For the interested: the Whitey’s Boyos character sheet. Comments welcome. Warning: contains language.

They’re not personal blogs. They’re not generalist blogs. Oh, hell, I read enough of ‘em — I guess they’re Historical Blogs. Thus, Bostonia (original), a lovely little series of explorations of Boston’s rich history; Old is the New New, “with a special interest in the history of technology and business in America and the world”; Cliopatria (original), a lot of smart people talking about history together; and Pillow Talk, a blogaptation of Sei Shonagon’s “Pillow Book.” ...

If you keep a blog, this is important (original). You should read it and take heed. If you use Typepad or LiveJournal, you’re covered (or will be soon). If you use Movable Type, see this post (original). If you use Blogger or Blogspot… um, I dunno, but since it’s a Google initiative and Blogger/Blogspot is owned by Google, I imagine support will come pretty quickly. Now, this isn’t going to stop spammers from spitting out comments all over your blog. It will make them less likely to benefit from those comments. It would be nice to think that less benefit means less spam, but let’s be serious — the people selling the software that generates this spam aren’t going to tell their customers that it’s a worthless activity. Still, you’re cutting back on whatever money spammers are making, and that’s a good enough reason to do it in my book.

I just installed Brad Choate’s MT-DSBL plugin (original), hacked slightly so that it checks against both the Distributed Sender Blackhole List (original) and the Blitzed Open Proxy Monitor List. (Perhaps I should add SORBS (original)?) Hopefully this’ll cut down on spam. If this interferes with anyone’s commenting, please let me know. Edit: it screws up mine. Off for now. Edit: found the problem (my colo provider’s DNS is somewhat over-zealous). It’s back on.

“Whitey’s Boyos” movies and television shows include the following. There are other obvious candidates; if you haven’t seen every gangster flick Scorcese ever made, well, you’re like me because I haven’t seen Gangs of New York yet either. But you know what I mean. These, however, are the direct influences and recommendations. Mystic River: not as good as the book, but still very very good. Sean Penn, Tim Robbins, and Kevin Bacon were on fire. ...

I admit it: the lure of a free Mac mini led me to take a peek at Freeminimacs.com (original). The deal is that you sign up for one of several offers via their site, and you get ten of your friends to do the same thing, and you get a free Mac mini out of it. Presumably your friends go out and do the same, and so on. The economics of this seem to make sense — it’s your basic pyramid scheme, but less objectionable because the upfront cost of getting involved is minimized. The percentage of people who complete the offer is fairly low (original), while the people behind it are making money on everyone who starts the process. So, sure, for a free Mac mini I was willing to give ‘em my email address. My spam filter is mighty. ...

The reading list for “Whitey’s Boyos” looks something like this: Black Mass: the canonical book about Whitey Bulger and John Connolly. This is where you get the basic history. Boyos: a gritty novel by an ex-Southie gangster. Not brilliant but pretty propulsive, and for obvious reasons the author has a good feel for the Southie underworld. Street Soldier: in a similar vein to Boyos, but non-fiction. Not as well-written and some have questioned its veracity, but I enjoyed it. ...

In the lobby of the Lowes Harvard Square today, while waiting for Million Dollar Baby, I saw the following two posters side-by-side, much like they are below if your browser window is quite large. Both these movies are distributed by Warner Brothers. They’re both comic book adaptations. They ought to both appeal to a similar audience. What are the execs at Warner Brothers thinking? This is why Marvel-based movies are on a fairly strong run, while DC-based movies are not.

$81.3 million was pretty close; it actually hit $85.85 million. Not too shabby, although still somewhat behind Spider-Man and the Harry Potter flicks.

Bill Condon’s next movie will apparently be Dreamgirls. I’m quite happy that I won’t have to wait another six years for his next. It’ll be a remake of the stage musical, which I know nothing about; the storyline isn’t terribly compelling to me. But hey, it’s Condon.