The Defenestration of Prague-Miscellaneous Musings on the Chiefio


The Defenestration of Prague - Matthäus Merian the Elder, copperplate engraving

Chiefio, someone who’s blog I frequent because I enjoy his “mind pleasers” and general thinking style, has a new post entitled, “Defenestration of Prague”, an event in European history that has been a favorite topic of mine for some time, so I am pleased whenever I see it turn up.

Naturally I felt impelled to add my two cents –  which Chiefio may regret, but how was he to know?  Live and learn I guess.

Basically, Chiefio takes us down a rather long winded boustrophedon from present geopolitical concerns regarding Euro-American troubles with everything going on generally East and South of the Bosporus back through history to the origins of our modern Occident/Orient conflicts in the aftermath of the Thirty Years War and the events of the Defenestration of Prague which precipitated it.

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Question of the Day – Well, Which One is it?


Many blogs and website include pages for FAQs, Frequently Asked Questions, which we think is a fine ideas; however, here at Meme Merchants we noticed that most of these supposed FAQs appear to be an invention of the site’s administrators in an attempt to preempt site users from actually asking any questions so the Admin will not then have to take time out of their busy schedule to answer them.  You can tell this is probably the case because there never seems to be a FAQ for any question YOU have about the site, how it functions or it policies – in other words anything you actually care about.  While this situation is not altogether wrong, it does seem to smack ever so sightly of intellectual dishonesty.

Think about it for a moment, if a FAQ page is actually doing its job successfully, none of the questions should ever rise to the level of being asked frequently, doubly true if the site Admins are doing their jobs properly in responding to queries, correcting problems, and have clear, well stated and easy to find policies.  It seems more correct then to call these type of pages something else like, “Things You Need to Know – TYNKs” or “Needful Facts – NFAC,” anything other than FAQ.  Thus the notion of a FAQ seems to be infact some kind of a fairy tale.

Here at Meme Merchants we do not have a FAQ page, because no one has asked us any questions yet, and the Editors would not presume to know what questions are burning in your mind.  We make up A LOT of things around here, our imaginations overflow, but we would not dare to make up what you think [that seems somehow very basic].  You have to set a limit somewhere, and that’s were we set ours.  We have included a contact form on our Contact page which you are encouraged to use to have answered any questions about Meme Merchants related topics or concerns.

We do have an idea to do a feature periodically called:

Question of the Day

Assuming someone ever asks a question – – we will then post it up and rave about it for a while – basically until we are sick of it – and you can then comment.  Eventually those questions and answers will be turned into a FAQ page or filed appropriately someplace else.

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Oh dear, yet another hazy, unfocused WordPress blog by the semi-literate – – or another precious moment of your life scuppered


Yes, I know what you are thinking already,  ” And with a blog post heading like that you are not helping your cause any.  In post-post-modern blogospheric representation a heading like that it will definitely cost you points.”

Yes, yes, yes, – of course – we know – but, the REASON for the extended headings occasionally to be found here is that it is in itself an obscure literary reference, and bridgehead into a possible new conversation;  which, cognoscenti maybe to be able to pick up on from a couple of different angles, [and you are allowed to congratulate yourself if you succeed] or maybe you will simply enjoy the display of linguistic eccentricity.

There WILL be a cost no doubt, it will probably cost us points with some readers, web aggregators, and search engine indexers – what will Google think?

So, to begin.

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