Sorry about the lack of service lately. Things are a bit hectic, with both of us traveling. Normal service will be resumed as soon as possible
Feeding you the Pavlovsk feed
Our ever-attentive reader will have noticed today’s Nibble on the TweetMedvedev campaign. It refers to an effort to save the priceless collection of fruits and berries at the Vavilov Institute’s Pavlovsk Station, just outside St Petersburg. Do please tweet President Medvedev, as suggested by Cary Fowler in his latest Huffington Post piece. To further highlight this important initiative, we are also bringing you a feed of a search on Twitter for the #Pavlovsk hashtag. Just scroll down the right sidebar past the featured comment box. We’re here to serve.
Tweet this: @KremlinRussia_E Mr. President, protect the future of food – save #Pavlovsk Station! http://huff.to/pavlsk
And we’re back …
All spiffed up, cleaned out, and ready to roll. We’ve dumped the rotating pictures, cleaned up the sidebar, and generally oiled the bearings. Comments from almost everyone welcome. 1
Carnival of Idiots
We’re hosting the next edition of Berry go Round, a blog carnival dedicated to plants and botany. In case you didn’t know, a blog carnival gathers together in one place, on a regular basis, good blog posts on a particular topic. It’s a way of pointing people to stuff they may not know about and of sharing the love. And we’ve had loads of submissions for the next Berry go Round.
Alas, most of them are idiotic submissions from idiots who are paid by even bigger idiots to waste our time and spoil the internet for everyone.
We have so far received 16 tip-top recommendations, from 15 Sci-Fi Predictions That Came True to 10 Things That Won’t Burn in a House Fire. You can imagine how thrilled we will be to share those with you next week.
The weird part about this spam torrent is that it probably involves real people. There’s a submission form to nominate posts for the carnival and it requires some pretty elaborate cutting and pasting that I suspect needs not a robot but a person. Even if it didn’t, there’s a person looking at each submission with a delete button at his fingertips. 2 And the people who are polluting our world with this crap are, I bet, being paid by their evil overlords to do so.
Wise up, cretins. Your crap ain’t gonna make it to our pages. Ever.
If, on the other hand, you genuinely want to share an interesting post on plants or botany — your own or someone else’s — use the form, or send direct to berrygoround at gmail dot com, and after intense scrutiny by our living, breathing crap detector, there’s a good chance it will make it to our pages.
Trying to speed things up
Apologies for our rather spare look. We’ve been having a lot of trouble with the site over the past few weeks, mostly being very slow to respond. I’ve tried everything, but I’m really rather out of my depth. In an effort to get to the bottom of the problem we’re going right back to basics and removing all the bells and whistles. If that helps, maybe we’ll add some of them back in, slowly. If there are any you particularly miss, shout.