perfidy

The Ministry of Minor Perfidy is pleased to announce what you have no doubt jealously noted, that the Ministry's appearance has soared to new levels of aesthetic, typographical and metaphysical beauty. The whip-scourged faces of thousands of Ministry Kobolds glow with pride as they contemplate the majesty of what they have wrought, cut from the stinking HTML mines deep below the Earth.

We would direct your attention to several features of the Ministry's elegant facade:

• The refined typefaces, purchased in the most exclusive typeries in Paris, Vienna and the Subcontinent.
• The enslickened link formatting, with clean underlining, clearly distinguishable colors and a reserved but not cold distance from the other text.
• The judicious use of Small Caps to enhance your blogging pleasure.
• And finally, a distinctive format for blockquotes that sets them apart from other, lesser material.

Before the swollen heads of the various minions who have brought you this wondrous transformation are unable to to fit into their cages, we will leave you to behold the majesty that is the Ministry of Minor Perfidy.

Thank you for your cooperation.

According to the Blog Ecosystem, somtime over the weekend, the Ministry has moved out of the water and onto dry land. We are now Crawly Amphibians. We kick ass. Seriously.

The Ministry of Minor Perfidy is tickled to announce (and we are rarely, if ever tickled, so pay attention) that we have enhanced the functionality of the Ministry's blog post format. Though we first demanded politely, in the end we were forced to brutally torture hundreds of HTML gnomes to pry from their greedy minds the occult knowledge required to effect these marvelous changes. As you are all aware, the Ministry is more than willing to sacrifice the blood of others to bring you the high quality service you have become accustomed to. Let this be a warning to all.

To describe, rather to sum up the changes to the bottom of each post:

• The clumsy "profile" link has been terminated, and its broken body thrown to the pigs.
• What little functionality the profile link once had has been granted to the author link, which previously could only create another instance of the blog.
• The category name has been enhanced with a link to the relevant category page.
• The trackbacks link has been added.
• Several '|' symbols were added, because they are awful nifty.
• All of the text in the bottom is now either marked as a hyperlink, or is in the paler grey typeface, so it all matches.
• There was some general rearrangement for aesthetics and proper Feng shui.

Allow the warm glow of satisfaction to permeate your pathetic souls as you revel in the knowledge that the Ministry is continuing its relentless quest to provide you with the highest quality blogging experience no money can buy.

Yesterday, the Ministry of Minor Perfidy suffered a brief and minor suspension of operations. This blackout, apparently caused by a rogue agent known only as "mySQL" has been isolated, corrected, and restored as an honored, functioning member of the Perfidy support staff.

Our apologies to the thousands of gnomes displaced in the aftermath of the correction of "mySQL." Your families will be duly compensated and the area where your homes stood will be safe for habitation once again within 1.3 million years, give or take.

Special attention must be given to "Kathy Kinsley," the entity entrusted with the care and feeding of the servers on which the Ministry's online presence resides. Within minutes of the problem arising, Ms. Kinsley was working to rectify it. Truly an exceptional entity.

Go about your business.

Comments are a service provided by the Ministry of Minor Perfidy to you, the gentle reader. This service is subject to revocation on a retail or wholesale basis at the whim of the Ministry. Only one individual has thus far incurred our wrath sufficiently to be permanently banned. Don’t be that guy. Any advertisement made in this space is subject to a fee of $500 per ad. Posting an ad indicates your agreement with this fee schedule. If you are a comment spammer, please immediately die a prolonged, agonizing and messy death. After you pay the fee.

Swear, curse and spit if it makes you feel better. Generally speaking, saying “fuck” a lot doesn’t improve the quality of your writing, unless you’re Charles Bukowski. I don’t think you’re Chuck, though. In any event, we won’t delete your post for foul language. As to general purpose offensiveness, we all have pretty thick skins and you’d have to be a real jackass to get a post deleted for that reason. So don’t be that guy.

To sum up: play nice, share your toys with the other kids, and pretend you’re having a nice conversation with friends at your favorite restaurant. And remember, we’re watching you.

Please direct your attention to the blogroll at left, for there are some additions.

The Ministry would like to extend its gratitude to Minister Buckethead. His absence from these annals has been noted with regret, but the loss of his insights here is more than equalled by his subaltern heroics these last few weeks. Hundreds of gnomes and day-laborers gave their lives so that his mission could be a success, and their sacrifices were not in vain. His mission may be secret, but its outcome will visible from low earth orbit very shortly.

Once the burns heal-- and they are healing nicely-- and that nasty business with the Yemeni Foreign Service is cleared up, we expect Minister Buckethead to return to active duty with gusto and verve.

Or else.

That is all.

The Ministry of Minor Perfidy is google's top two results for a search on the word "perfidy." That's much better than the stupid Beatles, who got beat out for #2 by the stupid Beach Boys*.

In other news, the search string "buckethead kneebiter" is a googlewhack.

[wik] *The Beach Boys are not stupid, Pet Sounds least of all.

Ah, ego. Such a thing of beauty. My challenge to the other members of this site (or anybody else with something to confess) is simple: What have you been wrong about? Pick some issues (hopefully serious ones), and explain how you were wrong about them, and what made you change your mind.

It has come to my attention that common ground can be found more easily in our errors, than in righteousness...

For showing how you can have financial discipline AND a national health care system!

For having a hemp-tolerant culture, at least for now.

For providing opposition to Buckethead. Did you really have to IMPORT someone to do this? Are there truly no liberals left?

Thanks to the Perfidy folks, all better writers than I, for the opportunity to provide some opposition. All I can do is offer facts; the eloquence will escape me...most of the time.

I am a level playing field capitalist. I think that we need to provide basic health care and education to every citizen, and if we don't, we make the American (or Canadian, take your pick) Dream so much harder to achieve. I think hard work should be rewarded, but I don't buy the "cut the taxes until the social systems bleed" crap. I think the environment is in danger, and that we can't risk NOT doing anything about it.

I believe that there are factual rights and wrongs, when it comes to politics. Partisan politics has, over the past few years, degraded in its discourse to the point where otherwise intelligent, learned people will argue black is white, up is down; you'll find them on both sides of the aisle.

Let the hazing commence.

The Ministry of Minor Perfidy continues to grow exponentially. The Ministry would announce to all and sundry that we have acquired a new minion. Minister. Ross, who despite his Canadian birth has become something of a success in the world, has been persuaded to join the Ministry's stable of bloviators. Bamboo splinters and heated copper wires were most certainly not part of Ross' decision making process, regardless of what he might tell you.

Ross has been blogging at Spiral Dive for time out of mind, where he mixes leftish political innuendo with learned scribblings on Java arcana. Ross' political and cultural commentary will move here, while soletta.com will remain a repository for his computer and technical thinking. We feel confident that in short order, Ross will be able to pad his technical resume with Ministry standard skills of bootlickery, rubberstamping, gnome-inveigling, and sublethal obfuscation.

Welcome, Ross, to the Ministry of Minor Perfidy. We welcome your particular talents to our relentless quest for minor celebrity, self regard, and world conquest. God speed the right!

The Ministry is pleased to announce that we have acquired the talents of GeekLethal as Special Roving Correspondent for Matters Concerning GeekLethal. He comes to us from his own semi-defunct weblog, and will soon become puissant in the arts of minion-beating, backstabbery, interrogative dentistry, and pixie-baiting.

The Ministry leaves it to GeekLethal to write his own introduction beyond this pittance.We congratulate GeekLethal, and welcome him, his talents, and the sweat of his legions to the cause. Excelsior!

At the suggestion of Buckethead Sr., a respected and credentialed historian, the Ministry is changing the name of the horseshit category. While the Ministry appreciated the sophomoric potty humor tone of the previous category moniker, it was felt that the new name would give the category, and by extension the entire website, an air of erudition and sly humor. If it should not have this effect, the world will mourn the passing of an eminent historian.

The Ministry sends its heartfelt condolences to the fans of the Chicago and Boston areas. While under ordinary circumstances the Ministry would stay true to its idiom of stoic and callous, even merciless disregard for the feelings of others, when the Ministry witnessed the sign held by a typically arrogant Yankees fan at the end of yesterdays game which read, (if the Ministry recalls correctly) "Which curse is worse?" and had crudely drawn depictions of the logos for both the Cubs and Red Sox teams; the Ministry was forced to take sides.

Feeling the pain of two heartbroken bloggers in Chicago, the Ministry has added them to the blogroll. They are The Spoons Experience and Pejmanesque.

The Ministry has reached a milestone! Through the tireless and, indeed, tiresome efforts of its lackies, the Ministry has, as of this date, reached its one thousandth post. Though it has often been arduous going, our unbending will and willingness to sacrifice others for the common good have seen us through. The Ministry would like to thank its loyal, nay, obsequious band of readers for their careful attention to our humble efforts. The Ministry also hurls obloquy, hate, and derision at all those who have failed to recognize the clear signs of greatness that we have deigned to reveal on these pages.

After strenuous interrogation, summary executions, and several six-hour-long mandatory marketing meetings, the HTML gnomes who labor in the stygian depths below the Ministry compound were forced to admit that they had made a dreadful and embarrassing error. That despite having received no instructions to do so, they had utterly and completely failed to adapt the new Perfidy logo to the Perfidy category, as should have been obvious to even your average retarded Ohioan. Behold, the new Perfidy category icon:

This painful mistake is now behind us. A new team of HTML pixies has taken over supervision of the smoking industrial edifice that is the Ministry web server, devotedly feeding it sacrifices of blood and toil to keep it churning away, pounding and shaping the code into the beautiful form you see before you.

[wik] That is now the old Ministry logo, the new one is this:

The Ministry would like to thank, if not actually compensate, the thousands of young children in various third world hell holes that have labored so hard and so well to create the new perfidy gear. The Ministry would also like to commend John Karapelou for his foresightful and compassionate concern for his pets, that resulted in the wondrous Perfidy Logo now available on a variety of consumer goods. 

By clicking here or on the "Perfidious Store Thingy" link to my right, you will be instantly transported to a luscious garden of glorious capitalism. Here you may peruse the garments hand crafted by the nimble fingers of Latin American youths. Here you will see toys manufactured by Chinese criminals paying their debt to soceity. Here you find wonders made possible by your humble servant, the Ministry of Minor Perfidy. 

Shop, and buy. We insist. 

[wik] The future Ministry is considering setting up a new merch emporium. If this should come to pass, you'll see a link in the sidebar menu.

Attentive readers will have noted that immediately to my right is a brand new perfidy logo. This stunning piece of artwork was created by John Karapelou, who is an award winning and stupendously compentent Bio-Medical Illustrator. The Ministry was forced to use ...persuasion... to convince John of the importance of the project, and to point out the consequences of failing to act with generosity and goodwill towards the Ministry. Happily, John recognized the need for a new Ministry logo, and his pets are as a result unharmed.

Lest you think the Ministry composed of unfeeling, nekulturny brutes, the unknowing contributors of our previous logo, the 1108th US Army Signal Brigade are given a plug here. They truly do set the standard.

The Ministry, in its relentless quest to improve no matter the price in blood or suffering, has developed another new category, and a new icon for an old one.

This icon, we felt captured the essence of the Horseshit category far better than any sophomoric fecal imagery, and so the old one was liquidated: [Update] this has been altered to reflect the new category name.

Click the webtastic punditry expander link below for more information on the categories.

For your edification, here is how the Ministry uses, and abuses, the categories:

The following categories may seem similar, but here are the guidelines for their use:

[wik] The Ministry of Future Perfidies notes from the distant vantage point of the year of our Lord 2025, that many of these categories proved to be unnecessarily precise, and were merged. Intermittent improvements to the quality of icons was seen every time someone bothered to pay attention to the site. (So, on average, about every 5-7 years.) 

The Ministry is pleased to announce the creation of three wholly new, completely original and stupendously nifty categories. After listening to the unending whines of of Johno and Buckethead for new categories for their particular fetishes, the Ministry graciously refrained from having them summarily executed, and spent almost a whole dollar to find new images for the category icons. And so, with a moderate amount of further ado, here are the new categories:

and

In the near future, some of the Ministry's wizened HTML gnomes will be flogged from their stupor, and sent to update some old posts to reflect the new categories. Additionally, a the icon for the Perfidy Attacks category was deemed surplus to requirements, and taken behind the Ministry headquarters and shot. The new icon will hopefully be more respectful and... useful.

[wik] The Ministry of Perfidies Future with an update: 

In time, That Buck Rogers Stuff would be replaced, and divided into several categories, each with better icons. Music Wonkery was removed, then re-added with a new icon to distinguish itself from the icon we started using for Minister Johno. The icon for Perfidy Attacks was retained, but now represents an omnibus Our Measured Response category. You can see all of these on the Archives page to the right ovah deh.

The code gnomes have been run hard and put away wet with all the post category updating. Think of them when you look at your non-bleeding fingers.

This message from the Ministry of Minor Perfidy, 2025 edition, thank you for your cooperation.