Blogger seems to be scheduled to perform maintenance in about an hour and a half (4PM PDT), although it shouldn't last more than 10 minutes or so.
This seems to be happening more than usual lately (or maybe it's just me?), so don't worry if we're down for a few minutes here and there.
When I had first heard about this ordeal, I didn't know whether it would be appropriate to post it on Wesleying. In fact, you might call this my first ethical blogging dilemma. To put it another way, I didn't know whether blogging about another student's blog would help or harm that student's current situation seeing as how readily Wesleying is attached to (though not recognized by) Wesleyan. I feared that whatever I said about the issue at hand would get picked up pretty fast before I had all the facts straight. I admit, I still don't get the facts right because this whole thing is pretty ridiculous and what it seems to be more than anything is the desperate death rattle of NYT's Metropolitan Diary editor Michael Pollak.
In essence, what happened was as follows: Andrea Silenzi '07 runs a blog called Seven Second Delay, which is basically blogged commentary for a WFMU radio show by the same name. On said show, the two DJs, Ken and Andy, joked about the predictable formula of Metro Diary submissions which document reader's anecdotes on life in New York City (think Overheard in New York, but lamer and tamer). A reader of Andrea's blog submitted a silly little made-up anecdote they felt would surely appeal to Pollak. And it did.
When the fact checker called, Andrea apparently "lied" and said the story was true. Pollak then emailed Andrea (read it, it's funny).
Anyway, long story short, the story gets picked up by Huffington Post, Gawker and now our very own Argus. You can read about all the painful details.
The best part of thism though, is that many of the bloggers who picked up this story basically took Pollak's word that Andrea was a liar--without fact-checking. Basically, though they all dismiss Pollak's column as trash, they still accepted the "truthiness" of his word against hers and rather than, you know, say email Andrea (since she's so "arrogantly" all over the internet, how hard could it be for a blogger to find her?), they just published his swill as is. Poor showing, bloggers.
Phew. That was fun. No, wait, no. No it wasn't.
Xue here. Wesleying was accidentally transferred to Blogger beta, which now means that none of the contributors can access it unless they, too, upgrade. Not only is this a stupid fucking development, it also means that things are going to be slow for the next few days as we sort this out and move everyone over. I can't even log in right now under my own account. Our apologies. We've got a lot in store for reading week, so stay tuned...
