I am the agent of your sweet procrastination ...
... and you are mine. Now that that's out of the way, I point you to an ingenious new toy called wikiscanner, a tool to detect and expose evil in the net, this time in the form of coordinated assaults of your beloved wikipedia by partisans and corporations. (Don't try too hard to look surprised.) So, for instance, simply enter the name of the company or organization ("Metropolitan Opera") and then put check marks on their IP ranges (check both), and voila, you got yourself a list of wiki-edits that have been initiated from the computers of the specified company (the Met). In truth, the Met list is pretty boring (ugh), when compared to Philip Morris's or Exxon's for instance. Was I fearing/hoping for multiple edits of Peter Gelb's wikientry. But you only have to spot the persistence of quotes like
to know Gelb's wiki hasn't been actioned by his tech-savvy media team (yet?). So, back to the list (click on the "diff" column to see the details of each particular edit): there's your usual obscure Anna Russell edit; the obligatory Arctic roll edit ("sometimes called Icebox Cake in the United States"); the prissy lecture on vocal types ("heldentenors include USHER?! Usher will most-certainly never sing Siegfried or Florestan"); and the addition of a couple of jokes ("What do violinists use for birth control? Their personalities.") It really only gets interesting when you come to the Kristin Chenoweth edit. I'm not going to quote the added line so I don't propagate it in perpetuity (click on it yourself), but it's safe to say that someone at the Met Opera Guild really, really hates her annoying chirpy personality. (Oops, did I just say that.)
OK, that's it. Now get back to work.
