Excerpt from “Dear Texas: Please shut up. Sincerely, History” by Mark Morford:

Hey, kids!  Here’s something I bet you didn’t know: Black people?  Back in 1800 or whenever?  They liked being slaves.  True!  Many savvy, industrious Negroes actually volunteered for that fine, desirable position.  It was a completely balanced, fair, hugely successful system, until those damn liberals came along and ruined everything.  I know, right?  What a shame.

Do you know what else?  America was wholly victorious in Vietnam.  It’s a fact!  Kicked some serious enemy butt!  Mission accomplished!  Sure it was a little bumpy for awhile, but President Nixon, that great and wronged American hero, put us on the righteous path in the end, wrapped that sucker up beautifully and made America the noble Superman to the world.  Hey, it’s the truth!  You can look it up in your history textbook!

Of course the venom is justified.  But the best use of sympathetic venom is not to curl up and let it take hold but to stand up and find the antidote.

This is not the first time the issue has crossed the mcgees.org desk.  It did 8 years ago as Texas Textbook Bonfire.  But don’t just get pissed.  Get moving.  Write letters.  Better yet, donate to almost anyone in the “Sleeve” section of the mcgees.org sidebar.

Get moving, people.  Work now, snark later.

Woot?  You, know, Woot?  That wacky corner of e-commerce where, each day, they offer (many of) one wacky item and write snarky copy to get people to buy that one thing?  Once in a while they’ll grab a bunch of their odds and ends and sell them, without disclosing the contents, as a “Woot Bag of Crap”.

With me? 

A Woot Bag of Crap just saved the life of someone in Haiti during the earthquake.

If this random weirdness gets you in a place the former news hasn’t, there are links to donate to charity on the Woot blog where this story showed up.

OK, I’m going to start cracking down on charities that, as discussed, do things like print your name and address in a blue “handwriting font” to make a machine-addressed envelope look hand-addressed, and buy your info from questionable sources.  The causes may be legitimate.  They may not.  But the practices are reprehensible.

Feel free to post.

When you place a bid on eBay, and it’s the high bid, the screen says “Hope you win!”

No they don’t!  They hope someone comes along and bids $500,000, and then another guy ups that.  “Hope you win!”  Gawd.

It’s that whole mentality of making computers seem more like people, like when Tellme says, in a concerned and slightly embarrassed voice, “Hm, I’m sorry, I didn’t get that” instead of “Please repeat”.  Or when — I am not making this up — my bank added the sound of keyboard keys clicking in the background to the recorded voice telling you they are looking up your account information.

Or — and this drives me up the wall — when charities use script fonts and blue ink on their solicitations, so it looks like someone personally wrote it with a ballpoint.  I can always tell, because there is not a single person on the planet who writes the two es at the end of my name exactly the same.  One is a transition letter, one is a closing letter, and they shouldn’t be perfect matches.  The next logical step would be to commission fonts that have n (five to ten) slightly differing letterforms for each glyph, all of which connect, and the software to randomly choose which one to render.  That might fool me.  Until then, if you send me a fake hand-written letter, you are not getting money.  Period.

The ONE campaign has been campaigning against global poverty for years now.  Please add your voice to the thousands and sign the petition urging the next President — whoever he or she may be — to make global poverty and Africa top priorities while in office.  All it takes is one click.

Donate to Wikipedia.  You all use it.  You know who you are.  Keep the dream alive

Billions of debt, much incurred corruptly, is hampering the development of the third world and leading to actual suffering, misery, and death.  Write to your congressperson asking him or her to support H.R. 2634.

For Magic players, CardShark seller greggo4randy is donating all proceeds on card sales to “relief efforts for the people affected by the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina”.  He has 9249 cards in stock.