EDog, one of our oldest and most loyal allies, was partially for the chuckles and partially for his skills in writing, forklift operations, and zombie deterrence. You can read his own introduction to himself here. And finally, we must hasten to introduce the latest addition to the Ministry, Kate, AKA Six Layer Kate, AKA Teeamora the Improbable, Potentate of the Lower Reaches. Both Buckethead and I know Kate from college (Clown College), and have long appreciated her sardonic humor, technical acumen, and incredible facility with code gnomes. She will be taking control of our massive, 300 Petabyte data center and the legions of pasty faced minions who keep it running. What she does with those minions is her business, just so long as the uptime on the Halo3 server stays about six nines... Welcome to Kate, and all hail!

The more attentive readers will have noticed that there have been a couple changes to the Ministry of late. Not least among them is the entirely new design. In the dark days of nearly a month ago, it was brought to our attention that there was a small problem with the comment function – readers wanting to comment were invited to type the magic word, but yet there was no word. This left many confused, hurt, and stymied. We at the Ministry are not ones for half-assed measures. (To be sure, there is a category entitled “Fake Blogging” which some might think indicative of half-assedness. They would be wrong, however – when the Ministry goofs off, we do it right and we don’t try to pass it off as real blogging.) So when we were presented this problem, we took steps.

We redesigned the entire site with a new content management system and relocated it to servers half the country away. Extreme? Perhaps. But that problem is solved. Some among you will be aware that this is the fourth incarnation of the ineffable spirit of the Ministry since it first took form almost half a decade ago. The first, proto-Ministry blog was Johnny Two-Cents, and the Ministers were Johno, Buckethead and Minister Emeritus Iron City Mike.

Here’s what it looked like – click on the picture to go to the wayback machine’s copy:

The next incarnation was the first officially-branded, Ministry of Minor Perfidy blog. We lost Minister Mike about the time of the switch, but we soon picked up a couple more – Geeklethal and the stealthy and nigh on to invisible Ross. The design was still primitive, but pMachine was about ten orders of magnitude better than blogger. Again, clicky on the picture to get taken to the wayback machine.

The third incarnation is the one most of you are most familiar with, it’s the one we had yesterday. It can still be viewed at old.perfidy.org – we didn’t want to bother importing thousands of posts, so we just mirrored the site and preserved it like a tick in amber. And so, here we are at the latest, most hip, up-to-the-minute, and generally swell version of the Ministry to date. We have eschewed the normal blog format, mostly because, well, we want to be special. Rather than scroll, scroll, scroll like most blogs, this one is click, click, click. The archives are accessible both in the nav bar above, and in the sidebar below. The two most recent substantive posts will always be displayed on the front page. If you click the “open sesame” button, it will magically reveal more links. On the left are the asides, which we plan on using for quick links to things we find interesting. They won’t show on the main page, or in the list on the right, which will show the seven most recent posts after the two on the front page. It shouldn’t take you more than two clicks to get just about anywhere on the site from the front page. And, it loads quicker than the old perfidy. We’ve loaded the last month’s posts to get you started, and click around to see what’s here. There's plenty of changes, large and small.

Comments are a service provided by the Ministry of Minor Perfidy to you, the gentle reader. This service is subject to revocation on a retail or wholesale basis at the whim of the Ministry. Only one individual has thus far incurred our wrath sufficiently to be permanently banned. Don’t be that guy.

Swear, curse and spit if it makes you feel better. Generally speaking, saying “fuck” a lot doesn’t improve the quality of your writing, unless you’re Charles Bukowski. I don’t think you’re Chuck, though. In any event, we won’t delete your post for foul language. As to general purpose offensiveness, we all have pretty thick skins and you’d have to be a real jackass to get a post deleted for that reason. So don’t be that guy.

Please note that any advertisement made in this space is subject to a fee of $500 per ad, per page view. Posting an ad indicates your agreement with this fee schedule. If you are a comment spammer, please immediately die a prolonged, agonizing and messy death. After you pay the fee.

To sum up: play nice, share your toys with the other kids, and pretend you’re having a nice conversation with friends at your favorite restaurant. Remember, we’re watching you. And don't forget that by submitting a comment you grant the Ministry a license to reproduce your words, name, likeness, address, phone number and sexual history in perpetuity.

The code gnomes are once again hard at work. So far, there have been three incarnations of the Ministry - an early, and staggeringly ugly blogspot version where we were known as Johnny Two-Cents; our first Perfidy branded site that ran on pMachine, and the one that you are looking at right now, running Expression Engine. When we began considering relocating our hosting (as the ever-helpful Kathy Kinsley is now far too busy to devote much time to web-hosting) we also began to think that maybe a redesign was in order as well.

So, currently we are experimenting with Wordpress, which we find to be an elegant, free and easy to use bit of software. You, our public (assuming you are still there after several days of non-posting on the part of all six of our lacksidaisical Ministers - you'd think that having more ministers would result in more posts) can take a look at our evolving efforts here. Any suggestions are welcome, and should be directed to Minister Buckethead. (Email him by clicking on his name over there on the left.)

The one thing that I most love about the set up of the current Perfidy is the category icons. And now, I have a ton more, of which these are a few examples:

I like to call those, respectively, "Atomic," "The History Destruct Button," "Pirates, and "President Bush's Second Term Performance."

As a side note, I think the word "Atomic" is vastly superior to its successor, "Nuclear." Nuclear does get a partial pass when used in combination with "Thermo."

The Ministry has become belatedly aware that it has been in operation for just a smidge over four years. It is the tradition among "bloggers" to celebrate annually the day when their blog took its first tremulous steps into the internets. The Ministry is no slouch in the tradition department, maintaining in its mountain retreats, coastal fortresses (and indeed in Texan swamps) a wide variety of traditions. Most of these are not fit for publication, and are the subject of terrified whispers amongst our various neighbors.

Therefore, let it be known that two days ago, the 11th of March in the year of our lord Two Thousand and Seven, was the fourth blogoversary of the Ministry of Minor Perfidy. Here, in all its profound and numinous glory, is our first post, entitled, "First Post." Take stroll through our early work, you will find that we quickly settled into our pattern of random political commentary surrounded by ephemera and silliness.

The Ministry is pleased to inform you that yet another blogger has been assimilated into our perfidious collective. Loyal reader, successful blogger, and knitter Mapgirl has, after years of begging, been accepted into the fold. The Ministry would like to make clear that we did not resist bringing Mapgirl on as a Minister years earlier because she was a girl. Or because she knits, or because we are prejudiced in any way toward any ethnic, social, religious, technical, or recreational group that Mapgirl might be a member of. It is only because we didn't think she was serious when she said she wanted to join. Finally, the Ministry was made aware of the error of its mistake when Maps stopped being subtle, sly, and making oblique references to the desirability of Ministerial rank and just said, "Let me in, or I'll plant my size six Doc Martins so far up your ass you'll taste Kiwi Black Shoe Polish for a week."

Once things were made clear, things started moving. The code gnomes were roused from their slumber, and whipped into action. The left sidebar bears the fruit of their pain, in the form of a new entry for our newest minister. As we speak, her passwords, credentials and secret decoder ring are wafting their way through the internets, and soon, we will be privileged to read our first post from our new minister.

The Ministry insists that everyone welcome Mapgirl. Thank you for your cooperation.

The attentive reader may have noticed a slight rearrangement of the sidebars, and the addition of a new item, namely, a small chunk of text advertisement. This is not entirely without precedent here at the Ministry, as for some time there has languished at the bottom of the right sidebar a small, tentative foray into the world of advertisement. This effort proved fruitless, and was summarily cancelled. Our new effort was undertaken after careful thought and considerable research, namely, Minister Patton said, "Hey, what about AdBrite?" and Minister Buckethead said, "What the hell? Why Not?"

Our new arrangement with AdBrite is already paying off, a tribute to the foresight and business acumen of those ministers. So far, we have been assigned ads that are euphemistically referred to as "Network Ads." We have come to understand that this really means cheeseball ads for ringtones and hair replacement therapy. Nevertheless, we are in the loop, adwise, and soon some hapless sap thoughtful and broadminded advertiser will see our site among the listings, and think to himself, (we are sure) ""Jesus H. Particular Christ! That's where I need to be peddling my shit!" And, then, brothers, we will be into the long green. In only a little under two days, we have already - already! - accumulated $.39. At this rate, we will get our first ten dollar check sometime before Christmas. We may even be able to afford Christmas bonuses for the Code Whittling Gnomes and the underage Laotian who labor in the HTML mines. And if some patron chooses us as the vehicle to drive to his own personal monetary and fiduciary goals, we could make as much as fifteen times that amount. Think of the celebrations we could have with that sort of cash!

We are even now pursuing other, possibly more lucrative venues for advertising dollars. What fo you, the readers, think of this move? Are you disappointed that the Ministry, long a bastion of selfless, ascetic devotion to blogging has sold out? Or are you surprised that such puissant thinkers and planners as the Ministers have taken this long to hold out a bucket when it's raining soup? We welcome your input - though be advised that money is a more powerful lure than the respect of others.

The Ministry is recognized the world over for its incisive writing, penetrating insights, and giant fighting robots. And Zombies. Until recently however, this recognition was sadly awardless. That changed forever on the morning of September 12th, when the Ministry received its first ever award.

There was great rejoicing in the Ministry Catastratorium and Piano Bar when, a week later, we discovered that we had won. By Ministry decree, all of the code whittling gnomes, the kobolds in the url mines, various minions, factotums and other oppressed functionaries were granted an unprecedented five minute holiday in recognition of their unstinting (and until now, completely unrewarded) efforts in making the Ministry the blog juggernaut that it is. Of course, it was not merely the little people who found joy in this glorious moment. Minister Johno was in such great shock that he put his beer yeast in the bread dough, and swallowed a saffron-jelly glazed, garlic and truffle stuffed peahen ($139.99/lb.) whole. Ross, overcome with glee, almost posted. Geeklethal nearly caused the death of several small children when, in an excess of bile, he aimed his rifle skyward and fired off a clip. Minister Patton very nearly smiled. And Minister Buckethead had to be revived with smelling salts and a warm mug of cocoa.

We shall treasure this award forever. Or at least until someone else is nice to us. Until then, we bask in the warm glow of the words of Enchiridon:

it's an above average blog

Since now every minister has had a post within the last seven days, I think, at least until we think of something better to do with it, the countdown timer will now reflect the elapsed time since posting for that Minister who has gone the longest without a post. I have no certainty that this will actually result in more posting, but it will at the very least be the occasion for some kind-hearted ribbing at intra-Ministerial conclaves. Now in the hot seat: Johno.

Plus, whatever that thing was that Ross did, just below.

We'd like to thank our readers for any patience they might have expended waiting for our inevitable but delayed return to the Innerweb. Also, many thanks to Minister Ross, without whom we'd still be suffering from the malaise of our surprise server upgrade.

[wik] Hey, did someone say "malaise"? And did someone else say "worst president ever"? Well, yes, they did, though the connection between the two seems a bit fuzzy right now.

The Ministry would like to extend felicitations to Murdoc, of Murdoc Online, which blog just celebrated its third blogoversary. We would also like to note that for all his shameless backpatting, the Ministry is still five days older, and wiser. If not nearly as popular.

The Ministry has passed a sort of milestone - the Top Ten Suggestive Lines in Return of the Jedi post was our 3000th. It somehow seems appropriate.

[wik] Sometime ago, we also passed the 10,000 comment line. Of course, most of those comments are Johno and Buckethead saying, "hey, you're right!" to each other.

The Ministry of Minor Perfidy wishes you a Happy Thanksgiving. Unless you're some sort of commie who thinks Thanksgiving symbolizes oppression and racism. If that is the case, The Ministry hopes that you get a life, punk. But for everyone else, if you are traveling, travel safely; give thanks and enjoy the turkey and most of all good company with those you love.

Inspired by a recent poll, the Ministry's interest is piqued. We now wish to take the pulse of our readership and members, to get a demographic sense of the tastes and predelictions of the group. Please, take a few minutes to answer the following questions so that we may more accurately tailor our content to your (our readership's) wants and needs and separate the wheat from the chaff, the literati from the glitterati, and the 1947 Château Cheval-Blanc St.-Emilion from the 2004 Yellowtail.

The questions follow after the break. Thank you for your co-operation; your timely compliance is expected.

• Philip Glass or Terry Riley?
• Milton or Dante?
• Mission of Burma or Gang of Four?
• Buzzcocks or Wire?
• Webern or Berg?
• Vico or Spengler?
• Addison or Steele?
• What's your favorite Goethe poem?
• What's your favorite Keats poem?
• What's your favorite de Kooning work?
• Art Moderne or Bauhaus?
• Clarke or Asimov?
• Joyce or Pynchon?
• Dreiser or Dos Passos?
• Lucchese or Gravano?
• O'Connor or Welty?
• The New Criterion or The New Yorker?
• Granta or The Paris Review?
• Ghengis Khan or Alexander The Great?
• Jean-Luc Godard or Krzysztof Kieslowski?
• Nino Rota or Ennio Morricone?
• The Romance of Three Kingdoms or Journey To The West?
• Bolshoi or Mariinsky?
• Alvin Ailey or Jerome Robbins?
• Laphroaig or Lagavulin?
• Golden Cavendish or cube-cut Virginia?
• Beluga or Savruga?
• My Favorite Things or A Love Supreme?
• Beethoven: better at Cleveland under von Dohnanyi or New York under Bernstein?
• Chanson de Roland or Orlando Furioso?
• Esalen or Chautauqua?
• Grand Crus: Montrachet or Chambertin?
• Explain the faults in reasoning in act ii, scene three of King Lear.
• Guryevich or Tolstoy?
• Kepler or Brahe?
• Louenhoek or Galileo?
• Ruprecht or Heeringen?
• Castelnau or Bulow?
• Best military memoir - Gallic Wars or the Anabasis?
• Most literate general - Wellington or Caesar?
• What, in your opinion, is the single greatest flaw with the new Michelin Guide: New York, and what differentiates it from Zagat?
• Which is the correct condiment for a roast beef on sourdough: aioli or brown horseradish mustard? And what cheese would be most appropriate for that sandwich: farmhouse cheddar or washed-rind tomme?
• For a five course formal dinner, how many spoons would you find to the left of the dinner plate?
• Who's your favorite Muslim naturalist?
• Who was more important in the decline of Christianity in the west, Descartes or Newton?
• Whose Protestantism (Puritanism) do you feel had more of an effect on the shaping of the American politicial and social landscape: John Calvin or John Owen?
• Favorite sophist?
• Who do you feel was more responsible for the development of the Calculus, Newton or Leibniz?
• Euclidian or Reimann topology?
• Which Superstring theory is most likely to survive intact if M-theory proves valid?
• Favorite pre-Revolution Russian mathematician and why?
• DiBergi or Smithee?
• Sidd Finch or War Of The Worlds?

The Ministry is loath to admit that updates to the blogroll have been too long overlooked. Nevertheless, the Ministry is making a clean slate by severely chastising those at the lower levels of Ministry Information Management services who have been deemed responsible for gross negligence and dereliction of duty. Entirely new lackeys and yesmen have been acquired and are even now cleaning up the sticky reddish-gray gore that is the sole earthly remains of their predecessors.

Meanwhile, the troglodytes and gnomes chained to the rock face of the Ministry's proprietary HTML mines have been working even harder than their usual twenty hour days to bring you a slew of hand crafted links worthy of your perusal.

To wit, a summary of the changes that have been made:

• EDog, long an aspirant to Ministry Crony status, has been granted his fondest wish and added to that august body. Ministry combat auditors deemed that his constant emailing of links was a major factor in his elevation, but his crowning achievement was suckering Minister Buckethead into joining the National Novel Writing Month. Anyone capable of this sort of trickery deserves a seat by the fire at the Ministry bunker and catastratorium come the end of days.
• The Ministry's crack legion of combat auditors noticed, whilst approving EDog's supplication, that there was in fact a great deal of dead weight on the cronies list. Two blogs, whose authors have been assimilated into the Ministry, were still occupying valuable real estate. Henceforth, Spiral Dive and Opinion8 are stricken from the list.
• Seeing that so much had been left undone on the Cronies list, a high level review was instigated at the highest levels of the Ministry. It was quickly determined that three members of the Top Five list were no longer actively blogging. Intolerable! A Small Victory, Porphyrogenitus, and The Spoons Experience were immediately placed on injured reserve status.
• Of course, this swift action left three open slots on the Top Five list. Such messiness being intolerable to the clean and orderly minds of the Ministry, three candidates were propelled into the most selective blogroll in the sphere: Gary Farber, Ezra Klein, and Naked Villainy. The Maximum Leader probably owes Buckethead a beer, now.
• Swiftly, like fire or unrest in third world capitals like Paris, the random purges and unfair promotions unfolded. Next to be hit was the Ministry Legion of Merit. Determined MIA or on Hiatus were the Airborne Combat Engineer, The Allah Pundit and Rachel Lucas. Receiving the seven-orbed, five spiky-thinged copper-plated medallion of the legion are: Hubs and Spokes, Austin Bay Blog, Scrappleface, The Unpopulist, Hell in a Handbasket, The Fourth Rail, and Froggy Ruminations. James of Hell in a Handbasket received special consideration because he lives in Columbus, Ohio. Froggy gets on because he could likely kill us all. Marc gets the nod despite living in Michigan.
• Lastly, the links to Protein Wisdom and the Belmont Club are finally the correct ones. And though the link to Allah Pundit's old site now goes instead to a pathetic pr0n site, the Ministry includes it for mawkish and sentimental reasons.

This Message from the Ministry of Minor Perfidy
Thank You for Your Co-operation

The Ministry is pleased to announce that by the application of violence, cunning, trickery, fakery and acting crazy, and then through the exceedingly tricky ploy of just asking, the Ministry has secured the right to host the Halloween edition of the Carnival of Music. Ministry operatives are even now scouring the interweb for fascinating nuggets of webby goodness to offer up for your perusal. However, this is not enough to satisfy the Ministry's insatiable lust for links. Therefore, you, you and, you - the unshaven one in the back there with the goofy look on your face, yes, you! - all need align your interests with the Ministry's interests. The Ministry wants a nonpareil Carnival experience. You want a nonpareil Carnival experience. Therefore, send music links to {encode="music@perfidy.org" title="the Ministry"}, so that we may include them.

The consequences of not complying with our simple and oh, so reasonable request are unpleasant, and do not bear contemplation.

This Message from the Ministry of Minor Perfidy
Thank you for your cooperation

The Ministry is pleased to note the attention brought to NaDruWriNi. All minions, readers, and hangers-on associated with the Ministry are herewith encouraged to make every effort to participate in this endeavor; only through concerted action will our enemies be driven in terror before us.

When the robots come your cooperation will not be forgotten; remember this act of kindness.

That is all.