Lucy is away visiting Philip this weekend. Randy and Elizabeth are both rather scathing when I try to explain to them how much more work I have to do while Lucy's away, like minding the children, washing dishes, taking out the trash, and walking the dogs. They just don't have any sympathy whatsoever. Luckily I didn't have to wash dishes because Alisa created some "garbage water" in the sink and we have an understanding that, although I'll do all the dishes when the sink is clean, I don't do any dishes when someone has left dishes full of "garbage water" in the sink.
We had breakfast at Kelly's this morning and then took the doggies for a walk downtown. After a stop at the library, we hung out on the common for a while for a 
Stop Sprawl Mart demonstration. Walmart wants to abandon their current location and build a new building to house a Super Walmart. I heard a few people speak, including our state representative Ellen Story. She made a variety of good points about why one should oppose Walmart in general and this Super WalMart in particular.
Going to a demonstration gave me a good (or at least funny) idea. We esperantists should get a few people together -- three or four -- and brings signs in Esperanto. We could position ourselves where the crowd is thickest and get someone to take a picture of the crowd with the signs over their heads to make it look like there's a big crowd of esperantists protesting.
I got sick of seeing all the spam in the Global Voices wiki pages, so I did some searches to come up with lists of pages that were spammed and despammed a dozen pages or so. It's not a battle one can really win, but I used 45 minutes or so and rolled back a bunch of spam anyway. It's interesting the approaches that different spammers take. A bunch of them include HTML wrappers to try to make the garbage they post invisible. Some of them destroy the content of the page while others leave it alone. Some overwrite competitors' blocks of links while others append their's within an existing block, if it's there.
Ethan wrote a bit on his blog about how tall the stack of pages would be if you printed out the whole wikipedia and lamenting a bit how small the contributions have been so far in African languages. I commented about the vikipedio which is at nearly 30,000 entries (Ethan estimates it would be a stack of pages only a meter high -- you could practically carry it around with you.) We were both surprised to see that the Ido wikipedia has more than 10,000 entries. Phil wondered why it was so big and, upon examining it, decided it was from creating a huge number of short pages with place-names. Over a 50 minute period, one guy entered a set of entries like
Ruleville, Mississippi; Rosedale, Mississippi; Rolling Fork; Mississippi, Ripley, Mississippi; Ridgeland, Mississippi; Richland, Mississippi; Raymond, Mississippi; Quitman, Mississippi; Purvis, Mississippi; Port Gibson, Mississippi; Poplarville, Mississippi; Pontotoc, Mississippi; Philadelphia, Mississippi; Petal, Mississippi; Pass Christian, Mississippi
I wonder how often an Ido speaker will go to the internet and look for a page about "Pass Christian, Mississippi" and shout "Eureka" (or whatever Idists shout) when he finds that the Ido "Wikipedio" has just what's he's looking for, with sections on Geografio, Historio, Demografio, Altri, and Extera ligili.
Of the 500 last entries in the Ido wikipedio, 324 were by the one guy who's been focusing on some list of place names. Another 142 are by another guy who's working his way through some different list of words. They've put in a huge amount of work.
StevenBrewer