feckless: promiscuous browsing

Sans feck since 1999
Peer devil! see him owre his trash, As feckless as a wither'd rash, His spindle shank a guid whip-lash, His nieve a nit: Thro' bloody flood or field to dash. O how unfit! -- Address to a Haggis by Robert Burns.
The column seems to be written with a world-weary sigh by an author who somehow lifts himself above the feckless failings of colleagues. Thus, a fortnight ago, a correction regretted an article's reference to someone "having the nerve to gamble in pubic". The correction concluded: "At least we did not say gambol." -- Re: The Guardian's corrections column, from This is London.
Anyone who grows up watching TV, never sees any religion or philosophy, is raised in an atmosphere of moral relativism, learns about civics from watching bimbo eruptions on network TV news, and attends a university where postmodernists vie to outdo each other in demolishing traditional notions of truth and quality, is going to come out into the world as one pretty feckless human being. And .. perhaps the goal of all this is to make us feckless so we won't nuke each other. -- In the Beginning Was the Command Line by Neal Stephenson.
The Feckless Newbie Idiot Troll: "Gee, what is this board about?" [not to be confused with the genuine feckless newbie idiot post that really wants to know, "Gee, what is this board about?"] -- categories of trolls, from the Alt.Flame FAQ.
That uncle of yours who embraces (and tries to enlist you in) one get-rich-quick scheme after another probably qualifies as "feckless." The folks who actually turn over their savings accounts to him, on the other hand, richly deserve the title of "gormless." -- Feck vs. Gorm, from The Word Detective.
Titania: Sometimes I wish that my ambassador was not quite so... let me see. Feckless? Cluracan: You reign over a feckless dominion, My Lady. -- Queen Titania and Cluracan, in Sandman #52: "Cluracan's Tale"
"I give ye your choice," says Alan. "Set me on dry ground in Appin, or Ardgour, or in Morven, or Arisaig, or Morar; or, in brief, where ye please, within thirty miles of my own country; except in a country of the Campbells. That's a broad target. If ye miss that, ye must be as feckless at the sailoring as I have found ye at the fighting. Why, my poor country people in their bit cobles pass from island to island in all weathers, ay, and by night too, for the matter of that." -- Kidnapped by Robert Louis Stevenson.
So far as Londoners are concerned, public spending is something that other people - usually Scots - receive. They see it as dole money for the economic wimps; hand outs for the fiscally feckless. The extent to which their own economy is propped up by public money is only dimly perceived, if at all. -- Scotching the Myth, from Scotland on Sunday.
- Of course, my school was so fractious and balkanized that my people--the goths--had a plurality. It was a way sucky school man--probably the worst in the state! - It couldn't have been that bad, dude. - Why not? - You know words like "fractious," "balkanized" and "plurality." - Thanks. I also know "feckless." -- Doonesbury, November 28th, 1999.
Hostile aliens crowd the streets, controlling the minds of the feckless human hayseeds with manipulative billboards and newspaper ads. And only Rowdy Roddy Piper can see them! -- Trance Mission, from Suck.
Sing, Michael, sing-on the route of the 19 Bus Hear them sayin' How you get a rude and a reckless? Don't you be so crude and a feckless You been drinking brew for breakfast Rudie can't fail. -- Rudie Can't Fail, from London Calling by The Clash.
'But I'm no socialist, and I would have ye keep mind of that. I'm yin o' the old Border radicals, and I'm not like to change. I'm for individual liberty and equal rights and chances for all men. I'll no more bow down before a Dagon of a Goavernment official than before the Baal of a feckless Tweedside laird. I've to keep my views to mysel', for thae young lads are all drucken-daft with their wee books about Cawpital and Collectivism and a wheen long senseless words I wouldna fyle my tongue with. Them and their socialism! There's more gumption in a page of John Stuart Mill than in all that foreign trash. But, as I say, I've got to keep a quiet sough, for the world is gettin' socialism now like the measles. It all comes of a defective eddication.' -- Mr. Standfast, by John Buchan.
ENEMY WANTED -- Mature, lonely, North American superpower seeks hostile-sounding and muscular-looking but internally moribund nation for international competitive bluster, mutual threat inflation, political-military gymnastics, and general bellicose finger pointing. . . . Possession of large, phallic ballistic missiles (large throw weight only), and/or chem-bio also a plus--willful violations of feckless arms control agreements will earn continuing thanks. -- Pentagon Personals Ad, author unknown, from Geez Jan.
Then there is a passage such as this, Lord Emsworth musing on his feckless younger son, Freddie Threepwood: Unlike the male codfish, which, suddenly finding itself the parent of three million five hundred thousand little codfish, cheerfully resolves to love them all, the British aristocracy is apt to look with a somewhat jaundiced eye on its younger sons. -- What ho! My hero, PG Wodehouse, by Stephen Fry.
FECKLESS DAVE specializes in high-energy, muscular, but introspective rockers like "Face." Songs like "Every Six Months" are blasts of cathartic energy. -- from the press kit of D.C. band Feckless Beast.
Another one of Reed's clients, Gary Hofmeister, a Republican congressional candidate from Indiana, ran an ad in which the face of his opponent, Julia Carson, who is black, melded into images of prison doors and hypodermic needles. Hofmeister, too, went down to defeat. What was most striking about these gambits was not their nastiness, but their fecklessness. It's bad enough to win with low-ball tactics; it's unforgivable to lose that way. -- Microsoft's Hired Gun, by Joshuah Micah Marshall.

Last feck: [4.17.2000 at 08:35pm PST] Add some feck.

[ F E C K L E S S . C O M ]

"And I shoudn't wonder," I said, for I was in a thoughtful mood,
"if even herrings have troubles of their own."
"Quite possibly, sir."
"I mean, apart from getting kippered."
"Yes, sir."
"And so it goes on, Jeeves, and so it goes on."
[from Jeeves and the Song of Songs]

Feckless is still reading.

tuesday, september 11

As usual, Eva says it much better than I.
[9:37 PM]

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[6:19 PM]

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wednesday, september 5

Right. The summer *is* over now, and I'm back in school. It is a very good thing to be back in school.
[9:49 PM]

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tuesday, august 7

Moved. New jobs. Busy. Summer gone!
[10:22 AM]

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thursday, july 5

Moving!
[12:21 PM]

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saturday, june 23

We're moving. Bicycle riding with Eva is fun. Punk music movies rock. So does Irvine Welsh. So does Edward Tufte.
[3:39 PM]

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wednesday, june 20

From Science Fiction Weekly's interview with Samuel Delany:
Where are the cities going? Are they stratifying? I know you probably didn't use the word Disneyfication, but other people have. Where are we going?

Delany: Good question. I do think people are trusting contact relationships less and less. And that's because big business tends to demonize them. "Oh, terrible things will happen if you meet people of different classes. They'll rip you off! You'll lose things! It's unsafe! You'll get AIDS!" Everything from one to the other. And there's a lot of this demonizing of interclass contact, which I think is the demonizing of city life itself. But city living, living with strangers, living with lots of different kinds of people and learning to live with them, is a very exciting thing. I've alway found living in the city to be a very exciting experience, because you do have contact with so many different kinds of people.
(If you're wondering why so much Delany lately, there's a new edition of Dhalgren coming out.
[4:23 PM]

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tuesday, june 19

Hey, it looks like Tracy Lee has updated her site. Yay! And it also looks like more of her work is going to be published. Yay!
[12:24 PM]

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thursday, june 14

Nerve interviews Samuel Delany:
Take a story like "The World Well Lost," written by Theodore Sturgeon in 1950. Two alien lovers come to Earth, one larger than the other, and everyone assumes that they're male and female. The story is told from the point of view of two security men who guard their starship, themselves close friends. Eventually, the guards discover that the aliens are both male, and indeed are gay. They've taken flight from their home planet because of terrible homophobia there. One guard, a typical 1950s Earth male, is disgusted by this and doesn't know what to do, he even suggests killing the aliens. But the other talks him out of it. At the end of the story, the first guard goes to sleep back in their quarters. His friend remains awake, looking at him, and we realize that he's in love with him.
I read it in an anthology when I was about fourteen or fifteen and broke out crying, exactly as I was supposed to. I was quite touched by it, and it certainly helped make it possible to talk about those things later on in my own work, like the gay, human characters in the story, "Time Considered as a Helix of Semi-Precious Stones." Historically, I guess that's how science fiction works: you start by using aliens to think the unthinkable � and then, eventually, another writer, having grown a little more comfortable with the earlier notion, brings it into the human.

[12:42 PM]

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friday, june 8

OK, this is not good. Two of the oldest (and best) original-content websites out there are on possibly-permanent hiatus: Suck and Feed. This has a sort of end-of-an-era feel to it: these were two of the sites that represented to me what was exciting about the net, and that helped convince me that moving out to San Francisco was a good idea. I don't mind a little bubble-bursting between friends, but the web will just not be correct without them.
[4:48 PM]

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wednesday, june 6

Hey! I'm back. You'll be glad to know I have work for the summer. I'll be doing website maintenance, usability evaluation, and possibly a user interaction redesign for City CarShare. I'm really happy about this, as I'll be doing the kind of work I'm interested in for a really cool and friendly organization and with people who are working hard to make San Francisco a finer place in which to live. I'll also be doing some freelance usability testing, copyediting, and anything else interesting that comes up.
[9:35 PM]

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Old Feck

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