g r o t t o 1 1

Peeve Farm
Breeding peeves for show, not just to keep as pets
Brian Tiemann
Silicon ValleyNew York-based purveyor of a confusing mixture of Apple punditry, political bile, and sports car rentals.

btman at grotto11 dot com

Read These Too:

InstaPundit
Steven Den Beste
James Lileks
Little Green Footballs
As the Apple Turns
Entropicana
Cold Fury
Capitalist Lion
Red Letter Day
Eric S. Raymond
Tal G in Jerusalem
Aziz Poonawalla
Corsair the Rational Pirate
.clue
Ravishing Light
Rosenblog
Cartago Delenda Est



Cars without compromise.





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Sunday, November 3, 2002
02:40 - Curses!

(top)
Betrayed by Cartoon Network!

Last week I was singing their praises, raising a paean to the heavens in thanks for their unaccountable largesse in putting everything-- everything-- on TV that I longed to see on a relaxed Sunday night. I was rendered giddy by the prospect of their showing Rejected by Dan Hertzfeldt. Oh, how I looked forward to it. Oh, how I did cue up my DV tape. It was so very cued-up. It was cued up so high I expected to see Al Capone doing the Charleston on top of it.

And tonight rolled around, and Home Movies was stomach-crampingly sarcastic as usual, and then it was 10:30, and right there on the digital cable schedule banner dealy it said Rejected...

...But that's not what came on. Oh no. Rejected is Denied! The Animation Nazi has spoken! Instead they showed The Lewis Lectures, a short starring apartment-dwelling dogs living the life they live when the humans are gone. I'd seen it before-- it's funny, yes, but it's not what they promised me, dammitalltohell! I mean... what happened? Was there a last-minute... injunction, or something? Did they discover at about 8:00 tonight that Bitter Films hadn't in fact given them permission to broadcast? Did somebody forget to clear it through legal first?

So now I'm all bummed. No Kelp Dip with extra sodium for me tonight.

And while I'm at it, why is it that Vlasic Original Dills are so much smaller all of a sudden? I thought it was just a bum batch for a while, but now they're all weeny little gherkins that amount to barely a mouthful, and they've been so for at least three or four months. True, granted, the old big pickles would always neatly anchor themselves into the shoulders of the jar, and when I managed to dislodge the first one from a freshly opened supply (unavoidably dousing myself in brine in the process of unscrewing the lid, because for some reason there's no dry way to open a jar of pickles, no matter how motionless or careful you are), the wedged first pickle would sproing out and spatter a fresh load of green salt water up the wall and/or my shirt. Yes, that problem now seems to be solved. But the price is too high! The pickles are now all too bloody small! We've made too great a sacrifice in the name of 1/2-as-neat broaching procedures. I'd gladly suffer a soaked shirt every week if I could have my Big Pickles back again.

... Uh, right.

"Brian Don't Bitch". It's a new Madonna song.

Time for a new workweek to get going, methinks. That'll get my head screwed back on. Homer sleep now.
Saturday, November 2, 2002
02:13 - Santa Cruz

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I spent the day today down in Santa Cruz, sightseeing with my folks; seeing things I'd either never seen before, or hadn't seen in years.

While it's easy to tar Santa Cruz as a Berkeley with the added handicap of being isolated from civilization, it must be said that it's what I believe is the most California of all California towns. That is to say, it's a microcosm of the entire state; it has steep pine-clad hills, quaint homey town life, a huge volleyball beach with a Boardwalk that became prototypical of the whole franchise amusement park genre, a University, a beach highway, vast ocean and mountain views, a Monarch butterfly wintering ground, and a prime surfing destination. It's everything about California rolled into one thick doobie.

After lunch on the Wharf and a stop at the Monarch butterfly grounds at Natural Bridges (with the interesting interlude of a large brush fire breaking out behind the visitor center, which attracted two fire engines who had to string their hoses for a mile out to the nearest hydrant), we headed up to the UC Santa Cruz campus.

If this were 1994, and we'd toured this campus back then, I might very well have been so enamored with it I'd have directed all efforts toward going there. This is one of the most gorgeous college campuses I've ever seen. Sure, any Ivy League can boast fine architecture and genteel Dover Boys leisure life. But how many of them can do it on the side of a mountain, packed into a forest?


Picture a long, long, wide hillside-- no, a bigger one. Like, three miles on a side. Most of it's wide open, just bare grassland. And it's all on an incline that would make a bike trip from the bottom to the top just too tedious to want to do every day. Picture numerous clusters of "colleges" scattered throughout this road-encircled space, each one with its own unique architectural style and its own academic discipline, comprising both residential buildings and academic facilities (one such cluster is neo-natural slant-sided post-modernism, one is neat Northwestern peak-roofed white-trimmed Colonial, one is almost Plantation-like in style-- look at this virtual tour full of QTVRs for the visual record). All the signs are spotless, all the parking lots are tucked away behind hillocks and trees. But wait-- it gets better. The entire northern, uphill half of the campus area is sown directly into the forest primeval-- the roads wind up into thick redwood groves and deeply cleft canyons, and at the top of the main entrance road, in the northwest corner, there's a five-story parking structure-- all but hidden from view in among the trees. You look around and see other large buildings, built in such a way as to not disturb the trees that are already there (presumably at great cost-- this is massive construction at the top of a large hill, at the limit of human penetration into a large redwood forest, for crying-out-loud). It's like they built a city's downtown into the middle of a State Park forest, with no detriment to either's sensibility. I thought it was breathtakingly attractive.

Since everything is so far-flung, buses travel up and down the hill all day, ferrying students from residences to academic locations and gyms and student unions and the like. And naturally, because this is a liberal university in a liberal town, the campus' sentiments beat on you like the humidity in the South. But when you're driving down the hill and you break out of the treeline and are faced with a panoramic view of the Monterey bay and the surrounding hills, it's almost enough to offset any unpleasant peer pressure towards smirking cleverness of parallelism and moral equivalence and America-loathing. By its very character-- its architecture, its placement, its views, its playful layout, its mascot (the Banana Slug)-- it embodies more that's cool about living around here than almost any number of shrill banners hung from residence-hall balconies can negate.

...Almost.

Anyway, the Boardwalk is as much fun as I remember it-- it's still freely open to the public and each individual ride operates on tickets, rather than it being a single-massive-cover-charge with a big entrance gate like so many modern theme parks. The Giant Dipper is still great fun-- built in 1924, and still a thrill even by today's standards. And the "Neptune's Kingdom" arcade is full of as many 1980s-vintage classic games as of modern favorites. You'd almost forget they're having trouble keeping the place open these days.

Why they close it at 5PM, though, I'm afraid I don't understand.

21:18 - Good God!
http://www.miltonbradley.com/games/pl/page.viewproduct/product_id.9432/dn/default.cf

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I just saw an ad for this game, which I don't believe I've ever seen before. Brand-new for the Christmas 2002 season, eh?

My question: how long will this thing last on the market before PETA raises its screeching voice against it and gets it removed?

Somehow I'm encouraged at the thought that they actually managed to create it, though, in this day and age-- that it got through all the levels of marketing and executive approval without being black-flagged. This isn't the age of Lawn Darts anymore, but still...

10:56 - Interesting if true

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Forwarded to me by a friend:

Anyone remember this?? It was 1987! At an old news video of Lt. Col.
Oliver North testifying at the Iran-Contra hearings during the Reagan
Administration, there was Ollie in front of God and country, getting the
third degree, but what he said was stunning!
Some senator was drilling him -- "Did you not recently spend close to
$60,000 for a home security system?"
Ollie replied, "Yes, I did, Sir."
The senator continued, trying to get a laugh out of the audience,
"Isn't that just a little excessive?"
"No, sir," continued Ollie.
"No? And why not?" the senator asked.
"Because the lives of my family and I were threatened, sir."
"Threatened? By whom?" the senator questioned.
"By a terrorist, sir" Ollie answered.
"Terrorist? What terrorist could possibly scare you that much?"
"His name is Osama bin Laden, sir," Ollie replied.
At this point the senator tried to repeat the name, but couldn't
pronounce it, which most people back then probably couldn't. A couple of
people laughed at the attempt. Then the senator continued --"Why are you
so afraid of this man?" the senator asked.
"Because, sir, he is the most evil person alive that I know of," Ollie
answered.
"And what do you recommend we do about him?" asked the senator.
"Well, sir, if it was up to me, I would recommend that an assassin team
be formed to eliminate him and his men from the face of the earth."
The senator disagreed with this approach, and that was all that was
shown of the clip.

By the way, that senator was Al Gore

------------------------------------------------
Also: Terrorist pilot Mohammad Atta blew up a bus in Israel in 1986.
The Israelis captured, tried and imprisoned him. As part of the Oslo
agreement with the Palestinians in 1993, Israel had to agree to release
so-called "political prisoners". However, the Israelis would not release
any with blood on their hands. The American President at the time, Bill
Clinton, and his Secretary of State, Warren Christopher, "insisted" that
all prisoners be released. Thus Mohammad Atta was freed and eventually
thanked the US by flying an airplane into Tower One of the World Trade
Center. This was reported by many of the American TV networks at the
time that the terrorists were first identified. It was censored in the US
from all later reports. If you agree that the American public must be
made aware of this fact, pass this on.

Hoax? Legit? Bizarre variation on chain letter? I don't know. Anybody have any details?


UPDATE: Fiction, and fiction. Thanks to the many who mailed.


Thursday, October 31, 2002
16:54 - Now you're talkin'.
http://www.israelnationalnews.com/news.php3?id=32749

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Via LGF and InstaPundit.

According to the Moskovski Komsomol newspaper, Russian security forces have decided to bury the terrorists from last's week's hostage siege wrapped in pig's skin. The aim is to deter potential Islamic terrorists from future attacks.

Shahidi (Jihad martyrs) believe by their nefarious acts that they ascend immediately to heaven. Using their beliefs against them, wrapping their corpses in 'unclean' pigskin prevents them from entering heaven for eternity.

At least some people understand the kind of playing field on which we're tussling. We would do well to learn from this example, particularly if the reaction is something new, something other than the age-old and feckless cycle of diplomacy from the civilized and shrieks of holy rage from the zealous. These two kinds of reactions feed off each other, because they're so mutually alien. But to fight zealotry on its own terms... now that's a novel idea.


UPDATE: Aziz has some clarifications. Well, drat.


10:47 - Electronics Recycling Porn
http://www.foxelectronics.com/webcam.htm

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Boy-- they have everything on the Web these days.


Fox Electronics, a Bay Area company specializing in the scrapping, recycling, refurbishment, and destruction of random electronic whatever-the-hell, has live webcams of its operations.

I saw this on a truck on the freeway the other day: LIVE WEBCAMS. I was sure it couldn't possibly mean what it seemed to mean. Half the truck's signage was about an electronics reclamation facility; the rest said LIVE WEBCAMS. It was like someone had just bought the truck and had only half-finished repainting the trailer walls; they still betrayed evidence of the truck's former life as... a conveyance for door-to-door Swedish masseuse delivery or something.

But no, it's actually just what it says. Live webcams... of the conveyor belts, assembly lines, warehouses, and shredder machines.

I sure hope they've registered with the proper rating agencies; I can't be held responsible for any damage to young sensibilities caused by following the link.
Wednesday, October 30, 2002
17:21 - Paying for entertainment
http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=1781196896

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Here is what has got to be the most oddball thing I've ever seen on eBay-- that doesn't, I should clarify, involve vast amounts of money or pranks or gods selling the Earth to other gods or whatever.

Go check it out-- for a laugh, or to enjoy the involved and entertaining story, or (hey!) to bid on the item in question. 'Tis the season, after all. And while you're at it, ponder the asking price, the bids (which currently hover around $5), and the idea that whether you even receive the item or not, you've paid for the story-- and you know, I'll pay five bucks for a story.

You can create a story and sell it online. But the RIAA doesn't want you selling your music there.
Tuesday, October 29, 2002
10:52 - Even the BMW stayed in the lines...

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10:03 - ...And they are illiterate
http://www.mikesilverman.com/2002_10_27_log_archive.html#85611407

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However moronic the far Left might appear to be, the far Right continues to have them beat six ways from Sunday. Even the worst of the Idiotarians, it must be said, generally exhibits a functional grasp of spelling, grammar, and logic.

Go see Mike Silverman's site for an example of the kind of thing he gets to put up with, and why it deserves no response more direct or serious than posting the whole thing for us all to see and point at and go Ha-ha!


Is it just me, or does it seem possible to write a Random Bigot Generator program for a website-- along the same lines as that Shakespearean Insult Generator thing? You specify a length and a level of vitriol, and it crams together a set of randomly selected clichés like "God made Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve" and mails it to the selected target? It shouldn't be too difficult-- and I have to imagine it's already been done, 'cause I don't know if much else can explain the lack of imagination or originality in these kinds of e-mails.
Monday, October 28, 2002
19:57 - "Because of me, they now have a warning!"

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Something I've been having to remind myself of lately is that whenever you see any disclaimer or warning on any ad anywhere on TV, in print, or anywhere, there is a lawsuit behind it. Or at least a complaint.

As my boss mentioned in passing, one of the best classic disclaimers he's seen is to pregnant women: Refrain from sexual intercourse after the water has broken. I mean, do people really have to be told these things? What, is the guy sitting there lecherously rubbing his chin, grunting, "Well, hmm-- just how frequent are those contractions, honey?"

It was with such things in my mind that I saw an ad come on TV for one of the new Transformers, which contained a disclaimer that for some odd reason I can't remember being a part of Transformers ads back in the heyday of the 80s. It said: Actual transformation time may vary.


...In other words, my brain was startled to realize, some oh-so-caring parent watched one of these ads with its trick time-lapse cappuccino-laced kid converting Optimus Prime from a truck into a command base in less than four seconds, bought it for her son, and then was confronted with the kid complaining that he couldn't transform it as fast as the kid on TV could. And (now this is the part that really gets to me) the parent, secure in her child's purity of heart and righteous indignation at the blatant false advertising of the uncaring corporation, complained to the company and got them to put up a disclaimer so future hapless moms wouldn't be entrapped so cruelly when their own time of trial came.

(Yes, I know this is all based on assumption. But if the story behind this particular case is off-base, I'd love to hear the true details. If they're in any way significantly different from what I'm guessing, I'll be very relieved indeed.)


What I want to know is, why couldn't this parent trust in her own ability to handle the kid's complaints herself? How is this any different from the Santa Claus situation? Yes, Dear, I'll get that letter in the mail to the North Pole right away! You'd think this would be an ideal time for her to impress upon the kid some concept of what reasonable humans should expect from reasonable companies selling reasonable products: Sometimes, Junior, we can't believe what we see on TV. Or at the very least: Yes, Dear, I'll handle that mean old toy company for you. Don't worry about a thing! I'll make sure they don't mislead any more innocent families like us! ... on the full understanding that the kid's enjoyment of the toy in its own right would outlast his attention span for frustration at the transformation speed, and with no actual intent to follow through on an endeavor that's both Quixotic and moronic. Wouldn't you?

And to think I thought it was bad when Barbie doll ads started foraying into CG animation, and they had to start peppering them with Dolls do not move by themselves...


UPDATE: Wouldn't I know it-- Hiker has the whole scoop on this. Ask him, and he'll also expound on the horrors of he current crop of Happy Meal Transformers-- robots in primary colors with big chunky parts, designed for kids of choking-hazard age-- as well as "Transformers Go-Bots", a name which strikes me in my sojourning-from-the-80s ignorance as a juxtaposition of concepts so cataclysmic as to risk creating an antimatter explosion merely by my typing them together. Oh, the things I've been missing out on...


Sunday, October 27, 2002
20:59 - Ow... I hurt...
http://216.136.200.194/auction/Oct/200210263376895213102630.jpg

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I'm not at all sure what the context of this is-- all I was sent was the URL. But regardless, a hearty belly laugh to whoever is responsible.



I know it's easy to want to mock the wannabe terrorist guys who have popped up in the past year, from Richard Reid to John Mohammed. But... they kinda seem to be setting themselves up for it, don't they? Not exactly XXX-style supersoldiers, are they?


UPDATE: Here's the context.

Saturday, October 26, 2002
23:24 - Ach-bar

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Just watching tonight's "History of Britain" episode on the History channel over burgers... it was the one that centered around Bonny Prince Charlie, the Jacobites, and the end of the Scottish warrior tradition at the hands of the British army in the mid-18th century.

It was the usual battles-and-dates-and-all-that-rot for most of the sequence. But the final few minutes were extremely eye-opening. After the Prince was exiled, the British government went about destroying Scottish nationalist culture. They forbade Scots from wearing tartans and clan colors, and from creating nationalistic art (such as portraits of the Prince-- an example of which, created after the ban, was painted in such a way that it was unrecognizable as art unless you viewed it reflected in a candlestick-- ingenious). Scottish warriors were given the opportunity to enlist in the British army and fight for the Empire.

And how did the Scots react to this heavy-handed and stifling treatment? Why, by changing the world, that's how. The Scottish warriors underwent a sudden change-- and transformed themselves into great academics and revolutionary thinkers. We got David Hume's philosophy. We got William Adam's architecture, which helped usher in the dignified austerity of classical forms. And we got Adam Smith's invisible hand-- a distinctly non-spiritual idea that uplifted personal accomplishment and innovation above the "romantic self-destruction" that Scotland had been indulging until their tartans were stripped from them. It's to this revolution that we owe everything we have in the modern world, from a government in which church is separated from state to an economic system where genius, like that of the post-warrior-culture Scotland, is rewarded.

It wasn't much of a stretch, but I couldn't help but consider these lessons as an example of what might become of the Muslim world in the aftermath of a firm and heavy takedown of Islamic fundamentalist nationalism. If Muslims long for the age when they led the world in innovation and genius, maybe they've got an opportunity coming up.

I know this is just another iteration of the "It worked in Japan" theory as propounded by Den Beste, among others; but it seemed just too clear an example to skip, and one that I don't think I've seen cited in among the invocation of Japan and Germany as examples of post-destruction-by-America success stories.
Friday, October 25, 2002
21:22 - Hey, c'mere-- wanna see a Michael Moore takedown?
http://www.rachellucas.com/archives/000102.html

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A really good one, too. I hadn't heard much about the man outside a Lileks screed and some gushing from various acolytes of his at work over Bowling for Columbine, but the letter that gets Fisked all to hell here by Rachel Lucas so richly deserves it.

Maybe because it manages to cover so many angles of the leftist landscape today, and is antibodied so efficiently by so much ready-to-hand reason and fact. Whatever the reason, I greatly enjoyed it.

13:46 - Non-Joke
http://www.bayarea.com/mld/mercurynews/news/4365595.htm

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Regarding the Moscow theater hostage situation:

The rebels have killed one hostage, a 20-year-old woman, and her body was dragged from the theater Thursday, wrapped in a black blanket. A spokesman for the Federal Security Service said she had been shot through the chest and her fingers were broken. A radio report said a female rebel killed her after she refused to stop talking on her cell phone.

This would be the perfect setup for an extremely tasteless joke, if I were willing to make it. But I'm not, so I won't.
Thursday, October 24, 2002
11:20 - I used to be with it...

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"...But then they changed what it was. Now what I'm with isn't it, and what's it seems weird and scary to me!"

Remember a few years ago, how it seemed that the bright new future of the Internet would involve seamless heterogeneity-- every computing platform would have roughly the same functionality and could interoperate natively on open standards? No matter what your OS of choice, you could plug the machine into the wall in your dorm room or cubicle and it would "just work"?

Well, technologically that's happened. But sociologically, we're moving backwards. And you can thank the hackers for that.

UC Santa Barbara, for instance, has recently instituted a new policy whereby Windows 2000 and NT are banned from the student ResNet. (A peek at the site reveals that they've already taken a lot of heat for this, and they've gamely explained the reasoning behind it as stemming from the fact that nobody administers the network but the students themselves, most of whom are no better equipped or prepared to de-Code-Red-ify and de-Nimda-ify their computers than the average home users is. Though this won't help much when the next such attack, to which XP is vulnerable, rolls around.)

Quoting Jeremy Epstein, from the RISKS digest where this was brought up:

BTW, students have to pay for a copy of WinXP. Maybe this is a fundraising effort by Microsoft... put out products that are so vulnerable that users have to spend more money to buy a less vulnerable version. "I'm sorry ma'am, but the wheels frequently fall off the 1998 model cars. We have no intention of fixing the problem. Would you like to buy a 2002 model for $20,000? By the way, you'll also need to build a new garage on your house to park it in, and a new driver's license, because the old ones aren't compatible."

So, nothing but XP for UCSB students. And meanwhile, many companies-- including my own, and Cisco (whose network was brought to a standstill by the networking stuff in XP during a beta), still prohibit XP within the corporate network. Anything but XP for such people.

And to add another bubble to the Venn diagram of platforms whose interoperability overlaps are rapidly retreating from each other like grease spots when you dump in the detergent, King's College of London University has banned UNIX and Linux from their network. In the interest of security and "network integrity".

> You may not run any Unix operating system since they can represent a serious
> risk to network integrity. Any student found running a Unix system (e.g.
> Linux) connected to the College network will have that system disconnected.

Because, see, all hackers use Linux; everybody knows that. Windows users, however, are to the last man pure as the driven snow. And all viruses and Trojans are really spread by UNIX. Never did trust them UNIX blokes, me. No balls at all.

(I suppose it goes without saying that Macs are banned too, because they're UNIX. Can't have them screwing up KCL's perfect and pure network integrity.)

Hybrid vigor, they called it. Free-enterprise competition. Survival of the fittest. What doesn't kill you makes you stronger. The "mutts" live the longest.

Whatever became of that grand vision?

10:52 - Better update my resume...

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...Because evidently someone's trying to prepare me for being Laid Off.



(Go to the site, by the way-- Odd Todd has posted a new Halloween Special. And if you haven't been following the "Laid Off" series to date, you ought to check out all four episodes that are available. Isn't it amazing how something so deliberately crude in its execution (it's clear that the guy can draw better than this if he so chooses) can be such a rich and fertile ground for new memes?)

Mep!

10:49 - The World Must Know!

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On the way in to work this morning, I saw a big pickup truck in the next lane over. In the rear window of the cab, there were some decals: "COWBOY" on the driver's side, and "COWBOY'S GIRL" on the passenger side. Aaaww, isn't that sweet.

In the center was one of those ubiquitous "Calvin pissing on some logo" stickers. He was wearing a cowboy hat. What was the object of his derision and urine? TERRORISM.

Boy, I'm sure glad we know what side of the issue COWBOY and COWBOY'S GIRL come down on.

Hmm. I wonder if the fact that I'm reacting like this means that the bumper-sticker phase of the post-9/11 era is more or less over?

10:45 - Hot Tub Weather

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For about six months of the year, Silicon Valley doesn't really have weather. From May through October, and most especially right during those endpoint months, it's hot and dry and still here in the inland valley where the onshore flow can't reach us (but where it keeps the air cool throughout the latter part of the summer). No bugs, either; so nighttimes are spent with the window standing wide open and my arm hanging down the outside wall.

Then there comes a day, usually in late October, when suddenly-- like the sudden palpable flow of cold air that rolls over you when you're camping out, late in the evening, that says "Hi, I'm the air. Nighttime tickover has occurred; I'm going to be cold now"--suddenly the whole region freezes right up. The windows close; the waterbed heater comes on; and I have to stop wearing shorts to work.

That day was yesterday. It was chilly again this morning, so it looks like we're in for the season of interesting cloud patterns and rain sculptures in the skies, and ski season will be upon us soon.

God, I love this place.
Wednesday, October 23, 2002
18:47 - Flame Warriors Roster
http://www.winternet.com/~mikelr/flame1.html

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I don't know if this is something that's been around forever and I only just now stumbled across it, but it seems to be one of those rare memes that betrays a true, deep, genuine talent behind it. Mike Reed, the guy behind this exhaustive listing of characters we all know and loathe, has as much skill with caricature as with humor.

I sort of suspect this project has been a long time a-building, but that's one of the things about the Net-- whether you're talking about Usenet, IRC, web-based forums, or comment boards attached to blogs or news sites, the sociology of the participants is pretty much a constant.

It's a great piece of work to self-consciously click through if you've got about an hour to fling to the wind.
Monday, October 21, 2002
20:41 - That's what I was looking for...
http://cgi.argusleader.com/cgi-bin/techwrapper.pl?URL=http://www.gannettonline.com/e

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I said I had no flippin' clue what to say about Steel Battalion; fortunately, though, Marcus is better equipped:

The top 5 things to say about "Steel Battalion"

5) We didn't think the system pack-in controller was big enough.
4) And you thought Dance Dance Revolution had a weird controller.
3) Think of all the money you save not having a game library like the PS2's!
2) If some of the buttons aren't working right, we'll have a patch out quickly.

1) A fool and his money are soon parted.


19:35 - Pretty good day for comics
http://www.herdthinners.com/2002/1021.html

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19:24 - It's like he looked right into my liiiife!
http://www.doonesbury.com/strip/dailydose/index.cfm?uc_full_date=20021021&uc_daction

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Friday, October 18, 2002
22:27 - A new power rises in the North
http://www.livejournal.com/talkread.bml?journal=entropicana&itemid=1463

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Evidently the Dark Lord himself has gone into real estate, and now Hiker's apartment building has fallen under the shadow of Barad-dûr.

Apparently Sauron goes in for a salmon-pink ensemble these days.

Wednesday, October 16, 2002
12:25 - Laugh

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It's been said that the truest sign of a healthy and strong group of people is its ability to laugh at itself.

Blaxploitation films. Queer jokes told by gay people. The Sopranos. All of them are the result of groups who have fought for-- and won-- their legitimacy, their right to contribute to society on their own terms. The ability to relax one's grip on the issues involved with being a minority is the best sign that those issues have dissolved, or are at least in the process of doing so.

And reading the last few days' worth of coverage of the Bali aftermath on Tim Blair's site, it seems clear to me that Australia is a nation that knows better than any how to laugh at itself. Seeing it thrust into this kind of situation through such an atrocity, and forced to confront evil on this scale, just makes it all the more wrenching-- like the Tolkienian image of the Shire becoming a war zone.

On the way to work this morning, it occurred to me that one thing I simply haven't seen at any time, anywhere in the world, is evidence of Islam not taking itself so bloody seriously. I mean, I'm not trying to defend other religions here in opposition to it, but... do you realize how much we mock Christianity, here in the US, the nation that's supposedly the monstrous oppressive bastion of Christendom in the world? We publish Vertigo comics and online strips in which God is a petty, conniving, selfish bastard-- and The Simpsons' take is a Heaven where Ben Franklin plays shuffleboard with Jimi Hendrix, and God give people canker sores in retaliation for being annoying, before swooping away to appear in a tortilla in Mexico. And Judaism? Jewish comedians whose acts center on mockery of their own religion have become almost a cliché. And one of my Hindu co-workers has tongue-in-cheekily named his test-network endpoint servers after Ganesha and Shiva and Vishnu.

The Simpsons writers know not to be directly and blatantly offensive with what religious satire they present, but they keep returning to the subject over and over again. And the American public eats it up-- and aside from a wacky lunatic fringe who decries eating shellfish and voting as being contrary to God, let alone the Satanic images that flicker on TV, regardless of what they portray-- this nation's religious majority tolerate this constant mockery with a tired smile.

So where is the Islamic equivalent of these social phenomena? Where is the self-referential humor? Where is there the approachable face of Islam that the world is supposed to find non-threatening? When the majority of what we see-- not just in al-Jazeera tapes or al Qaeda statements, but in the everyday discourse of regular people on the Internet-- is of a religion that takes itself so seriously as to consider itself perfect and infallible, without even the possibility of self-effacing parody, well-- I think it's not much of a stretch to see why Western culture has a hard time relating to it. If there's a crisis of intolerance post-9/11, if there's concern that Americans and Brits and Australians simply don't "get" Islam (and therefore that's why they're getting blown up in nightclubs), then is it fair to say that this is one of those intractable differences between the two sides-- a difference that just won't resolve itself on its own?

Every religion is convinced of its own divine truth. (That fact, and the sheer number of religions in the world which all claim to have their own irrefutable and exclusive legitimacy, is enough to convince me that none of them are right.) But I'm hoping that we start seeing something in the very near future that convinces us of what many of us are trying hard to believe: that followers of Islam are just as capable of laughing at themselves, and therefore just as human, as those minority groups who have learned how to succeed in the modern world. Let's have a Muslim Yakov Smirnoff, or a Muslim Ellen DeGeneres, or a Muslim Chris Rock. Something to put on Comedy Central after South Park and show everybody what the real face of modern, tolerant Islam is all about. Show everybody that the fundamentalists really are on the fringe.

It should be possible.

Right?
Tuesday, October 15, 2002
02:09 - Mr. X? ...Do I cross the final frontier?
http://www.mikesilverman.com/log.html

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One of the best things that's come out of the link that Lileks bestowed on me on Monday is all the people who have dropped in and said hi, many of whom have their own blogs that I've been checking out in due course. I've been hearing a lot of kind words on everything from my writing style to my taste in psychotic animated cartoons. My head's still spinning, but in a good way, I think. Thanks, everybody.

One such blog, by the way, is Mike Silverman, who's got a number of flattering things of his own to say, and a fine blog to put them in.

Funnily enough, something he said in this same post got me thinking, especially in light of tonight's Simpsons episode, the one from several years ago in which Homer moonlights as an Internet gossip columnist by the name of Mr. X, exposing scandals and shady dealings that the mainstream news is too cowardly or too incompetent to cover properly.

As a side note, finding blogs like this is one of the neatest things about the 'blogosphere' -- it kind of reminds me of the early days of the web, back in 1994 and 1995, when the web was new and exciting, and surfing around looking at people's individual home pages was a lot of fun. You'd go from home page to home page, reading people's opinions, links to their favorite things, maybe a picture or two, and you really got a taste of that person's personality. Most of that early spirit of the web appeared to be long gone, but with the expansion of blogging, I hink it has simply evolved into a new form. Blogging, by its very nature is personal. People's personalities and opinions are what make any blog worth reading. James Lileks said that reading a few of one's favorite blogs is like sitting in a coffee shop with a bunch of smart and interesting friends. Exactly!

...Or, as Lance sneeringly quotes Fritz the Cat, "A bunch of goddamned intellectuals sitting around trying to out-intellectual a bunch of other goddamned intellectuals with their thumbs up their ass." Depends who you ask, I guess.

If you asked Kent Brockman, he would have said that opinions should be left to professional licensed newsmen on TV, not some yahoo with a dancing Jeebus on his web page.

Sure, there's still plenty of Geocities-itis out there on the net. But Mike's right-- blogs have raised the bar, lifting the personal voice back up above the noise that it had almost drowned in. That's what I find interesting about the Internet; it's got no inherent structure of its own, and so it will develop its own architecture just through the act of living and growing. Networks will form of their own accord. Codes of conduct will congeal. Communities will form and split and merge and fork and re-form. And the technologies and the tools will keep evolving, without any limit to their usefulness as long as the interconnected substrate is there.

Whether it feels more like a college coffee shop or a Borg cube is subject to debate. I suspect the jury will remain out for some time yet.

00:51 - Don't read this just before bed
http://www.e-sheep.com/apocamon/

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Seriously. Not a good idea.

Blame Makali for this one.
Monday, October 14, 2002
19:20 - ...The hell was that?

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It's been about an hour since the sun went down. But not in the upper atmosphere, where this evidently just happened:



It came from the south, most likely Vandenburg AFB, where they've got five of these missile tests scheduled. this one certainly looked funky, though. (The first picture was right after it apparently was disarmed; while I was still focusing my camera, it changed from a bright point to the diffuse blotch you can see in the photo.)

Still waiting to see something on the local news about it... looked awfully cool, though.



UPDATE: I still haven't seen any official reports on the news, but Paul sends me this:

http://www.estripes.com/article.asp?section=104&article=10999


Ain't the Internet grand?


Sunday, October 13, 2002
00:56 - View from the Skyline

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So today was the first weekend day in three weeks that I had all to myself; yesterday I finished all the AR chapters that I had pending in my queue, and so today I decided to just lay around and do nothing all day-- maybe go see Spirited Away again later in the evening. Nothing with any kind of tight schedule or anything. Nothing outdoors, certainly.

Around about 5:00, though, I realized that sitting inside on the first day that I had the chance to not sit inside just seemed... I dunno. Wrong, somehow. Now, let me first clarify that I'm I'm not one of those health weirdos who insists on setting some kind of bizarre physical example by insisting that all those around me run around in circles in the hot sun all summer just so they can tell they're alive, even if just from the pain and the sweat. I like a good squash game, and I'd still be riding my bike to work every day if we still lived anywhere near work. But today, for some reason-- I don't know if it was the fact that the rest of the world seems to have suddenly exploded in a hundred different places at once, or that I'd just the other day managed to resurrect the battery of my iPod (tip of the day for iPod owners: if the battery stops being able to hold a charge, pry off the back with an Exacto knife, peel off the battery, and unplug it for a few hours; it'll be good as new when you plug it back in), or that I'd just started the export process on a half-hour Invader Zim episode that was going to tie up my computer for about the next ninety minutes. Whatever it was, I decided that being indoors was a fairly unappealing thing.


So I threw on some sandals and struck out towards the hills behind the house. The big wide streets that lead southeastward and up into the foothills seem about five times too wide for any kind of usefulness; my house is right on the boundary zone between older 80s-style housing full of multicultural families and trench-warfare software engineers, and the brand-new hillside estates with the long sloping lawns and white trellises and panoramic views and Lexus SUVs bought by people who made their millions in those halcyon pre-crash days. ("Mansionland," as Carmine from Zorak's throat would call it.) And now the real-estate signs in those front lawns cluster like the mailboxes would if they weren't sculpted into elegant brick and stucco pillars instead of fixed to wood pickets.


Walking past those houses, gaining elevation as the wide and empty boulevard wound its way through the slopes, listening to Daft Punk and William Orbit and Alan Menken music as served up from my leathern hip-flask, I couldn't help but wonder if there was anybody in the valley who had managed to time the market's writhings with sufficient aplomb as to be in the market to move into one of those hillside homes, like the carney family squatting in the Simpsons' house; biding their time in the lower rings of Minas Troney, putting their trash out at the sidewalk with the rest of the white-collar chumps, just waiting until their chance to cash out what stocks haven't lost value and emerge as the next wave of technoveau riche, waving to the previous generation of startled stock-market surfers on their bewildered way down: Hi guys! U EARNING: BAD! And perching on the upstairs decks of those houses in their gated communities with names like "Ponderosa Ridge" and "Bel Air Hills" and "The Meadowlands", gazing out across Silicon Valley from the squat skyline of San Jose to the string of lights on the quarry above Cupertino in the distance, taking a lungful of high-altitude rarefied rich-people air, and thinking, Okay... so, uh... what's on TV?



It's just another valley now, they say. It's no longer the playground and Mecca of nerdkind; it's just another place with Taco Bells and water parks and street crime and Apple Stores. It's nothing special.

Yeah... sure. Whatever you say.

I went on past the yuppie shopping center, with its Cosentino's instead of a Safeway, and on a whim turned left where the sidewalk veered away from Farnsworth where it wound through the canyon to the next valley up. The canyons here and the landscaping and the natural vegetation make it a place of palm trees, ground-cover bushes, little trees that are still trained along sticks and surrounded by cylinders of chicken wire, and wide swaths of cedar chips in the empty spaces. I swear, these bushes have little lamps inside them to illuminate their interiors. Just in the middle of the blocks, if "blocks" is the word. The sidewalk flew up the side of the hills above the road itself, winding between the manicured bushes, wide and smooth and paved like a nature trail for the rich. (The fence at the top of the hill, on the near side of the line of view houses, had a gate in it-- accessible only to people who leave Farnsworth, climb the sharply angled and curvaceous foot/bike path a couple hundred feet up the hill, and turn aside from the trail where a side path led to the fence.) Turning back from the highest point of the trail's serpentine ... uh, path, I could see all the way across the valley again; by that time, it was completely dark, and I had to use the backlight on my iPod to tell what the hell the name of the Angelique Kidjo song it had burped up the white earbud cords to me was. It also meant the houses in the canyon across from me-- in which I'm told most of the San Jose Sharks live-- showed up as curvy Eastern dragons of light below my vantage point.

I could get used to living up here, I thought. I wonder if any of these houses have dipped under a million bucks yet?

Probably not. But a guy can dream, can't he?

It was another hour before I got back home; my chosen route was circuitous and mostly darkened, and by the time I had found my way back to Nieman and its superfluous extra nineteen lanes, I was reeeeally wishing I'd put on some shoes. Sandals suck for extemporaneous five-mile hikes through the hills.

But now Sealab 2021 is on. And something one of the seals being pursued by sharks just said seems quite appropriate: Oh crap oh crap oh crap ohhh crap on a crap cracker!


Yeah-- sorry, just getting some incoherence out of my system, by way of shaking out the lead from the foregoing two or three weeks of inability to even get near this ol' blog. My attention span is going to need a bit of whupping back into shape.

Hot damn! O Canada is back on the Sunday night schedule. Oh, how do I love thee, Cartoon Network.

And they're showing The Big Snit. Oh, Lor bless you, Messrs. Lazzo and Crofford!
Saturday, October 12, 2002
00:02 - I'm Kevin Nealon, and that's news to me...
http://www.livejournal.com/talkread.bml?journal=welcomerain&itemid=92881#cutid1

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This is some gooood stuff.

13:30 - InstaMeme

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I've noticed that over the past several days, Glenn Reynolds has been reporting (with many a "Heh") on the existence of some of the Internet underground's most beloved memes.

He's found HomeStarRunner, home of Strong Bad. He's found Seanbaby. He's commented on SpongeBob's sexuality. He's even linked to Sluggy when it's salient.

How long before we see quotes like "Elf up!" and "Hatten är din" popping up in his sidebar?

Keep 'em coming, Glenn.
Wednesday, October 9, 2002
00:33 - I'm trying...

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..."Our patience!" Yeah, I know.

It's a lean time for blogging right now. I just haven't been able to devote any time to this lately. It's the same old excuses, I guess-- or possibly new ones, because it's never been quite this bad, not all at once.

Covering author review for two books simultaneously, on all kinds of chapters that I hadn't originally signed on to do, has taken its toll on my weekends. Specifically, it means I've had to spend literally twelve hours each day-- each of the past two weekends-- in at work, where there's a copy of Word, from noon until after midnight, editing and reworking and arguing in embedded comments. Some chapters are taking me upwards of four hours each. And this is just the review part; this is where I'm supposed to just be rubber-stamping minor changes, not spending more time than I spent on the original writing. It'd be fine if it weren't the case that, oh, for instance, every piece of software I'd covered, from Sendmail to Tripwire, had completely changed in its implementation between the time I'd originally submitted the chapters and the time I got it back for quick-turnaround AR. Sendmail now runs two parallel queues, with an outgoing client mqueue in addition to the incoming server mqueue. Gee, thanks a lot, guys.

So there's that. But why can't I just do these things after work, like I was doing two weeks ago? Why can't I just stay in for a few extra hours after the day's machinations are done, and come home exhausted but triumphant at about 9 or 10? Well, because two weeks ago we weren't taking on more concurrent simultaneous projects with such bizarrely tight deadlines as team goals than we'd ever taken to date. We're talking three releases-- patch, minor, then major-- within a period of six weeks, beginning to end. And factor in a crisis in transparency, in which we must bear the onus of delivering internal milestone visibility to a greater degree than ever before, using augmentations to the already insanely-complex testcase-tracking system I'd designed and that we'd been using for the past four years. Now we have both "explicit" and "implicit" test coverage, a visible "deliverables" section showing committed coverage figures and the current matching level, number of flagged must-test suites remaining, and number of testcases pending bug resolution, the latter two of which must dwindle to zero before any release. Like, say, Friday.

It's no problem writing ever more complex infrastructural tools. It's no problem testing more intensely than usual. It's a problem, though, when both always seem to happen at once. And when there are competing edicts from on high demanding that we a) write more infrastructure as investments for future testing, and b) test more intensively and shelve the infrastructure development. At the same time.

So that's, at any rate, why I'm in no mood to spend several hours writing and rewriting and wrestling with Word at the end of the day, when all's dark outside and the world comes to life for the evening.

Anyway. I shouldn't complain; mine is a dream job, one that was enviable even during the inflationary phase of the bubble, and downright criminal today when thousands of qualified people don't even have jobs in this withered hulk of an IT/QA/development job market. I couldn't ask for a more rewarding thing to do with my day. It even feels as though I'm making a real, concrete difference in the world. I get that thrill through my fingertips that tells me that the products I help shape actually affect world-shaking events, in however small or behind-the-scenes a way.

But it does mean that during the day I haven't had the time to keep on top of any of the blogs and news sites that shape my emotions throughout the day, whether negatively or positively-- much less to write anything about them. And in the evenings, all I've wanted to do lately is watch my Simpsons DVDs and pretend that having the directors' commentary tracks playing instead of just watching the familiar old chestnuts straight-up counts as mental activity. (Hey, it's better than some things I could be doing to my time.)

I've got some things I want to write down sooner or later, but they're not time-sensitive. They can wait for real life to get out of the way.

In the meantime, if the blogging seems light here, and if anyone is perspicacious enough to have noticed anyway, that's why.

(Yeah, I know. All this just amounts to one of the ever-popular "Sorry for the silence, I've been too busy" posts. But, well, you know.)

Saturday, October 5, 2002
00:23 - I am sooo saving this...
http://home.attbi.com/~bhayes82/fark/l33t_cereal.jpg

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I don't know where this came from, but it's going into my file-away-for-future-laughage folder.

Oh, and it's Emotion Eric! Excellent! He's become a meme.

The Fark goons strike again...
Wednesday, October 2, 2002
11:39 - Urban Iconography

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There's a new building going up in downtown San Jose. I'm not quite sure what it is, but it's been under construction now for about a year, and it's almost done.

San Jose is sort of a poor excuse for a city. The largest buildings in the downtown area are no taller than about 15 stories; this is largely because the approach path to the airport comes in right over the middle of downtown. Skyscrapers wouldn't be a good thing to have there. And in any case, San Jose is a strange beast-- a theme park of a city. It's a thing of wide palm-lined boulevards, broad sidewalks, shining modern-art buildings intermingled with Conquistador architecture-- ancient arched hotels from the glory days right next to buildings like the Adobe headquarters. There are little courtyards everywhere with fun little restaurants, there are easily accessible opera houses and stage theaters, and a surface-street trolley floats along a smoothly paved side arcade where the street level is an unbroken, polished interlock of cement and brick, into which the rails seem to magically vanish once the train has passed. When leaves fall from the trees and litter the pavement, you expect a uniformed man with a nametag to scurry out from an alcove and whisk them away before the visitors have a chance to see.

And yet it almost always somehow seems deserted. Even when there's traffic on Almaden Boulevard, right down through the heart of downtown toward this new building (to which I am, by degrees, coming), it seems hushed and respectful somehow. The wide sidewalks always seem empty. Whenever I've been downtown, I've felt like I should be stopping by an information booth to see where the concession stands are, only to find it unexpectedly boarded up-- or maybe to be greeted by a grinning and cackling evil clown face, or Yubaba come to steal my name and put me to work in the spirit baths.

So I'm surprised at the amount of new construction that's going on in San Jose these days. Maybe it's still all residual fundage from dot-com fortunes that went into real estate before they shriveled up and blew away; but the cranes have been popping up to raise new edifices one after another, just in the past couple of years. To me it's felt as though it's a band of traveling construction companies, setting up shop wherever they feel like building something, hoisting up their cranes and planting jugglers and ticket-takers outside. I've felt like taking them aside and saying, "No, see, look-- this is San Jose. You want San Francisco, further up the bay." See, even the most midtown city-dwellers in Silicon Valley use the term The City-- and by it they mean San Francisco. San Jose's just an overgrown suburb, and we're still startled to find it there over our shoulders.


So there's this new building, and I'm not sure what it's for. It's butted right up against the San Jose Convention Center, a cavernous hall that hosts car shows and high-tech symposia, but whose corridors have always seemed-- surprise-- curiously empty of people, even during the most intense periods of activity. It's like everything was built about six times too large, but there was always plenty of money so nobody minded.

Approaching the building from the east, as I do every morning, it doesn't look like much. It's kind of beige, kind of drab; it looks like it can't decide whether to be a hotel or some kind of warren for bureaucrats.


But when you pass it edge-on, you notice that the westward-facing side-- the side that fronts on Almaden Boulevard-- is gently curved. And the front is completely faced with glass. The beige stonework that makes up the back face and part of the sides is wrapped around it like a cloak; from the front, this building has a symmetrical grace that looks rather bleak and dingy in the eastern light of morning, but that flares into life at sunset, when the sun ducks behind the fog rolling over the Peninsula mountains and flickers across that curved facade. I wish I had a picture of it, but we're past the season now when I'm driving home during sunset.


Fortunately, I do get to see it at night now, and what strikes me about it-- even now, before it's been opened, or even filled full of walls-- is that big three-story colonnade at the top. Four shiny pillars, fronting what appears to be a tall atrium right at the top of the building-- that's lit from within at night. I'll definitely have to get a picture of it at some point. The columns are back-lit by a soft white glow after dark; I just have to imagine what kind of palatial Monty Burns penthouse is back there, what kind of throne room someone has planted at the top of one of the tallest buildings in the capital of an empire that's in retreat.

No, I don't expect that Silicon Valley will wither and die as the entire world forsakes all technology investment and anything with the word "dot com" in it as a foolhardy fad, akin to betting corporate fortunes on the future of pet rocks. As someone said on the radio the other day, this is a New Economy-- not quite as new as we thought it was, but new nonetheless. The Internet has changed everything, but in more subtle ways than we were willing to believe-- the old rules do in fact still apply. We're just a lot freer in how we get to set up the subjects to which those rules apply.

San Jose doesn't feel deserted because everybody's leaving. It feels deserted because it's less a city than a monument, built by people who wanted to create-- who had learned how to do so under the rules of software. Put all the pieces in place and watch the program run itself. It's SimCity writ large. People go into the city and do city things, but it doesn't feel like it has any history, really. No personality. Even though San Jose as a community has existed as long as the country has, founded in the 1770s, it hasn't been until just recently that it's been built up-- and the result is artificial, like Orange County. It has no expression on its face. Not the tired grin Los Angeles flashes at visitors, not the casual wave you get from San Francisco, not the curt businesslike nod of Chicago, not the self-consciously guilty shrug of well-dressed Boston. San Jose is a lovely place to visit, a great place to relax. But it's no New York.

It takes some getting used to. But I'm liking it more and more, just for what it is, the more I see it. After all, its clean wide streets and its palm colonnades and its gleaming new buildings do make for a personality of sorts-- and the longer it's there, the richer a tradition it becomes... until San Jose ceases to be a thing of business parks and electronics superstores, and becomes a City.
Tuesday, October 1, 2002
22:33 - <blinks audibly>
http://counterspin.blogspot.com/

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Okay-- forgive me for being buried under a rock lately with nothing to keep me company but chapter upon chapter of author review, but just what in the hell is up with this Hesiod Theogeny guy?

I just skimmed the posts on his page going back through about 9/19, and almost all the content consists of him pointing a shaking finger at other bloggers and shrieking, "Look! Look at him-- he's an idiot! And this guy is stupid! And this one stopped linking to me-- what an asshole! And her-- I've never heard of her, but she must be a moron too!" He seems to spend all his time inventing imaginary grassroots Silent Majorities for the purpose of overruling opinions like Den Beste's and Lileks' and Reynolds'-- if you removed all the posts that refer to Den Beste, you'd be left with a couple of sneering references to the quote-unquote-Axis-of-Evil and the quote-unquote-War-on-Terror and an animated GIF of a candy bar wrapper fluttering in the breeze.

I mean, I don't agree with everything Den Beste says... but when he writes a researched thesis that runs to ten monospaced printed pages, I consider that a point worth respecting, if not responding to in kind, not ridiculing. Especially if the best response I could come up with to an invocation of Godwin's Law is a spurious reference to the other guy's reasoned mention of Nazi Germany as a genuine salient contention.

Why is everybody suddenly wasting valuable electrons linking to this guy?

And why are the intro sentences to his posts in a smaller font than the rest of the text?


20:56 - Come in, Falcon Seven.
http://www.denbeste.nu/cd_log_entries/2002/10/Unrestrictedrestrictions.shtml

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Via Den Beste:

Dr Blix said the inspectors would have unconditional access to all sites - but not to eight presidential palaces which are covered under a separate agreement between Iraq and UN.

All I've got to say about all this, is, doesn't Dr. Blix sound like some evil villain out of an old "Birdman" cartoon or something?

I guess it was only a matter of time before the players in this war "crossed the line from average everyday villainy to cartoonish super-villainy", as Smithers put it.

20:42 - Nucularity
http://www-csli.stanford.edu/~nunberg/nucular.html

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As an off-and-on student of linguistics and English, I find it the highlight of my week to hear another of Jeff Nunberg's editorials on Fresh Air on NPR. Almost without exception, each one is focused on some foible of the English language that he reveals to have a fascinating history, which he covers in a few concise paragraphs' worth of compelling pop-cultural references and leaves the listener feeling startled to have become so much more practically educated in just a few minutes.

Tonight was a treatise on the word nucular, particularly its popularity with Presidents dating back to Eisenhower-- though naturally it's Dubya who bears the brunt of popular derision for it these days. Nunberg starts off by making the distinction between verbal "typos" and the more psychologically interesting "thinkos", and covers pretty much the whole gamut of speculation about what goes on behind that weird word.

On the face of things, "nucular" is a typo par excellence. People sometimes talk about Bush "stumbling" over the word, as if this were the same kind of articulatory problem that turns February into "febyooary." But nuclear isn't a hard word to pronounce the way February is -- try saying each of them three times fast. Phonetically, in fact, nuclear is pretty much the same as likelier, and nobody's ever gets that one wrong. ("The first outcome was likular than the second"? ) That "nucular" pronunciation is really what linguists call a folk etymology, where the unfamiliar word nuclear is treated as if it had the same suffix as words like molecular and particular. It's the same sort of process that turns lackadaisical into "laxadaisical" and chaise longue into chaise lounge.

That accounts for Eisenhower's mispronunciation of nuclear, back at a time when the word was a new addition to ordinary people's vocabularies. And it's why Homer Simpson says it as "nucular" even today. But it doesn't explain why you still hear "nucular" from people like politicians, military people, and weapons specialists, most of whom obviously know better and have been reminded repeatedly what the correct pronunciation is. The interesting thing is that these people are perfectly capable of saying "nuclear families" or "nuclear medicine." I once asked a weapons specialist at a federal agency about this, and he told me, "Oh, I only say 'nucular' when I'm talking about nukes."

In the mouths of those people, "nucular" is a choice, not an inadvertent mistake -- a thinko, not a typo. I'm not sure exactly what they have in mind by it. Maybe it appeals to them to refer to the weapons in what seems like a folksy and familiar way, or maybe it's a question of asserting their authority -- as if to say, "We're the ones with our fingers on the button, and we'll pronounce the word however we damn well please."

This stuff is great. (I'd love to hear him take on heighth at some point.) While you're at it, if you're so inclined, read the rest of his radio columns. I'm already poking through to see which ones I've missed. This guy's every bit as educational as Bill Bryson, and almost as funny.
Thursday, September 26, 2002
22:57 - Failed Product Names

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"The Nerd Turd"



22:05 - Blog 54, where are you?

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Apologies-- my blogging, and my general presence and attention to e-mail and such, have all suffered this week; they're likely to continue to do so until I'm done with author review, which currently is keeping me after work for at least two hours each night.

Oh, but it'll be worth it-- why, just imagining the day when it's all done makes it all worthwhile. Because, see, then I won't have to do it anymore.
Tuesday, September 24, 2002
23:40 - Do Not Read This Post (under penalty of law)
http://www.ilovebacon.com/092402/l.shtml

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Here is the translation of the lyrics to an unspeakably bizarre Flash animation that made the rounds a few weeks ago. I honestly wouldn't recommend following either link, incidentally, unless you have a very healthy sense of humor regarding sex.

Which, incidentally, is something I am growing to value very highly in a culture in this day and age: a sense of humor, especially one about sex.
Saturday, September 21, 2002
22:41 - Hah! Chortle, giggle, guffaw and other such utterances

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I was listening to the ever-amusing "Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me" on NPR on the way to the store just now. Usually the hosts manage not to let their political leanings and/or cheap-shottery bleed through into the discourse. But this time, well...

Peter, the lead guy, posed one question (the obvious answer was "Bush") in which he related, in a thick Texan accent, the recent occasion where Dubya tried to recite the old "Fool me once/fool me twice" aphorism, but mangled it rather badly. He said, apparently, "Y'know, there's an old saying down around where I'm from: 'Fool me once, shame on me... fool me-- er, fool... you can't get fooled again.'"

The hosts all guffawed, as one might imagine. Peter explained how the press has been loath to gleefully broadcast Bush's malapropisms in the course of the past year, because hey, there's a war on and all. Word is that Bush's on-camera appearances have been intentionally brief, often rebroadcast only after editing, and written transcripts of his extemporaneous speeches have been cleaned of verbal flubs.

You could just hear the scorn dripping from Peter's expertly clipped and waxed voice when he smugly tried to finish up the segment as follows:

"Of course, as we all know, the actual saying is: 'Fool me once, shame on me. Fool me... er... wait...'"

The laughter that rocked the studio was louder than it had been before. As it was from inside my car. Yeah, take that, you sneering so-and-so. But the best part of all, what got the biggest belly-laugh out of everybody involved, was the next line out of Peter's mouth, delivered through a mortified, self-conscious giggle:

"I guess that just goes to show, I shouldn't criticize the Predisen--aaagh!"

15:10 - Lawyers and Computers: A Dangerous Combination
http://www.freep.com/news/locoak/checks21_20020921.htm

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You know that "Nigerian Scam Letter" thing? The one that's apparently been in circulation since the 80s, through various media, and only now becoming so much more common knowledge because of e-mail?

Well, a 59-year-old woman at a law firm in Michigan seems to have fallen for it-- big-time. Bigger-time than usual. See, she had access to her entire law firm's assets. And she drained them in order to dutifully fulfill the scam's requests (for fees, taxes, bribes, etc. that must be paid in order to secure the victim's "fee"). To the tune of $2.1 million.

If a person falls for this scam and uses his or her own money to bankrupt oneself over it, that's one thing. But if the person embezzles money from business accounts to which he or she has access, well, now they're both stupid and malicious. And all you can hope is that they haven't bred.

Now we see why it's so futile to try to educate people to not open e-mail attachments, not install every damn piece of spyware/malware that they find, to pay attention to security warnings, and so on. We'd like to think of ourselves as a society that can handle the responsibility that comes with an unfettered, unregulated, unguaranteed medium like the Internet. But the sad fact is that our society-- and that of the whole world-- is in fact full of morons, and more of them are coming online every day. Half the population, after all, has an IQ of less than 100, by definition. Up till now it's mostly been the other half, the ones with a clue, who were using computers. But you know... that was once true of the telephone and the TV.

Sooner or later someone like this-- someone intensely rich and intensely stupid-- will have something like this happen to them, and then will pull coffee-in-the-lap emotional tricks and play on the PC conscience of the public and convince everybody that it's the Internet's fault, not theirs. And you know what that means.

The free ride can't last forever. Let's enjoy it while we have it.
Thursday, September 19, 2002
02:39 - Sweet Lileks eases the pain
http://www.lileks.com/bleats/archive/02/0902/090302.html#092002

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Another of those "Day in the Life" Bleats. I'd be hard pressed to say that these are the best kind, but they're awfully choice. Mostly because I find myself relating personally to so much of it-- my brain is surprised to find that so many of those unaccountable reactions I've grown up with weren't mine alone.

When we get fully-immersive 3d holographic TV, I want someone to redo the Beethoven’s 6th portion of “Fantasia. “I loved it as a kid, and even though it now looks kitschy as hell, the style of the animation is unforgettable - to this day I still see the Pegasus fighting the wind when I hear the storm sequence.

I know it's not widely regarded as one of his best works, and it's never gotten the respect afforded to illustrious siblings like the 5th and the 9th, but the 6th has always been my favorite of Beethoven's symphonies. Purely because of Fantasia. Because the music is so visual, just like the movie said. Because I can't disassociate the music from those visuals even if I try. Because if I hear a different recording of it, by some other orchestra, where they play that one strong sharp chord sequence too fast or without enough emphasis-- the one in which the pegasi come stomping through the clouds in the first movement-- my brain makes that Family Feud "X" noise and I have to go dig out my soundtrack to hear it "right". Maybe that impoverishes my musical appreciation capacity, or maybe it just means I'm nuts. Hey, either way I'm cool with it.

Oh, and:

“I’m running Jag on a newer iBook, and while I’m on an internet connection via Airport, I periodically get an OS 9 alert that I need to enable Apple Talk. It only happens when the connection is dropped for a half-second or so.”

He nodded, thought a second, then explained how I should reset a certain setting, and that was that. (It worked.) I’ve said this before, and I’ll say it again: WALK-UP TECH SUPPORT. I pidy the foo who buys a PC at Best Buy, and goes back to ask a blue-shirt a question. I’ll bet if I dragged my 512K Mac to the Genius Bar and asked for help, they’d oblige - after they stopped cooing and petting it like a long-lost pet.

Yeah, more speed would be nice. More applications and games would be nice. But neither of those things are why Mac people buy Macs. We buy Macs in spite of a clear and demonstrable disadvantage on both counts. Why? Some things are just more valuable to us than Bonzi Buddies or four-digit frame rates. Things that-- contrary to the unflappable opinion of some-- simply aren't a part of the PC experience. Like operating systems that people come to love so much that they treat a derisive comment like they would a personal insult, and a report of a bug like they would an injured family member; stores with knowledgeable, free, walk-in tech support; and well-maintained demo computers in those stores that a two-year-old can play on without a moment's confusion. I've been in one or the other of the local Apple Stores a number of times over the past year, and on every occasion the toddler's tables were full. Never once was a single kid crying or pouting or waving for help. Never once was any of them doing anything but typing and mousing and having a good time.

...No, that's it. That's all I wanted to say; nothing terribly important. Just wanted to register my pointless "me too".
Monday, September 16, 2002
20:48 - Shut up, Brian

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What would happen if Kelsey Grammer married Tori Spelling?



(Hey, shut up, at least she wouldn't be Miss Spelling anymore...)


09:54 - 2050 History Book Illustration

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Via Tal G. and Live From Brussels:


There are certainly a lot of photos from a year ago which deserve Pulitzers; but whoever took this one gets my vote.
Sunday, September 15, 2002
16:46 - Well shut my mouth.

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Not five minutes after I posted that last entry, a member of the list sent a message through in response to the WSJ article.

"Oh good," I thought. "Finally, some condemnation."

Well, I was right: condemnation of the US. The poster wanted to make clear that the Finsbury Park gathering was a media circus that ended up conveying a very negative portrayal of what was going on in the crowd and those organizing the event. He also wanted, just by the way, to pass on and endorse a document from the event's organizer explaining how America is evil, 9/11 is all America's fault, Israel is a nation of murderers that everybody hated before 9/11 and now everyone is sympathetic to because of the evil media, etc, etc. Oh, and "Perhaps the rapid rise of Islam and Muslim converts in the West is an indication of a future under the Shariíah, where everyoneís life, wealth and honour is protected and where Muslims and non-Muslims can live side by side in under the divine justice and beauty of Islam."

Boy, that sure makes me feel a whole lot better.




Oh, by the by-- there was another post commemorating the deaths of all Muslims who died on 9/11, giving their names and telling their stories and explaining how the survivors have been subjected to a life of unjust racial profiling and prejudice ever since.

Not a word about anybody else who died that day, though.



14:32 - Radio Debut Redux
http://www.grotto11.com/pc20020508.mp3

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Well, at long last, the radio show I did on Point & Click Radio on KZYX back in May is now MP3'ed and online. (Here are the related posts from that day.) It's an hour-long show, and I haven't listened to it myself, so I don't know how much of an idiot I made of myself. But now it's public, and my idiocy belongs to the ages.

Thanks to Bob Laughton for hosting the show and for getting it archived for me!
Thursday, September 12, 2002
10:10 - Rhetorical Paralysis
http://www.tonypierce.com/blog/2002_09_08_blogarc.htm#85438971

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InstaPundit yesterday linked to this piece by Tony Pierce-- a speech "by" Bush in which he calls Osama out, WWE-style, High Noon style, American style.

Unfortunately, it has this bit:

im going to grab you with my own hands and prove to you, and to the world, that even though we are both sons of millionaire oil men, there's a difference between you and i.

you are a slimy, lying, gutless, cheap-shot artist who hides behind religion and ignorance in your sick quest to have others murder innocent people under your twisted leadership.

The trouble is that even though the author clearly tried really hard to write it so this wouldn't be possible, it's still way too easy for a reader to snort, smirk, and say, So who's saying this, anyway-- Dubya or Osama?

'Cause, like, you can apply the same statement to Bush, man. See, it's all the same.

That's the problem with finding moral clarity here. It should be so easy, considering what happened to us. If we didn't have to be so intellectual about it, if we could just react from our moral centers as dictated by our gut feelings and our hearts, we'd be able to get somewhere. And believe it or not, in this case we'd be right to do it, no matter what your ethical system. I'm not a big fan of thinking with one's guts in a general context, But for God's sake, Islamists hijacked commercial fucking jets and destroyed the two largest and most recognizable and symbolic office buildings in the world and all the people in them. I don't care what someone's personal definitions of "good" and "evil" are. It shouldn't even be necessary to decide whether 9/11 was "evil" or just "another in a long series of the same or worse perpetrated by lots of people, including the US, throughout history". None of that crap is relevant. Didn't anybody's mother tell them how "it doesn't matter who started it, what you did is wrong"?

But looking at passages like the one above, it's just too compelling to educated people-- or just those who think they're too clever for their shirt-- to twist the words around and apply them in new and deliciously ironic ways. Look, if you apply this filter to the statement, suddenly it becomes a clear condemnation of all US policy in the world at large since the War of 1812! That kind of thing is what college English and Literature classes are about. It's all about finding new angles on the same old crap, about interpreting things in new and exciting ways, and about writing papers about these observations that shakes up the academic community and makes a name for oneself.

It's just so tempting to look at 9/11 and see it as an awesome opportunity to show how un-sheep-like one is. "I don't subscribe to your traditionalist views of 'good' and 'evil'. I see this whole event in a way that you visceral, reptilian demagogues stuck in the 1940s just can't grasp." As a recent college grad myself, and as someone who tries to write his thoughts down on a fairly regular basis and make them be at least a little bit unique, believe me-- I know that feeling.

The following is going to be my personal justification and mandate for the War on Terror, and I suspect it's one of the shortest such around:

You want to talk about "root causes"? The biggest root cause of 9/11 is that the terrorists thought they could get away with it. They thought they had a real chance at realizing their sick fantasy of a goal. The only way to address this root cause is to show them that they cannot get away with it. A spanking. The rest will follow.


Our mission is clearer now than it's been since WWII-- possibly ever in history. This is a bigger war, conceptually, than fighting fascism ever was. This is war against theocracy. One of the oldest concepts on the planet.

We need to can the bullshit, pull on our wading boots, and start getting our hands dirty. Raising martinis on the lanai wearing dinner jackets and fezzes doesn't help one bit.

The war is real. Get used to it.

09:25 - From the mouths of comic artists...
http://www.kevinandkell.com/2002/kk0911.html

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A lot of comics yesterday (of both the online and the traditional variety, though there aren't many left that are exclusively paper-based) featured commemorative 9/11 strips. Many were tasteful, but a lot more were sarcastic, petulant, eye-rolling pieces of root-causing moral-equivalencing self-blaming negativity. Yeah, thanks, guys <coughBoondockscough>. We sure needed that.

Fortunately, though, there were good ones. The best one I think I saw was Kevin & Kell:



Yeah. That's the stuff.
Wednesday, September 11, 2002
19:33 - Can't... see straight...

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The Ar-Rahman list came the hell alive today.

A day of remembrance has been called for those who died in the September 11th 2001 attacks and will be marked by a minutes silence. It is clear from this that the Western Capitalist states only remember the deaths of their own citizens whilst they ignore the hundreds of thousands killed by their hands. Indeed, it seems they have even colonised human sympathy.

Who will remember the 200,000 people killed by America when it dropped Nuclear bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945? Who will remember the 200,000 people killed in 1991 during the 'Desert' Storm' campaign spearheaded by the US against Iraq? Who will remember the innocent civilians bombed in Afghanistan? Who will remember the tens of thousands killed by US corporate greed in Bhopal? Who will stand silent for the thousands of babies that have died at the hands of America in Iraq?

If we were to stand in silence for all the victims of Capitalism then we would never sit down again!

Muslims have a responsibility not to blindly follow the practices of the Capitalist West but rather to be at the forefront of exposing the contradictions of the Capitalist ideology and its colonialist worldview.

I can't say anything. I couldn't. I'm too angry.

its true how is Islam is being tarnished by false media reports ... one thing about islam, its perfect .. one should get this straight that if some one can critisize islam then he or she doesnot know about it .. islam is uncriticizable if learnt to the max or atleast understood ...

One should remeber that man is a individual .. on theday of judgement every one will be judged as individual and not a group ... The deeds count and islam does not support any thing wrong .. to summarize islam in few forward i would say EVERYTHING GOOD IS ISLAM

if a man is judged by the religion .. then what kidn of religion does support men like hitler , julius ceaser, alexzander, the romans in general, the vikibngs and napolean bonepart.. if we see things straight we will find that there were no muslims like napolean and hitler ever in the history ...

... No, still can't manage it...

Where Indonesia is concerned, it is a country
plagued with the american curse. a country forced
to accept debt from the world bank and
consequenty its downfall. plz do remember that
any country in the world that accepted loans from
the world bank has only seen its downfall, never
progress. world bank, by giving loans, enters
into the political scene of the country,
squeezing as much out for the american cause as
possible not caring about the lives of the
millions it destroys. if i, as a person, face soo
much lack of concern from someone else, i really
doubt that id feel any obligation to be nice to
them - if only for humanity. no i do not advocate
revenge but when world bank doesnt show humanity
neither does indonesia.

Let us not forget the innumerable hate crimes,
burnt mosques etc in America during the post sept
11 period. Where America advocates democracy,
sept 11 is all but farceness and greed in the
name of democracy! Afghan has oil so lets
advocate democracy there... where was this
democracy when rawanda was dying of hunger and
starvation? where is the democracy for the
starving, AIDS infested african countries? Name
me one afghani involved in the plane crash. all
names mentioned were saudi... so y afghanistan?
aboive all, the first three lists of people dead
in the aircraft sept 11 aircrafts had not ONE
saudi names. moreover, the cnn website for the
longest time carried a banner on the top
apologizing for the misprinting of names. some of
the names mentioned in the list were found to be
survivors having moved bak to saudi 4-5 years
ago. one of the names mentioned was a 7 year old
child! Studies in the last two days show that the
pentagon attacks were through american misslies.
numerous articles and pictures prove such.
try visiting these sites:
http://www.asile.org/citoyens/numero13/pentagone/erreurs_en.htm
http://www.ummahnews.com/viewarticle.php?sid=4195

It's just not coming to me...

Why the entire world is waging war? u ask
yourself this. go bak in time to the ottoman
empire and even before that. the time of Mohammed
(peace be upon him) was the time where the world
prospered the greatest. all atronomical,
numerical discoveries go bak to this age through
muslim scientists. all the theories of light and
vision u study in physics today, were discovered
by musli scientists. Ibn Batoota, a muslim
traveller covered 7 times as much as his
contemporary Marco polo. Islam is not a religion
limited to sunday (friday in our case) practices.
its a whole way of life. it is a system not only
outlining our religious obligations but our
social and political practices too. This
threatens america because our system is against
capitalism which is based on non existent money.
we consider that cheating people - remember the
stock market crashes across the world? remeber
the artificially caused one in 1997 which
throttled indonesia and malaysia? our system, if
practiced, doesnt cheat people. remember that our
political leaders in most muslim coutries are
american puppets. if they were to follow islam
instead of america.. wat u see today wouldnt be!
and sitting in america u dont see american
hypocricy... try getting a a channel like al
jazeera to tell the brutal masacres in palestine,
afghanistan, kashmir etc by america! ull be
astonished!



<hyperventilate> <hyperventilate> <hyperventilate>

No, words just won't work. Not today.

Wait, I've got one:

Care for a cigarette, you odious, insufferable hypocrites?

10:58 - Where do they get these people?

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Maybe I shouldn't have been listening to NPR on the way in to work today.

On Forum, the discussion featured in place of prominence an Arnold Zinn, professor of God-knows-what, speaking in that kind of infuriatingly calm and knowing and smug way about how all of our reaction since 9/11 has been entirely inappropriate. Our attack on Afghanistan was "blind" and "stupid", Prof. Zinn said, and it was an entirely "arbitrary" action: We got attacked by people from Saudi Arabia and Egypt, but we went and killed people in Afghanistan. Like we just pulled that target out of our ass, like we had some existing agenda there and were just looking for an excuse to go kill Afghan civilians. It could have been North Koreans launching missiles over Alaska, and we still would have gone on our murderous rampage in Afghanistan, apparently. See, the only people responsible for the 9/11 attacks were those 19 hijackers. Everybody else is innocent, because they didn't do anything, see? Attacking Aghanistan accomplished nothing-- nothing at all-- except deepening anti-American hatred in the world and killing a lot of civilians. It didn't disrupt terrorism in the slightest.

I guess all those al Qaeda corpses in Tora Bora count as "civilians", or maybe "freedom fighters", because they certainly hadn't taken part in any anti-American activities. Not until we brutally attacked them, out of the blue.

According to this guy, it's a good thing that the Taliban fell, that the women were liberated, that they have schools and medicine and music and barbershops now that the Taliban are gone. But, said he, it's all rendered a fatal failure because we did it through military action. Bombing places around the world, throwing our military weight around, being a bullying imperialist nation-- that's what causes terrorism. We should stop all that flying around the world for fun and just bombing the shit out of any old place we feel like, just for target practice. That's got to stop, man! We must become a humanitarian nation, giving food and medicine to the poor all over the world! Then nobody will hate us!

Fortunately, his opponent was a Howard Bikeman (?), whose strident shrieks of disbelief were a very welcome thing to hear. When he asked incredulously whether Zinn condoned the Taliban, or whether he thought there was any better model out there for a democracy than the US (with all its flaws), or whether the governments of Saudi Arabia and Egypt actively support and promote and harbor terrorism like the Taliban did, whether we should have stood back and allowed Hitler and Tojo to march all over us while we rolled over on our backs and peed on ourselves, Zinn stuttered and scrambled and tried to change the subject and reiterate his stupid points. I think Zinn came out of the discussion looking like a complete ass. As well he should have. He sat there on 9/11 and told a nation full of listeners how we were entirely wrong to go and oust the Taliban, how our obviously deliberate bombing of civilians in Afghanistan was every bit as reprehensible and unwarranted as the 9/11 attacks themselves.

The callers were equally stupid. One woman shrieked about the 9/11/73 thing in Chile. Another guy said that in ten years, we won't consider 9/11 to be any more than a footnote in history-- it'll be entirely forgotten. And another guy said that "We won't get behind a war in Iraq because we don't have George Washington, we have George Bush. And Bush wasn't even there! We don't even know where he was a year ago today! He knew this was going to happen!" Er, guy, we did know where Bush was on 9/11/01. He was at a school, talking at some event or other. We have photos of his aides coming up to him and whispering in his ear that "another plane just hit the other tower". We saw the expression on his face. We saw how terrified he looked when he addressed the nation that day at noon.

Goddamned conspiracy theorists. Except now they're on the other side of the political spectrum.

At least the US flags and banners are back up on the freeway overpasses today. Not quite in the same way that they were a year ago, but in a symbolic, evocative kind of way. Remember when we did this before? Remember how we felt?


Yeah, I'm glad somebody does.

09:26 - True Colors
http://www.samizdata.net/blog/archives/001943.html

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I wonder whether this is happening in France or Germany or Canada or Belgium?

Probably it is. But the degree of it is the question-- how spontaneous is it? How heartfelt? How unalloyed by suffixes of "But you have to understand..."?

I remember speeches coming out of Canada a year ago to the effect that Canada was standing by us at this time of need, and I remember Glenn Reynolds saying "When the chips are down, you learn who you can count on. I won't forget this." Britain has certainly shown the same spirit now, a year later, now that the morality is a lot more muddled. I'd be curious to know what everybody else is doing... or if it's just Britain.

Michael Drout posts this in the comments on the linked article:

"Between us there can be no word of giving or taking, nor of reward; for we are brethren... and never has any league of peoples been more blessed, so that neither has ever failed the other, nor shall fail."

--J.R.R. Tolkien

Now that's interestingly apt.
Tuesday, September 10, 2002
22:32 - Just a guess
http://www.lileks.com/bleats/archive/02/0902/091102.html#091102

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I don't know what I'm basing this on, but I suspect I'm not far off in thinking that Lileks' 9/11/2002 post is probably the most anticipated thing in the blogosphere. We know it's going to be art, but we don't know quite what form it will take. We know it will be poignant but reassuring, grim but in a steely kind of way, and run through with references to Jasperwood that can so easily be replaced with any reader's home address.

And so it is. It's posted now, and I suspect ol' James will have a hell of a bandwidth bill to pay come the end of the month.

Tip-jar the man.

21:28 - What am I doing here?

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It feels like I should write something for the occasion, considering what day it is and all. Everybody's doin' it. In fact, I even had a post earlier today that I was working on, but I stepped back halfway through, concluded that it was too sappy and derivative and brought nothing original to the table, and I closed down the browser window without another thought.

It's not that I'm unemotional about 9/11. Really, I'm not. I'm not one of those people who thinks we should all just "move on", like it was an earthquake or a hurricane or something-- a terrible disaster that killed a lot of people, but it's nobody's fault, really, except maybe our own, and so we'd best just pick up the pieces and maybe don't build in a floodplain next time. No, that's not me.

I guess what makes me a little uneasy-- and, simply, not in a writing mood lately-- well, except for the obvious, which is that I've been doing nothing but writing for the past two weeks, and in a not-for-fun kind of context, and I'm not out of the woods yet-- is that I don't feel like 9/11 is a blogging kind of "thing" for me. It just doesn't feel right. I wasn't writing last September. I didn't start until late December, when I had a Lileks column to tell me what blogs were and a Peter Jackson movie to babble inanely about. A year ago I wasn't posting my thoughts as events unfolded. I was watching the news, reloading cnn.com, fitfully trying to develop some database code for features that I knew still had due dates, ICQing grimly with friends, trying to keep some kind of lightness to the situation: "You know what this means? The guy selling Klau Khalash is dead."

I wasn't among those who had been writing personal columns since before there was TCP/IP. I wasn't even one of those who furiously started blogging on 9/12. On September 10th last year, on my way home from work, I stopped by Fry's and bought a PlayStation 2. I'd set it up that night, played Gran Turismo 3 for a couple of hours, and then I went to sleep. When I woke up next, everything having happened on Eastern Time and therefore before I woke up, glancing over at the PS2 told me that no matter how hard I tried, I'd never really be able to enjoy it properly, and so I got rid of it a few months later. I still have the receipt for it, though, with it's 9/10/2001 date stamp. One of those things I'll probably never have occasion to look at again, but I know it's in my receipts drawer somewhere, and that's the extent of my nostalgia for the Halcyon Days. I'm not one to weep for those things that are forever lost. I do believe in moving on, but not because I have no sensibility to what we're moving on from.

So I don't feel right about writing about 9/11 specifically, not now, not tomorrow. I'd feel too much like an outsider who comes in after the fact and tells everybody what they're doing wrong. I'd feel like the "efficiency expert" that the pointy-haired boss hires to come into the company to interview everybody and find out who can safely be fired without shooting up the place. I figure other people are already doing the event justice far better than I could.

I'll stay on the sidelines tomorrow, I think. It's what I was doing then, and if I'm going to try to commemorate what life was like last September 10th, maybe that's the best I can do.

"Blog, or the terrorists win!" At least we're not hearing that kind of crap anymore.

10:00 - <pant pant pant>

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Last night, around 3AM, I finally finished proofing the new Databases chapter and touching up the illustration sketches, zipped them up, and shipped them off to the editor. Then I collapsed unceremoniously into bed.

This chapter took 26 hours to write this weekend, and another three to finish properly last night. (Though that wasn't the only reason I wasn't blogging-- a friend and I watched We Were Soldiers, a film we found oddly forgettable, with a confusing tactic about the usual war-movie clichés, which Randall Wallace decided to play out to the hilt rather than try to avoid even in the slightest-- we couldn't figure out whether this was intentional and ironic, or just inept. Great Lieutenant-Colonel character, though.)

So this morning I'm going to celebrate the wrapping-up of the late-evening season, which I've taken advantage of far too little this summer, by motorcycling in to work.

And I'll download iCal when I get there.
Sunday, September 8, 2002
03:01 - Best... Engrish.. Ever
http://www.anotherboutique.com/articles/art00008.html

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"Lade up with briefness, administer upwith placet not briefness oh"

My oh my. I've just been sent this link, which contains some of the best (read: worst) badly translated English I have ever yet seen. It's so bad that it leaves most of engrish.com in the dust. In fact, I'm not so sure it's "translated" at all-- this stuff has the sound of text that's been pulled at random out of a third-rate thesaurus and transliterated by someone who's never quite learned what the space bar is for, purely for the purpose of getting something that looks like English onto a product box. Because, y'know, English sells stuff.

Like this children's keychain/light thingy. And more specifically, the packaging wrapped around it. It's a work of art, I tell you. I've never seen anything quite like it. And I've seen quite a lot of this sort of thing. The only other Engrish of this caliber that I've ever run across was deliberately created as parody, and even it wasn't as stupefyingly luscious as this little glowing Korean gem.
In green text - middle of card

"Beamof light placet throw light on lock hole !!
Smallness genius too lustronsly!!"

In blue text - printed over middle of the key

"On accont of shape either thickneessk of set measures to, share key unpowered stow down."

In green text - printed at bottom of key

"Whenas key unpowered stow down chron May, forcompany commonness key-holp wield"

Believe me when I say that this is just the beginning. It only gets better from here. Go. Go and read it now. And stow down with nether pastern! D'you hear me?!
Friday, September 6, 2002
15:47 - The Isotopes are moving to Albuquerque!
http://www.cnn.com/2002/SHOWBIZ/TV/09/06/offbeat.television.simpsons.reut/index.html

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Lookee here! A Triple-A minor-league team from Calgary is moving to Albuquerque, and it's going to rename itself the "Isotopes" in a nod to the "Hungry Hungry Homer" episode in which the Simpsons' favorite team planned to abandon Springfield.

Although a local newspaper poll showed strong support for the Isotopes name, the mayor of Albuquerque was not amused.

"This isn't a second-rate city that should be taking our name from a cartoon show," Mayor Marin Chavez told reporters upon hearing the name for the new local team.

Oh, lighten up, you humorless assmunch. Baseball needs some humor these days, and some reminder that it's supposed to be about fun. If the fans want to merge their memes for the sake of more enjoyment of what's supposed to be a pleasant pastime, stay the hell out of the way.

Besides, I don't recall Anaheim being so huffy about adopting a beloved (?) fictitious team name.
Sunday, September 1, 2002
00:14 - Fanatical Muslims Discover the Earth is Round

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I'm honestly not trying to mock indiscriminately, here. But... well, possibly the less said the better.

'AZAAN' - AN AMAZING DISCOVERY
Azaan: An incredible medium for the proclamation of Tawheed of Almighty Allah and Risaalat of Prophet Muhammad Sallallahu Alayhi Wasallam, the sound of which constantly echoes around the globe.

Amazing though it sounds, but fortunately for the Muslims of the world, it is an established fact. Have a look at a map of the world and you will find Indonesia (an Islamic country) right on the eastern side of the earth’s central landmass. Indonesia consists of numerous small islands, the principle ones amongst them being Java, Sumatra, Borneo and Saibil, all of which are well known. It is the largest country in the world, with 180 million inhabitants. The number of non-muslims here is negligible.

As soon as dawn breaks on the eastern side of Saibil, at approximately 5:30 am local time, Fajar Azaan begins. Thousands of Mu’azzins in eastern Indonesia commence proclaiming the Tawheed (oneness) of the Almighty, Omnipotent and Omniscient Allah and Risaalat (Universal Apostleship) of the Prophet Muhammad Sallallahu Alayhi Wasallam.

The process then continues and advances towards the Western Islands of Indonesia. The time difference between the eastern and western islands of Indonesia is one and a half hours. Hence, one and a half hours after the Azaan has been completed in Saibil, it echoes in Jakarta on Java island. Sumatra then follows suit and before this auspicious process of calling Azaan ends in Indonesia, it has already begun in Malaysia. Burma is next in line, and within an hour of its commencement in Jakarta, it reaches Dacca, the capital city of Bangladesh. No sooner the calling of Azaan ends in Bangladesh, it has already prevailed in western India, from Calcutta to Srinagar. It then advances towards Bombay and the environment of entire India resounds with this august proclamation.

Srinagar and Sialkot (a city in north Pakistan) have the same timing for Azaan. The time difference between Sialkot, Kota, Karachi and Gowadar (a city in Baluchistan, a province of Pakistan) is forty minutes, and within this time, Fajar Azaan is heard throughout Pakistan. Before it ends there, however, it has already begun in Afghanistan and Muscat. The time difference between Muscat and Baghdad is one hour. Azaan resounds during this one hour in the environments of Hijaaz-e-Muqaddas (Holy cities of Makkah and Madinah), Yemen, United Arab Emirates, Kuwait and Iraq.

The time difference between Baghdad and Alexandria in Egypt is again one hour. Azaan continues to resound in Syria, Egypt, Somalia and Sudan during this hour. Alexandria and Istanbul are situated on the same geographical longitude. The time difference between eastern and western Turkey is one and a half hours, and during this time it is echoed with the call to prayer.

Alexandria and Tripoli (capital of Libya) are located at an hour’s difference from one another. The process of calling Azaan thus continues throughout the whole of Africa. Therefore, the proclamation of the Oneness of Allah and the Prophethood of Muhammad Sallallahu Alayhi Wasallam that had begun in the eastern islands of Indonesia reaches the Eastern Shore of the Atlantic ocean after nine and a half hours.

Prior to the Azaan reaching the shores of the Atlantic, the process of Zohar Azaan has already commenced in eastern Indonesia, and before it reaches Dacca, Asar Azaan has started. This has hardly reached Jakarta one and half hours later, then the time of Maghrib becomes due, and no sooner has Maghrib time reached Sumatra, then the time for calling Isha Azaan has commenced in Saibil! When the Muazzins of Indonesia are calling out Fajar Azaan, the Muazzins in Africa are calling out the Azaan for Isha.

If we were to ponder over this phenomenon seriously and studiously, we would conclude the amazing fact that: 'There is not a single moment when thousands if not hundreds of thousands of Muazzins around the world are not proclaiming the Oneness of Almighty Allah and the Apostleship of the noble Prophet Sallallahu Alayhi Wasallam on the surface of this earth!' Insha-Allah, this universal and continuous calling of the Azaan shall not cease until the Day of Judgement, and we should all make du`a for the same, AMEEN.

(Translated from Tameer-e-Hayaat)

Yeah, that sure is an amazing discovery, all right. I can hardly contain myself.

Sure beats the hell out of that whole artificial cybernetic vision thing that Wired covered.

15:14 - Who is Johnathan R. Galt?
http://www.islamic-news.co.uk/

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I've been hearing a fair amount about "cyber-terrorism" lately, on NPR and elsewhere-- in the context of a different way groups like al Qaeda could attack Western interests, ranging in severity from defacings of websites (which mostly amount to sending the message "Hey, if we can do this, think of what else we can do! Mwa ha haah!"-- even though the ability to deface a website implies nothing about someone's ability to access completely unrelated national-security resources; this isn't a movie) to being able to shut down power grids and access missile launch systems and so on.

At the very least I've expected to see some scrawlings on websites here and there, perpetrated by those doe-eyed Clear Guidance youths or some such. What I didn't see coming, though, was defacements of Jihadi websites-- like this one, which I saw linked from Tal G's blog, of www.islamic-news.co.uk.

(It's apparently remained like this for at least a day or two. If it's put back the way it was soon, I've saved a web archive of it.)

The defacement is signed by a Johnathan R. Galt, with a link to his own site, which appears to be a surprisingly comprehensive lising of Jihadi websites all over the world-- including references to their contents prior to 9/11, and lots of fascinating stuff like Egyptian year-2001 calendars printed months prior to the fact, with September's featured picture being of a jetliner crashing into Manhattan. And a ton more.

There's a worrisome angle which implicates the CIA in a lot of what's been going on, which sends off a few "conspiracy theorist" warning bells in my head:

America's CIA helped Osama and the Taliban overthrow the Soviets in Afghanistan. Maybe Osama bin Laden is still on the CIA payroll? And perhaps they arranged for him and the higher-ranking Taliban to escape .

...But the links are fairly damning, as are dozens more that involve the CIA later in the site, and I'm left wondering why we haven't heard more about this guy? I can't even find a reference to his name in the InstaPundit archives.

As for the Islamic News defacement itself, it appears to be an appeal directly to Muslims, though it's far from clear how Muslim Mr. Galt is. Interspersed with quotes from what appear to be Islamic scholars doing things like debunking the Palestinians' right to the land in Israel and calling for Muslims everywhere to stand up against the hijacking of their faith by fanatics who appear to want to destroy Islam by fighting for it are lines like:

Is it any wonder that the people of the world have developed  a fear and sometimes open hatred for Muslims when they see:  terror videos for sale at a mosque . This is madness, it's a blasphemy against Allah, and it must be stopped.

 We have decided to cooperate with the authorities here in Britain andin the USA. Britain must not be used as a base for world-wide Islamist terrorism.  The evidence we have of Islamists activities against India regarding Kashmir  will be given to the Indian authorities. We will help the Russians battle  the evil of the Saudi-Wahhabi sponsored Chechen Mujhadeen. We will help the Israelis overcome  Arafat and his goons .

(I'm not sure what all the weird extra characters are about. Maybe it's steganography. I dunno.)

I'm still looking through these links. And here I thought I'd be able to get some work done today.
Friday, August 30, 2002
09:08 - Ball 1...

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Apparently, in preparation for eleventh-hour negotiations this morning ahead of the supposedly imminent baseball strike, three undisclosed teams called their owners and said that they wouldn't walk. Work out a deal, they said, because they're backing out on the strike.

I wish I knew which teams those were. We might still be thanking them fifty years from now.
Thursday, August 29, 2002
23:02 - Moments of Canadian Zen

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Now that I've got my USB cables all untangled from the unpacking process, I've got my big pile of photos imported into iPhoto, and once again I have to say that whatever the situation with Nikon's service department, the CoolPix 885 takes hella' sweet pictures. Kodachro-oh-ome, my ass... gimme 3.2 megapixels any day.

But that aside-- there were a few sights in Toronto that I treasured. One of them wasn't actually Canadian so much as Ford; it's what you find if you open up the trunk lid on a Ford Focus sedan.

Isn't that awesome? It reminds me of nothing so much as that "Pong: It's Not Just a Game" meme. It's like a hyperactive little video game. Pull the handle, and you pop out like Mario. Wheee!

Lance suggests that the handle is for the benefit of kids stuffed into the trunk by their deadbeat dads, so they can eject to freedom while hurtling down the interstate. I guess that makes more sense than what I had in mind-- I suppose the mob isn't going to use a whole lot of Ford Foci.

But then, in the TTC subway, there was this:

Read the text in the posted... read the small-print caption at the bottom ("Take away the anger before it takes away the girl"). Then look at the setting.

Above the third rail in the subway.


It's Humpty-frickin'-Dumpty. Whatever hideous incident of young-girl-incited violence took place that felled an innocent bystander from a precarious wall or ledge, you just gotta admire a place where a public service announcement can get away with being placed in so deliciously ironic a position.

I just couldn't let it go unphotographed, now could I?
Wednesday, August 28, 2002
16:43 - Breathing Oregon's Second-Hand Smoke
http://www.earthobservatory.nasa.gov/NaturalHazards/natural_hazards_v2.php3?img_id=4

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Okay, so the dingy brown haze that's still hovering over the Valley is in fact the result of those month-old wildfires in southern Oregon, as a Mercury News article last week confirmed with a very telling image from the National Weather Service which showed the smoke drifting very clearly southward, blown down along the coastline and pressed up against it by the prevailing ocean winds. Since we're right on the coast here, we get the easternmost swirls of that still-cohesive mass of smoke, oh joy.

The picture above isn't the same one, but it's very similar. The page I've linked to has a whole lot of other pictures of the event over the past month, and it's very cool to browse through. It's a little bit hollow, though, considering what the air outside looks like.

Other than that, though, I'd say that this is extremely pleasant summer weather. Just yesterday it was 98°F outside; Lance and I spent the lunch hour prowling around a Sunnyvale outdoor shopping center, without much more than a vague sense of it being sort of warm and nice out. Try doing that in, oh, I don't know, Toronto.

I like this place. Even if we have to put up with the occasional side effect of living on the frontier.
Thursday, August 15, 2002
22:50 - Seanbaby the Sorcerer's Advocate
http://www.thewavemag.com/pagegen.php?pagename=article&articleid=22182

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Huzzah! Seanbaby is back, this time with a new article in The Wave about a truly inspired piece of moronicity: a low-budget video warning Christian parents about how evil the Harry Potter books are.

Seanbaby is great at reviewing stupid videos (of which many more such articles can be found at seanbaby.com); and this one proves he's no different even when he has to hold to some level of decorum because he's being published in a Bay Area lifestyle rag. It's all so good, I had a hard time picking a paragraph to quote.

The thing that makes fundamental Christianity special is that it’s the only religion that runs smear campaigns. No voodoo witch doctors have ever put together a home video warning voodoo parents of the seductive danger of Christian rock. HP...WR:MELI takes its outrage an extra step into crazy by actually inventing most of the things they hate about Harry Potter. Of course, as the video warns, if you say witchcraft has no power, you have two problems in your line of reasoning. One: you’re ignoring all the people that do have magic powers, and two: you’re saying that God’s warning in the Bible against sorcery is actually worthless. That means that the people who made this video have set it up so that in order for them NOT to be crazy, children need to be flying on brooms and raising bodies from the dead. So say what you want about their book-burning crusade, these people have balls.

Indeed.

The people we have to share our air with...
Monday, August 12, 2002
12:10 - Bill Biggart
http://digitaljournalist.org/issue0111/biggart_intro.htm

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We've all seen Bill Biggart's last few photos in Newsweek and elsewhere; he's the guy who stayed under the WTC towers on 9/11, snapping pictures on his D30 right up until the buildings fell on him.

I don't know if this page is new or what, but it's worth some perusal either way. If just to refresh the imagery in our minds now that the one-year anniversary is coming up. It's not like it's that easy to forget, especially for New Yorkers. But still-- sometimes seeing something that makes us grit our teeth is more useful than reading a ten-page screed on why George Galloway is an anti-American, terrorist-supporting bogocrat and the quicker we take Baghdad the less chance we stand of getting ourselves nuked. Sometimes we just need a few photos-- and a few extraordinary circumstances under which they were taken-- to remind us what's at stake here.

11:35 - That's that good ol' entrepreneurial spirit...
http://www.origamiboulder.com/

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A few days ago, Corsair the Rational Pirate pointed me towards this site, which in the grand old tradition of Ninja Burger and the "totally sweet" Real Ultimate Power Ninja site, sticks a shuriken in the eye of the reverent mystique of Japanese art and tradition.

It does a damned fine job of it, too. I may have to buy one of these, just to exhibit my support for this guy's spirit.

Site is beautiful
Sekimori would be proud
But-- the content? Naaah.


Sunday, August 11, 2002
22:45 - I'm preordering this book...
http://www.lileks.com/bleats/archive/02/0802/080202.html#081202

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Great payoff on today's Bleat. It's long and artsy, and you have to stick with it-- but it ends in a LOL. (Not a LOLOLOL or a LOOOOL or an OMFG, but still-- excellent.)

I wonder why I haven't picked up the print version of the Gallery of Regrettable Food yet. I've been showing it to people with great relish since I first discovered it in about 1997. I should get me a copy.

16:59 - Uh, guys...

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The latest charming missive from the Ar-Rahman list, which hardly requires comment (not that I can refrain from it):



Now, again, I realize that this list is about preaching-to-the-choir. But listen, guys: not just Allah, but the world is watching you now, very damned closely. And stuff like this does not exactly drum up sympathy. You don't get to mass-mail pictures of Sharon as a baby-murdering butcher-shop owner dealing in human sausages, and then take horrified offense at a picture like this, no matter who created it. (I would venture to guess that the Koran has unflattering things to say about hypocrisy, just like eveybody else does.) And it does not raise sympathy for your cause either to lead it off with Juden Raus slogans.

("From a jewish site". Yeah? Which one? Got a URL? Any facts at all?)

I've got news for you: it's not just "Jews and Indians" who are creating pictures like this. They're not the only ones who are desperate to see an end to this bloodthirsty Wahhabi madness.

Besides, in the midst of all this shrill virulent indignance on the list, I have yet to see a single condemnation of violence committed by Muslims, let alone of 9/11. Which, I hardly need to explain, actually happened. The Ka'aba is still standing. It's only because of the West's common human decency and unwillingness to damage sites of religious significance or antiquity that that is the case, but I hope would-be mass terrorists are bearing in mind that such decency is bound to have limits. Should another 9/11 happen, the scenario this image depicts might well become a very real and justified measure in the minds of Americans (and even Europeans, if they get attacked, perish the thought). No matter how many US cities they manage to take out with suitcase nukes or anthrax, all it takes is a press of a button to send a cruise missile into Mecca. I hope that keeps them up at night.

I wonder if the Islamic world has at least accepted that Muslims were actually behind the 9/11 attacks, and that it wasn't just a Jewish plot as they so stubbornly maintained for months afterwards?
Saturday, August 10, 2002
19:33 - So who's been screwing with the lighting out there?

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I don't often drive westward through San Jose towards work in the late summer evening, as the sun is descending into the Peninsula mountains, so I don't know if it's always like this. If it is, I should do it more often.

It's been very hot all day today-- well over 100, and still and close, unlike the usual windy summer days we usually get around here-- carrying the haze out of the valley and drawing humidity away from one's skin, so if it's 95 out you can just open a window and you'd have an occasional gusty breeze all day that prevents the heat from being uncomfortable.

But today's heat was different; it was the kind of heat in which the entire color of the sky changes. And not in a Midwestern, opaque whiteness kind of way; it was sort of a dingy, smoky, gray veil over the sun. Looking towards the mountains and the lines of trees, I kept expecting to see them shrouded by a murky brown LA-like haze. But I didn't. The sun was falling on leaves and turning them to clear gold. It was reflecting off buildings and railing the contrast slider, enhancing the vividness of everything, even though the sky itself seemed as dull as though we were in the middle of an eclipse.

There was a big, heavy, ponderous swath of cloud across the horizon, right above the mountains, that the sun was punching through on it way down as I made my way westward towards it. It seemed to be in one fringe or the other the whole time. And the result was that the long evening shadows on the ground blended into gold and bright blue rather than into grays and browns. The sun has by now emerged out the bottom of those clouds, and the colors are returning to something more closely approaching normal, but I don't think it'll get all the way there-- the air is just in a really weird mood today.

Ah well. I've spent the day recording Invader Zim episodes and watching the Season Two DVDs of the Simpsons, so I figured I'd better get in to work or else I'd feel humomgously guilty about having wasted a day with a sky like this.
Thursday, August 8, 2002
09:33 - I was not aware of that.

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Apparently, we're all Muslims-- we just don't know it. See, you don't convert to Islam-- you revert.

Salaam.. everyone person born is a muslim at birth, since it is the true religion.  After time, whether it be parents, where we live whatever, that changes, and people have then conform to their different religions.  So I have reverted back to Islam.  Most people that I have talked to, do not like the word converted.  That means you made an entire switch, which is not true. Since you start off as Muslim,  you are just reverting or coming back to it. I truly hope i have said this correctly. If I have not please forgive me and correct me.

Boy... the things I learn about myself from this Ar-Rahman list.

Seriously, it's every bit as important to hear this kind of stuff as it is to hear the intelligent discourse from sane Muslims who have a grip on reality. We can't blind ourselves to either side.



By the way-- yeah, I know this kind of thinking is hardly unique to Islam. I've heard the same kinds of things out of the mouths of everybody from Baptists to Branch Davidians. I just find it awfully silly, though, regardless of the person's background who's saying it.

I spent my entire freshman year arguing with my devoutly Christian roommate, plastering written re-re-rebuttals all over the interior of our room and spilling over outside into the hallway. (We never actually discussed it face to face-- we just posted these long dissertations at each other and never mentioned them out loud.) One thing he said was that "Atheists don't go to Hell-- they just return to the dirt from which they came." In other words, you had to be a Christian and an apostate in order to go to Hell.

Interesting fairy-tale semantics, but that's all it is. To someone who doesn't subscribe to them.

Besides, Aziz points out that there's a "No compulsion in religion" clause in Islam that this person seems to be ignoring, and a verse (109:6) that says "To you be your Faith, and to me mine." So, well, it's not like contradictory behavior to what's in the text is unique to Islam either; but at least this person's either wrong, or simply walled off by context. And either way, it's just wordplay.


Wednesday, August 7, 2002
22:40 - Did I really just see that?

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I just saw a Barbie doll commercial on TV. At the end of the ad, they mentioned the Barbie website and the stuff that you can do on it if you're the kind of kid who would find such things compelling. Naturally, such a pitch has to have a disclaimer on it that says you should be over 18 to go online and gain access to the site, a stricture traditionally conveyed with statements like "Your parents put it together" and "You must have your parents' permission to visit the website".

But this one-- though I only saw it for a fraction of a second, I'm sure I saw it correctly. It said:

"Help Mom or Dad to get online."

Genius.

22:37 - Things that defy description
http://serendipity.magnet.ch/wtc.html

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Has this site already been discussed and beaten to death in the blog world? And I'm just late to the game? Or is it actually enjoying a wave of popularity?

The site, called "The World Trade Center Demolition and the So-Called War on Terrorism", comes to us as the "Awful Link of the Day" from somethingawful.com. It seems to be the definitive 9/11 conspiracy-theory treatise, purporting to explain how the whole thing was a massive hoax perpetrated by the CIA, the top-level government, and the Jews. The goal of all this is hard to discern-- the main thrust of the site appears to be to discredit the idea that Islamic terrorists hijacked the planes, and instead that the attacks were carried out by remote-controlled drone planes, demolition bombs, high explosives (in the case of the Pentagon), or perhaps even a high-powered laser weapon. But if anything in the site proposes any kind of goal to this whole conspiracy thing, it's the closing paragraphs:

And what if the U.S. warmongers achieve their aims of gaining control of all sources of oil in Asia (and the Middle East and North Africa), and of the mineral wealth of Central Asia?  Will the Europeans, Japanese and Chinese feel secure in the knowledge that the United States will surely sell them whatever they need to maintain their industrial economies — and their military capabilities?  (The Russian and Chinese leaders surely understand the long-term threat to their national sovereignty, and are acting accordingly.)

Or is there something even more sinister going on?  Is the goal "at the highest level" the extinction of the human species?  If so, will the American people prove to be "useful idiots" facilitating the attainment of this goal?  Or, on the contrary, might they yet awaken from their ignorance, their stupidity, their greed and their egoism, take a hard look at themselves, understand what their lying, vicious, rapacious, hypocritical government is doing in the name of "freedom and democracy", and rein in and reform that government, reconstitute their nation as a republic as the authors of the Constitution intended, and save the world, as they believe (or used to believe) is their manifest destiny?

Ah, good. The goal of this conspiracy is to enslave and/or exterminate the human race. Why this would benefit anybody more than a prosperous and free society (like the one we have now) would is left unclear.

Read through this page, if you feel like shaking your head in disbelief at something, but you want a change of pace from the current Jew-stabbing-teens message boards and would rather see a Libertarian-who-gives-Libertarians-a-bad-name set of allegations supported by Chomsky quotes and barbs at "the Jew-controlled media", hosted in Switzerland because-- well, it's Switzerland.

I could say a lot more about this, but... it's really not worth my time.

Draw your own conclusions.

13:17 - Media Bias

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You know what's funny? We in the blogosphere appear to have a pretty widespread consensus that the big media is of a liberal slant, with its continued nostalgic fascination with the Clintons, its merciless attacks upon the country's corporate upper-echelons, its pro-gun-control rhetoric, and its recent expressions of opposition to the war in Iraq and to Israel's policies, as well as being the bastion of moral-equivalence arguments and "why do they hate us?" soul-searching. The New York Times the Washington Post, CNN, Fox, CBS and so on-- they're all widely held to be disproportionate representatives of the liberal minds of Americans, claiming to speak for a great many more people than they really do.

But through the eyes of the Ar-Rahman list, what people keep saying is that the American media is hopelessly biased toward Israel. The exact opposite observation. They see the same media coverage that we do, of events in Jenin and Ramallah and Jerusalem, and while we might furrow our brows at the soulful camera pans across downtrodden Palestinians as the announcer explains why they feel their only choice is to blow themselves up in pizza parlors and dismiss it as liberal heart-wringing, to the Islamic viewpoint the exact opposite impression is given. To the people on the list, such coverage is nowhere near anti-Israeli enough. (I suppose this really shouldn't surprise me.) They feel they can't trust a word of what any media outlet says about the events in the Middle East. They're obviously lies and half-truths, covering up the heinous deeds of the Israelis which the biased conservative American media wants kept silent so the American people can be kept in the dark and their anger stirred to madness against the world's Muslims.

I guess it must be indicative of a certain kind of cultivated mindset to think that we in this country could possibly fail to gather the complete picture if we're really interested. This isn't the CCCP; this isn't China or Iraq. We don't have to rely on a state-run news organ to get our carefully filtered porthole into the outside world. Our big media agencies may be subject to bias, but they're private corporations-- each with their own internal agendas-- and there are a lot of them. We've got everything from Rush Limbaugh to The 700 Club to NPR. We've got the Drudge Report, we've got Stratfor.com, and we've got InstaPundit-- not to mention hundreds, if not thousands, of other blogs, comprising a spectrum of opinion that-- because it's individual people speaking, not shareholder-bound companies-- is at even wider variance than what's on TV.

And when they all agree on the basic facts of something that's happening in Tel Aviv or Nablus, then I'll tell you: it's pretty safe to say it's the real story.

The people on the Ar-Rahman list are giving each other tips and advice as to which news organs are more likely to present-- well, not an unbiased view of events, but at least one that's less horrifyingly pro-Israeli than most. "Try MSNBC," says one participant, "It's a little better than CNN or Fox."

I've got a better idea. If you want news that tells you what you want to hear, go tune in al-Jazeera. But if you want to listen to what the American news agencies have to say, and you don't like what they're saying, it could just possibly be that reality is what's not on your side, not a conspiracy of biased Jew-operated anti-Islamic infidel media.

12:21 - Ooooh.
http://talg.blogspot.com/2002_08_04_talg_archive.html#79890535

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In the responses to Tal G.'s link to the Clear Guidance message board yesterday, someone mentioned the thing about jihad really meaning simply "internal struggle".

Then someone named James said:

Of course Jihad means struggle. So does Kampf.


10:48 - My what?

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As I was crossing the driveway heading for my car on the way to work this morning, a guy in a utility truck pulled up to the sidewalk.

"Hi! Are your mom and dad home?"

I must admit I was so taken aback that I can't remember what I said. Probably something like "Hhwhwaaaa?" Because he repeated it.

"Are your mom and dad at home?"

I'm 26. My hair is short, I'm wearing a Hawaiian shirt and a gold watch, I'm carrying an iBook and a couple of bills to pay, and I'm holding the keys to my suburbanite econo-sport wheelbox.

"I'm, uh, not-- no," is all I can come up with.

Something hits him. "Aah, are you the man of the house?"

"Well, I'm one of them..."

"You want your yard trimmed?"

I take his business card and tell him our yard is in the shower. I'm not home alone, nuh-uh, for reals.

I suppose I should be flattered and stuff, but... geez. What a freaky way to begin the day.

10:07 - You dipshits.

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Speaking of Ar-Rahman, someone sent a message through last night with the following pictures as attachments, as "evidence" that the Israelis are just as bad as the Nazis. "Sharon vs. Hitler," read the subject.





Ooh, yeah, it's exactly the same thing. I don't know why I wasn't totally convinced before. Such images of brutality.

(Yes, I know, this list is about preaching to the converted-- those to whom these pictures are incontrovertible proof of the parallel in the subject line.)

But doesn't anybody have the balls to question anything? Doesn't anyone have enough assurance to put this kind of position up against facts, or to approach it from a dissenting viewpoint? Or would such a thing be implicitly kufr?

"These pictures show that the Israelis are just like the Nazis." Uh huh. So let's see the pictures of Israeli soldiers lining up Palestinian civilians next to a pit and mowing them down with machine guns. Let's see the pictures of Israeli soldiers murdering little girls in their beds. Let's see the photos of the Israelis' concentration camps where they send the Palestinians en masse to be gassed. Oh, and while you're at it, show me some history with Jews blowing up German ice-cream parlors and shopping venues and commuter buses with suicide belts, killing grandmothers and babies and pregnant women, and then dancing in the streets of the Berlin and Warsaw ghettos, shooting guns in the air and praising Jehovah.

Then we'll talk.

Until then, shut the hell up.
Tuesday, August 6, 2002
02:39 - A Religion of Peace
http://www.lileks.com/bleats/archive/02/0802/080102.html#080702

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Children are savage little things. The jungle is in them, and the wilderness. Occasionally, one will come along in whom the jungle boils and screams, and with that one comes chaos. And with children, chaos is a thing of stones and blood.
Preacher, of course-- Allfather D'Aronique sadistically recalling to Starr the events of his own tormented childhood.

It's all I could think about while reading today's Bleat.

I saw the link to the message-board that Lileks is talking about, referred to in his usual emotionless and bewilderingly matter-of-fact way by Tal G. But I had an idea of what I might find there, and since I had no wish to spend the remainder of my workday fuming and seething, I didn't go and read it. It seems I made a good call, if only for the sake of my sanity. Lileks has taken the bullet of reading this stuff so we don't have to-- but we'd all better read it just the same, so we know what kind of primal savagery we're dealing with.

The thread is full of charming stuff; they talk about the joys of knifing Jews, and discuss the merits of a particular decapitate-the-infidel tape - who knew it was such a genre? It almost seems as if these guys trade decapitation tapes like l33t hackers swap warez...

There’s more. It’s lovely. Sample message topics: “Do Jews Drink Human Blood?” “Holocoust Never Happened!”

I’d have no interest in this website whatsoever were it not for three things:

1. When there’s a subculture out there ranking the best jihadi decapitation video, you’d best pay attention.

2. When a message board devoted to guidance for Islamic youth doesn’t delete the posts about stabbing Jews, you’d best pay attention.

3. This thread. As far as I can tell, the debate seems to be whether it’s a brother’s job to kill his sexually active sister, or the religious authority’s job.

It's a Bleat, so that means go read the whole thing.

What I find so sick and disheartening about all this is Islam is being treated by these kids as a carte blanche license for them to express-- not just without guilt, but with righteousness-- the kinds of savage and barbaric feelings of bloodlust that the rest of the world learned to rise above and leave behind many hundreds of years ago. These days, kids who want to work out their chainsaw-wielding aggressions go out and buy whatever hyper-violent video game has just hit the market, and they learn to separate such impulses from reality and the rules we live by in a healthy and self-determined way. But when there's an excuse like Islam for kids to latch onto-- one where the Law of Life flat-out encourages them to think in terms of hating infidels and killing Jews-- they're going to throw themselves into it headlong and lick up every drop of vitriol that it offers. And those are the foundational values that will inform these kids throughout the rest of their adult lives.

It's really small wonder where people like John Lindh come from-- the picture that militant Islam paints for bellicose, testosterone-pumped teenage boys is irresistible. It's like painting a naked woman on a big piece of butcher paper and then setting it up at the edge of a cliff; they're going to walk right through, drooling all the way. The evidence is right in front of us-- on this message board, and on the Ar-Rahman list I still seem to be on (where the latest discourse is from Muslim Americans pleading the others on the list to understand that the "vast majority" of Americans hate Bush and his policies, support the Palestinian cause and despise Israel, and will come to see the light of Islam if only the world gives us a chance).

As much as it might pain the students at clearguidance.com, American churches don’t give two figs for the subject of Islam one way or the other. It’s just not on their radar. There are no pained debates in church basements about how to act towards Muslim friends, or what to do when your friend’s sister comes over with a headscarf. As much as some would like to portray mainstream American religious belief as a Dangerous Ravening Force bent on establishing an Ashcroftian theocracy, most churches look inward. A dear friend of mine is part of a church-group mission to help the Truly Farked - she’s mentoring a down-and-out drug addict, helping her get on her feet. Is that addict a Christian? No idea. Doesn’t come up. Does my friend praise Jeeeeeesus every time she drops off meals or blankets for the addict? Irrelevant. The act is what matters. It’s the gift, not the wrapping.

Yes, yes, of course, I understand-- it's two entirely different ways of thinking. In the one world, religion is something you do as part of your normal day-to-day life; whereas in the other, day-to-day life is something you do as subordinate to religion, which defines all of existence. As part of a tradition in which I'm raised to consider the former to be far more natural, I can't properly understand the context or the motivation behind the latter.

But Tal G. never once has mused upon knifing a Palestinian baby. And he freely linked to the message board full of Muslim youths discussing doing exactly that to Jewish babies, and with hardly a comment by way of preamble or reaction.

I don't know what could possibly speak more succinctly than exactly that.

17:56 - Now there's an idea...
http://www.techcentralstation.com/1051/techwrapper.jsp?PID=1051-250&CID=1051-080102A

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Via InstaPundit, here's another proposal for a WTC replacement that we could be proud of having built. It's a lot more subtle and quiet than the WTC2002 design, which (by the way) now has a petition/vote thing up so you can make your voice heard through some unclear means if you feel such a design is worth pursuing-- even if that means putting it at the extreme ostentatious end of the spectrum of possibilities.

But this one doesn't even necessarily have to be hideously tall. It's got real possibilities, and it's as symbolic as you could want without being pretentious or overbearing. It's a bit ungainly, perhaps, but these are just rough sketch ideas that the site has.

Hint: it's all about the roof.

13:48 - Do You Believe in Love?
http://www.coldfury.com/Entries/00000262.html

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Something that has always, always befuddled me is how in movies, books, TV shows, pretty much anywhere-- there's the recurring plot element of a guy who's been dumped by his girlfriend/wife/female companion, who clearly cannot stand him anymore. And yet he spends the rest of his life trying to win her back. You know, the kind of thing that stalkers are made of. The plot of The War of the Roses. The idea that even though she clearly hates you, all you have to do-- in order to make her love you again-- is to capture her and force her to submit to your will.

What is it about this kind of situation that strips people of their sense of reality? Any sane man ought to be able to understand that if she wanted to be with him, she wouldn't be running and hiding and calling the police every time he comes near. This is not a woman who is teasing, who secretly "wants to be won over". This is a woman who wants the guy the hell out of her life, for good. If she says, "I want a divorce"-- that means she does not want to live with the guy anymore. It does not mean that the guy can reason and convince and bitch-slap his way into her heart again. What could make a guy think that love can be forced to exist? What would lead him to believe that having the companionship of one particular woman is so unique and important that he is willing to throw away all of his cherished morals and ethics and willingness to abide by law and common human decency, just to recapture it in some bizarre physical drug-like ritual-- even in the face of the obvious fact that she would rather kill him or herself than be in the same state with him?

... Okay, that's sort of a tangent from what I'd originally meant to say. But I suppose not, because it's pretty much the same ridiculous mindset that seems to drive what Mike "Cold Fury" Hendrix has begun calling the Axis of Feeble: the UN, the EU, and other international leftist bodies who seem willing to leap at even the smallest soiled handkerchief tossed from the window of a woman named Iraq who has been flinging rocks at them nonstop for the past ten years. (This is Mike's metaphor, not mine, but it works.)

Can't a guy ever learn to move on?

It's one thing to try to patch up a relationship where both parties honestly want to make it work, where both sides are willing to change and to make sacrifices and compromises and to alter their respective planned futures for the prospect of a symbiotic life that might grow to be more than the sum of its parts.

But it's quite another for one party to be continuously spurned, insulted, threatened, and attacked for years and years-- and not to ever reach the conclusion that the party doing the spurning might just be a lost cause, and not worth throwing everything away over at the first (and by no means sincere) sign that she might be softening.

What will it take to convince the world that some nations and some regimes just flat-out suck, and the onus is upon them to change-- not us? That it's their responsibility to make the unilateral concessions if they don't want to get blown up?

All I can think is that Kofi Annan has been watching too many chick-flicks lately, or something.
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