| Sunday, February 2, 2003 |
03:26 - A-suh-puh-ring is here
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Today was probably the clearest, most gorgeous day I've seen all year-- possibly for a couple of years now. Around lunchtime I went up Quimby Road to get the lay of the land, and I found to my pleasant surprise that I could see Mt. Tamalpais quite sharply from my vantage point in the East San Jose hills. I didn't have my camera with me, but-- well, here's a photo from last year, so you can get an idea of the view I'm talking about:
Today was like this, only-- see that faint mountain line along the horizon? See how it's all sort of hazy and vague? Well, pretend instead that it's as vivid and clear a panorama as anything you've seen from 30,000 feet over New Mexico. See that lump of heights over at the right, just above the house with the kickass view but the awful commute? That's Mt. Tam, and it's north of San Francisco. Today, not only could I make out the striations of treelines on the mountain's slopes; I could see individual buildings in downtown San Francisco, right in front of the mountain from my perspective. I could see where Pac Bell Park was. I could see individual neighborhoods. At sixty or seventy miles' distance as I was, I couldn't identify any particular buildings; but I'd know there was a city there, and if I were an alien visitor with the power of unassisted bodily flight, I'd beeline straight for it.
If you follow the mountain line toward the left, southward along the Peninsula, you see a couple of lowish rises-- the hills in the middle of the City, Twin Peaks and the one Sutro Tower is on-- and further left still are the San Bruno Mountains, the line of hills that form the southern boundary of the City, the bulwark that separates SF from South San Francisco: THE INDUSTRIAL CITY. Today, I could see the green of the grass on those hills. I could see the transmission towers on top of them.
I could almost see the Cow Palace, down at the foot of that ridge on the northern side, tucked away into a little sheltered valley-- a Mediterranean seaport town with rich folks living on perches overlooking the Bay from a thousand feet up, minutes from the airport (just head south around the foot of the San Brunos) and just out of reach of the bleak sprawl of the South-of-Market freeway portal that leads into the City's southern quarter. You can take a road up from the Cow Palace into the hillside balcony rows of tract homes, then let the road take you down the ridge of the foothills, aiming you eastward right across the Bay, with its blue water and the houses clinging to the steep hillsides ringing the little cove region south of Candlestick Point and north of the San Brunos. I was just up there yesterday, listening somberly to the ongoing coverage of the Shuttle cleanup and damage-control effort with Lance as we drove home from the Golden Gate Kennel Club show at the Cow Palace. (We'd been there out of more or less idle curiosity-- what with the new house and all, and the marked lack of a landlord other than myself to forbid such things, we've been thinking of getting a dog or two to add to the household. Fun show, indeed-- got to meet a lot of interesting breeds. I nearly got adopted by a Borzoi in the benching area, where he was standing up on two feet so he could match me in height, and he decided my hand was just the thing to lean his head against and force me to plant my feet under his weight like some macho guy on the subway who refuses to grab a handle when the train jolts to a stop.)
So, yeah. It's been a beautiful weekend, with skies of clearest blue, hills of lush springtime green, and trees flowering in the grocery store parking lot. There was a brisk wind blowing all day, which I'm sure is what contributed most to the clarity of the air; that's fine with me, but I wish we could have it more throughout the year, or at least to predict when it'll happen. 'Cause though the fog-rolling-over-the-Peninsula-ridgeline summertime weather patterns play a strong hand, I'm leaning like a Borzoi toward this time of year being my favorite around here.
I've got to stop leaving my camera at work.
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11:08 - Yeah, real compassionate there, guys
http://www.arabnews.com/Article.asp?ID=22449
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Aziz Poonawalla sends this editorial from the Arab News, and it's encouraging: unequivocated sorrow and reflection, with nary a but to be found.
It is highly probable that yesterday's crash will cause a major setback in the ISS program. Even if another design flaw is not found to be at the heart of the Columbia wreck, it is certain that the other shuttles will be grounded for at least a year. Columbia was, in fact, the oldest ship in NASA's shuttle fleet, built in 1981, five years before the Challenger tragedy. Though extensively refitted several times, most recently with a new cockpit, some sort of structural fatigue seems a strong possibility. It may well be that scientists still have much to learn about the huge stresses placed on metal which has to endure phenomenal stresses at launch and re-entry as well as the unique pressures of life in orbital space.
The immediate lesson remains, however, that this is a tragedy for everyone, not just the United States, India and Israel. We have all lost in this disaster. A technological challenge has been thrown down and once again, a warning given that in the unforgiving region of space, nothing can be taken for granted. The solutions may be a long time coming.
They will come. The struggle to conquer the space will go on. All that we can hope for is that, when the battle is won, the knowledge gained in the process will add to human happiness, not to human misery.
Aaahhh. A breath of fresh air before diving back into the breach. With, namely, another Arab News article on the crash, posted the same day (forwarded by Steven Den Beste):
7 Astronauts die in shuttle blast over 'Palestine'
[Love the mockery-quotes. -ed]
"Once again we see that space technology can fail," Bruce Gagnon, international coordinator for the Global Network against Weapons and Nuclear Power in Space, told Arab News last night. "I'm troubled because the Bush Administration has recently announced a program called the 'Nuclear Systems Initiative', a $1 billion research and development program to expand the launching of nuclear power into space. The problem is that as you increase the numbers of launches carrying nuclear payloads into space, but you are also going to dramatically increase the chances of a catastrophic Chernobyl in the sky."
Asked why NASA was advising extreme precaution at the crash sites, Gagnon said: "We haven't heard that there was a nuclear payload on this shuttle, but one of the great hallmarks of the Bush administration is increased secrecy. I must admit that when NASA said no one should go near a site because of the toxic potential of the fuels and 'other reasons,' I couldn't help but wonder what those reasons are."
Due to cuts in NASA's budget in recent years, NASA has been forced to turn to the Pentagon for increased funding, said Gagnon. The result is that the space shuttles are now also NASA missions and carry both military and civilian technologies.
"What you have now is the military takeover of the space program. NASA is not just about gazing at the stars, it now also has a political and military agenda." What is of concern, he said, is that the Pentagon in now working on a program called the 'Space Based Laser.' "Its nickname is the 'Death Star,' and its job is to destroy other country's satellites, and also hit targets on the Earth below. NASA hopes to have the first operational tests by 2016 or 2017," Gagnon explained.
"This would give the US full control and domination of space and the earth below, because whoever controls space will control the Earth."
C'mon, Arab News, pick a side. It's either the conspiracy theorists or the human beings.
Steven and I once joked about this. It's no joke anymore, apparently.
Criminy.
UPDATE: Meanwhile, Palestinians have expressed their heartwarming condolences, via LGF.
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| Saturday, February 1, 2003 |
16:47 - Not In Vain
http://www.israelnewsagency.com/israelastronautilanramon.html
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If there's any consolation to be had, it's that the Shuttle's mission was in fact complete-- which means that the symbolism of Ilan Ramon's flight, including the journey into space of Petr Ginz' "Moon Landscape" drawing, remain intact. And though the experiments and research carried out during this sixteen-day mission was ground-breaking and every piece newsworthy in any less cynical a time, and every member of the crew a hero for accepting the risk inherent in the pioneering nature of the space program in the first place, Ramon's family and country can be particularly proud that he and the crew he flew with died bringing this one symbolic objective to fulfillment.
The art won't be returning to Earth, but it's met an end more poetic than any museum could give it.
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16:27 - I hate being right
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Steven Den Beste mailed me links to several sightings of exactly what I'd hoped not (but morbidly expected) to see: the dancing-in-the-streets of just about everybody who is willing to stoop to this subhuman level of pettiness just to grind their anti-US axe.
First up, as InstaPundit caught early on, was a CBC interviewer in Canada who asked the interview subject whether the accident could be pinned on American "arrogance".
I am watching coverage on different networks. CBC Newsworld just interviewed writer Robert Sawyer for his reflections on the shuttle program and potential causes of the disaster. The Newsworld interviewer asked Sawyer whether the cause was "arrogance" on the part of the U.S. government. (Sawyer said no.) This is one of the most odious questions I can imagine. It took minutes for the CBC to twist a tragedy into a politically motivated theatre of hate. Talk about manufacturing consent.
Furthermore... the interviewer linked American "arrogance" explicitly to current potential conflict in the Middle East. My only surprise is the CBC did not manage to sneer at the death of Israel's first astronaut in the same breath.
Then comes the bitter sniping from those comment-forum-dwellers who are protected from being strangled by a vengeful mob only by the fact that they live in an evil country that doesn't permit that kind of thing:
What's bush up to?
I am not afraid to say this -
I guess bush's SOTU speech went over so poorly, he needed a disaster to distract us from his horrible actions and lies.
I am getting sick of this bull. How many more Americans must die for bush to look legit? How often will he need to kill to keep up his legitimacy?
How convenient that the first Israeli citizen was on the shuttle, too. Everybody rally behind Sharon and don't question or speak against him, either.
Just how deep can someone's resentment over not getting his way possibly run? I'd thought we'd seen the worst of what acidic hatred the human frame could sustain in the course of the last couple of years, but I fear we're seeing now that the human capacity for ghoulishness knows no measurable bounds.
Finally, though I didn't really expect not to see something like this, we've got Iraq's enlightened take.
Immediate popular reaction in Baghdad on Saturday to the loss of the U.S. space shuttle Columbia and its seven-member crew -- including the first Israeli in space -- was that its was God's retribution on Americans.
"We are happy that it broke up," government employee Abdul Jabbar al-Quraishi said.
"God wants to show that his might is greater than the Americans. They have encroached on our country. God is avenging us," he said.
Car mechanic Mohammed Jaber al-Tamini noted Israeli air force Colonel Ilan Ramon was among the dead when the shuttle broke up shortly before its return to earth.
"Israel launched an aggression on us when it raided our nuclear reactor without any reason (in 1981), now time has come and God has retaliated to their aggression," Tamini said.
How many Iraqi "minders" were present when these statements were taken, I wonder? Just how "popular" was this sentiment? We've been saying all along that our quarrel is with Saddam Hussein, and not with the Iraqi people; but this is not a good thing to do if you're interested in keeping the game on those terms, guys.
We'll show you some "God's vengeance," by golly, real soon now. In fact, we might stamp that phrase on some of our Saddam's-bedroom-window-seeking missiles. And I guarantee we've got more of those than we do Space Shuttles-- besides which, they're designed to explode.
Awright. Hamas? Arafat? Who's next up? How 'bout France? Yeah, we'll have to come hat-in-hand asking for some Arianes next, eh?
Christ. And here I'd thought 9-11 would have turned out to be a great unifying event which would wake up the vast majority of the world that identifies itself as human and rally it as one. How disillusioned we all must be if I can't even curb my cynicism about what opportunistic bastards some people are willing to make of themselves in response to a Space Shuttle accident.
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08:27 - Pointing fingers
http://www.fas.org/spp/civil/congress/1997_h/hsy274160_0.htm
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How long before someone brings this up?
The specific reason for this hearing is to provide our witnesses with the opportunity to report on the shuttle and the shuttle safety in context of repeated transfers of funds from the shuttle program to the International Space Station. This spring NASA took $190 million out of the Fiscal Year 1997 shuttle budget--and that was over the objections of this Committee, I might add--and this was done to pay for Russian non-performance of the International Space Station. And just last week, the Appropriations Conference Committee on VAHUD, acting at NASA's request, cut another $50 million from the Space Shuttle Program for Fiscal Year 1998 and gave it to the International Space Station. Since most of these funds were going to be spent on upgrades which would improve the shuttle's safety and reliability, it seems self-evident that such cuts will have some impact on safety sooner or later. The only question seems to be, ''How many more times can the cookie jar be raided before we get punished?''
This won't be pretty.
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08:03 - Well...
http://www.cnn.com/2003/TECH/space/02/01/shuttle.columbia/index.html
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Another one of "those days" for NASA. The kind of day that changes the course of the space effort-- and at least for a long time, not for the better. Unless we can use this as a reminder of the importance of properly supporting the space program at the ideological as well as the financial level, the whole idea of a space "shuttle"-- an unsexy, utilitarian mode of space travel, a space bus-- is going to be at odds with any desire to afford it the appropriate attention to prevent accidents like this.
The big question is going to be "Well, Ilan Ramon, the Israeli, was on board. Was there any terrorism-related sabotage?"
Nobody's making that claim yet; nobody's saying word one in that direction. They're explicitly denying it over and over. And that's all to the good; the circumstances (the point at which the accident occurred, after all the mission objectives had been completed; the "debris hit wing on launch" thing; and the fact that the breakup happened at the single most dangerous place in any given space flight) are such that sabotage just isn't an issue.
However... I dare anybody to dance in the streets over this.
We'll just see.
Contextual oddity: Just last night, I was watching the MST3K of 12 To the Moon, a 50s B-film about a moon shot where twelve of the World's Finest Ethnically Diverse Scientists banded together to symbolize Earth's unity in spaaaace. Now, the plot points themselves were laughable, but there was a subplot involving an Israeli scientist and a German whose father was a Nazi higher-up. The two nearly came to blows a number of times, but eventually had to reconcile and give their lives together in a maneuver to save the Earth. Clumsy writing, but a nice sentiment-- and one you probably won't see in movies made today.
(On top of that, the French astronaut turned traitor and tried to get the German to join with him and condemn the North American continent to being frozen by the Moon people, so the old European powers could have their glory back. The German refused and the American helped subdue him. Wait, when was this movie made?
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| Wednesday, January 29, 2003 |
01:16 - It was all just a dream
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This morning, when I woke up, it was with great startlement. I'd been immersed in one of those dreams that seemed utterly plausible when in progress, and even managed to retain much of its plausibility long into the day.
It started with Bush, or maybe one of the White House advisers-- actually, it was probably Rumsfeld-- on some interview show like Face the Nation. He looked tired, haggard, hunted; it was the day after the SOTU, just as in real life, but for all intents and purposes you'd think the speech had been one of surrender.
The interviewer asked a few questions, beating around the bush; the interviewee dodged them without making eye contact. Finally, whoever it was holding the microphone said, point blank: Are we going to war in Iraq?
And Rumsfeld, or Fleischer, or whoever-it-was, said: No.
This caught the interviewer by surprise. He asked for elaboration.
"We just can't go to war in good conscience," Rumsfleischerbush said. "We can't ignore the fact that so many of our own people are demonstrating so loudly outside these very doors, demanding that we stop."
I suspect I was lying in a pool of sweat at this point. But he went on:
"We still believe war is absolutely justified-- all our evidence and intelligence still tells us that the only way to secure peace in the Middle East and for the American people is to remove Saddam Hussein from power, eliminating the threat of weapons of mass destruction falling into the hands of al Qaeda. We believe that failing to act against him right now would be a grievous mistake and an act of reckless endangerment of our people bordering on high treason.
"But... we simply can't allow ourselves to go into the history books of future American and European children as being a government, supposedly elected by the people, who steadfastly refused to listen to those very people when their voices rang out the loudest they had done in decades. We cannot take an action that, even if it is justified by our internal classified intelligence, will be widely viewed by the public as an imperialistic power play or a grab for oil. We cannot abide the hypocrisy of our own nation for having nuclear weapons while we forbid Iraq and North Korea from having that same power. We cannot deny that action by the US military in a foreign country, no matter what the justification, is morally equivalent to any terrorist attack perpetrated against our own nation. Public opinion must be held in higher regard than the strategic recommendations of our most senior advisers and experts, and must absolutely trump any prior pledge by our President. The President serves the people, and he cannot serve the people unless he obeys their momentary demands before obeying the mandate of defending the Constitution that he assumed at his inauguration.
"Never let it be said that we dared to claim to know what was best for our own people. Never let it be said that we allowed our own privileged, insider information on world affairs take precedence over the clearly expressed wishes of huge crowds of our citizens and those of our brother nations in Europe, thronged in the streets of the world's cities. Never let it be said that the US Government presumed to know more about how to end terrorism than the university students of the world did. Never let it be said that we did what we knew was right instead of what our loudest people asserted was right."
I remember seeing news reports covering this exchange. I remember seeing unbelievable outpourings of support gush forth from the streets formerly trod by A.N.S.W.E.R. I remember seeing Bush's approval rating soar, the plummeting to zero of warbloggers' opinion of him being muffled to inconsequence by the immense flowering of goodwill from the Left.
I remember blogging about it, but I don't remember what I said. I just remember the onset of a sick feeling in the pit of my stomach, along with the strange unaccountable desire to move to Montana.
It was about at this stage that I woke up.
I tell you... no more generic-label pickles before bed for me.
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| Tuesday, January 28, 2003 |
20:17 - Expelliarmus
http://www.cnn.com/2003/ALLPOLITICS/01/28/sotu.transcript/index.html
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We will consult, but let there be no misunderstanding: If Saddam Hussein does not fully disarm for the safety of our people, and for the peace of the world, we will lead a coalition to disarm him.
And while we're at it, maybe we can dis-leg him, and possibly dis-head him too.
(Sorry-- this is what happens when I get a ride home from Kris.)
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11:16 - Redmond Justice
http://finance.lycos.com/home/news/story.asp?story=31168037
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Ahh, now this is the kind of thing that puts a twisted smile on my lips. It's only a partial consolation for the network's damage at the hands of the SQL Slammer worm; but it does melt the ice surrounding my wrought-iron heart just a little.
Microsoft Corp. itself was exposed to the virus-like attack that crippled global Internet activity last weekend because it failed to install crucial fixes to its own software on many Microsoft computer servers.
Although Microsoft contends its failure to keep up with its own updates did not cause major problems, security experts said it points to a larger issue: Microsoft's process for keeping customers' software secure is hugely flawed.
The virus-like attack, called "slammer" or "sapphire," exploited a known flaw in Microsoft's "SQL Server 2000" database software, used by businesses, government agencies, universities and others around the world. Microsoft had issued a patch for the flaw in July, but many _ including some units within Microsoft _ had failed to install it.
The result was that the attacking software scanned for victim computers so randomly and so aggressively that it saturated many of the Internet's largest data pipelines, slowing e-mail and Web surfing around the world.
Microsoft spokesman Rick Miller declined to say which areas or how many computers at Microsoft were affected. He acknowledged that some servers were left unfixed because administrators "didn't get around to it when they should have."
Not that this will do anything in the long term to change anybody's approach to proper administrative habits. Oh, sure, it'll put the fear of God into a few IT guys, for a few months. Lots of techs will get sent to security training seminars; lots of consultants will make lots of money.
But sooner or later, everyone will go back to the tried-and-true method of using whatever software came preinstalled on their servers, hiring MCSEs to maintain it who follow little flowcharts and leave root passwords on Post-it Notes stuck to their monitors, and relying on service contracts and lawsuits to cover their asses in the event of anything bad happening.
It's cheaper that way, of course. It's how the insurance industry works. Hope for the best, but pay a tax and gamble that it'll explode, because someone else will take care of it if it does.
Meanwhile, we on the Internet get stuck in traffic jams behind massive auto pileups, and nobody's raising the premiums.
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11:08 - The Sordid Underbelly of Video Games
http://www.seanbaby.com/nes/naughty.htm
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Seanbaby strikes again! This time, he's got a rundown of the Top Ten Naughtiest Games of All Time. The long and storied history of pornographic video games, in all their (ahem) glory.
And yes, it includes "Boong-ga Boong-ga". Though it inexplicably only came in at #2. ...Okay, well, maybe it's totally understandable, considering what won #1.
Not Safe For Work, naturally-- but more because of how loud your laughter will be than because of the illustrations and screenshots.
Getting these sluts out of their panties requires such a fantastic level of hand-eye coordination and rapid reflexes that it becomes a death trap. Because if you masturbated using your amazing dexterity, there's a good chance it'll end with a pleasure-induced brain seizure and a fucking disturbing corpse for your landlord to find.
Seanbaby rocks my world.
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| Monday, January 27, 2003 |
09:20 - American sports fans show how mature they are
http://www.msnbc.com/news/864816.asp?0cv=CB10
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And to think I had felt self-righteous about our lack of British soccer fans trashing stadiums and crushing other fans, or of Toronto hockey fans turning downtown into a circus of drunken death. Here I'd thought hey, that could never happen here. Yeah, we have football; but at least people just sit calmly at home and drink their own beer and pass out afterwards instead of going out and killing people.
About 10 vehicles were set on fire, and crowds broke the windows of at least one television news van, police and witnesses said. One group of young men set debris on fire in the middle of a street and then posed for news photographers. Rioters broke nearly every window at a McDonald?s restaurant, which was also set on fire.
Tear gas wafted through the area, and some witnesses picked up rubber bullets fired by police.
Maybe it's because Oakland is so close to Berkeley, and the fans have picked up on their brethren's spirit of non-violent protests for peace (e.g. smashing the windows of the INS)?
What the hell country is this again?
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| Saturday, January 25, 2003 |
17:40 - Not that liberal
http://bleedingbrain.blogspot.com/2003_01_19_bleedingbrain_archive.html#87999536
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Hmm. Seems Bleeding Brain took exception to my war liberalism post from a few days ago. Apparently my views are terribly discouraging to him, because I advocated different political motivations during different kinds of national situations. Liberalism for peacetime, conservatism for wartime. That kind of thing. He didn't like the insinuation that it's okay to think about liberal goals once the war is over.
Abridged version: "While war looms, let's have conservatives running things so that success can be assured, however, during times of peace, let us go back to liberalism so that societal problems can be ironed out by those who know how to iron."
Liberalism (Leftism) is what GETS US INTO WAR IN THE FIRST PLACE.
Why would we resolve a war at so great a cost and then revert to the insane philosophy that invites attacks on freedom?
Leftist policy makers ignored or appeased Islamic threats that resulted in a sucker punch on the U.S that resulted in the present war conditions. Leftist foolishness handed nuclear weapons to N. Korea and Leftist foolishness handed missile guidance systems to China. The later two are recipes for future wars.
Even worse, leftist thinking fragments our own society and dooms humans to mediocrity and failure.
When the war is over, don?t re-embrace the Democratic Party because of its willingness to squeeze the nation?s teats.
Embrace freedom instead. Isn?t that what we are fighting for anyway?
Fair enough. But embracing freedom, when you have achieved freedom, becomes a lot less concrete a thing. That's my point. Once the world has been made safe from terrorism, do we go swagger about the streets and high-five each other and revel in the fact that we've preserved freedom? Sure. But how long can a society keep that up before it just starts to get masturbatory? At what point does it start sounding vaguely silly and alarming, like striptease night at the Springfield Retirement Castle? At what point does it become a parody of itself, like Mexico's "Revolutionary" PRI and the "Democratic People's Republic" of North Korea? (After all, the best proof of the strength of our republic, I think, is that we don't feel the need to advertise like that.) At what point is it appropriate to simply cool it?
Eventually there comes a time when a people has to recognize that their revolution has been successfully defended and the enemy has been dispersed. At that point, it's no longer productive to wave flags and revel in the victory of the people's ideals; it's more productive to look around and see what kind of domestic and diplomatic problems there are that can be tackled, and tackled in such a way as to provide maximum benefit to society while minimizing impact on taxes, the military, guns, and so on. And that's where peacetime liberalism comes from.
I'm not saying we should ignore the Founding Fathers' principles once we're back in stable times. Far from it. If anything, we should study them all the more intently. There's never any call to marginalize our country's core beliefs because they seem like dowdy relics of another time. But there is a time when it doesn't have to always take center stage, because we're confident that it's sturdy enough to stand on its own.
But liberalism can go too far, yes; that is, as Bleeding Brain says, the reason why we're in the shit we're in now with Iraq and al Qaeda and North Korea. I acknowledge that. It's a situation we can lay a lot more firmly at the feet of unthinking, overidealistic, one-world-one-people liberalism with a lot clearer conscience than we could heave it in the face of Reagan and Bush and Lincoln and McDonald's. We show ourselves to value freedom so little that we're willing to compromise it for the sake of more understanding and coexistence, and that sends a much clearer message to humanity's predators than the understanding and coexistence itself does. We show ourselves to be more wussy than principled, which speaks more loudly than our being more friendly than isolationist. We show the world we're a bunch of rich queeny city boys who like to go slumming for a thrill, not a haloed Mother Teresa healing the sick with a touch out of the goodness of our hearts. (Which seems more realistic, anyway, to a non-American viewpoint?) Then we get our skyscrapers knocked down.
The best way to preserve freedom as we know it appears to keep the central government small, firm, and non-intrusive. There are times when such a conservative government ought to allow liberal interests some rein here and there in order to accomplish some advancement that everybody can benefit from; but it'd be a mistake for that government to take the opportunity to itself grow large or liberal. That leads to ruinous policy decisions both foreign and domestic. That way lie dragons.
In any case, I've learned one thing: You try to oversimplify something in order to establish common ground, and you end up pissing off people from both sides.
I'm spending the weekend at a convention full of people who are naturally predilected toward the Left. A midnight comedian (who was excellent in every other way) kept coming back to what he found was his biggest heartfelt laugh-getter: knee-jerk Bush jokes. And every time he made some riff on Bush's stupidity or other far-too-common mocking point, he got thunderous applause from EVERY SINGLE MEMBER of the audience. (Except me. I stood there and sullenly stared at the floor, looking for a good and visibly dramatic opportunity to swish my cape about my shoulders, elevate my nose, and exit.)
I worry that the nation's public simply isn't paying attention, and isn't thinking about anything beyond whose jokes are best. So in my attempt to simplify the situation, in my earlier post I was speaking more to a liberal audience than not-- trying to berate those I knew for their knee-jerk-ism while not making it sound like I was rejecting all the admirable goals that do exist on the Left (though, for the more reasonable of them, they're goals which the entire political spectrum ought to agree is worth fighting for). I wanted to present the image of a Way Out for the lefties that I know, a way to break out of the cycle of stupid Bush jokes and take an intelligent position on world politics without facing the inevitable criticism for "joining the Bible-thumpin' rednecks" that they'd probably have to contend with. You know-- it's an "I found an intellectually satisfying, morally consistent and courageous platform that doesn't depend on cutesy slogans and wry irony from comedians for fuel. Why can't you?" kind of thing.
I personally have no interest in flip-flopping my politics back to the way I was in high school, as soon as the war is over. But I don't imagine that I will remain rock-steady as times change, either. My whole point is that politics and the appropriateness of various viewpoints ebb and flow over time. Stubborn insistence upon a particular platform can make a guy look steadfast, yes... but add it to the popular predilections of society at a given time, and the reaction can range from healthy checking-and-balancing all the way up to full-blown revolutionary insanity. We've got to be Greenspan-like with our rhetoric. We have to know when to let it have free rein, and know when to reel it back in. We've got to recognize when liberalism is getting to dangerous levels and smack it back down; we've also got to understand when conservatism is running too high to prevent social good from being done, and lower its profile a bit. And we have to recognize those times when one side or the other really ought to be pumped up to its fullest strength in order to accomplish the greatest benefit available to it at a given time.
Sure, perhaps this is just mealy-mouthed refusal on my part to take a stand. But I am looking for common ground here, and I do believe I have a consistent set of principles that I think are appropriate to these times. That's what I'm saying-- I think more people would be attracted to the anti-idiotarian platform if they were freer to subscribe to the idea that politics can change; that refusing to be scandalized by the Monica Lewinsky thing doesn't mean an automatic and permanent contract stipulating hatred of all Republicans; that wanting to see better environmental controls and more gay rights during the 90s does not mean it's okay to put I CAUSED 9/11 bumper stickers on SUVs; that just because Bush can't pronounce "nuclear" or distinguish in public speech between "prosecute" and "persecute" does not mean that the entire premise of a war in Iraq is invalid. (Want to know who else was so miserable a public speaker that he seldom or never did it himself, but instead gave his speeches to a professional orator in order to deliver them? Thomas Jefferson.)
I fully expect those who identify themselves as anti-Idiotarian today will persist in their unity of thought well after the war is over. But how long do people think it'll be before the various factions begin again to drift apart to their respective poles?
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| Friday, January 24, 2003 |
09:33 - Must... have... poster-sized... version...
http://www.penny-arcade.com/view.php3?date=2003-01-24&res=l
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In response to the apparent securing by somebody of the movie rights to Metroid.
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| Thursday, January 23, 2003 |
01:49 - Totally sweet
http://www.duke-kim.com/korean/
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Okay. So, like... you know the Real Ultimate Power site, the one about ninjas? The purpose of the ninja is to flip out and kill people. An Internet legend in its own time. You know the one.
Well, apparently, it now has spin-offs. Marcus sends me this link: The Official KOREAN GUY page-- part of the new and burgeoning Real Ultimate Power Network! After you finish giggling at the page itself, notice at the bottom that there are links to RealUltimateSororityGirls, RealUltimateBums, and RealUltimateLiquorStoreClerks. (None of these are remotely as funny, however. More's the pity.)
I don't think I've seen one of these proto-web-ring-things-that-got-away-from-people since the old Mr. T Ate My Balls phenomenon, which seemed to peak in around 1997...
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| Wednesday, January 22, 2003 |
09:40 - The Terrible Secret of Parody
http://littlegreenfootballs.com/weblog/?entry=5353
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There's got to be a lesson in here somewhere.
I wondered, when Charles Johnson posted this parody news item about the Arab League condemning the launching of Israeli Ilan Ramon into space (along with that drawing of the Earth from space by that kid who died in the Holocaust), whether he should have been just a bit more clear about the fact that it was a parody.
In Gaza City today, thousands of Palestinians marched in the streets, many firing weapons into the air. "With our blood and our souls, we will strike the orbital Zionists," chanted the protestors. Sheikh Yermani-Makr, appearing on Palestinian television, said, "It is not enough that the unbelievers have come on our land, but now they also take our heavens? How can this be permitted?" Palestinian youths also took to the streets in Nablus, chanting, "One! two! Where's the Arab manned space program?" In Nablus, three Palestinian youths were dragged through the streets by members of the al-Aksa Martyrs Brigade, who accused them of being "collaborators." Witnesses said that the teenagers were heard making positive statements about the American science fiction program Star Trek, several of whose main characters were played by Jewish actors. Reports of the teenagers having received "atomic wedgies" were unconfirmed.
After all, the human ability to fail to identify satire is something that's always amazed me. And it's all made the worse by the fact that so many news items these days have to carry disclaimers to assure readers that they're not parodies. Some things are just too ridiculous to take seriously-- even when they're true.
Case in point: Remember this?
July 24, 1997
WASHINGTON (CNN) -- No one expects to lose much sleep over it but, for the record, NASA has been sued by three men from Yemen for invading Mars.
The three say they own the red planet, and claim they have documents to prove it.
"We inherited the planet from our ancestors 3,000 years ago," they told the weekly Arabic-language newspaper Al-Thawri, which published the report Thursday.
Adam Ismail, Mustafa Khalil and Abdullah al-Umari filed the lawsuit in San'a, Yemen, and presented documents to the country's prosecutor general which they say proves their claim. There was no word on whether they had paid the appropriate inheritance taxes.
And no, that was not a parody. Which should go without saying-- it was, after all, on CNN.
But apparently people as highly placed as Israel's ambassador to France were taken in by Johnson's ruse, and are citing it in interviews for news columns.
But as usual the Arab League which during its history and since the day of its foundation never missed an occasion, to miss an occasion which would contribute to the peace, hastened to publish a press release whose its silly thing seems to have reached paroxysm and a level of stupidity which exceeds all its preceding records.
You know... much has been made about the advantages bloggers have over traditional media, in terms of speed of coverage, and willingness to tackle certain issues before the old media is able to overcome whatever bias it has in order to cover them properly. Bloggers had the Muhammad/Malvo story and Trent Lott's gaffe and countless other developments covered long before they resolved themselves in national headlines.
But this, I guess, would be the downside: people who can't tell the difference between bloggers and traditional media, mixed with bloggers who are perhaps a little more willing than they should be to post parody items with little in the way of disclaimers. Don't get me wrong-- I certainly don't want to see bloggers have to hold themselves to some kind of universal standard of journalistic integrity or whatever-- the lack of such a thing is what makes blogs what they are. But we all just have to bear in mind: there are idiots in the world, and easily confused people, and people who love to jump to conclusions. And there's no telling how high a misunderstanding might go-- or how much damage it might cause-- before someone figures it out.
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| Monday, January 20, 2003 |
23:03 - Seanbaby, Watching While You Sleep
http://www.thewavemag.com/pagegen.php?pagename=article&articleid=22887
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To help get this year started off right, the inimitable Seanbaby has been inspired to action (or maybe coerced), and now has a roundup of truly mind-bending frivolous lawsuits to guffaw at.
Eighteen years ago, John Duggan was convicted to life in prison for beating his wife to death. And how did the prison staff reward him for this? By putting his money into a zero-interest prison account! This wicked deed will not go unpunished, and with justice on his side, John is now suing the prison system for an undisclosed amount of money he feels he would have earned through proper investment. Despite the possible loss of funds, the prison is still finding new ways to improve conditions. In fact, right after the announcement of the lawsuit, the prison guards announced a new holiday, Free Knife For Everyone Except John Duggan Day.
This guy frightens me, he's so good.
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| Saturday, January 18, 2003 |
02:51 - What a Day
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So I spent the day today out with friends-- hiking and taking photos, seeking out interesting restaurants, and hanging around with the guys while they drew comics and let me write sarcastic commentary in the panel boundaries. The evening's auditory accompaniment was mostly hours of insane laughter.
But it started out not too auspiciously; a peek at one friend's blog (which I won't link here) showed me his ultra-clever juxtaposition of Bush's head with a compost heap ("the only post Bush is fit for"). So I was morose and tight-lipped for a good half an hour, until I managed to put it out of my mind with an effort of will, as well as the thought that in San Francisco and DC and Europe and Iraq and the West Bank and Syria and everywhere, every last gunport of the knee-jerk anti-war, anti-Bush activism machine would today be flung wide open. And yet I somehow knew that it would turn out to be so incoherent, vapid, morally shallow, and generally based on nothing more than inane slogans ("Bush iz st00pid!!!11!``") as to be unlikely to really put forth any real unified platform that meant anything. (Perhaps it had something to do with the fact that I was up in San Francisco last night, discovering afresh the hell-for-any-kind-of-motor-vehicle-that-isn't-a-bus that is Market Street, trapped at each no-left-turn-here arrow while trying desperately to find a way to get left, with nothing to do but look at the signs exhorting participants to the coming rally that would convene there in the morning, and to listen to NPR's coverage of the Freedom Riders heading up to DC from Mississippi. They passed the phone around the bus, from a guy who thinks Bush is a shrieking monkey who obviously can't tie his own shoelaces, to a girl who opposes war because violence is bad and stuff, and plus she has a husband in the army, to a 60-year-old lady who is convinced that there are better ways to solve our problems than fisticuffs. The interviewer tried to pose some interesting questions, like why the hell they're riding a bus to the nation's capital to wave signs demanding love and respect for Saddam Hussein and the deposition of our own President, when we know exactly what kind of hell we'd be condeming the Iraqi people to if we did nothing; but their best response was that those kinds of things were best dealt with at the political level, not by blowing up innocent civilians. And then they hung up.)
So I had the feeling that the world would have its little day of insanity, but then it would end, and everything would go back to normal. And I was able to relax and have fun for the remainder of the day.
So it turns out that the protests turned out pretty much as I expected; a bunch of sloganeers out for a good ol' protestin' day like they heard their parents had back in the Sixties, with such oh-so-clever sentiments as GOD BLESS IRAQ and NO BLOOD FOR OIL. The best that can be said for them, apparently, is that some of them pledged to be open to the idea of war if proof of Iraq's threat were produced. That's the most coherent facet of the whole movement, and the whole movement's credibility will hinge on how that facet gleams when it's turned toward the light. Put up or shut up, in other words.
Meanwhile, France appears to have found a new way to surrender-- devoting tons of government money towards subsidies of mosques, trading the separation of church and state for a little bit of appeasement. Oh, how that warms the cockles of my heart.
All this-- the protests everywhere, the slogans, the vitriol, Saddam's speech thanking his friends on Market Street and the Mall, and so on are contingent upon the US being wrong about Iraq having weapons of mass destruction and a secret nuclear program. We must be wrong, after all. We in the US have such a terrible track record when it comes to choosing sides on big, world-altering issues. We were wrong about rule by royalty, choosing the losing side of democracy. We were wrong about crushing the Confederacy and ending slavery. We were wrong about fascism, it would seem. We were wrong about communism. We continue to be wrong about global markets, socialism, gun freedom, and all those other little things we continue to be so misguided about, while the rest of the world-- who has country-by country made so many right choices over the years when it came to things like Hitler and Stalinism-- gets to lecture us sternly on our inexperienced, presumptuous ways. We can't possibly know what we're doing. Just because the world has eventually come to agree on our values and decisions in just about every major area doesn't mean a thing, you see; America is still wrong, and the rest of the world is right. Because they said so, that's why.
And they say Iraq is peachy-keen. Saddam doesn't have any weapons of mass destruction, they say; and besides, even if he did, which they're not saying he does, he deserves them! Hey, someone's got to give those Yanks the come-uppance they've been cruising for all these many years? Someone's got to take the wind out of their sails! Who do they think they are, traipsing in here and showing the world how a nation goes about being successful and prosperous without ever having to undergo a violent revolution or reversal of any of the basic principles upon which it was founded, ever since the first President took office? Just because it's unique among nations in being the same sort of country today as it was in 1776, does that mean it's doing anything right? Shyeah. As if.
Iraq has no weapons of mass destruction, Cowboy Buddy. Trust us.
Well, we say: No.
I tell ya. If only the world were in more capable hands than ours, huh?
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| Friday, January 17, 2003 |
15:59 - Stubbornly San Franciscan
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Well, I'm going to be incommunicado for a few hours-- I'll be up in North Beach for a performance of Beach Blanket Babylon. While the civilized world's opinion of San Francisco crumbles around us, I'll be clinging to one of the most bizarre memes to ever have attempted to define the city experience. Westward ho!
UPDATE: Okay, well, then again... perhaps BBB doesn't so much attempt to define the San Francisco experience as... uh, as just do a bunch of stuff with really huge elaborate hats. Fair enough... now I know better. And I've also got a better idea of the geography of North Beach/Little Italy... which I'm sure will stand me in good stead should I have a need to show someone around.
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| Thursday, January 16, 2003 |
01:53 - Oh, right, it's that time of year again...
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One more thing before I turn in. (Closing time for my inbox just never seems to roll around.)
As most of my friends know, the end of January sees me trying harder than at any other time of the year to dig up pretexts for rebelling against the football-fueled fervor of loud cacophonic whooping caroming its way up the stairs while I hide out in the crawl space. Each year I try a new tack, hoping for better results than last time. Well, here we go-- a little something from a posting on the ever-entertaining Ar-Rahman list:
A Religious Injunction Regarding Football Given by a Particular Jurist
This is an extremely fine matter to comment on. Many jurists, such as Mufti-e-Azam of Pakistan, Moulana Rashid Ahmed Ludhyanwi have gone to the extreme. His point of view is as follows:
Firstly, he defines the words `physical exercise' into two.
a) One which is apparently linked with jihad.
b) And one which has no apparent link.
Mufti Rashid Saheb places football in the latter category. He then goes on to state, "For football to be permissible, due to it being linked with the latter group of physical activities, there are many pre-requital conditions, which need to be studied.
Firstly, there are three conditions:
1. There should be no physical or financial loss.
2. The person who takes part in such activities, himself, should not be encountering any loss, nor those who are participating with him.
3. The aspect of futile entertainment should not be dominant.
For the former two conditions he puts forward two ahaadith from which he puts forward his deductions.
The Holy Prophet has stated:
"Every play from which pleasure is gained is baseless (impermissible) apart from the practicing of bows and the training of horses or playing with his wife. Verily, these are permissible."
I'll be sure to let the guys in the living room know this on Super Bowl Sunday. I'm sure it'll go over real well.
UPDATE: Ayn Rand wouldn't make a very good mufti. (Thanks to Josh Ellison for the link!)
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00:35 - PunditPundit
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You know all those little questionnaire things you find online that allow you to look up your porn-star name, your Jedi name, your gangsta name, and so on? (According to which I'm respectively known as Christopher Colony, Tiebr Feuki, and Stupid-ass Pond Swimma?)
Well, why not a Blogger Name Generator? You know, like _____Pundit. We'd get such worthy entries as CitricAcidPundit, TartarControlDuffPundit, CrimeanWarPundit, PottedPalmPundit, uh... PakledPundit...
Okay, maybe this wasn't such a good idea after all. C'mon, gimme a break.
I guess it seems like it's the night for experimentation. Lileks is doing it, at least-- he's Bleating in blog format this time, and if anyone ought to be able to get away with calling himself SpringfieldPundit or something along those lines, it's him.
(Good show, but I think James forgot to note that when you do things in blog format, you can't do things like make sense and have internal consistency and throw and catch your literary devices. This is like watching Jose Canseco get picked for one of the teams in a Little League game. Or something.)
For my part, even with all the world's events, I couldn't work up a head of steam to write anything today; but I did add a link icon to Dave Hyatt's Safari blog (at right) so I can have some thematic baggage to carry around with me. As a gun-rights supporter who can't tell a Glock from a bottle of Smith & Wesson oil, I'm right out of the running for the more popular blog bumper stickers (at least, popular in the linkage circles in which I seem to travel). So I gotta take what opportunities for personality I can get.
Maybe I should try to put up more "grotto 11" stuff, and maybe even elucidate just what the hell it is that means. (Trust me, you wouldn't be any more enlightened if I told you.)
Or maybe I just need some sleep. Yeah. That sounds like one helluvan idea.
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| Monday, January 13, 2003 |
09:51 - The Future is Already Installed
http://www.lileks.com/bleats/archive/03/0103/010303.html#011303
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Whoo. Lileks has devoted most of today's Bleatage to detailing his experience with a piece of benighted PC movie-editing software. Usually he seems to try to keep the direct specific software-fisking of post-iApp PC software to oblique sidelong references, and I don't blame him; given his experiences, and those of any Mac user who knows, who knows from first-hand experience that there is a better way than the fighting and swearing and throwing up of hands in frustration reported over drinks by one's dinner partners... and given the all-too common reaction of said dinner partners if you meekly raise your hand and say, "Um... 'scuse me, but... Macs aren't like that," he has every reason to be discreet about it like we've all learned to be in order to maintain mealtime civility and avoid getting a "ETYLOCAM" branding iron in the ass.
But the iMovie-pretender software he talks about, it seems to me, is the kind of thing to bring a guy's defenses down, come hell or derision. Software like this does that to a guy. This is the product of a wasted afternoon devoted to learning useless crap about an application that shouldn't have any such useless crap to learn about it, if it had been designed properly. And yet, it's interesting: so many PC users are so resigned to this kind of wrestling with their software, on a daily basis, that it doesn't make them anywhere near as pissed-off as someone steeped in Mac software gets when venturing into that world, armed with some technical know-how but handicapped by a presumption-- completely flawed in the PC world, it seems-- that the software maker is not malicious, that the app developers aren't trying to take out their own frustrations on the user, that the companies in question actually want to help the user do something.
It's a perfectly reasonable assumption out here in the ghetto, but it leads to nuclear explosions of the head when you cross over. And, oddly, it's the PC users who are afraid of the unaccustomed weirdness of Macs, not the other way around.
Brooks' The Mythical Man-Month talked about how software development flouted the traditional rules of manufacturing and R&D, how if you threw more men at a job, it became more late, not less-- largely because software is something that only highly savvy individuals with an intimate knowledge of other highly savvy individuals' areas of expertise can produce, where cooperation and willingness to code to a standard must wrestle with each engineer's personal flair and cleverness. No semi-skilled labor here. It's a bunch of mavericks all trying to write to their own visions of the future, and the more such people you fling into an already-late project, it'll just make it worse.
Eventually every manager and CS student in the world had read that book, and it became standard operating practice. But it still only addressed the side of developing functionality, shipping on time, that sort of thing. Its lessons-- that software is something inherently different, that has to be developed with priorities that aren't obvious or intuitive to the manager-- haven't been taken to heart yet in so much of the computer industry, in the areas of usability and design. Software makers still seem to assume that focusing on user-interface, writing software that abstracts itself toward enabling an ability rather than on remaining software that the user has to learn, is still a luxury that's unnecessary to invest in. And they're right, really, because the PC market doesn't follow Brooks' observations either: it moves and ebbs and flows based on price and feature set, qualities that seem intuitively obvious to most consumers as being of paramount importance, because they are of paramount importance in every other kind of product. And what that leads to, tragically, is companies that write software toward the goals of price and feature set while shelving the whole making it easy and enjoyable to use and obscuring unnecessary technical esoterica from the user chimaerae. They're not necessary. Customers will learn to cope. They'll buy the software 'cause it's cheaper and has more checkboxes and more function buttons on the main screen; sure, they'll only use the software once and then abandon their digital filmmaking careers. But that's not our concern! We just gotta sell 'em that one boxed copy and make it just useful enough that he'll feel too guilty to return it for a refund.
Computers are something different. They have to be treated differently. Price and checkboxes will only get you a half-solution, and traditional solutions on the R&D end will only solve more price-and-checkboxes problems. Not the usability problem.
In order to create usability, you've got to invest in UI development-- an enterprise that probably won't directly earn you any money, because most of the industry's consumers don't buy software based on usability, much though they might caw about wanting software to be "easy". (People get software with their scanners or cameras, and that's what they learn to use. Or don't.) You've got to make the decision to write not to the known money-making goals of price and checkbox items, but instead to the intagible goal of making the software do stuff intuitively and correctly. Now, this won't necessarily make your company any more money, and it'll cost a lot. It's not necessarily good business. But it is what serves the customer, whether it be good business or not. To put it into "prisoner's dilemma" terms, you've got to "collaborate" in order to serve the customer; you've got to take a hit for the team. You've got to invest in an area where it's not intuitively beneficial to the company to invest. And if all the companies in the world did that, they'd be subject to being undercut by one company that "cheated"-- selling software that it chose to write toward price and checkboxes. Guess which product customers will buy?
A company that chooses to stick to the intangibles and make products that only 5% of the public can properly appreciate is "collaborating" even when the whole rest of the world is "cheating"; they know they're dooming themselves to a tiny sliver of the market. But they do have the right idea, and as long as they continue to exist, there's some reason to believe there's hope for the industry-- that some people, some engineers and managers and designers in the field, do care enough about usability and serving the consumer as to forgo large market share and profits in favor of those elusive ideals.
People wonder why we Mac users are so obnoxiously self-satisfied and smug when we talk about this sort of thing. Well, I'm sure everybody's been in some position or other at some point in life where you see that Hey! Everybody's doing everything all wrong! Can't they see that?! -- and yet you can't wave your arms and yell enough to get anybody's attention. The best you can hope for is to be called a troublemaker, a rabble-rouser, a malcontent, some snobby geek who's living in a dream world.
But you can't just remain silent, knowing what you know, can you?
I'll say this for his machine, though: if he ever wants to back up that 3.3 GB movie file on floppy disks, he's all set.
Yep. It's sure got that checkbox nailed.
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| Friday, January 10, 2003 |
09:29 - Make no mistake! Okay, maybe a few.
http://www.lssu.edu/banished/current/default.html
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Judson forwards me this list of LSSU's Banished Words for 2003. I'm gonna be looking forward to these every year; last year's were lots of fun as well. Give it a look; I absolutely agree with the nominations of "Make no mistake", as well as "Extreme" (you listening, Apple? Better than Togo's, though, who say "Make your lunch extreeeeeme! ... which means putting avocado on your sandwich), and "as per".
Judson would add "At the end of the day" and "the fact of the matter". Yeah, good call. (Hey, maybe "good call" should be in there too.)
As for myself, I'd love to see a ban on the inappropriate use of "apropos", which outnumbers appropriate usage in the media by about 90/10. But I disagree with the inclusion of "branding"-- while it sounds like a hijacked term being used for a trumped-up purpose, I'd argue that it actually means something concrete these days, a whole branch of business. Someone on NPR yesterday was talking about the difference between a "brand" and a "company"-- the former is fun, hip, and has loyal customers; the latter is work, boring, and has employees and shareholders. Might be the only way to save the New Economy companies from falling prey to a new return to strict control of non-work-related conversation and activities and lax dress codes and work hours, as is already happening in a German design firm, under the tutelage of a woman whose book Fun is Out is apparently taking the business world by storm.
I'll keep my friendly work environment and my "branding", thank you very much.
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| Thursday, January 9, 2003 |
03:12 - Next Stop: Premium Blend
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A while back, I noted the marked lack in the Islamic world of that staple of modern society that we take so much for granted here and now, self-effacing humor. I said (or implied) that a social group has only really "arrived" when it produces a universally-known celebrity figure who uses self-referential humor to mock his very group, and thus to validate its strength and resiliency. If you know your group can stand up to the acid test of a home-grown stand-up comic's roasting, then you give it that roasting and let the world see how well it does. I wondered where the Muslim version of Chris Rock, Ellen DeGeneres, and Yakov Smirnoff was.
Well, just now I got an e-mail from Shahed of the alt.muslim newsgroup/website; he passed me two links as evidence of Muslim comics who are gaining an appreciative following. The first one has a number of links to various comics and humor sites, inclding a Muslim version of The Onion. (Really.) And the other one focuses on comedienne Shazia Mirza, whose act evidently is a big hit in Europe (particularly in Germany, where audiences reportedly like her because she reminds them of Hitler; ohh-kay).
Mirza's background necessitates finding new ground - after all, you can't do many gags about being drunk and stoned when your religion demands abstention - and the material based on that culture is easily the strongest. She does have other gags that do not rely on her faith, but these are not always as assured.
Interesting. I'd like to see this.
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02:24 - "Missiled about Islam?"
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While I was down in Atlanta over the weekend, I saw that at the LaVista Road exit near where my brother lives, there's a huge billboard towering over the freeway interchange. Against a backdrop of a US flag, it said in enormous letters, "Misled about Islam?" (My brother's wife said she always sees that first word as "Missiled" for some reason.)
The billboard was an ad for the site WhyIslam.org, and purported to present the facts regarding Islam as a countermeasure against the ill-founded rumors and assumptions being spread in the post-9/11 world. This is the kind of thing I've been hoping to see for a long time: an "outreach" site with large, mainstream advertisement, presenting a clear message for average-Joe consumption.
And I checked out the site; as a matter of fact, it does seem to be what it claims to be. It's nice and friendly, speaking to an American non-Muslim audience, and seems to make a game attempt to be fair and balanced in the facts it presents. Certainly the face it puts on Islam is a very smiley one, but I suppose that's par for the course.
I found myself thinking, though: How far would I have to look through the site before I ran into the inevitable moral-equivalence rhetoric? How many clicks does it take to get to the center of an Islamic outreach website? One... two-hoo-hoo... thrrree...
Turns out the answer is one. Click on the "More>>>" link at the bottom of the main page, and you get an essay centered on the following charming sentiment:
The word terrorism came into wide usage only a few decades ago. One of the unfortunate results of this new terminology is that it limits the definition of terrorism to that perpetrated by small groups or individuals. Terrorism, in fact, spans the entire world, and manifests itself in various forms. Its perpetrators do not fit any stereotype. Those who hold human lives cheap, and have the power to expend human lives, appear at different levels in our societies. The frustrated employee who kills his colleagues in cold-blood or the oppressed citizen of an occupied land who vents his anger by blowing up a school bus are terrorists who provoke our anger and revulsion. Ironically however, the politician who uses age-old ethnic animosities between peoples to consolidate his position, the head of state who orders “carpet bombing” of entire cities, the exalted councils that choke millions of civilians to death by wielding the insidious weapon of sanctions, are rarely punished for their crimes against humanity.
Sigh.
But aside from that, the site is pretty even-handed, and in any case I'm glad to see that this kind of outreach is taking place, even though I had to go to Georgia to find it. I wonder why that is? I'm sure it isn't simply that huge billboards are more common down there...
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19:47 - Bring On the Cultural Studies
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It was only a matter of time after the hippie movements of the 60s became the subject of master's theses by people who were too young to have lived through it.
Now, it seems, it's become the "in thing" in journalism and academia to latch onto any old phenomenon/fad/movement and elevate it to the level of Transcendentalism or Socratic philosophy.
I refer to the report which was on NPR this afternoon, on All Things Considered, on otaku-- anime fans. It centered on the manga-zine Shonen Jump, which is launching a US-produced, fully English-language edition (though it still reads right-to-left, so as not to offend the purists) to sell to a new generation of anime consumers in the West.
Now, this is fine: I have no problem with anime as a genre or an art form. I myself don't like the art style-- it's a point against any given anime show or movie, not a point in favor of it, and I'll watch a good piece of anime in spite of the art style, as long as the story is good. The anime I enjoy most is the stuff that doesn't look so much like anime: Miyazaki films, Cowboy Bebop, that sort of thing.
But what I don't understand is this: Why is it that what so many people absolutely adore about anime, even among the supposedly intellectual youth who make up the biggest lump in the money-to-be-made distribution curve, is so pathetically insipid?
Maybe the report was focusing on the wrong part of the anime convention it covered; it wouldn't be the first time. But in quoting its financial figures for the mainstreaming of anime, it cited the fact that what we now had was a generation who had spent their pre-teen years watching Pokémon... and now they'd outgrown it, and now were watching Yu-Gi-Oh, which obviously is a much more grown-up show.
Um. 'Scuse me? Do these journalists realize what Yu-Gi-Oh is? It's a show about a bunch of kids who have duels using magical playing cards. Playing cards. As in, cards that you can go and buy and collect. Each episode (though I'll admit only to having seen a brief glimpse) is just another set of duels, with canned power-up sequences and florid taunting language and statistics that make it clear which cards to buy-- no story any deeper than that. No grander vision. It's an even more blatant piece of manufactured merchandising pap than Pokémon was, and that's saying something. Coupled with the report's characterization of the anime convention being filled with 15-to-17-year-olds blowing their life savings on Yu-Gi-Oh stuff, this thing even makes the "Chinpokomon" episode of South Park look like yesterday's news.
And naturally, the whole otaku movement was being presented as the Next Big Thing: in an onrush of sociopolital irony, today's disaffected youth are reaching out for a non-American art form to call their own, a culture that's patently alien to adopt instead of the bland and boring one they were spoon-fed before the Saturday-morning saviors came to call. Now they have a generational identity! They have a language all their own! They have a culture that's defined as a wilful mixture of influences, and isn't that remarkable? Isn't that meaningful? Isn't this somehow a microcosm of our whole lack-of-direction-as-a-people-in-the-world-community thing? Can we write our master theses on this yet?
Now, far be it from me to rag on the devotees of some obsession that I don't understand, nor on their self-fulfilling behavior at conventions full of like-minded souls. Believe me, I understand it all too well.
But I'm just at a loss to understand one little thing: When was it that I became so old and out of touch with the minds of my fellow human beings that I can't even begin to comprehend the attraction of something utterly vapid that makes slobbering acolytes out of otherwise fully functional humans of at least average intelligence? When did Yu-Gi-Oh become a surrogate for C.S. Lewis or Walden?
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| Wednesday, January 8, 2003 |
13:48 - Hammer and Tongs
http://diveintomark.org/archives/2003/01/07.html#safari_review
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Aimed at web designers and CSS-heads, Mark Pilgrim has posted a detailed set of observations on Safari and what it does and does not do properly. It looks as though it might become sort of a clearing-house page for these kinds of observations, as it has links to numerous test cases and other sites' reviews, as well as updates from readers (which include Safari developers, who are clearly very interested in following-up on any compliance test cases they can find to work on).
So far, what I've seen encourages me quite a bit. It turns out that most of the bugginess I've seen only occurs on the first run-time; subsequent times you run the program, after it's created its various pref files and things, are much smoother. And I'm seeing mounting evidence that Apple is ravenous about gathering feedback about this thing so they can improve it to prime-time quality before release.
All I really need is some kind of text focus and navigability in drop-down <SELECT> menus, and I'll be able to use it just fine.
Incidentally: it turns out that the problem with my own blog page in Safari was that the <PRE> block up above had the following form:
<FONT SIZE=-2><PRE>
...
</PRE></FONT>
But Safari is more strict about style than IE or other browsers, on this issue; it interprets <PRE> as a complete font override, and so it ignored my <FONT> setting. (This happens in <TT> blocks as well.) I changed it to:
<PRE><FONT SIZE=-2>
...
</FONT></PRE>
...And now it's fine.
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| Tuesday, January 7, 2003 |
00:17 - Long Day
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Up early this morning to catch the Stevenote, and up to the City this evening for what has to have been the fastest-passing three hours of my life: the dinner with the Bay Area bloggers and others who happen to be in the neighborhood for MacWorld and such.
So I got to meet Mike Silverman, Bill Quick, Stefan Sharkansky, Andrew the Punning Pundit, and a couple of heaping handfuls of other notables whose names eluded me over the course of the steak (which was, by the way, excellent). And it was a blast. The discussions ranged all over, from vegetarianism to Macs to Bush to Simpsons quotes and back. A pretty broad spectrum of opinions were in evidence, and I would have loved to see a transcription of the multitude of threads flowing back and forth across the table, occasionally rising to shrill cries of "That's because you're a fucking socialist!" and "That is the most wrong thing I've ever heard in my entire life!" My most treasusured memory, though, will have to be that whenever one of these good-natured near-explosions about rent control or public transit or welfare or slaughterhouses rocked the table, someone would meekly interject, "So-- how about those Palestinians?" You know, steering it back to a nice safe topic on which we could all agree.
We oughtta do this kind of thing more often.
UPDATE: Stefan Sharkansky has posted photos.
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| Sunday, January 5, 2003 |
01:10 - Shut up, Brian
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You know how they tend to create names for literary genres by taking a word that describes what makes up a genre and adding "a"-- like "erotica", "Americana", "Judaica", and so on?
I think they should have one of those genres for autobiographies, diaries, personal journals, and the like.
They could call it "diarya".
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00:30 - I'm back
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Well, that weekend went pretty well. A few random notes...
Because of the recent weird weather patterns we've been having around here, planes taking off from San Jose International have been taking a southerly flight path rather than the usual northerly one. This means that when we took off on Thursday, on the steep power-climb out of the airport, we banked almost directly over my South San Jose neighborhood. From what must have been about 4,000 feet, I could clearly see my little circular street-- and not only could I make out my house, I could make out my car. Quite an unexpected treat.
On both legs of the journey eastward, there were what I believe to have been federal air marshals. I don't know what I was expecting-- presumably some guys in white shirts, pressed slacks, and dark glasses with those little curly wires coming out from behind their ears. But these guys on the flights I was on looked distinctly... military. Shaved heads. Green uniforms with large gold "US" lapel pins. No more than about 19 years of age, from the look of them. And considering that the guy on the second leg (MPLS to Atlanta), who sat next to me, spent the flight time writing love notes to his girlfriend and sleeping, I'd say that they're still working out the kinks in the system. (In addition to the guy next to me, there were two others who sat further up the plane, on opposite sides of the aisle, and looked decidedly more alert.)
So then there was Atlanta, which was a lot of fun. Friday morning I dropped off my brother Mike at his job at 7:30 (a part of the clock I haven't seen in years, in any time zone), and took his car off east of the city, parked it, and went bounding up Stone Mountain to catch the tail-end of a protracted overcast-baffled sunrise. Quite a place, that-- it's the "Mount Rushmore of the South", with images of all the Confederate heroes carved into the granite rock face. There's a gondola to the top, where ATLA is painted in huge yellow letters along with a giant yellow arrow pointing in the direction of the Atlanta skyline. (It must have been put there like in the 30s; it's not exactly a mystery to pilots today where Atlanta might be.)
Saturday we (Mike, his wife Julie, and I) went up to Tallulah Gorge, where they filmed the sniper scene from Deliverance. It had what has to have been the most studly trail I've ever been on: the top part is edged with boards, and the actual trail surface is made of a rubber mat recycled from old tires and molded to look sort of like pine needles. The result is a surface that's springy to walk on, and very clean-looking. Then, below one of the upper overlooks, there's a huge long staircase section-- some 1500 steps or so-- down to the bottom of the gorge. (There's a massively overengineered suspension footbridge in the middle, which I'll post some pictures of as soon as Mike gets them developed; more fool me for forgetting my digital camera!) The stairs are all very new and sturdy; the only problem is getting back up them after you've descended the thousand feet into the gorge...
Then we went to the Mall of Georgia (not really competition for the Mall of America, don't worry-- pretty cool nonetheless) to see The Lion King in IMAX. Not much to say here, except that... well, you know. Maybe I'll expand further on that subject at some other date.
And today we spent some time driving around downtown Atlanta, Piedmont Park, and related environs (where for the price of a run-down Sunnyvale bungalow, one can buy the biggest mansion in Mansionland); the flight home was air-marshal-less, but it did get me stuck in Detroit where it was freezing-rain conditions and we had to trudge thr plane through the de-icing pad, where they doused us with detergent, making us an hour late getting back into San Jose. But hey, I'm not complaining, right? I'm back home now, and all's well again.
...OR IS IT?
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| Thursday, January 2, 2003 |
16:00 - <clap clap clap>
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Just bloggin' from the Minneapolis airport, because I had to make a note of the fact that the connecting Northwest flight to Columbus, Ohio has flight number... 1492.
Cute... very cute.
Oh, and the airport has an observation deck tower. Yeah, this place is pretty nice indeed.
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| Wednesday, January 1, 2003 |
03:45 - Back on Sunday
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I'll be flying to Georgia tomorrow morning to visit my brother and his wife, conveying the last straggling remnants of Christmas that keep me from being able to pack up the wrapping paper for another year into the Deep South. I understand they have electricity and telly-o-phone down there these days; however, I don't foresee that I'll have any ability to blog until I'm back on Sunday.
(Ow! Ow! Sorry! I was kidding!)
Anyway, see y'all then.
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16:36 - De Beers Summarized in 29 Kilobytes
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(Originally posted on Fark, sent via Marcus.)
Lance says this needs to be made into a poster.
Now do pardon me; there's a sunset to go and watch.
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04:10 - Good night, moon; good night, stars; good night, police sirens
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Well, once more the big shiny ball has dropped more or less without incident; no terrorist attacks, no massive computer glitches, no ball getting stuck, and certainly no actual dropping of the ball from the specified height at the precise moment when gravity would cause it to reach bottom in free-fall right at the tickover point. (Didn't they used to do it that way? What happened, did someone sue Discover and the Times because dropping the ball according to the laws of nature and science was insensitive to the beliefs of the platygaeists, or that the "apple" imagery cruelly drove millions of helpless innocents to gorge themselves on fast food and become enormous flesh-bags, or to buy computers they didn't need and couldn't afford but looked cool in the den?)
Yeah, pretty low-key New Year's, overall-- maybe it's because I spent the four-hour time chunk straddling midnight watching the Adult Swim marathon and playing with my new EyeTV. (Think TiVo for the Mac; it's a soft DTR system, of which I'm sure there are examples for the PC. A little plastic box takes RF or RCA input from cable or antenna, encodes it to MPEG on the fly, and streams it over USB to the machine's hard drive, where it can be accessed directly and interacted with via actual integrated software, instead of having to deal with the set-top middleman. Seems to work pretty well, barring a few glitches-- not least of which is the moronicity of MPEG and its inability to be properly demuxed for editing, like any sane movie format would be. But the whole direct-control-of-live-TV-through-an-onscreen-floater-remote thing is pretty neato.)
Incidentally, on an unrelated note, it's been "Encore Week" on Fresh Air on NPR, and the other day they re-aired the infamous Gene Simmons interview in which the tongue man cut loose with all his frankness on Terry Gross, unleashing both barrels of his I-slept-with-4,600-women-and-you-too-could-be-one-of-them, in which Terry came off as a good deal less sure of herself and capable of handling the reins of the interview than Gene did. But one thing I thought was interesting was that Gene, for all his Howard Stern-esque lewdness and arrogance, has some very strict personal observances and limits, and they're self-imposed rather than derived from some non-corporeal power (which would have been a good excuse, considering that he had attended Yeshiva as a kid and was well on his way to becoming a rabbi). He's so vehemently anti-drug and anti-smoking that, as he said, the most beautiful and seductive woman in the world could be lying right on his bed-- but if he smelled that dirt-under-the-bleachers smell on her breath, she'd find herself chucked right out the door, if not the window. Gene said he's never been drunk-- and with the exception of a few valiant attempts at taking a sip here and there during toasts (in order to be polite), he's never been capable of drinking alcohol. "I might be cursed with some kind of freakish one-in-a-million defect," he said, "but the very smell of alcohol makes me gag. And I'd say that makes me very, very lucky." So whatever else might be true about the guy, I guess I can say that at least he's not the only one to "suffer" from that particular malady.
So while I listen to the police chase down late-night carousers out in the neighborhood at the edge of hearing, I'll take my leave of the good blog-posting page and curl up with my new "The Art of Spirited Away" book and be glad I'm not out in it.
Happy New Year, and to all a good night.
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| Tuesday, December 31, 2002 |
09:42 - Random thought
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You know, under most circumstances I really like classic rock. It's what I have on my radio every morning to get me out of bed.
But I've just got to say this: I am really sick of songs whose choruses consist solely of the same line (usually the title of the song) repeated four times.
Thirty days in the hole
Thirty days in the hole
Thirty days in the hole
Thirty days in the hole
Sheer genius, man. Seriously, have a little bit of imagination. I guess I could understand if the music on this kind of chorus was something to get excited about, but it's not-- it's just a plodding workmanlike chord progression. It's like the chorus is just a placeholder to stick in between verses, and the less interesting you make it, the fewer neurons you waste on what could be a good song you might eventually squeeze out.
Okay, I'm done now.
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| Monday, December 30, 2002 |
09:34 - Go to hell, Mikey
http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/common/story_page/0,5744,5763232%5E7583,00.html
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Ah yes-- I've been hoping for a long time to see a definitive list of the blatant factual errors (whether deliberate or negligent) in Bowling for Columbine. Trust Tim Blair to be the one to come up with it.
Blair takes on the sycophantic reviewer community, too, and pretty much constructs the best comprehensive takedown I've seen yet. And there's this one particularly important bit:
Some of his reviewer/fans share Moore's accuracy problems. Bunbury claimed that "he bails up the entire management of Kmart and confronts Charlton Heston on his own front veranda" although he meets only a few Kmart management types and interviews Heston inside his house; and The Australian's Jane Cornwell wrote that Columbine's vile three-minute cartoon history of the US, written by Moore and made by animators FlickerLab, was produced "by the guys from South Park".
I am so glad to find that it wasn't actually Trey and Matt behind that little animated interstitial; until I read this, I had the dark gripping suspicion that it was. After all, Moore interviewed Matt Stone outside an In-N-Out, and heard from The Man from Columbine himself that the NRA's post-disaster publicity stunts were politicaly schtoopid. But somehow I'd never pegged the Guys as being viciously anti-American enough to not only endorse Columbine, but to produce that animated short for it, with its South Park-like movements and its freakish noseless character designs, and its insinuations that America was born in fear, grew out of fear, and now lives in a heavily-armed fear supported by an NRA which is really the same thing as the KKK. The style seemed right, but the message wasn't anything like what I'd come to respect Trey and Matt so deeply for.
Which means that Moore deliberately tried to imply that the short was done by the South Park guys, by having it come so hard on the heels of the Stone interview and his excerpt from Bigger, Longer, & Uncut. It's yet another of the sneaky editing tricks he used in order to make it seem like more respected public figures agree with him and are willing to help him spread his message of peace and love and think-of-the-children than really are.
Trey and Matt are thereby exonerated, and I can once again watch their masterpieces in good conscience.
And Moore gets my biggest demerit of all for trying to cash in on my heroes.
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| Sunday, December 29, 2002 |
01:26 - "Paper bag, or triple mylar sleeve?" "No thanks, I'll eat it here."
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Last night, after the movie, we were relaxing in front of the National Geographic channel, when an episode of "Taboo" came on. This is the show where they showcase the Bizarre and Fascinating Practices of Societies Unfamiliar To Us. There's a disclaimer at the beginning that says Every society has its own standards of what is acceptable behavior. Some of these practices may not be suitable for younger viewers. Your discretion is advised. My first reaction was that it had to be the most wussy, PC-ified, every-viewpoint-is-equally-valid disclaimer ever yet seen on this planet; but I'd misinterpreted it as implying that all viewers had equally valid definitions of what was suitable TV to watch, or something. It was actually better than that, but not by a hell of a lot.
Anyway, that's an aside. The show had three segments; the first was on an islander tribe whose males proved their manhood and ensured a good yam harvest by building a big tower and then bungee-jumping off it, except without the "bungee" part. Then there were hot-coal-walkers in Greece. Those were fine. Sure. I can deal with those.
But then there was the third segment, which centered on a guy in the Phillipines who had made a pact with God: in exchange for his wife and daughter living through childbirth, he'd promised God that he would crucify himself once a year, on Good Friday, for like ten years. Thus would he repay God for this deed of divine intervention.
Now, I'm the first to admit that I don't understand much about religion, and that that's probably irredeemably tainting my perspective on this. But one just has to stop and think about this for a second.
The act that this guy is taking upon himself-- flagellating his back with sticks and glass until there's no skin left, then being nailed through the palms onto a cross and left hanging there in front of a cheering crowd for several searingly awful minutes with a circlet of barbed wire on his head-- is predicated on the concept that his suffering is something that he can use to pay for a divine act done on his behalf.
My question is this: What kind of God is it that wants his people to suffer?
If you undergo unimaginable torture in exchange for God's doing you a favor, this assumes that God wants and appreciates and enjoys suffering on the part of his creations. Evidently he gets off on it. Like ants under a magnifying glass. Only these ants hold the magnifying glass for themselves, and fight for the chance to suffer and writhe in agony in order to give God the pain points he apparently craves.
As Lance put it, any God that demands suffering from his people is no god, but a devil.
And maybe I missed something, but wasn't the whole point of the Crucifixion that Jesus chose to suffer so that the rest of humanity wouldn't have to? It's like someone gives you for your birthday a brand-new immaculate paint job on your car; and you say "Thanks!" and proceed to take a circular saw to it. Yeah, way to treat a gift, there, guy.
They talk about how Americans, as a Puritan-derived culture, seem to crave suffering above all else, and work under the assumption that the less you enjoy life, the more worthwhile your life is. Presumably this is what expands to "we like to work hard, harder than our family/social lives can support". But you know-- it seems to me that the urge to torture yourself is more of a general human predilection. Some people do it in different contexts than others, though. Some put themselves through agony in pursuit of the elusive chimaera of personal achievement; others undergo their agony in the hope that God will enjoy watching it so much he'll grant them their wishes.
As I've mentioned once or twice in passing, I'm not religious, but neither am I an atheist; I'm an agnostic, because as one of my classmates once put it, an agnostic is the only thing a scientist, by definition, can be. (We can't know that there isn't a God, any more than we can know that there is a God. We have insufficient evidence one way or the other, and the nature of the question is such that scientific evidence can't be used as proof.) I don't know who or what God is, exactly, to quote Lisa.
But I do think it's not too much to presume that God is not some nasty pimply little boy gleefully roaming the neighborhood with an air rifle and a slingshot. If we have anything like the same morals that God has-- and I think that either has to be true, or all of religion is a sham-- then God can't possibly want to do favors for people in exchange for their voluntary pain and suffering; as though the more they hurt, the more pleasure God feels. No way am I prepared to believe that. I'd have a far easier time believing God exists in the first place than believing that God is that evil.
Okay, okay-- I understand that self-torment and insane personal risk and so forth are a form of "ecstasy", in its etymologically correct meaning-- a way to put yourself "outside" your normal self and existence, a way to feel like you're doing something "special", and therefore achieving some kind of goal or building up some kind of points, redeemable for valuable prizes of the divine-intervention sort.
But I wonder if anybody actually thinks about just what the theological implications would be for this kind of thing to actually work.
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| Saturday, December 28, 2002 |
13:24 - Wholly crap!
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Okay, so an hour ago it was sunny (if a little breezy) and I was thinking quite seriously about calling up a friend and going hiking up in the mountains-- taking my camera up into the woods, finding a nice sunny hillside, and taking some photos of the cloudscape and the clear blue view across the bay to the Santa Cruz hills and up north as far as San Francisco and Mt. Tamalpais.
And now, suddenly I look outside (in response to a sudden loud rattling and hooooooowwwwwwling at the windowpane) and see rain sheeting by almost horizontally, waves of water rushing up the street, those tall pointy trees that line people's driveways bending over sideways, and lightning directly above.
What does this place think it is? The South?
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| Thursday, December 26, 2002 |
11:27 - Room to stretch out
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Well, we're now more or less fully moved over to our new building a block down the street. (Actually we were moved on Monday, but... ye gods, the boxes to unpack, the labs to rebuild, the rough edges to sand down.) We're no longer right across the intersection from Infinite Loop. We're now far enough away that to see it, you have to stand on the roof of the parking structure (we have a parking structure now! Woo-hoo!) and gaze off over the tile roofs of the one-story buildings that line Bandley Drive, the little green-swathed industrial access road that until a couple of years ago was known as "the Apple Graveyard"-- because all the buildings along it used to be Apple buildings, sporting striped Apple logos on the "tombstones" out front, only to be replaced with dot-coms as Apple retreated into itself in the early-to-mid-90s. But lately, the shiny single-colored Apple logos (each building a different color) have been staging a comeback, most recently with Mariani One (right across Mariani from our old location) being reoccupied in triumph by its old fruity tenant.
They somehow managed to miss all of our explicit directives that our lab space was a lab, not a machine room; so all the 19-inch racks that we've had them install ended up bolted to the edge of the platforms nearest the wall that you can see in this picture. It is left as an exercise to the reader to imagine how much walk-behind space this would have left us, if all of our machines were flush-mounted (as they tend to be. Machine rooms tend to have center-mounted devices). All the racks you see here have been uprooted and unbolted so they can be reattached further away from the walls. We're all sure glad we got a networking-lab specialist to do this part of the move, instead of leaving it to the regular contractor.
Still, that's one helluva nice lab, innit?
But anyway, if there's one major complaint I have about the new place, it's the cubicles. Look at 'em. I mean, geez.
Okay, maybe it's not obvious what the problem is-- but that's probably because there are lots of them. See, first of all, there's this stupid corner piece with its cutout section and adjustable keyboard tray with eight axes of motion and fourteen little levers and two-way slide-out mouse boards. If I lean on this thing, it sinks under the weight of my elbows. I can't move the keyboard out of the way and eat lunch in front of my computer as I'm accustomed. And because my size is such that my hands are most comfortable with a keyboard sitting flat right on the desk, I have to raise the keyboard tray to desk level-- which means the mouse tray that slides out to either side collides with the side of the cutout part of the desk (or slides right under it, so I can't fit my hand in between it and the desk, much less a mouse). Plus its surface completely confounds my optical mouse. So I tried putting the mouse on the white desk part, but if I try to move the mouse to the upper left side of the screen, it disappears with a squeak (and a "Fly, you fools!") into the crevasse between keyboard tray and desk cutout. Clunk.
So I moved my primary machine-- my iMac-- over to the straight desk. Trouble with that is, the straight desk is about two feet deep, as opposed to the three feet that our old desks had. So there's barely enough room even for the iMac and its keyboard, and much less for a 17-inch CRT; I tried putting the PC monitor on the straight desk and a keyboard in front of it, and the keyboard hung over the edge by about an inch. Not good. We'll either need to get deeper desks for most of the engineers (all of whom have multiple computers), or buy us all LCDs. Heh. (Many people, by the way, have already unbolted their keyboard trays and are living in the little cutout nooks.)
But this should work out okay; I think the solution I have here, with the iMac (which doesn't take up much space) on the straight desk and the PC in the corner (where the monitor can take advantage of all the corner space that otherwise would have been wasted), is a viable one. Plus there's like a little sticking-out bit of the corner desk that I can use for a Diet Coke holder. In fact, I had worked all the bitching out of my system, but these days I find that it just doesn't feel right if I don't commit such things to blog for permanence and catharsis. Plus it's a shame to have my digicam here and not use it for every little excuse that comes along.
iPhoto really needs to have a way to control the JPEG compression on the Export function. I mean, it really really needs it.
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10:37 - New Jesus 8.0! Now with more features!
http://www.cnn.com/2002/TECH/science/12/25/face.jesus/index.html
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This is bound to upset a whole lotta people, but they're going to be hard pressed to explain why, I think.
Neave and a team of researchers started with an Israeli skull dating back to the 1st century. They then used computer programs, clay, simulated skin and their knowledge about the Jewish people of the time to determine the shape of the face, and color of eyes and skin.
They turned to the Bible to determine the length of his hair. In the New Testament, "would Paul (one of the apostles) have written, 'If a man has long hair, it is a disgrace to him' if Jesus Christ had had long hair?" the article speculates.
The magazine's editors admit that they cannot be certain of the accuracy of this facial representation.
Indeed, but I'm much more prepared to believe this than the Sistine Chapel. Truth tends to be less glamorous than fiction... and Kevin Smith movies aside, it's certainly a lot more plausible for a face like this to have been the real deal than some internally lit version of any ten long-haired thin guys I knew in college.
I wonder what kind of psychological tricks it'll play on people who have deeply internalized the "classic" Jesus face, though? Will this be a blip, or will it shake things up?
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| Tuesday, December 24, 2002 |
11:18 - See ya on the flip side
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I'm just about to take off, driving up to the Wine Country to see my folks for Christmas Eve and the following associated Morning. Then I'll be driving back down here for what looks like it's turning out to be one helluva Christmas dinner-- roast goose and everything.
Take care, everybody, and Merry Christmas. Go see Mike's greeting card-- it's creepier even than a lot of Lileks' discoveries, and that's saying a lot!
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| Monday, December 23, 2002 |
13:08 - Frank Speech
http://www.snopes.com/rumors/hawley.htm
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A lot of people have been talking about how they wish American political figures and military leaders and other talking heads would stop beating around the bush (so to speak) and say what they really mean, without fear of offending some special-interest group or campaign funder. Some, like Acidman, are writing the speeches they would make if elected President. It's cathartic.
Well, a speech purportedly by retired General Dick Hawley started going around the net, and while it was good enough to post here in its entirety, I was a good boy and checked snopes.com this time. And yep indeed, it's a fake.
But that doesn't mean it's not worth reading.
4) "These people are poor and helpless, and that's why they're angry at us."
Uh-huh, and Jeffrey Dahmer's frozen head collection was just a desperate cry for help. The terrorists and their backers are richer than Elton John and, ironically, a good deal less annoying. The poor helpless people, you see, are the villagers they tortured and murdered to stay in power. Mohamed Atta, one of the evil scumbags who steered those planes into the killing grounds (I'm sorry, one of the "alleged hijackers," according to CNN-they stopped using the word "terrorist," you know), is the son of a Cairo surgeon. But you knew this, too. In the sixties and seventies, all the pinheads marching against the war were upper-middle-class college kids who grabbed any cause they could think of to get out of their final papers and spend more time drinking. At least, that was my excuse. It's the same today. Take the Anti-Global-Warming (or is it World Trade? Oh-who-knows-what-the-hell-they-want demonstrators) They all charged their black outfits and plane tickets on dad's credit card(!) before driving to the airport in their SUV's.
What's gravy, though, is that Gen. Hawley actually responded to this piece, and his comments are on the snopes.com site-- and he agrees with what was said, though is a little more reserved with his epithets. What he has to say for real is just as good as what was attributed to him in fiction.
What would that be like, I wonder-- seeing a column posted somewhere that I mostly or entirely agreed with, only to find my own name at the bottom?
"Boy, I sure wish I could write like that," I bet I'd say.
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| Sunday, December 22, 2002 |
21:00 - Decadent Society Watch
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So the local Albertson's where I shop has recently undergone a massive renovation, doubling its floor space, rearranging everything, dramatically improving its produce section and the selection of products across the board (I can reliably get those dill-pickle-flavored potato chips now).
One of the new features that I just noticed was a drink kiosk near the entrance, under a big sign that says "Enjoy a cold drink while you shop! (Inform the checker of your selection.)"
In other words, you can grab a drink of your choice-- under the honor system-- and tell the checker at the end what you had. This says something about the cheapness of soft drinks these days, if nothing else.
The shopping carts have drink holders too, formed as part of the wire frame of the toddler basket. Ye gods. Whatta country, eh?
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17:25 - The Missing Voices
http://unmedia.blogspot.com/2002_12_21_unmedia_archive.html#90080219
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Aziz Poonawalla took exception to my uncharitable reaction to the PBS documentary on Muhammad.
I can understand why he's upset and frustrated at my lack of ability to see Islam for the peaceful and tolerant religion that it is. It's a thankless struggle, trying to convince people like me, one by one, that the voices of the imams of Mecca, Riyadh, and Baghdad-- who every Friday call for Allah to shake the earth under the Americans' and Jews' feet and freeze the blood in their veins-- are the freakish statistical outliers and that the vast majority of Muslims are nothing like that at all. Because even when it seems the convincing is done and won, along comes another terrorist attack or another fresh wave of al-Qaeda rhetoric, and then we're back to square one.
I wish it weren't like that. I wish I could simply shut my ears to those imams' threats, and in so doing, cause them to cease to exist. But you know-- even if the American media is biased toward them for shock value, and even if we see more of it than is reflected by reality just because LGF gets crosslinked more than places like Aziz' site do, the unfortunate fact is that for those same reasons, more Muslims are going to hear that rhetoric than would have been the case if people just followed the numbers and percentages. The media isn't the only entity lured by shock value.
In the comments on the post in question, I gave my responses to its charges; I think it's just as tasteless and tactically unsound to have a show on Muhammad on PBS during Christmas as it was for the NRA to go and hold rallies in Littleton and Flint after the shootings that took place there. (I don't think it's unreasonable to suggest that Islam had at least as much to do with 9/11 as the NRA had to do with Columbine, which is why I'm comfortable so far with that analogy.) And while I'm all for seeing a more widespread acceptance of peaceful, coexistent Islam shoving the rhetoric of al Qaeda and the Wahhabist imams aside into the shadows, that's not what this PBS show is about: it's not a distant, respectful historical account of Muhammad, with opposing viewpoints and evidence at odds, as are most PBS shows that focus on religious figures. It's also not a "fireside chat" from prominent Muslim leaders driving home the point, to an audience of Muslims and non-Muslims alike, that they condemn the terrorist attacks of al Qaeda and the Palestinians, in clear and honest terms and not followed by any "but..." that renders the condemnation toothless. What it is, instead, is about the equivalent of PBS running a breathlessly positive series on Marxism, in 1962. How well would that have gone over?
I'd love to believe that Islam poses no threat to my life and my way of living it. Nothing would make me happier. But closing my eyes and going "la-la-la-la" doesn't make al Qaeda go away, and we learned last September the price of thinking it would. And much as I wish this weren't the case, to attack the extremists on the far side of Islam from where we stand right now is going to mean causing some incidental damage to the moderate middle ground. There's no way for that region of thought to remain an innocent bystander, to borrow another set of metaphors from Jeffrey.
It's no more than I would be prepared to have expected of me if, for instance, fanatical Mac users started blowing up Redmond city buses and issuing anti-Windows diatribes. I would bear some responsibility for such a thing, for helping bring it under control, and for absorbing some suspicion and loss of my own freedom due to my incidental association with the same kinds of values. I would reject those acts outright, without attaching a "But these guys do have a point" rider. And I wouldn't post sycophantic articles about Steve Jobs while the victims' families were still mourning.
We have a responsibility to preserve the freedoms of everybody in this country, whether Mayflower-derived WASP or recent immigrant. We must remain vigilant that we're not causing any more dishonor or pain to innocent citizens than we absolutely have to, even under the most extreme circumstances. But just as they say on one side of the debate that "9/11 did not occur in a vacuum", neither was it perpetrated by skateboarder kids or little old ladies, by Buddhists or Christians or Jews. It was done by a specific group of people from a particular region, defined by a certain religious fervor fomented by a particular brand of Islam. We can either accept the damage to American freedom caused by keeping a suspicious eyeball peeled in the general direction of Islam, if just to reassure ourselves that those South-Park-watching Muslims we all know personally aren't going to turn out to be Mohammad Attas; or we can dismiss all these very real terrorist attacks and social trends as so much regrettable noise on the fringes, and do nothing to prevent more of them lest we offend somebody.
No, I don't like what bin Laden has made of me. I don't like having to think in these terms. But just knowing the psychology of my own mind under these circumstances isn't enough to make me undo those changes. Things will have to happen in the world before everything can go back to the way it was before the towers fell. If I were a Muslim, I wouldn't like this situation any more than Aziz does, and I hope he can forgive me what my mind considers its rational need to keep an eye out in the direction from which danger has proven likely to come.
If my facial expression Islam-ward is an ugly one, it's because it's focused on what's in the distance, not on what's close to me.
Anyway, Aziz has four articles in a series which are worth reading on this subject, especially for the comments on each one, which address many of my concerns:
http://unmedia.blogspot.com/2002_11_27_unmedia_archive.html#85723644
http://unmedia.blogspot.com/2002_11_28_unmedia_archive.html#85726154
http://unmedia.blogspot.com/2002_12_01_unmedia_archive.html#90000506
http://unmedia.blogspot.com/2002_12_07_unmedia_archive.html#90022546
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| Friday, December 20, 2002 |
17:49 - You're not as happy as you think you are!
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(...To borrow a line from a comedian who was trying to capture Bob Dole's 1996 campaign attitude.)
Tom Lehrer, too, once had a line about a friend who "specialized in giving helpful advice to people who were happier than he was."
That's what I feel like sometimes, when explaining what it is about the Mac and about Apple that I think is worth writing as many megabytes about them that I have over the past year. I find myself in the position where for all intents and purposes I'm trying to convince people who are perfectly happy with their computers that they shouldn't be... or that there are things about their computers that they don't even realize are sucky.
I'm reminded of this every time I have to explain ColorSync to a PC person, or give reasons why Macs are so preferred in professional video editing, or graphics, or audio, or prepress. I explain the technical reasons why Windows is inherently ill-equipped for these tasks, and they don't believe me-- because how can Windows be so dominant if it's that deficient?
Well, it's because for 95% of the uses for computers, the advantages of the Mac are invisible. A school might buy Macs for their maintainability, but students-- who have PCs at home-- merely find them unfamiliar and weird. And they're usually ill-maintained, used as scanner machines or Photoshop stations, and the students come away thinking that Macs are the retarded uncle of the computer world, rather than considering why a Mac was being used for scanning and Photoshop in the first place.
There are problems Windows is trying to solve nowadays that people don't even consider "problems" most of the time, because they've figured out a way to cope with Windows' deficiencies in those areas. But what galls me so much is that Apple solved so many of those problems years ago, through lots of research and development, and that's why Macs cost more. Reward for effort. It's only fair, right? And for those industries that depend on Apple's solutions for the survival of their business model, Macs are indispensable. Mention Windows in such an environment and you'll get laughs.
Macs have things like ColorSync, WYSIWYG dpi-based monitors, FireWire (and SCSI before that), and peer-to-peer zero-configuration IP-routable file-sharing. Each of these things helped to define an industry, but there were always cheaper solutions on the Wintel side that satisfied the average, everyday consumer, even if they were sorely insufficient for those industries that depended upon those solutions being done the right way. For most of those computer users, the Mac solutions are things they've never heard of-- things they can't imagine are really that worthwhile, because they've figured out ways to cope with not having them... or because they don't have a need for a better solution that the ones they have under Windows.
PC users without ColorSync learn to deal with the fact that the colors in their images never quite match up, that one user can't send an image to another and be assured that it will appear the same on the recipient's screen as on his own. They grouse and grumble, but they accept it as "one of those computer things". They learn to tweak colors one way or another, fiddling with white-balance and temperature and doing multiple proofs until it comes out right. And that's just the way it is.
PC users with xVGA-based video cards and monitors (which includes Macs these days-- the dpi-based monitor standard has given way to the demand for higher pixel density and large resolutions) have learned to deal with images that aren't exactly the same size on screen as they would print out on paper. Point sizes on fonts have ceased to have any meaning, other than relative to other screen elements, crippling CSS. Images are rendered however the video card and monitor feel like laying them out, eschewing attempts to simulate reality. And that's just the way it is.
PC users without FireWire or SCSI have things like USB2 and IDE. And those things are fine, as long as you don't need to daisy-chain the devices together, offload the processing from the CPU into the devices, or power them through the same cable that carries the data, especially if it's a device that uses a lot of power. But for most PC users, IDE and USB are fine, because they've learned to cope with A/C adapters that take up three slots on a power strip and device channels that can only handle two drives each. That's good enough for most people. If they need more, they just get more power strips and USB hubs. And that's just the way it is.
PC users without AppleTalk get by with Windows' SMB-based file sharing, which is fine on a LAN-- but which isn't routable over IP and never has been. You can't just type in an IP address and mount someone's drive from across the country. But that's fine for most people; they use SMB to pass files around the LAN, but when they encounter the limitations of Windows' file-sharing, they turn to things like e-mail as a means to broadcast their PowerPoint presentations and Word docs. I'm sure I need not explain how ugly an idea this is, but whaddyagonna do? This is Windows. It's just the way it is.
Some of Apple's solutions will eventually make it to the PC world. Apple-style monitor-control software, common on Mac monitors since 1991 or so, is appearing from many third-party companies these days. Windows may one day implement a kind of file-sharing that does everything AppleTalk does. But other solutions, like ColorSync, are unlikely ever to reach the PC world-- not to their full extent and potential-- precisely because of the open nature of the Wintel architecture, the democratization that made Windows so successful against the Mac on the strength of price. When every company has its own idea of how monitors should work, a technology like ColorSync is... shall we say, implausible.
Most people remain blissfully ignorant of just why it is that Apple exists. Because they'll never benefit directly from the solutions Apple has implemented over the years, not being in the industries that demand the "real deal", all they know about Apple is that it's just "some weird computer company that makes expensive machines that don't run Windows". They have no idea why Mac people are so ferociously adamant that Apple not be given short shrift or belittled by sneering wags who would rather see a homogeneously Windows-based world than learn why it is that some industries still insist upon Macs. It's simpler to assume that the graphics world is inhabited by rich snobby art people who are seduced by translucent plastic, right? It can't be that they know something that the hecklers don't.
Because a rant like this is never complete without a metaphor-- it's as though Ferraris or Lamborghinis are being criticized for having insufficient trunk space or seating room or hauling capacity. Of course they suck in those areas. But for the purposes Ferraris or Lamborghinis are targeted towards, there is no substituting them with Fords or Chevys. (And in any case, Macs are a lot more well-rounded than Ferraris. ...I didn't say it was a good metaphor.)
What irks me beyond belief, however, is that eventually the defenders are going to be overwhelmed. There are just too few of them left, and even if everyone in the trenches who understands the issues remains firm in their resolve, there will always be clueless supervisors reading eWeek and Network World and .NET Propagandist Weekly who look around, startled, and realize how much money I could save the company if only we got cheap PCs instead of these stupid Macs. Macs are just slow, incompatible computers with more style than substance, right? And out go the Macs, and if necessary the people who relinquish them only over their own dead bodies; such people are livin' in the past. Windows Is The Future!
And then these supervisors wonder why they can't do certain things the same way anymore, and why there doesn't seem to be a good solution for IP-routable file-sharing or standardized color-matching-- why so much more of the business is based on kludges and assumptions and guesswork, instead of the technology just working and handling all that computer-related crap for people.
We in the trenches see this happening every day. We see Macs dwindle from business, thrust out by standardization in IT (in the name of reduced support costs, not that Macs cause nearly the same number of long-term headaches as computers with Registries do) or by starry-eyed supervisors intent in saving a buck and impressed by the Dell they got for their daughter and how fast it ripped that CD. Out with the old! In with the new! So long, stupid old Macs! Hello, the bright future of Windows!
Now, I really have no problem with people buying PCs because of lower price or higher speed or greater software compatibility. Those are all fine things.
But for me, conscientious design is a real, honest-to-God feature, as are fit-and-finish and corporate integrity and a demonstrated penchant for pandering to consumers' needs.
But even more important to me is that Macs not be dismissed from the niches where they are the only viable solution, just because of some edict from some suit who thinks he's doing his company a favor. I want people to be aware of what makes Macs special, what makes them desirable to the pros who use them. I want to make sure people understand what it is they're mocking before they mock it. Because if they knew, really knew how Windows was lacking and how much better it can be done, they probably wouldn't be quite so dismissive. They might even realize why it is that a company like Apple, which by rights and by all the evidence they can see should have died long ago, is still chugging right along, hanging on to that 5% of the market, and running prime-time TV ads and covering Silicon Valley with billboards.
They're not dying; and that fact is attributable to the many people who do still understand what it was Apple was trying to accomplish, and what they're still doggedly pursuing. They're willing to pay the extra dollar to support uncompromising development of real, top-drawer solutions, even if they themselves won't use them. I don't consciously use ColorSync myself; but Apple gets my dollar because they went the extra mile to create it. That's the kind of company that we need in this world.
Because if Apple were gone, even people who'd never used a Mac in their lives would lack from their lives the things made possible by the people who do.
UPDATE: Robert Lloyd mails to tell me that Windows can do direct IP-based file-sharing now. Well, that's good-- I figured they'd get to it eventually.
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| Thursday, December 19, 2002 |
10:10 - New WTC Designs
http://www.cnn.com
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Okay-- so, various folks have linked to these new WTC designs that have been unveiled. I haven't yet had a chance to register my opinions, but at first blush I'd have to go with the majority and agree that primarily I'm extremely happy that the original blah-fest of proposals were sent summarily back to the drawing board. Clusters of anonymous office buildings isn't any kind of way to mark this set of events in history. Fifty years from now there are going to be thousands and thousands of pilgrims visiting the WTC site, and they're going to want to be able to find the place without a street map. That's the way it should be.
So anyway, CNN has a vote on the various designs. They're all appropriately scaled and free-standing, finally; this time they actually seem to aspire to improve upon the site, rather than to just band-aid the gash in the skyline so nobody notices. Some of the designs I find bizarre and gross, but others definitely have the right idea: huge and imposing, but tasteful.
#1. Studio Libeskind.
Hmm. Four amorphous quartz crystals with a pointy spire reminiscent of Frank Lloyd Wright's Chicago "Mile High Skyscraper" concept? Naaah. We can do better than this.
#2. Foster & Partners.
I could totally go for this one. It's got that whole glass-and-steel Star Trek look to it, but it's extremely evocative of the original WTC, as well as being much taller. I wonder how it would react to wind, what with the venturi-tube effect betwen the towers, though...
#. Meier Eisenman Gwathmey Holl.
Looks like a couple of Rice Chex dropped into the middle of Manhattan, or possibly a giant fence erected to keep out intruders. No stylistic integration with... anything, really. Bleah.
#4. THINK Team.
The idea with the three narrow towers is kinda cool, but I'm less-than-wild about this "World Cultural Center" thing. It looks like a mock-up, like the false fronts on Old West buildings. It looks like the city's saying "We can't put the World Trade Center towers back up, so we'll build a wire-frame model of it so people think the towers are still here." Plus the name "World Cultural Center" sounds like a lame post-modern backlash-against-trade-and-commerce thing-- bets on whether a three-story "9/11 was caused by America's insensitivity to the Palestinian cause and cultural imperialism in oil-rich nations" exhibit is part of the proposal? Oh, and whatever-that-is near the top sorta looks like a plane stuck in the towers, but that's just me.
#5. United Architects.
Nice thought, nice scale and size, but... from the ground, this thing looks like three or four buildings grew together as a result of bad splint-work, or possibly like several buildings fell against each other and got stuck together. I'll pass.
#6. Peterson/Littenberg.
I'm not sure what to make of this. The towers look nice, very Empire State Building-- even the concept art looks like "City Beautiful" stuff. But I can't tell where the buildings are supposed to go, from the artwork. I'd like to see a better skyline shot of this one.
#7. Skidmore, Owings & Merrill.
The hell is this? Arc de Triomphe in a corset? Looks like a bad optical illusion. No thank you.
As for the voting, it's surprisingly close-- every design has many thousands of votes. But the front-runner, and this doesn't exactly surprise me, is #2-- perhaps because it bears the most resemblance to the original. Somehow I suspect that if one of the proposals were to build 'em back exactly as before, that one would be raking in the votes. As it is, I'm glad to see that the people have taste as well as nostalgia.
This might work out yet.
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| Wednesday, December 18, 2002 |
02:36 - Busy week
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There's not been a whole lot of blogging today (read: none), largely because this week is rapidly barreling toward the Big Move-- in which we pick up our corporate skirts and scuttle down the road a couple of blocks to a new building, a larger one which can accommodate us as we grow. There are three stories altogether, and to start out we'll only be in the first two, with large empty areas that we're not allowed to put permanent furniture into until we decide to add it to the lease; but until then, nobody else can use it either, so we can use it for, say, Ultimate Frisbee or Super Soaker wars.
This does mean, however, that our days are taken up currently with dismantling our labs and cubicles and packing their component parts all up into boxes with little color-coded labels. This takes up a lot of time during the day, and saps me of most of the energy I otherwise would have had at night. So I can't even complain about not having been able to score opening-day tickets for The Two Towers.
Ah well-- Friday will be a bust work-wise, because on noon we all shut down our color-coded machines and go home. And for me (and, likely, most of the rest of the engineering staff), that will mean "go home by way of the movie theater".
I did see Star Trek: Nemesis last night, though. Very good movie, if viewed in a self-contained sort of way. Continuity-wise with respect to the TNG series, though-- well, all I can say is that it stands to reason that Brent Spiner had a hand in writing this one, and it doesn't appear that he stands on much ceremony when it comes to maintaining compatibility with the established storyline.
And what with that Voyager episode with Janeway's ancestor in that snowbound Minnesota town, and now this-- what, is the entire Janeway clan throughout history an unbroken line of clones?
And I didn't buy that one dude as a younger version of Picard, either. Sure, they may have broken his nose, broken his jaw... but surely they didn't break his lips too. Those aren't Picard lips. Plus this would imply that Picard had less hair when he was younger-- male-pattern antibaldness is creeping up onto his head from the back, and when Stewart is 90, he'll have a full luxuriant mop to call his own.
Eminently MST3K'able movie. But good nonetheless.
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| Tuesday, December 17, 2002 |
02:18 - That's a new one on me...
http://www.guardian.co.uk/international/story/0,3604,861272,00.html
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Hey-- did you know that South Africa is a mortal enemy of ours now? Or at least, they consider us to be an enemy. A bad enough one that they're willing to forgo the funding that would have paid for HIV/AIDS drugs, and instead spend it on submarines to use in the event of an attack by the US.
(Via CapLion.)
Manto Tshabalala-Msimang told the Guardian that budgetary priorities meant her department could not provide anti-retrovirals to the estimated 4.5m South Africans with HIV. "We don't have the money for that. Where would it come from?"
Asked if it could come from defence savings from leaving out the submarines which formed part of a £4bn arms deal, the minister said that South Africa needed to deter aggressors: "Look at what Bush is doing. He could invade."
President Bush is expected to visit South Africa in January although only as part of a diplomatic tour of several African countries.
9/11 may have come out of left field, but this is from somewhere up in the nosebleed seats, or maybe out in the parking lot. What mental illness is it that has afflicted the leaders of just about every nation on Earth lately? Why is it so difficult for them to understand what we fight against, when, and why?
How does one argue with people like this? Where does one even begin?
And when did the USA become a bigger menace to the world than AIDS?
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01:03 - Right under my nose
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My search for pickles has taken me to all corners of the world, throughout my life. I've gone through brand after brand of grocery-store dills trying to find a reasonable approximation of the bright green, humungous deli-style monsters they sell in the fluorescent brine at meat counters in supermarkets and 7-11s. But they never sell those in grocery stores' pickle aisles, nor do they sell the sliced versions. At college, I could have my fill of the green slices of ambrosia, party as they were to the bounty of Sysco. But now those days are gone; and the best I can do is to ask for extra-heavy pickles at burger joints and sandwich places, hoping that one day I can penetrate the perimeter of the Evil Pickle Conspiracy and find out where one can obtain these supreme examples of foodservice pickledom. Even Granzella's, the restaurant/deli/grocery out in Williams where my family stopped on the way back from vacation and I found jars of the whole giant deli dills for $8.95 (and brought one home cradled in my lap), seems not to carry them anymore.
But today I had a revelation-- one that I feel like an idiot for not having before. If I want the kinds of pickles I get in restaurants, why not go to Smart & Final-- the foodservice supply bulk retailer that has outlets all over the Bay Area as well as the whole state?
Of course, they had 'em. Of course, they're exactly what I wanted. And henceforth, my quesadillas shall never go unadorned again.
They're cheap-ass, they're brashly oversalted, they glow in the dark. And that's the stuff of my dreams. Such has it been for nearly twenty-seven years, and now the dream is realized.
Now the only question that remains: who in God's green hell came up with the name Smart & Final?
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16:31 - As though we expected any different...
http://www.danielpipes.org/article/982
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Via LGF. I saw a story in the Mercury News on this PBS series (Muhammad: Legacy of a Prophet) during the same Taco Bell lunch when I ran across the ad for Bowling for Columbine. It was a nice full-color feature in the Entertainment section, featuring one of the show's producers, a son of American converts to Islam.
Forget print, go to film. Put together a handsome documentary with an original musical score that presents Islam's prophet Muhammad in the most glowing manner, indeed, as a model of perfection. Round up Muslim and non-Muslim enthusiasts to endorse the nobility and truth of his message. Splice in vignettes of winsome American Muslims testifying to the justice and beauty of their Islamic faith. Then get the U.S. taxpayer to help pay for it.
Show it at prime time on the most high-minded TV network. Oh, and screen it at least once during the holidays, when anyone out of synch with Christmas might be especially susceptible to another religion's appeal.
. . .
* PBS has betrayed its viewers by presenting an airbrushed and uncritical documentary of a topic that has both world historical and contemporary significance. Its patronizing film might be fine for an Islamic Sunday school class, but not for a national audience.
For example, PBS ignores an ongoing scholarly reassessment of Muhammad's life that disputes every detail - down to the century and region Muhammad lived in - of its film. This is especially odd when contrasted with the 1998 PBS documentary, "From Jesus to Christ," which focuses almost exclusively on the work of cutting-edge scholars and presents the latest in critical thinking on Jesus.
* The U.S. government should never fund a documentary whose obvious intent is to glorify a religion and proselytize for it. Doing so flies in the face of American tradition and law. On behalf of taxpayers, a public-interest law firm should bring suit against the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, both to address this week's travesty and to win an injunction against any possible repetitions.
Now, I know this reaction smacks of a fear that this documentary will in fact result in a lot of fresh American converts to Islam-- that we don't trust the nature of secularity, democracy, and our existing traditions to stand up to scrutiny, and that we'd rather suppress "dangerous" viewpoints rather than risk them gaining a following.
And maybe there is in fact some of that. The disaffected youth of today crave a non-American role model. They sneer when they see the Stars and Stripes on TV, even (and sometimes especially) after 9/11. It's cool to be non-American, even anti-American. Why watch Disney movies when you can take that beginning Japanese 101 for Anime-Watching course and pepper your speech with kawaii and gaijin and otaku? Why eat at McDonald's when you can eat take-out Thai? Why go to church with your clueless parents when you can go to a mosque?
It takes a supreme effort of will not to feel threatened by this, especially knowing that there is another side to Islam as it is practiced elsewhere in the world-- and that as long as it's kept far away, even that seems romantic and cool to some. No doubt most would change their minds if they had to experience it first-hand, or if they stopped reacting out of rebelliousness and actually thought about what they were doing. (Ar-Rahman abounds every day with women living in England or the US rhapsodizing about what a paradise for women an Islamic world would be, as though everything we know about life in Saudi Arabia or Taliban Afghanistan is wrong, or if it's right, that those are regrettable exceptions that no true Muslim would actually want.) But for someone wishing to make his fiery teenaged mark on the world, perhaps the most rebellious and self-righteous and purposefully inscrutable thing he can do-- the thing most surely guaranteed to piss off his parents, far more so than listening to Eminem or smoking-- would be to cheer 9/11 and/or convert to Islam.
Look, I don't care at all whether someone chooses for his or her own personal reasons to adopt some particular religion. I have friends who have gone Mormon and JW and 7DA. I don't have the slightest problem with it; if it makes them happy, that's great. Frabjous day.
But I'm not about to tolerate my tax money being used to fund positively-biased proselytizing films for those religions, to be shown on PBS right in the middle of a period when we're trying to find solace in our cherished traditions while so much of the world we grew up with changes right out from under us. Now's a time when we need the facts, and the other facts that back them up-- not propaganda designed to be divisive and to further an agenda which is profoundly counter to the spirit upon which this country was founded.
Unless PBS is planning a follow-up special that encompasses the whole picture of Islam in the modern world and complete coverage of the loudly spoken aims of its highest imams-- I can see it now, Ken Burns' Islam-- I'd say PBS has reached the end of its usefulness to me.
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11:23 - John Poindexter, This Is Your Life
http://www.wired.com/news/politics/0,1283,56860,00.html
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I'm lifting this title from the e-mail from Matt Eric who responded to my plea for help in tracking down this source. (I knew I'd seen it on InstaPundit, but oddly enough my searches on "poindexter" had turned up squat. I was beginning to wonder whether the reason I couldn't find any info on this new eyes-that-never-sleep system was that it was already working, or something.)
"Why, for example, is their $269,700 Rockville, Md., house covered with artificial siding, according to Maryland tax records? Shouldn't a Reagan conspirator be able to afford repainting every seven years? Is the Donald Douglas Poindexter listed in Maryland sex-offender records any relation to the good admiral? What do Tom Maxwell, at 8 Barrington Fare, and James Galvin, at 12 Barrington Fare, think of their spooky neighbor?"
. . .
What Smith didn't realize was that Poindexter's phone number and other information would end up on more than 100 Web pages a week later as others took up the cause.
Phone-phreaking hackers supplied details on the Verizon switch serving the admiral's home. The popular Cryptome privacy-issues website posted satellite photos of the house.
Poindexter could not be reached for comment for this story, and calls to his home phone now reach a recording: "The party you are calling is not available at this time."
Left wing... right wing... we're the ones with the Internet.
Matt adds:
This ought to be made into a major project. We should all get some dirt on him,his extended family, reading habits, and post it all to the Internet. Let's see how *he* likes it.
P.S. And maybe also do the same for whoever came up with that creepy-ass logo.
Yeah, I'm all for that.
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11:04 - I love this place
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I just drove through what seemed like three entirely different biomes on my way to work this morning.
When I left my house, it was in bright sunlight, under the bluest sky I've seen in weeks. The East Bay Hills were lit up in clear, 19th-century-painting-of-Ireland-looking greens and browns. There were big billowy clouds all around, ringing the view, blinding white on top and dark, heavy gray underneath.
On the high overpass from 101 onto 280, I could see the downtown San Jose skyline, lit by direct sunlight, looking like a World's Fair model... but behind it, in that contrast I love so very very much, was that dark curtain of cloud that sets off so perfectly any brightly-lit foreground scenery.
There was this huge raincloud squatting right in the middle of the valley, you see. Most of San Jose is in clear blue sunlight, but the center of the lowland area is home to this giant brooding mass of water. As I passed through the downtown area and the 880/17 intersection zone, the rain suddenly rushed onto the scene, taking me from the lowest notch on my intermittent wipers to the highest-speed continuous, for the space of about twenty seconds. Then I was back out in the barest of sprinkles.
And when I came into Cupertino and passed Apple's overseer-of-all-it-surveys headquarters on the left, the clouds' ragged western edges were giving way to that bluest sky in weeks, the western Peninsula mountains illuminated, the colors stark and bold. There was a light, crisp breeze blowing back the sunlit palm fronds against the dark, brooding, retreating cloud bank. The traffic light on the off-ramp stayed red extra-long just for me, so I could enjoy it.
(Yesterday, the clouds were bursting right over Apple, and the ever-popular "God Rays" were streaming out of a break in the cloud bank right down onto the Infinite Loop campus. But the clouds were moving way too fast for me to get a picture.)
I grabbed my camera and raced out for a quick circuit of the last couple of exits, but photos taken from a moving car never do the visuals justice. Plus I ran out of battery after about the second shot, and I had to trick the camera into letting me take a few more pictures, turning it off for a few seconds, then back on, then snapping the photo before it had time to realize what was going on and bark sternly at me. I'll pay for this eventually, I know. I'm sorry, camera.
There'll be more rain all this week, though, including another big storm on Thursday. I'll be ready for those God Rays this time.
UPDATE: And now it's hailing.
   
Good thing we're moving out of this building with its glass roof...
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09:58 - Oh, now that's good.
http://chinpokomon.com/lap2/images/nra.jpg
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Marcus points me to this:
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| Sunday, December 15, 2002 |
18:04 - How to Wreck your Credibility
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Another little gem from Ar-Rahman:
And Michael Moore tells us that WASPish Americans are the ones who overreact irrationally.
Just for the sake of perspective-- last night, millions of Christian Americans watched in mirth as on South Park, Jesus Christ rode Santa's sleigh into Baghdad to slay Iraqis who were torturing Santa Claus in prison. He took a rifle round to the gut and died in a cellar, in Santa's arms.
And yet, somehow, life goes on.
I mean, criminy.
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| Friday, December 13, 2002 |
09:50 - Well, at least that's honest...
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09:47 - Storm's a-comin'
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The news services are reporting that the Bay Area will be getting two fairly large storms this weekend-- one starting tonight, the other on Monday-- which will result in a weekend of six inches of rain and 50-mph surface winds.
Greg Kihn, on the radio, just talked about having read newspaper reports calling it a "Super-typhoon", whatever sense that makes.
I dunno. But it means the skiing will be outstanding next weekend...
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09:42 - Perspective
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Post-9/11 discussions about how to deal with rising Islamic terrorism-- as well as arguments over how to deal with our own domestic religious fundamentalism, including the usual evolution-vs-creationism debates-- seem to comprise opposing sides whose world views are so fundamentally incompatible that no common ground can ever be reached.
To the non-religious, all these arguments about religious freedom, secular government, and scientific exploration of the natural world all seem perfectly natural. We are willing to tolerate all religions, because to us, religions are about the equivalent of what TV shows a person likes to watch. "Do whatever you like in your personal life," we say. "However you choose to spend your private time, however you intend to relate yourself to the universe, is fine with us. It's none of our business." It fits in perfectly with the arguments for self-determination, privacy, freedom of expression, and protection against "thought crime" police.
But this isn't the argument embraced by the religious, to whom religion isn't just a diversion, it's truth. And that truth must apply to all people equally, because, well, it's truth. From that perspective, it's futile to argue against truth, just as it's self-destructive to live life in a way not in accordance with that truth. So our arguments in favor of freedom of religion must appear to the religious to be more or less similar to the arguments in favor of legalization of drugs: if some people want to pursue a self-destructive act, which will only result in them ending up in Hell, that's fine. (Or, as the other side of the argument from that perspective would posit, such people need to be protected from themselves-- prevented from making such self-destructive choices-- forcibly if need be.)
One group sees it as an argument about art, expression, and freedom. The other group sees it as an argument about the containment of an epidemic of criminal self-abuse.
How can these arguments be reconciled? Unless we figure that out, I doubt there'll be an intellectual solution to the current global clash between religious tolerance and fundamentalist theocracy, which can only become more immediate a concern as time goes on.
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| Wednesday, December 11, 2002 |
02:34 - C'mon, guys-- you can do better'n that...
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Posted to the Ar-Rahman list, with many a snort and chuckle, by one of the regulars:
What's funny about this is that it's actually not all that incisive, or even that far from the truth. I've seen variations on this same theme that have been far more sarcastic.
Are the propagandists losing their touch?
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09:41 - Photoshop and Puns: a winning combination
http://www.somethingawful.com/articles.php?a=452
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Photoshop Phriday isn't the only reason to keep an eye on Something Awful. On Tuesdays, they have these "Comedy Goldmine" contests things, which are just as funny, if this one example is any indication. I haven't been paying attention like I should. Fortunately, Marcus was, and so I didn't miss this.
So far I'm a big fan of "Muslim Extremist" (right) and "Affirmative Action". And I find the prevalence of Apple-related gags to be refreshing, especially since so few of them are derogatory. "iRack Inspector", featuring Xserves? Cute... very cute.
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| Tuesday, December 10, 2002 |
03:02 - Oblio in the Pointless Forest
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Okay... so I've been doing this blogging thing now for about a year now (on the 18th), and in all this time I haven't come up with a title for the page, or any kind of visual theme. Part of the reason for this was the same kind of self-effacing, purposefully unassuming humor that informs all those clever and abstract bylines that identify blogs to their readers; taking it to an extreme, I insisted on leaving the page as boring as possible, and letting readers (if any) make their own decisions about what to call it. And part of the reason was that I didn't exactly expect that I'd have kept at it for a year; I figured, why waste a precious cutesy name, of which there can only be a finite number, on a blog that isn't even going to last?
But it's still here, unaccountably; and if I'm going to mark my "blogiversary" with anything, hey-- I figure I may as well at least take the opportunity to pretend like this page is a significant part of my life, which it has indeed become, and give it some kind of personality.
The idea came up yesterday, when Chris and I were sitting around my cubicle with various other engineers discussing global issues like whether The Two Towers, the movie, will completely follow the Merry/Pippin/Aragorn et al storyline before turning back to Frodo and Sam, the way the book does it-- or if it will interleave them together throughout the movie. (I suspect the latter.) During the discussion, though, I glanced over at my e-mail, and noticing in a passing message one of the modern language quirks nearest my heart, I suddenly burst out, Why is it so difficult to understand-- OOPS is not spelled OPPS! You've got your double vowels, and you've got your double consonants. It's not a difficult concept to understand! (I mean, I swear-- I knew more kids in Mrs. Muñoz' third-grade class with a firm grasp of this rule of English than I meet in a given day, it seems.)
The discussion halted; pairs of eyes focused on me as I hyperventilated, glowering, glancing huntedly between the iMac screen and the faces of my sardonic co-workers.
This wasn't just a pet peeve, Chris and I agreed. This was a free-range peeve. This was a peeve that had been ranched.
So anyway, the previous byline (Irony, Adjectives, and Eyebrows) was fun, but probably just a little too obscure. (Kudos to all those throngs of readers who correctly identified the reference but didn't mail me to say so, as I'm assuming is what typically has been happening.) I'm hoping that this one will work out; I keep giggling at it, but perhaps that's just me. In any case, I'll at least leave it up as an experiment for a while.
And if you don't think it works, well-- in that case, it's just a silly prank I'm pulling, and I never intended it to be permanent. Yeah.
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| Sunday, December 8, 2002 |
16:55 - Libertarianism Uplifted
http://www.davidbrin.com/libertarianarticle1.html
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A lot of Libertarians are fans of famed sci-fi author David Brin, apparently; enough so that they invited him to give the keynote speech at the Libertarian Party National Convention in July 2002.
What they didn't count on, though, was that Brin would take the stage, peer deeply into all their souls, and deliver an hour-long monologue that systematically deconstructed all the dysfunctionality of traditional Ayn Rand-ish Libertarianism-- everything that's dismal and unbendingly idealistic about it-- and through exorcising these demons of hypocrisy and misguidedness one by one from the audience, he sets up in their place something he calls "Cheerful Libertarianism"-- a new way of looking at everything.
My friend who pointed this article out to me-- the five-page transcription of the keynote speech, which contains links to the questionnaires and references Brin distributed to his audience-- said that by the time he was ten minutes into this speech, the audience was grumbling and making petulant noises. But by the time the hour was up, he'd earned from them a standing ovation.
The gist is that we in the US today are really a whole helluva lot better off than any society ever has been before in the past-- and rather than looking backward at some mythical Golden Age of Enlightenment in framing our vision of the ideal state, we can reassure ourselves that we're actually on our way to a better time in the future, and preaching doom-and-gloom isn't going to help. And the way we can help bring it about is by accepting compromise and applying steady pressure, rather than by demanding to turn this festering decadent cesspool of a society on its head.
I can't pick out a single bit to quote. It's all a tremendous amount of fun, a startlingly good read. (Hell, it's David Brin. He uses the word freeping in front of the national convention of a major political party.) I think anybody with a passing interest in Libertarianism, or in politics of any kind, will find it fascinating-- and will be just as glad to discover all the little gems embedded in it as I was, without having to be guided to them by a <BLOCKQUOTE> in some weirdo's blog.
One thing I will say, though, is that when it comes to incisively searing through the layers of irony and nomenclature that obscure true meaning in ideology today, I haven't seen much that's been this effective. And considering the reaction it evidently got from its audience, I suspect that goes for many others too.
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| Saturday, December 7, 2002 |
17:21 - Evil will always triumph, because Good is dumb
http://www.debka.com/article.php?aid=217
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It seems Steven Den Beste need not be worried that the UNMOVIC position of having their findings subject to censorship and weeks of vetting through Officious Channels will derail the US from getting the real answers (and fast!), because we've been doing a little inspectoring of our own.
It's like a well-written spy-movie misdirection plot: seventy-five minutes into the story, it looks like the bad guy has outsmarted the hero, who is now at his mercy, trapped, tied up, with a gun to his head... and then he looks up, grins, and delivers a smug and devastating line as the plot takes a second sharp left turn, revealing that everything is going according to his plan, that the bad guy walked into a trap just as carefully crafted as the one that it had seemed the hero had been caught by.
Running circles around the UN arms inspection headed by Swedish diplomat Hans Blix, the Iraqi government dropped a massive pile of documents – its reply to the UN Security Council demand for a full accounting of Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction – in the laps of the international media Saturday, December 7, before allowing Blix a peek. The presentation was accompanied by yet another formal denial that Iraq has no weapons of mass destruction.
The 11,880 pages on CD-Rom, landing with a thud in Baghdad, will not reach UN Headquarters in New York before late Sunday, exactly on the dot of the Security Council deadline.
Washington in any case had no expectation of substance from the UN inspectors.
Thursday, December 5, the White House declared it already had “solid evidence” that Iraq does indeed have weapons of mass destruction. Where did that evidence come from?
. . .
This project is in the hands of a special multinational task force made up of special elite units and armed with combat helicopters and aircraft, spy-planes and satellites. Unlike the Blix outfit, which is based in Baghdad, the alternative investigators are fanned out across the country. One well-placed source disclosed: “Our men in the field know where 90 percent of Saddam’s missiles and unconventional weapons systems are located, even the mobile ones that are moved from place to place every hour. We are keeping them under tight, on-site observation because when the war begins we want to be there before Saddam orders his men to hit the triggers.”
According to our sources, this highly sensitive, elaborate and secret inspection project has been going for more than three months. Its success could pre-determine the course of the war before it begins. Its members are drawn from the United States, Britain, Jordan and Turkey and possibly Israel. They operate under the Special Forces command at Al Udeid in Qatar and its sub-command in the Jordanian base of Mafraq.
For the purpose of the search, Iraq has been divided into 16 squares, each the province of an elite unit for a set period. The Talil air base complex in north Iraq, for instance, with its air fields, missile bases and air defense batteries, was assigned for the first three weeks of December to US special forces.
And in contrast, gallingly:
The story going around the Gulf, according to DEBKAfile’s sources, is that in the week since the UN inspection team started work, it has been well penetrated by Iraqi agents.The most disturbing aspect of this - and the reason for the sharp responses coming from the White House - is that the spies have managed to fit "electronic jackets" on the UN measuring instruments, which throw them off and make them emit false data. The technical assistants, some from Arab countries, are also thoroughly infiltrated by Iraqi intelligence.
But it's okay, because we knew that would happen all along.
It's looking to me as though there are these special teams of multinational operatives who know what job needs to be done and do it, implicitly trusting each other as partners in a "special relationship" between nations... while the top-level, internationally visible US bickering in the UN and the press has simply been a set of opinion probes to see who's willing to be an ally when crunch time comes, and who would rather stand in the way. None of it affects the evidence-gathering or the war effort, but it will affect how friendly and open and cooperative we're going to be with certain other nations in the future.
As CapLion puts it:
Looks like this is shaping up to happen rather quickly, and it also looks like we'll have bombs for Christmas, but the troops will be back for New Years.
Once again, Dubya has been underestimated and will probably pull another of his trademark I'm a lot smarter than that, stupid moments soon. I love when that happens.
This is another one of those things that, when flung into the winds of the blogosphere, will catch and gain runaway attention in no time. Spread the word, eh?
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16:45 - Aw, that's no fun...
http://www.newsday.com/news/nationworld/world/wire/sns-ap-china-bad-signs1206dec06,0
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China is starting a concerted campaign against signs and other literature written in badly translated English:
"There are many 'Chinglish' words on road signs, public notices, menus and signs describing scenic spots, which often puzzle foreigners," Xiong Yumei, vice director of the Beijing Tourism Bureau, was quoted as saying.
The signs feature misspellings, obscure abbreviations and jarring word-for-word translations of Chinese characters into English.
Some examples: "Collecting Money Toilet" for a public toilet, and "To take notice of safe, the slippery are very crafty" on a sign warning that roads are slippery.
And thus dies a great and cherished art form. Well, I guess it's a bit much to expect that this initiative will have much effect; but even so.
Ah well... Japan has always had a much better sense of style with their Engrish-- instead of just simple misspellings and grammatical errors, it's a joyously vacuous need to attach random, meaningless English sentences to completely unrelated contexts-- often containing bizarre and obtuse "informative" factoids. Like shopping bags and restaurant signs that say "Elephant family are happy with us. Their dancing makes us feel happy", or "Switzerland: Seaside City", or "Greenwood: 'To go to greenwood' means 'to become an outlaw' in English". Oh really?
Long live Engrish!
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| Friday, December 6, 2002 |
17:54 - Get Out Your Irony Board
http://www.nationalreview.com/hanson/hanson120602.asp
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Victor David Hanson has evidenly worked awfully hard on this piece, "America Upside Down". So go give it a read.
In contrast, a group of Islamic academics recently met at a conference in Cairo entitled "Why do they hate us?" The symposium sought to examine Muslim culpability for the latest outbreak of Western terrorism against Islam.
"One could argue that we simply asked for it," the chairperson of the American Studies Department of Cairo University remarked. "I can envision a scenario in which we deserve all we get from America. In some sense, I'm ashamed to be from the Middle East. It is humiliating really. And unless we go to the root causes of Western hostility, there may well never be peace. We should examine very carefully our construction of the Western "other," and our culpability for the attendant frustration and sense of helplessness that drives an angry young L.A. surfer dude, a Texas ranch-hand, or a bare-naveled Miami skateboarder to blow themselves up along with Middle Easterners across the globe — and then rethink what the Egyptian or Saudi regime really stands for in the world today. They see our gender apartheid, our religious discrimination, our racial castes, tribalism, and autocracy — and then all that sexism, racism, and homophobia just overwhelms these idealistic-but-impotent American kids, causing them to strap on some bombs and strike a blow in anguish, as it were, against the patriarchy of imams, mullahs, and sheiks."
The sad part, however, is that he had to explicitly state that this was a parody (in the title bar). The fact that this is likely to be less than obvious to some readers makes me shiver.
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13:24 - Of Mistake Is You
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You know, I'm getting really, really sick of hearing the words "Make no mistake".
Politicians have been saying "Make no mistake" ever since 9/11, as though it were coined on that day: "Make no mistake-- we will hunt down and destroy the perpetrators." "Make no mistake-- terrorists will have no place to hide." "Make no mistake-- we will make no mistakes." Give it a rest already!
It's another of those phrases that stops making sense at all if you think about it too long, like "all in all" or "by and large". What, are they honestly trying to prevent us from making mistakes? If so, is it Engrish? I can picture sitting down in class to take an exam, and the professor at the front of the room says: "You are have one hours for complete of test. Make no mistake!"
I wonder what the phrase sounds like in other countries where people are supposed to interpret it as a warning. Does it sound determined, or just dorky? How does Al-Jazeera translate it? "If you make no errors, we will destroy you." Huh?
Maybe it's al-Qaeda-esque code language, designed to awaken CIA sleeper agents like the Mossad agents recently redeployed undercover by Sharon in response to the Kenya attacks. Every "make no mistake", coupled with the sentence that follows it, is really an encoded message to some deep-cover operative. With the number of times we've heard it from Bush and Rumsfeld and Ashcroft by now, there should be a veritable army out there in the underground, launching secret shadow-war machinations with every televised speech.
Or maybe I've just been reading too much Seanbaby lately.
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| Wednesday, December 4, 2002 |
13:41 - Spam funny
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You know those Klez worms that are still clogging up everybody's inboxes with subject lines like "A special new game" and "So cool a flash, enjoy it" and "Investor relations for you"? You know how they seem to mutate themselves every time, so you have variations like "A new game" and "So special a flash" and "An WinXP patch"?
Well, I just ran across the best accidental example yet:
Subject: Fw: Idiot relations for you !
Hoo-boy, sign me up!
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13:15 - The Islamist-Controlled Media
http://littlegreenfootballs.com/weblog/?entry=4898
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Ever wonder why Islamic terrorism cases are so frequently reported as being perpetrated by "unnamed gunmen" or "militants" or "freedom fighters" or pretty much anything except for "Islamic terrorists"?
Well, wonder no more, because Charles Johnson has posted a link to the Canadian Islamic Congress' grading scheme for demeriting Canadian media outlets for any reporting that doesn't portray Islam in the best possible light at all times:
1. Identifying Muslims by their religion when they are involved in violent acts = 100
2. Interring [sic] that Islam is intolerant and an extreme religion that teaches, endorses or condones acts of violence = 90
3. Use of the term "Muslim Terrorists" = 80
4. Use of the term "Muslim Militants" = 70
5. Use of the term "Muslim Extremists" = 60
6. Use of the term "Muslim Fundamentalists" = 50
7. Propagating negative stereotypes = 40
8. Being culturally insensitive, for example to religious practices, dress code, food or social customs = 30
9. Selective presentation and analysis of events and the use of popular "experts" = 20
10. Failing to offer a balanced view on political events = 10
Granted, that's Canada. But if pressures like this are widespread, it would explain a whole lot.
Meanwhile, European countries are one-by-one banning Kosher food. Yeah, that sure sounds like a massive Zionist conspiracy's in charge of everything, don't it?
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11:16 - Really Big Shoe
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Jackie Mason was on "Forum" this morning; he was holding forth in what I'm sure has become the archetype for the comic Yiddish delivery, with his thick crunchy accent and rambling speculative inward kvetchings that have spawned so many homages throughout entertainment, from characters in Mel Brooks movies to Rabbi Krustovsky.
Michael was asking brief questions about Jackie's career, and then sitting back and letting the master work. One story that he told, though, I found particularly revealing. Jackie talked about a recent occasion when he hired a young Palestinian comic (yes, apparently there was one) to be on his show. Mason then faced a torrent of media attention over whether he had any problem working with the guy because he was a Palestinian. I'm paraphrasing, but Jackie recounted his reaction as being, "Well, is he coming here throwing bombs, or is he coming here telling jokes? He's not in Israel killing people, he's here to make people laugh. I'm not so hateful as to blame him for the things some of his countrymen do. If we've learned nothing else as a people, it's that we have to be above that kind of nonsense."
And then, the comic in question repaid him for this by publicly spewing vicious anti-Israel, anti-Sharon, anti-Jewish rhetoric, and Mason fired him. And the press again leaped all over him, taking up the comic's claim that he had been fired for being Palestinian. Said Mason: Did I hire him or what? I knew he was Palestinian when I hired him. Why would I fire him for that reason? The press completely ignored the real reason for kicking the comic off the show, and turned Mason into the bad guy.
I don't know anything from any other source about this incident-- I'm just going by what he said on the air this morning. But it's an interesting case study anyway.
Later Jackie explained why Jewish comedians are such a common thing. When you're persecuted throughout the world, and you have no power to fight back, you laugh at your predicament. When you're a studious and intellectual people, you engage in self-aware, self-effacing humor. Now, I'd like to know why the Palestinians haven't tried this? It's a much bigger and more effective form of passive resistance than Gandhi ever came up with: it's the ability to sow memes throughout a society, positive memes, that go through phases of derision and resentment-- but eventually become nostalgic, endearing, and treasured. Today, it can hardly be denied that the Jews are stronger as a people and as a pop-cultural influential force than they ever have been. And not one of them ever had to blow himself up on a schoolbus in order to achieve that.
UPDATE: Oh, wait. Rabbi Krustovsky actually was played by Jackie Mason. I guess that would explain that.
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| Monday, December 2, 2002 |
03:05 - Oh really.
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On the way back from squash, the BBC World Service anchor said-- in a voice that denoted great momentous import-- that Iraq had just admitted to having tried to circumvent UN weapons sanctions.
Namely, they admitted having imported (or tried to import) aluminum tubes of the type used to make missiles. And they claim that they wanted them only for the purest and most innocent of civilian and humanitarian purposes. Of course.
(Not that this will have any effect on the strident calls for the US to get its greasy mitts out of innocent Saddam's backyard.)
Looks to me as though if Baghdad's bag of tricks is this limp and empty, then the days until real reckoning can well and truly be counted in single digits.
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15:50 - Image Issues
http://www.panic.com/~stevenf/mt/archives/000125.php#000125
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Reader Neil McKeown alerted me to this weird, weird problem that seems to have affected a number of images on or linked to from this blog page. From various comments at the site where this is being discussed:
Secondly, and even worse, Windows versions of Internet Explorer, mostly 5.5 and 6.0 get thoroughly confused by a file that identifies itself as .jpg but contains XML. When you try to load one of these inflated images with Win IE 5 or 6, it spins endlessly, trying to figure out what to do. From that point on, you have completely lost your ability to view images in that browser session. Even if you go to another site. All graphics loading will spin endlessly from that point on. Only completely quitting and relaunching Win IE fixes the problem.
Don't believe me? Try it yourself. I've seen it reproduced on at least five different Windows machines. I've even reproduced it myself on Virtual PC.
It doesn't seem to affect Mozilla-based browsers, or any Mac browser. But you must appreciate the danger and/or irony here -- designer on Mac OS X generating lethal .jpgs, hapless Windows browser locking up when they visit the site.
It's hard to say where the blame lays here.. Adobe or Microsoft? Either way, if anyone knows anyone in a position of influence at either company please bring this to their attention, as it makes the web a suckier place to be for everybody.
Update: The problem may be specific to certain combinations of tainted images and HTML. The following URL reproduces the problem consistently for me on Windows XP with IE 6 (under Virtual PC): http://www.snapclub.com/wintest.php
. . .
Obviously, at some level the blame lays with Microsoft. There shouldn't be anything I can put on my webpage to destroy your entire ability to view images.
. . .
The "XML" you see is actually an XMP packet. XMP is the Adobe-defined open metadata format for metadata. It uses RDF as its data representation hence the comment it "looks like XML".
Microsoft and Adobe worked together to identify the problems Windows Explorer had with JPEG files that contained application-specified data. This problem appeared not only for JPEG but TIFF files as well. The latest XP service pack fixes the known issues related to Windows Explorer and these files, include some bugs that can corrupt such files and make then unreadable at all if you use Windows Explorer to edit the metadata in the file.
Note this appears to be a different issue than the one you are reporting about Internet Explorer being unable to display such files.
Marc Pawliger
Photoshop Team,
Adobe Systems
. . .
However, there are some people who _don't_ realize what's going on and need to be made aware. My web site, Snap Club, for example, allows users to upload images from their hard drives. Every so often, someone uploads a JPEG that contains this extra data, and from that point on all the Windows IE users who visit my site lose the ability to view images.
They think my web site has a virus or something. They never come back.
Neil reported that some images on my site that were causing trouble were the larger versions of screenshots which I linked in with thumbnails, which always did work, as in this post. But these images work for me on my IE 6.0, so it seems to depend heavily on individual platform combinations.
One poster did comment that a mogrify command can strip out the offending IPTC header, so I'll add that to my posting script and run it against all my existing images, so it shouldn't cause any more problems... please keep an eye out, though, and if you're using Windows and you see this happening, please spread the word. Mac-using bloggers and website owners in particular, take note. (Does this happen at lileks.com?)
Pretty fugly problem, if you ask me.
UPDATE: Oh, and it should be noted that it is not "malformed" JPEG files that are causing this to happen. It's simply JPEG files that-- quite legally-- use an RDF text block in their headers (which Adobe's Mac software does as a matter of course), which is something that IE chokes on, thinking it's XML that it has to parse and execute.
This is an IE problem, pure and simple, and the onus is on Microsoft to fix it, not on website designers and bloggers who happen to use Photoshop or other software that writes RDF or XML headers. But we'll "fix" up our files anyway, just to be good citizens and clean up after Microsoft's mess yet again.
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10:59 - Pravda
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Heard among the book plugs on "Forum" this morning:
Hi, Michael... I'd like to recommend a book-on-CD, entitled What the Heck is Going On in the Middle East? by [something] Fayed ... it explains what's happening in Palestine, and portrays the Palestinians as regular people just like you and me, and explains what drives them to become "suicide bombers" [Serious-- you could hear the quote marks. -ed]. It overturns a lot of the myths we've grown up with, about the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians, and the Arab-Israeli war. You can listen to it in your car... really important stuff for people to hear.
Yeah. If something is on CD, then it must be true. Especially if it has a cutesy, unassuming title.
I guess that's why it had to be plugged by the author's brother, huh?
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| Sunday, December 1, 2002 |
19:25 - Sunset on Mt. Hamilton
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Whether it's a long holiday weekend or not, Sunday seems to be turning out to be the day almost every week when I get to go out and do something visually satisfying-- sometimes it's taking in the latest movies with friends, but more often it's just me doing something on my own, something I can enjoy by myself and absorb the visuals (or take pictures) so I can repackage them and publish the results so anybody who happens to be interested (hey, it could happen) can take some kind of third-hand part in it.
Sure, it'd be nicer to do these things with somebody. But if I did, then somehow the visual record wouldn't seem to me like something I should multiplex out to the world, or try to frame as some kind of Greetings From Sunny California pamphlet to showcase why I live here. It's this way with movies too, though-- I like to see things on my own, and then I can tell everybody at once what I thought. The alternative is to share it with someone at the time, and then not have anything left to talk about after discussing and absorbing it face-to-face.
So if you take Quimby Road up into the mountains from behind my house, drop down over the crest into the Grant Lake valley, and then follow the road as it rises back up the other side again, you'll find yourself aimed squarely at Mt. Hamilton, home of Lick Observatory. The road is a favorite of motorcyclists, but while this was the first day in months that I've had the opportunity to just head out into the hills while the sun was still up (one reason I'm not wild about winter), for most other bikers this is way far into the off-season. So I had very little company on the road for most of the fifteen miles of hairpin turns and switchbacks filled with little piles of rubble that had fallen from the cliffs that the road winds around.
(By the way-- no, I didn't have my iPod with me this time. It would've been kinda neat to get a photo for the iPodLounge.com "iPods Around the World" gallery, but there's not a lot of room in a motorcycle helmet for headphones or earbuds. Nor would such a thing be very safe.)
Today wasn't the greatest day for picture-taking, unfortunately. (Hey, we can't be choosers, we who wake up so late we get four hours of sunlight on weekend days during winter.) There was a big inversion layer over the whole Bay Area, the kind that completely blankets the region and makes any kind of long-distance panorama viewing an exercise in glum futility. (The clearest air happens in spring and summer-- and oh, such air it is.) But all was not lost! If you're facing away from the sinking sun, up into the hills, the quality of the light is something to behold in and of itself. I've always been a sucker for sunlit hills against a dark cloudy backdrop; somehow it just seems so cool. And today was no exception, inversion layer or no inversion layer. The sun streamed in between the little knobby foothills and made dusty visible rays through the oak branches; it lit up the dry grass covering the hills and turned them bright gold against the dull dark gray of the sky behind. And for most of the way up, there weren't any other road warriors-- either on two wheels or four-- pushing me up the hill, their engines grumbling at my pathetic slowness. (Hey, c'mon, guys... I'm still getting my legs back.)
So I got to the top, and I pulled into the observatory parking lot just in time for the sunset. I parked next to a couple named Mike and Christine who were a lot of fun to talk to; they apparently come up to the peak fairly often, and they were well equipped with digital geek toys that they were all too willing to talk shop about. (They appreciated my tales of digital photography and wireless picture-posting from the line in Emeryville.) We spent a good half hour talking about random stuff-- motorcycles, Silicon Valley, DSL availability, home mortgages, and the fact that Mt. Hamilton was the spot where John Muir once stood and, facing east, saw the setting sun lighting up the whole line of the Sierra Nevada, whereupon he named it the Range of Light. (You can still see the Sierras from the peak, on good days. Today was not a good day.) And they had me take a couple of pictures, with their camera, of them posing with my motorcycle.
The trip was not to be without its technical hurdles, however. After the sun had just about vanished behind the large western cloud bank and I knew I'd be riding back down the mountain in a thick dusky haze, I decided to start 'er back up and head down-- except the bike wouldn't start. The starter chugged, and chugged, a-n-d c-h-u-g-g-e-d... ho boy. My battery has been fairly temperamental lately; I have to keep it hooked up to a battery tender to make sure it starts up on command. And on top of a mountain is not a good place to lose warp plasma containment. Several increasingly nervous minutes went by, many of which were spent in trying to raise a human at the other end of Christine's cellphone, which seemed strangely unable to accurately report whether it had any signal or not. (It would say it had full signal strength, dial, ring-- and suddenly say "No Service". Rinse, repeat.) So I never was able to get a call through to anybody with jumper cables. And anybody who's about to seize on this opportunity to point out that ha-haah, cellphones are useful after all... hey, shut up, at least it didn't work.
So anyway, I went back to the bike, thinking that surely the battery was drained by now-- when the starter-motor chugs start getting slower, it's not an encouraging sign, especially if you have those ultra-retina-searing carbon-arc lights that flicker while the bike is starting, presumably sucking down the equivalent of a couple of minutes in a metal vaporator every time I turn the key. But much to my surprise and then delight, when I hit the trigger again, it started right up, instantly. Whew!
I took this picture on the way down the mountain. Whether it's smog, an inversion layer, the Smokes of the Spirits, or whatever euphemism you might care to ascribe to it-- it certainly can make for some interesting sunsets. I don't much mind that I couldn't see Half Dome or Mt. Tamalpais this time up; I will, some other day. But I won't be able to get pictures like these.
But I mentioned another technical nuisance that reared its head. That would be my stupidity in pulling in behind this guy and his girlfriend in a BMW-- who had been riding my rear bumper all the way down the mountain, pushing me way faster than I was hoping to go, until I pulled over and let them by, only to catch up with them again at this infamous switchback on Quimby Road. They were pulled over, engine and lights off, obviously enjoying the romantic view-- and along I had to come, parking right behind them on a downhill slope with my kickstand in a pile of sand, so I could take this picture.
When you're aimed off the road with only a couple of feet between you and the rear bumper of a BMW, with your rear wheel higher up a curved slope and your kickstand in a pile of sand, you're kinda screwed. I spent about ten minutes frantically hurling my weight from front to back, desperately trying to back the five hundred pounds of bike up the hill so I could get myself some turning room and escape the trap. The couple in the car were blissfully unaware-- though they turned back to glare balefully at me once or twice as my light flooded past their windows rhythmically with my undulating exertions. I'd discarded my glasses-- they were fogging up under my panting breath in the cold air-- and finally I gave up, went to the driver's window, and asked him to please scoot forward just a few feet so I could get out. He seemed quite happy and accommodating, once it became obvious what my pathetic problem was. And all ended well, as I puttered my way down the rest of the hill.
But that could have happened anywhere. Quimby Road itself, however, and Mt. Hamilton, can't.
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| Saturday, November 30, 2002 |
23:22 - Revisions
http://www.wtc2002.com
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Two new refined proposals have been posted at the WTC2002 site. These new ones are even taller than the original (2000 feet), and one has a dome-- which I'm sure would, if built, end the Washington Monument's long reign as the Nation's Most Phallic Symbol.
It's still gigantic and ostentatious, but oddly graceful... and though I seriously doubt that it will get built as-is (especially because the guy running the site, while proficient at Flash, is undeniably kind of a nutcase), I do hope that at least some people whose designs are being considered are looking at it and using it as an anchor point for one end of the design spectrum. Whatever does end up rising in Lower Manhattan, I wouldn't at all mind it being reminiscent of this.
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| Friday, November 29, 2002 |
19:38 - "We Got It Right This Time, We Swear"
http://www.somethingawful.com/articles.php?a=443
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This week's Photoshop Phriday at Something Awful is the best one they've had in a while, following a long streak of mediocre concepts with less-than-stellar execution. This one is "Rejected Software", and it's got some very choice bits.
It starts out kinda slow, but things pick up in the later pages. Particularly amusing are "Microsoft BackAlley", "Windows Type R", and the Ellen Feiss one (which is a masterful piece of Photoshoppery).
Oh, and don't forget the "hidden" Eleventh Page, which consists of something that may be a first: Photoshop jobs whose humor content and/or execution are so inept that the SA admins who put it together felt it was worth breaking the fourth wall of editorialism and posting them just to ridicule them and their creators. CapLion refers to this as the "Photoshop for Windows page".
"phoenix_r" gets the credit for this messy image. I think this is intended to be an OS-movie hybrid, which is a concept that can be funny, but only in the capable hands of someone with capable hands. This just ends up looking like another “Macs are for Nazis” joke, which is neither funny nor fair to Nazis. The curbjob scene from “American History X” isn’t quite known for eliciting laughter either. Bonus negative points go to the fact that phoenix_r must have gotten his front “Mac OS X” text from a tiny 100x96 sized thumbnail image he pulled out of a dead robot’s ass and enlarged to the point it looks like a mangled mess of gigantic blurry pixels.
This is only minorly and tongue-in-cheekily a swipe at Apple, and it's more obviously an example of OS X and other such products having gained widespread acceptance and respect. I like.
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| Thursday, November 28, 2002 |
10:30 - Wassail, wassail
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So I'm going to be spending the day walking from door to door, singing Thanksgiving carols and being invited in for a heaping plate of cranberry sauce and turkey and stuffing and cranberry sauce at every house from here to Petaluma.
...Okay, well, not quite... but I'll be on the road a lot, heading up to my grandma's apartment in Larkspur for the midday meal with my family, and then scooting on back down here to San Jose for the early-evening one that Lance is putting together for all our local social circle. Hopefully by that time the football will be over with. (I can dream, can't I?)
Which means I'd better load up my iPod and get a move on. See you all this evening.
Wait a minute. Did Leonard Cohen's voice change that much between 1968 and 1974?! Good lord. What'd he do, install a tar filter in his throat?
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| Wednesday, November 27, 2002 |
01:47 - Kumbaya
http://www.mikeoverbeck.com/osama/
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Here's what I'm thankful for:
That gifted animators like Mike Overbeck, creator of such delectable bizarritudes as Atlas Gets a Drink, have not had their senses of just and ironic vengeance dulled by time, success, and no more home-soil terrorist attacks. No way-- not him.
These are his "Osama-Rama" cartoons, and there are four of them. I'm hard pressed to come up with which one is best-- "Anthrax: The Invisible Victim" seems to be the one that speaks most eloquently to my heart of hearts, however. You be the judge, though. I think they all kick ass.
On the subject of Osama-themed Flash cartoons, On the Run Again is pretty good too.
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22:38 - Wheeere's the Wahhabism?
http://www.nationalreview.com/interrogatory/interrogatory111802.asp
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In Saudi Arabia, East Africa, the political veneers of Iraq, various mosque leaderships here and there throughout the Muslim world-- and the US. And not many other places, says Stephen Schwartz in NRO, via UNMEDIA. Stephen Schwartz, that is, a Sufi Muslim convert with a very sane viewpoint, a retained Western name, and a refreshingly tolerant attitude toward the rest of the world's faiths-- something I wish we could see more of.
He methodically lists the countries where Wahhabism is prevalent, and the countries where it has an influence-- and the nature of that influence.
Unfortunately, the U.S. is the only country outside Saudi Arabia where the Islamic establishment is under Wahhabi control. Eighty percent of American mosques are Wahhabi-influenced, although this does not mean that 80 percent of the people who attend them are Wahhabis. Mosque attendance is different from church or synagogue membership in that prayer in the mosque does not imply acceptance of the particular dispensation in the mosque. However, Wahhabi agents have sought to impose their ideology on all attendees in mosques they control.
I hope those in charge of the WOT have this kind of filter to look through at the Muslim world, because this does exactly what we've been hoping for for a long time: it identifies who should be (and who should not be) the targets of the WOT, in a religious, political, economic, and national sense. And it tells us where we should be able to find sympathy, and why; and who in the Muslim world we should consider long-term allies and assets, once we've established that Wahhabism, specifically, is what needs to die.
I'm comforted to think that leaders like George Bush, Tony Blair, and John Howard have all made public statements that establish that they realize exactly what the score is, as Schwartz lays it out. They know what path the WOT will have to take as soon as the roadblock of Iraq is out of the way. (In a way, Iraq probably is going to turn out to be about ooooiiil as much as the other reasons, largely because we'll need it from the Iraqi fields in order to take on Saudi Arabia when the time comes.)
Anyway, there's lots of good stuff in this article, including admonishments against the media (for oversimplifying Islamic sects into a single entity, and for failing to present any kind of respected Muslim figureheads and their viewpoints to the Western public), and a reality-check about where our attention should be when looking for pan-Islamic sentiments that condemn terrorism (hint: it's not going to come from the Arab Street, but the Arab Street is not and never has been strategically important).
Of course, for much of the media, the primitive and simplistic image of Muslims as uniformly extremist and terrorist is easier to report, more popular, and "better TV" than that of a complex conflict inside a world religion. It also supports the left-wing claim that it's all our fault, or Israel's. It's so much easier to say they all hate us because of our hegemony and Zionism than to say, as I do, that they don't all hate us, and that the real issue is the battle for the soul of Islam.
Maybe there are some holes in what Schwartz is saying; it may not even be based in facts. But at first blush, it appears to be just what I've been waiting to hear for a very long time.
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17:52 - Give a think! Don't delink!
http://wilde.poetweb.net/archives/00000282.htm
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Via InstaPundit-- well, anybody reading this has probably already run across this item already anyway, but if you have read it, you'll understand why I'm adding this little stitch into the vast Riemann-surface-looking piece of fabric that is the blogosphere.
It involves two blogs/bloggers that I'd never heard of before today, but it could as well be a fable dropped from on high out of the blue: if you come at this from a perspective of certain types of bloggers fitting certain molds and behaving certain ways, this one sort of turns those preconceptions right on their heads. Or it doesn't, depending on how you look at it.
The synopsis is: a self-described conservative Democrat posts some perfectly civil thoughts in the comments section of an arch-conservative's blog; and even though the two are of similar minds in a lot of issues, the arch-conservative responds to the mere fact that he is a Democrat by delinking and IP-blocking him.
Read the whole exchange, and the comments too. I don't know how much more of this Rittenhouse/LGF-ian delinking nonsense is going to take place-- if it's going to become the next fad of the Web or something. (Censor dissenting opinions for fun and profit!) But I for one would like to see it stop, right quick.
Every blogger has the right to not link to whatever site he or she feels like not linking to, and that includes the right to remove links that the blogger decides are no longer worth endorsing for one reason or another. These links are courtesies that blogs extend one another. Unless one person is paying another to have his name in lights, nobody's beholden to any other site for referral traffic. It's all about individual choice. That's the whole point of the Internet in its purest original conception, and it's what makes the blog world what it is.
But there's such a thing as being mature about it. And more important to me than whether delinking amounts to "censorship" or not is the attitude that someone takes when declaring someone else unworthy of endorsement.
These characters sure show their respective true colors, eh?
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13:42 - Inspectors on the scene
http://www.cnn.com/2002/WORLD/meast/11/27/iraq.inspectors/index.html
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Well, after a day of activity, evidently nothing obvious has been unearthed by the Blix team.
I must admit, I'm more nervous about these proceedings at this stage than I've been about anything in a while. There's so much riding on the inspectors' ability to turn up damning evidence of WMDs-- if they find any, it would cause the long-awaited meltdown of the credibility of Saddam and all his higher-ups who have been claiming all along that they have no such weapons and any claims that they do are evil lies. Not only that, but it would force pretty much everyone who's been seizing every opportunity to side with the UN and European leaders and take Saddam's official claims at their word-- to admit that they were on crack. It would be the clearest case of US vindication on record since 9/11; even Afghanistan continues to have its detractors, and its present political situation remains in doubt (riding primarily on whether we choose to stay and rebuild). But Iraq is another story.
Because if for whatever reason the inspectors are not able to turn up any compelling evidence by December 9th... well, the PR consequences would be just about as bad against the US. It's one thing to be Iraq, historic bully and enemy-of-all-that-is-right, who in the absence of incriminating evidence seems to have recently turned over a new leaf and become all benign and happy (and no doubt all kinds of people would come to accept his 100% victory in the recent election as genuine and legitimate). But it's quite another to be America, up till now more or less a "good guy" as far as First World countries are concerned, but with lots of intangible, semi-Washington-endorsed imperialistic aims consisting of Golden Arches and oil tankers, bombing lots of innocent civilians in what is undoubtedly a long series of war-crime atrocities that have been masterfully covered up, so nobody can prove anything for sure-- suddenly turning out to be unequivocally the evil lying oppressor that Iraq makes us out to be. Everybody's worst dread would be realized. We'd be "proven" to have fabricated this whole set of allegations about Iraq's nonexistent weapons and trumped up the war so the Republicans could seize power. The US would become in everybody's eyes the Enemy of the World, by the stroke of a pen in the hand of the Inspector General.
I have to imagine the inspectors will take a bit of a different approach this time, though. I have to believe this is going to be a different kind of "inspection" than the "Make sure such-and-such destroyed factory was really destroyed" checklisting of the post-Gulf-War inspections. Interviews I've heard on NPR talk about how some of the inspectors (who are back there again now) were endlessly frustrated by the crap they had to put up with from the uncooperative Iraqis and the things they were obviously hiding, and they were clearly gung-ho about having a chance to get some real progress made this time around. And judging by this, there's all kinds of crap we know about that even local Iraqis don't realize is there.
So I guess I'm pretty confident that something will arise, though I'm going to be on edge and pondering all that time they've had to methodically hide and smuggle away any contraband that they'd been developing, ever since we started making the noises about our inevitable return to the trail. How many months now have they known that we'd end up back in the country, the only variable being how long they could stall us? How much could they have hidden or spirited away in that time?
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| Monday, November 25, 2002 |
20:11 - Tule Fog a-go-go
http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/NaturalHazards/shownh.php3?img_id=5266
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Good gawd. I wasn't kidding about the tule fog in the Central Valley last weekend.
(Via InstaPundit, via Jerry Pournelle.)
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19:33 - Reverse Taqiyeh
http://www.southknoxbubba.com/skblog/archive_2002_11.html#597
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Someone should disseminate this amongst the Wahhabi clerics worldwide. Maybe they'll fall for it.
That'd be entertaining.
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| Saturday, November 23, 2002 |
15:25 - That, too, is unlikely to help
http://www.albawaba.com/news/index.php3?sid=234454&lang=e&dir=news
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I haven't yet been able to find anything on this online, except for a brief blurb in the BBC World Service headline crawl, which didn't link to a story (yet); I'd only heard the details earlier on the radio, on the way to Emeryville.
Apparently Israel has just banned all Palestinian fishing activity off the coast of Gaza; the reason for this is an incident earlier today, in which a Palestinian fishing boat strayed across into Israeli waters. The coast guard approached and tried to open a channel, to get the boat to turn back; but as the cutter got closer, the fishing boat exploded.
They're not sure whether it was a terrorist operation or not; but a sound bite from the Israeli officials called it "a suicide fishing boat".
What, so now they're using suicide as a method for fishing too?
I'm reminded of the Radioactive Man shoot-- Bart walks up to "Milhouse" and says hi, whereupon Milhouse responds by... exploding. "I didn't do it...I didn't do it! I wished him well!"
So next I suppose we're to expect suicide restaurants-- "Hi, I'd like a cheeseburger." "Yes, sir: BOOM!" Or suicide auto mechanics-- "Aha, it looks like a clogged fuel injector. I know how to fix this: huh-BLAM!" Or suicide news anchormen: "And today in weather-- a cold front will be moving into the area this evening, with increasing KABOOM!"
Hint, guys: it doesn't work any better for endearing yourself to world opinion, either. Time to try something else.
UPDATE: Thanks to CapLion, the story link has been added.
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14:53 - Pompitous of Googoogajoob
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I'm sure I speak for everyone when I say... "Huh?"
Yes, yes, I know the song. But... well, all I've got to say is, that's one helluva lot of quote marks.
Yes, I know it looks like an inexplicably stupid Photoshop job. But it's not; it's an inexplicably stupid actual decal job. That's just part of the mystery, I guess.
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| Friday, November 22, 2002 |
22:47 - Axis of Snivel
http://www.cnn.com/2002/WORLD/asiapcf/east/11/23/nkorea.dollar/index.html
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North Korea is still pouting that we found out about their secret successful nuclear bomb program, which (according to them) they've only been working on since Bush called them Evil a year ago (being called a nasty name, you see, is grounds for nullifying an international agreement).
'Cause, you know, a year's all you need to develop a nuke completely from scratch in the enlightened communist paradise that is the DPRPDRK.
So now they're banning all US dollars.
China's Xinhua news agency reported that North Koreans and foreigners will need to convert U.S. dollar accounts at the state-run Korean Trade Bank into euros or other currencies, quoting a letter from the bank.
North Koreans have had to adhere to the measure since November 18, the letter said, while foreigners will need to convert their dollars by December 1.
"Hotels, foreign-exchange shops and foreign-related services will receive no U.S. dollars from the start of December," a staff member of the Korean Trade Bank was quoted as saying in the Xinhua report.
U.S. dollar accounts will be converted automatically to euros if no declaration is made by the end of the month.
The dollar ban was a "political means" to react to increasing pressure from the U.S., an unnamed British diplomat was quoted as saying in the Xinhua report.
Uh, guys, you only get to take your ball and go home if you have a ball in the first place.
How come the world has trained itself so thoroughly to turn a blind eye when some country repeatedly backs itself into a dangerous corner and yet persists in refusing to admit it's ever, ever done anything wrong? Why is insane fanatical xenophobia and self-righteous rejection of reality seen as such a virtue?
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| Thursday, November 21, 2002 |
00:04 - Then there's this...
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uslatest/story/0,1282,-2190472,00.html
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I was given this URL directly; I can't find it linked from the main Guardian page or any other big news site. I wonder why that might be (or whether it's likely to change).
PORT CANAVERAL, Fla. (AP) - About 100 passengers on a Disney cruise ship contracted a contagious stomach virus, shortly after more than 500 people on another cruise ship came down with a similar illness, Disney officials said Thursday.
Passengers and crew members on the Disney Cruise Line ship Magic became ill Wednesday. The ship departed Nov. 17 from Port Canaveral with 3,200 people on board and returns Saturday.
Disney will clean and disinfect the ship at sea, spokesman Mark Jaronski said. Disney's terminal and other locations also will be cleaned.
. . .
After the latest passengers disembarked, 573 crew members began cleaning the ship, emptying garbage cans and wiping down remote controls, clock radios, even Bibles. During the next 10 days, crew members will replace 2,500 pillows and dry-clean, steam-clean and disinfect every surface aboard the ship, which is 780 feet long and has 690 staterooms.
Is this the kind of thing they do in response to stomach flu?
Wait, here's the CNN story.
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16:54 - Has the Afghan story gone cold?
http://www.guardian.co.uk/afghanistan/story/0,1284,838892,00.html?=rss
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"I am not sure whether to hope or fear it," says Polly Toynbee of (gasp!) The Guardian, in an extremely well-worth-reading article linked by LGF. It's a Long Hard Look at whether the war was worth it, and what the people there actually think-- unornamented by any editorial sanding-off of the clear joy the liberated Afghans feel toward the US, or of the cynicism the professionals and civil servants feel toward the UN aid workers.
It's all good. It's all valuable and worth your time. However, I wanted to zoom in on one point, the one that leads off the whole effort: women and burqas. Here's what happens when the reporter talks to a bunch of women to get their first-hand opinion:
At the Woman to Woman centre, 20 women of all ages were sitting on the floor, all them with burkas left hanging on pegs by the door. Despite the absence of outward change, were things getting better for them now that the Taliban had gone? There was a spontanteous chorus of cries, hands raised in the air, laughter, sighing, exclamations - my translator could not keep up with their energetic assertions that life had changed beyond recognition. This relative liberation - freedom to walk outside for many who had never left their one room in years - was hard to imagine. "I never saw the light of day in five years!" one widow said.
So why did they still wear burkas? A gnarled and toothless old woman from the countryside (who might be no more than 50 - already beyond the average life expectancy here) said she had worn hers since she was seven and she could not imagine the nakedness of going without it. But she thought the younger women soon would and should shed it. These women were the poorest, many of them homeless, uprooted by war, or among the country's two million war widows. "We wear the burka because we are still afraid," several said. It is too dangerous; and besides, the psychological effect of five years of terror is not easily erased at a stroke. How many thought they would take them off some time soon? Eight of the 20 raised their hands, mostly the younger ones, though only five said they had ever worn a burka before the Taliban came.
However symbolic they seem, the truth is that the burka is the very least of their problems, mere outward garments, easily discarded. The inner scars of the way women are treated here in this darkly savage place will be harder to erase. As the women talked of their lives, terrible stories tumbled out. Though none of them knew each other already, they wept when they listened to one another. Fahina, a woman in her 30s, wearing a thin black veil and swaying back and forth a little as she spoke, began to tell how she was beaten daily by her husband, a drug addict who had sold everything in the house. So why did this woman not leave a dangerous drug-addict husband who drained her money away? Because, she explained, she would have to leave her 12-year-old daughter behind with him. By now several other women were crying in sympathy.
At the start of this session, many had proclaimed that women should have absolutely equal rights with men, so I asked the translator if they thought it right and fair that this abusive father should keep the child. The translator looked at me nervously and whispered, "I don't think I can ask that." "Why not?" "Because it is our Islamic law, in the Koran, that after the age of nine a daughter belongs to the father." "But ask them if it is fair in this extreme case?" Quietly the translator asked them, and they fell silent and gazed down at the carpet. No one spoke until Fahina, the battered wife, said softly, "It is the law", with tears falling down her face.
Once the shutter of religion falls, the rest is silence. The women are indoctrinated so deep with it that their own inferiority is branded on their brains. Every time sophisticated Muslims in the west use sophistry to explain that the prophet was actually a great liberator of women, every time they fail to condemn outright some of the Koranic laws themselves and demand reformation, they help condemn women across the Islamic world to this self-immolating damage.
Contrast this with what women have been saying recently on the Ar-Rahman list:
Wendy I too am not muslim, but hey, even you've got to agree that islam is better for women then this crazy democratic garbage that Bush and his puppets like Blair, are trying to govern people under. For instance muslim women cover themselves and do not want to show their bodies, im all for that. Whereas western women do the opposite they show their breasts etc, and expect respect from us men, you've got to be stupid, the only thing their gonna get from us is the want to take them to bed. The only thing that i feel where the religion of islam lacks, in fact its not the religion its the people. Islam in all its purity does as they say liberate women, because the way i look at it, women will be only judged on their intellect and faith rather then if they are a 38DD chest size. One question though, why do so many muslim women not wear the hijab, or like in afghanisatan the RWADA (a womens group) are trying to oppose wearing the hijab, when it clearly states in your Quran and elsewhere that the muslim women are obliged to wear the Hijab!?! By the way Christian women are obliged to wear a headscarf to Wendy, so a hope your doing your bit for the Christian faith, whens the last time you saw a picture of Mary without her Hijab?
. . .
Another thing, for the person who thinks that we are opressed women in islam, i dont think so. Whats so oppressed about us huh?
Allah tells us to wear the hijab, ok? did you ever actually think with you brains and say why? or did you just listen what them ignorant ones say that Allah is opressing us, or islam....or whatever.!
How are we opressed when allah is trying to protect us? How are we opressed when we get sooooooo much respect from people more than the one who do show off there body like what keanbin said?? How are we opressed when woman were mentioned in the quran sooooo many times...not sure how many.... but alot mashallah!
Getting raped, isn't that oppression? Getting sexually harrassed, you dont call that oppression? Just being used as a sex material...AINT THAT OPPRESSION??† You tell me! Or is that just how kuffar live? like animals! And say that we are oppressed....Subhan allah! How many muslim woman do you hear everyday getting raped??? NONE! because Hijab is not just a peice of scarf on our heads, Hijab means a covering, and protection from people and eyes!
Whether or not the Koran actually decrees the hijab (Aziz has told me it doesn't), isn't it interesting to see how much more appealing the idea seems to women who aren't and have not been required to wear it-- who live in countries where they have the free choice not to?
I have no problem understanding that women who choose to cover up their bodies find that they're treated with more respect and are less subject to feeling worthless and objectified. But this is like a "voluntary security measure"--something women ought to be able to choose to do on their own, whether as a form of protest, or because it makes them feel more empowered and modest, or whatever the reason might be. It's something that only really matters and has meaning if it's a choice... if it's decreed for all women regardless of their personal feelings, capabilities, and level of comfort with how the world treats them, then it loses any significance that it would have had if it had been freely chosen.
I hope Karzai can keep dodging those bullets... and considering his situation, I'm not speaking figuratively.
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09:59 - Generation Xbox
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That's what I'm going to start calling the invincible army of scaly little toad-children who crawl around the Internet, leaving slug-trails behind them all over the sites they infest, operating under the conviction that it's okay to steal a piece of artwork that someone has posted, remove the signature and copyright notice in a pirated copy of Photoshop, and then upload it to other sites like Neopets.com (or even the same site they got it from) under their own name.
And they've learned this code of ethics before they have attained two digits of age. And they never learn any better, in a distressing proportion of cases.
These are the same people who call me names for posting negative things about Microsoft, by the way, because hey, m1cr05oPh+ m4k3z the Xb0x-- and making a fucking video game system (and buying up independent multi-platform game companies in order to brute-force a saleable exclusive platform, and dumping it onto the market with prices subsidized by money obtained elsewhere in the conglomerate, just so as to undersell the established players and eventually own this market too) trumps any other alleged unethical behavior by the company. To them, any technical, legal, or ethical shortcomings of the company are rendered irrelevant, and and they'll grow up feeling benevolent toward Microsoft because Microsoft provided them their soma during their pre-teen years.
Ugh. Some days my inbox is just not a pleasant thing to wake up to.
Yes, I know that the Xbox has certain qualities-- both in its development style and in its target audience-- that set it apart from what usually characterizes Microsoft. And I don't mean to antagonize readers who have Xboxes but don't fit the description above-- they're cool.
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| Wednesday, November 20, 2002 |
00:19 - The Towers Regrow
http://www.capitalistlion.com/article.cgi?155
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CapLion has found a story on Mayor Bloomberg's unveiling of the new WTC No. 7 tower. Go give it a look if you're interested in what's going on with the site.
I do wish, though, that papers like The Independent would refer to the WTC as "Center" rather than "Centre". And maybe look up the proper usage of "principal" vs. "principle".
At any rate, Bloomberg certainly seems to be full of ideas...
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11:36 - A thought on network effect
http://denbeste.nu/cd_log_entries/2002/01/fog0000000140.shtml
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Den Beste has mentioned "network effect" several times as evidence that Apple is doomed and Windows will achieve 100% penetration. From his original article on the subject:
There is a marketing term: "network effect". It refers to the fact that for some kinds of products, the product becomes more valuable to each individual customer as more and more people buy it. Companies love this if they can get it, because there's no manufacturing cost associated with network effect, so the value (and potentially the sales price) of the product can rise and thus profit margins can increase.
The effect exists; I'm not going to argue that. It's a truism of humanity that the more the people around you do something, the easier it is for you to do the same thing.
But I have to wonder whether the effect will lead to where Den Beste thinks it will. I find myself thinking that the result of network effect on any given niche depends heavily on circumstance; it's not a foregone conclusion that it will lead to homogeneity.
My thought is that network effect is only really potent when the choice in question is in fact a choice. I'd say network effect was absolutely instrumental in Windows attaining the critical mass that it achieved in the mid-to-late 90s. Back then, a new computer user was an informed buyer, someone with geeky tendencies, who knew what a computer was supposed to do and what he wanted to do with it. He had a choice between Windows and a Mac; he weighed the merits of each, and eventually the fact that all his friends were using Windows because it was cheaper and had more software won out. That's network effect in its purest form.
But that's not the case these days. Using Windows isn't a choice, it's a default. New computer buyers don't know what operating system their computer runs any more than they know what encoding standard their phone uses. Network effect doesn't enter into the buying decision; when someone is getting a new computer, it's going to run Windows. Only if the user is savvy does he weigh the relative merits of Windows and the Mac-- and such users, though it may not look that way from within the blogosphere, are vanishingly few. They're not a significant part of the numbers which drive sales.
It's at a time like this that network effect actually can work in favor of the niche player. My personal experience tells me this. Time was, after all, that nobody wanted to use any Apple products; the Mac was seen as a "toy", the Mac OS was seen as limited and restrictive and unstable, and Mac users were usually simply called "gay" and left at that. (Network effect in reverse.) But these days, the situation is quite different. People come up to me to see my iMac and my iBook and ask questions about it-- what it can do, how much it weighs, how much it costs-- quite unprovoked. They're seeking it out. If I flash my iPod while in line for burritos, people's heads turn my way and I get to show it off to a genuinely admiring audience, rather than having to hide it from people who think it makes a statement about my sexuality. (I just saw an iPod on the title-card sequence for "Modern Marvels: Boys' Toys" on the History Channel.)
And that, too, is network effect.
Using a Mac is starting to be seen once again as something real people do. Everybody has a friend who uses a Mac-- and such people are more common than they were a couple of years ago, at least in my experience, anecdotal though it may be. The "Switch" ads are putting memes into the water. Everybody knows what an iPod is and what an iMac looks like. OS X gets high-profile billing in movies like Men In Black II. People create videos in iMovie and photo books in iPhoto. Apple Stores present hip and inviting facades to passers-by in high-income malls. There are more games being produced for the Mac platform than there ever have been since the mid-90s. These things enter the collective consciousness. And they're doing it more now than they used to.
One of the most common refrains here at work is "When I get my Mac..." --and a big driver for that is the fact that there is already that crucial seed of shock troops within the company who have already bought Macs and are visibly happy with them. That makes it easier for more people to consider, "Hey, now, maybe these things are worth looking into. Sure can't be worse than this Windows box, can they?" And when a friend sees my iPod and plaintively says, "God, everybody has one of those except for me!"... it means an imminent sale is dependent only on whether it turns out to be in the guy's budget for the month.
When those around you are increasingly making a certain choice, you're more likely to make that same choice yourself. I see that happening with Apple products more and more these days. But I don't see it happening with Windows anywhere near as much, because to use Windows first has to be a choice that one has to consciously make.
I suspect that network effect is only really valid in a plural market, is what I'm saying. It confers the most momentum to a product or company while that company is a minority and on the rise, but its potency falls off as that product or company achieves near-total penetration. Beyond that, other effects take over-- more volatile ones, depending largely on PR, economics, design, and luck. Anything can happen. But in a situation like we have today, I don't think network effect is really something Apple has to worry about as much. Instead it's an ally, as long as they can keep it fed and don't blow it.
Popular opinion toward Apple is curious among the casual and respectful among the savvy; the zealous are zealous as ever, but the hostile are a vanishing bunch. This is a much different environment from what it was two or three years ago. Apple is no longer a pariah-- and whatever its products' numbers might look like, the environment is a rich one for growth.
OS/2 failed because while it was a niche player with a similar position to Apple's, it didn't bring anything to the table that was compelling and hip, the way Apple does now. Good as it was, it didn't have an exclusive "killer app" that IBM could show off on TV and build consumer lust. There wasn't any reason for the man on the street to think, "Hmm, OS/2-- that's cool stuff, right? I oughtta go get me some of that!" Nor was there for Be, which had cool idealistic prospects, but nothing concrete for people to latch onto. But aha... Linux started off as a niche player, and it had the crucial network-effect ingredient that it brought something desirable to the table-- something that would overcome its minority position and gather adherents even in the face of overwhelming opposition from the status quo. Somehow that worked. Linux brought a concrete benefit to people who wanted to make an informed choice and achieve something specific. And that's what Apple is doing too; that's why Apple is better equipped to survive in its current market than, say, OS/2 was.
Or maybe I'm just on crack.
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| Tuesday, November 19, 2002 |
15:02 - The Mysteries of Life
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WHY are there always SHOES on the side of the freeway?
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| Monday, November 18, 2002 |
23:26 - Everybody look what's goin' down
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While out back watching for the Leonid meteor shower (the biggest particulate cloud won't be for another couple of hours, but it was worth a shot), we saw a light show of a different kind: a long stream of large military aircraft-- C-5s and C-130s and the like-- rising from Moffett, droning southeastward over our house in South San Jose, and then banking right and heading out to sea. Possibly toward Guam. In half an hour, we saw at least three of these, rising along the same flight path, one that I've never seen taken before.
You'd think something was up.
UPDATE: The later part of the meteor shower rocked. We saw several bolides (exploding meteorite chunks that created long, hugely bright streaks, displayed a flare-out at the end, and left a visible trail of smoke in the upper atmosphere); one of which looked to have penetrated down to about 30,000 feet. Quite a show...
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13:08 - Doc Pemberton was so worldly and ahead of his time
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From the Ar-Rahman list, which has been blessedly free of blistering anti-US and anti-Israel sentiment for the past couple of months, ever since someone spoke up and mentioned that hey, this stuff is actually kinda offensive:
Oh. Yeah. Geez. No idea why I never saw that before. Hey, I've got some incontrovertible proof, by the way, that Barney the Purple Dinosaur is really Satan. See, just add up all the letters that can be interpreted as Roman numerals, and you get 666, or something. <yawn> Next...
Hey, and I thought all the good Doctor was trying to do was capitalize on the great taste of a narcotic with syrup. Time for everybody to switch to Mecca-Cola, eh?
(Ah well. At least our religious loonies more or less keep it within the family, or at least they keep the racist conspiracy theories locked up in their woodland cabins where they can't hurt anybody.)
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| Saturday, November 16, 2002 |
00:42 - Preaching Laughter
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It's been remarked here and there in the blogosphere that comedians seem to be the public figures who most frequently exhibit that they have heads securely welded to their shoulders. Forget political demagogues and religious leaders; from the mouths of comedians does all-too-frequently come wisdom. Free of the strictures of political correctness, unafraid to offend any particular "aggrieved" group among their audience (who waives their right to be offended by the act of purchasing the tickets), comics get to say things that so many other figureheads with wide reach are muzzled from saying.
I just got back from seeing a Lewis Black show at the Punchline Comedy Club in Sacramento with my folks. Black is the "angry comic" guy on the Daily Show and elsewhere on Comedy Central; I haven't seen much of him to date, but I'll have to keep an eye out for him in the future. Nothing quite beats seeing him from four feet away and at ankle level, with our dinner-theater table actually touching the edge of the stage.
Anyway-- after nearly an hour of gut-busting material covering Halloween costumes, Enron-esque CEOs, candy corn, drinking water, his Jewish upbringing, and creationists, he suddenly dropped to a serious tone and posited that in life three things are really important: patriotism, faith, and humor. He said that the biggest reason that our current enemies are our enemies is that they've "been wandering the desert for thousands of years and never run into a knock-knock joke. ...Guess that's the price they pay for living in tents." He went on to claim that if only there were a tradition of humor in the Islamic world, nobody would have ever been able to stand in front of a group of men and say in all seriousness that if they blow themselves up in the name of Allah, they'd be met in heaven by 72 virgins. "They'd recognize it as the punchline of a joke!"
I've said that kind of thing before here, myself; after all, I haven't seen a whole helluva lot of evidence for comedy and not-taking-oneself-so-damned-seriously in that community. Unless you count the cartoons of M. Khalil of The Arab News, which I don't believe fits the description of "humor".
Anyway... on the drive home from Sacramento, I encountered what one of the featured comedians (whose name I can't remember) described in great detail having encountered the night before: an immense bank of fog-- "Tule fog", they call it-- that rolls off the Sacramento River and blankets Highway 80 all the way across the Central Valley. And when I say "blankets", I mean "fills with a palpable mass that light cannot penetrate". The Central Valley is our own little Midwest; it has Eppie's and Quizno's restaurants, which don't exist in the Bay Area, and used-car dealerships are closed on Sundays for church. But I didn't get to see any of that on the drive home. I got to see fog. It would be ineffectual to describe it in numerical terms: I could say how I could only see twenty feet ahead, or couldn't see past two of the reflectors on the edge of the freeway, and it would tell you nothing useful. It's only marginally more effective if I tell you that I couldn't see the approaching headlights of the cars going the opposite direction on the other side of the median, or that the only way I could tell I was going under an overpass was that the air and the sound suddenly and briefly grew thicker and darker-- after which the subtly changed light allowed me to see the beads of water gathering on my windows and migrating backwards. No, I think the only way I can convey what it was like would be to say how on a 75mph freeway, I was going about 60, hunched forward over the wheel, hands gripping it at the top, jinking back and forth as my vision-- which petered out after the second reflector, meaning that I couldn't tell whether the next reflector ahead would be in a straight line or a sudden curve-- told me to react on the basis that there might be a car right in front of me, or there might not, and I'd never see it until it was too late-- gritting my teeth and yelling Jeez! . . . Crap! . . . Fuck!! . . . into the night.
I shot out of the fogbank with a whoof sound right at Vacaville, which I could tell because of the giant tall tombstone-towers on the sides of the freeway which advertise malls and the stores in them. And shortly afterwards, I was back in the mountains, and then I was back in the Bay.
No wonder geeks like California. Travel fifty miles, and it's like you've traveled to a different state, only in virtual reality.
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13:18 - A different kind of "Switcher"
http://bantha.cjb.net/john
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Is it just me, or is this just a bit uncalled-for?
It's a whole "Switch" ad parody advocating moving north. Go watch it and see. And here's an article in The Ottawa Citizen which provides some more-or-less impartial analysis and background.
Now, I realize that Apple is a company whose clientele is not known for being a bunch of Limbaugh-listening, Falwell-watching flag-wavers. And I know what Mr. Jobs' personal leanings are like, as evidenced by the recent front-and-center Jimmy Carter tribute. But I for one really don't appreciate the ad campaign and the corporate trade dress being hijacked in order to spread "Bush is a monkey" memes. If Apple has any bones in its body, they won't appreciate it either.
I'm not saying it should be taken down or anything... I just think it's in poor taste, and I'm not used to seeing things in apple.com-looking trim that I consider "in poor taste".
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| Friday, November 15, 2002 |
03:06 - Zoinks!
http://corsair.blogspot.com/2002_11_01_corsair_archive.html#84529599
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Corsair has found a truly frightening photo. Go look if you dare.
Lance said it looked "like a doctored Michael Jackson".
I replied, wasn't that a redundant term?
By the way-- via InstaPundit, here's the page that the picture comes from-- it's a fully annotated chronology, and a laugh riot. But nowhere near so much as the estimable webmistress's hate mail page. Boy, they'll let just about anybody on the Internet these days, huh?
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| Tuesday, November 12, 2002 |
22:16 - Just your average, run-of-the-mill 13-hour workday
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Ah well. At least I got a lot accomplished in the post-seminar hours-- and again, the food was far too good and far too plentiful during the day.
Two down, one to go.
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| Monday, November 11, 2002 |
21:00 - Blog? Huh?
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Not much blogging today-- and probably not for most of this week. I'm at all-day seminars, which begin at some ungodly hour of the morning and involve my driving up to San Francisco and back, followed by several hours of actual work, supporting our current mad dash toward release.
At least they feed us well there, though.
Anyway, I'm off to see The Ring now.
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| Sunday, November 10, 2002 |
18:49 - Daily California Affirmation, with Stuart Smalley
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It's rapidly getting so that Sunday is the spiritual center of my week-- not in any kind of go-to-a-building-and-kneel sense, but in a sort of mutant Thoreau sense.
Sundays, you see, I get to wake up extremely late, like after noon (usually because I've been up till at least 5:00 in the morning working on something). I have a leisurely lunch, catch up on pending e-mail backlogs, and either work on whatever parts of the site or book or whatever still need working on since last night, or revel in the fact that there's nothing more of such work to do right now. And then I strap on my iPod, pull on some shoes, and head up into the hilltop neighborhoods of South San Jose for a nice long soundtracked sunset walk. I find a nice place to enjoy the view and the weather, I sit there for a while watching the clouds with some appropriate music alongside, thinking appropriately expansive Whitman-esque thoughts, and then I head home. Then I laugh myself hoarse at Adult Swim for the rest of the night.
I should point out, by the way, that the iPod has a very bizarre sense of humor sometimes. With well over a thousand songs in its library, and the random-play setting turned on, the oeuvre with which it serenades me as I march up the hills is usually very diverse, and often oddly fitting. Yet it seems to zero in, with irritating frequency, on "Sit On My Face", by Monty Python. Sometimes it pulls it up at the most inopportune times. I don't know what it's trying to prove, but it's got me peeking over my shoulder now on occasion, looking for the hidden cameras.
The fact that when I left the house, the first song it played was "Shaking the Tree" from the Peter Gabriel studio album that it's on, and the very last song that it started playing two hours later as I came within view of the house again was "Shaking the Tree" from the Secret World Live tour album, didn't do much to allay my paranoia.
Anyway, tonight I took advantage of the fact that the rain had cleared from our neighborhood for a while to head to the highest point I could find in the general area and watch the clouds break across the valley. I made my way to the top of Silver Creek Valley Road, which winds its way through gated communities and posh country clubs to a narrow hilltop pass beyond which no houses have yet been built; the road on that side winds down into the Hellyer valley where there are some dot-com business parks, but the steep canyon and hillside in between is as yet uninhabited (though lined with manicured trees and polished stonework medians). At the crown of the pass, I scrambled up the hill from the sidewalk to the knob right above, and found myself at the end of a ridgetop with an exquisite view of the southern end of Silicon Valley. I found a relatively dry patch of ground and sat down.
One of the nice things about living in a place without any bugs, by the way, is that I can go up to a grassy hillside and sit down and stare across the valley as the sun goes down. It's something I take for granted until I go elsewhere in the country, where such a pastime would be suicide, a selfless sacrifice to the clouds of pests which seem to inhabit every other place I've been to. There just don't seem to be any here.
Actually, I lie. There was one mosquito-- a very inexplicable one. It hovered about two feet above my head for about ten unbroken minutes, wavering from side to side. Picture this: I'm sitting with my back to the hilltop, and there's a gentle breeze coming from behind me and rolling out away from me down the hill. This mosquito seemed to be trying to fly back over the hill, but perhaps it was just a wuss-- it couldn't make any headway against the breeze. I couldn't figure it out. But if all mosquitoes acted like this, I'd have nothing against them at all.
At any rate-- there I was, at the bald peak of a hill about a thousand feet up, gazing out across the Valley to the Santa Cruz Mountains on the other side. I was facing westward, right toward the setting sun. But in between myself and the sun was a huge, dark bank of cloud-- it was clearly dumping rain on the valley floor below me, but I was far off to the side and above it, and I could see its upper contours as well as its lower draperies of moisture. The entire bank was moving slowly southward, toward my left. Its upper edge sloped downward to the right. As the clouds moved left, the sun sunk lower; it never actually came out from behind the cloud bank, but rather followed the moving contour of the clouds as the upper edge sank lower and lower, fading southward. And because of the wisps of high moisture that made up the only cloud presence against the blue that domed the rest of the sky, the sun was creating a deep orange flood across the western sky-- which backlit the slow, trundling cloud bank with edgework of orange and pink. Far from the indeterminate haze of a Midwestern horizon, where you can't really tell whether there are clouds in the distance or not against the milky white sky, these clouds were all razor-sharp against the blue, with clear and detailed texture that looked near enough to reach out and grab hold of. Every few minutes, a jet emanated from the cloud bank, slowly descending, bound for the San Jose airport. Orange and gold light glinted off its wings as it crossed my plane of vision.
And me without my camera.
I sat there for almost an hour. The music that came on my iPod as I watched the clouds' edges burst into orange flame was the final "Farewell to Neverland" score track from Hook, a long orchestral piece that fit the scene better than anything else I could have dialed up, except possibly Beethoven's 6th. The recurring theme played a few times, the way I'd remembered playing it in Band back in high school. The light began to fade; the sun, though I couldn't see its position exactly, was surely below the immovable cloud horizon by now. And the music rose to the unmistakable John Williams Fantasy Finale-- grand, royal chord progressions, the kind that can go with no possible visual but a sunset like the one I was now watching, and the words THE END. A couple of birds fluttered by as the chords faded and the track ended. I waited a couple of seconds, taking a deep breath, letting it all sink in, serene and happy as I've ever been on one of these Sunday walks, as relaxed as I've ever been sitting on a grassy hillside with nothing to do but watch birds and--
SIT ON MY FACE, AND TELL ME THAT YOU LOVE ME!
Aaauuuuugh! <jabjabjabnextnextnext>
I swear. I love my iPod, but some days it can be such a butthole.
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| Saturday, November 9, 2002 |
14:11 - Instead of... a block party?
http://www.videoclipstream.com/akamai/h-l/jaylo/oops_email.html
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Okay, this is amusing. Fox News anchor makes a bit of an embarrassing live stumble on a story about Jennifer Lopez.
Seems almost as though the writers were trying to trip him up... well done, boys.
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| Friday, November 8, 2002 |
21:47 - Gadzooks, that's funny.
http://www.libertymeadows.com/gallery/LM36.jpg
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The most recent freaky thing from Frank Cho, via Marcus:
The Superfriends versus Space Ghost, at a monkey knife-fight. Dear lord.
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09:44 - W00t!
http://ackackack.com/
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Wow, look-- I'm part of a demographic! I feel sooo like I belong. :)
Judson has a theory that being a Simpsons fan and a Mac-head makes for a Libertarian. (He cites me rather flatteringly as an example. Thanks!) I wouldn't be surprised, given the prevalence of such sentiments in the blogosphere; there seems to be a Simpsons quote for every occasion, and I continue to be startled at how many high-profile bloggers have telltale links specifically to Mac resources.
I wouldn't quite say I describe myself as Libertarian, though. I certainly didn't vote a straight Lib ticket or anything. I'd like to see a Lib as attorney general, and maybe one as Treasurer, but other than that there's policy to be made that I think the Libertarian agenda is just a little too unrealistic for. Sure, those are fine ideals they've got-- but there are realities of life in this complex world that just have to be left to a central government to handle. And I don't place individual rights above all other priorities under all circumstances; for example, I think racial profiling is a regrettable but necessary means of protecting the public. No, I'm not a fan of the feds pawing through the carry-on bags of every Arab-American who gets on a plane. But I do think that makes a whole lot more sense, and inconveniences a whole helluva lot fewer people, and gives a hugely better impression of the government's intelligence and common sense, than patting down old ladies and single parents with kids in tow.
Yes, we need to be alert for individual liberties wherever possible. But we don't have to be damn fools about it.
That's why I wish there were an Anti-Idiotarian party to vote for. Too much to ask, I know; politics is, by definition, the art of making the people happy with your actions and opinions. And even with this week's Republican landslide, and even with all the efforts of all the bloggers with all their loyal readership, it still isn't the majority of the public who thinks like we do. Most people need to be told what to think, and need to feel like an R or a D, if they take an interest in politics at all. My friend Chris has a set of Laws, the Third of which is: I am not the target audience. It's a mantra we should all repeat to ourselves as often as possible.
Just remember: by definition, half the population has an IQ of less than 100.
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| Thursday, November 7, 2002 |
20:49 - Winter is in effect... nnnnnnnnNOW!
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It was summer yesterday...
That's how it is in the Bay Area, though. Summer lasts about six months. Right up until yesterday afternoon, it was warm, even hot-- the same kind of clear, boring, clear-sky conditions that characterize California weather from April through October.
Then, last night, while I was relaxing in the hot tub... suddenly the wind rolled over me like the sandstorm from The Scorpion King, tossing an armload of pine needles from nearby trees into the water and on my head. A glance upward revealed swathes of angry, fast-moving clouds hunching over us. We hurriedly covered up the tub and retreated from the first prickly raindrops.
This morning it was drizzly, and there was some detritus on the roads, but not too bad; it still looked like summer still existed, somewhere, deep beyond the current battle front. But after work, well...
Work ended rather... abruptly, shall we say. I was perusing the comments upon a recent LGF post (sorry to hear about Rasheed, Charles), when the iMac screen suddenly went dark. Stunned silence... then I realize that the silence is fairly total. The one or two other late workers and I stand up, prairie-dogging out of our cubicles, silhouetted against the emergency lights. The hell?
"First rain of the year," I note. "A branch falls on the power lines, or the substation arcs. It's how we know winter's arrived."
And indeed, the streetlights and traffic signals at the intersection between us and Infinite Loop are darkened. With nothing useful that can be done work-wise, I pack up my iPod and head out.
The parking lot, this time, is filled with debris. I'm talking matted. Branches, leaves, pine needles, pine cones, large pools of standing water. The wind is driving sheets of rain into my face, rendering pointless my attempts to shield my laptop by sticking it into my shirt... and as I start the car and pull out into the intersection, trying my best to behave with the rest of the drivers as though it's a four-way stop even though my windshield wipers-- which haven't seen action in six months-- are sticking and shuddering across the glass, I realize that the NPR station, KQED, is just static.
Seems the transmitter's been hit. Hokay... I turn to KCBS, where I learn that large parts of the Bay Area are in chaos. The mountain highway to Santa Cruz is at a standstill (as it always is under anything but ideal conditions). Mill Valley and the Buena Vista Hills area of San Francisco are blacked-out. The Richmond/San Rafael Bridge has been shut down, because construction equipment on the bridge was being blown around by the wind. And as the traffic reporter relates from a caller on the Bay Bridge, who witnessed it as it happened, the transformers at the toll plaza suddenly shot huge blue sparks into the air as a gigantic electrical arc zapped across the station-- and all the lights on the bridge went out.
It was summer yesterday, I will reiterate. And tonight there's a Winter Storm Warning in effect-- which in these parts means "watch out for water on the road, and drive really carefully. And stay out of flash-flood gullies!" Heavy rain is predicted throughout the coming week.
I'm home now, and there are candles burning here and there. The power's on, but it hasn't been that way all day.
Sure, the weather's boring here most of the year. But when it gets interesting... boy, does it get interesting.
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11:48 - Okay, now what?
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I just got the following e-mail:
From: "NELSON DANDY" <nelsondandy44@eircom.net>
Date: Wed Nov 6, 2002 8:00:54 PM US/Pacific
To: m_s2002uk@hotmail.com
Subject: URGENT HELP
Reply-To: <nelsondandy33@mail.com>
STRICTLY CONFIDENTIAL
> From: MR NELSON DANDY JNR.
> E-Mail :nelson_dandy20022000@yahoo.com
>
> ATTN: THE DIRECTOR /CEO.
>
> Dear Sir,
> URGENT ASSISTANT
>
> You may be surprise to receive this kind of message
> from me since
> you do not know me personally and we have not met
> before. The purpose
> of my introduction is that I am MR. NELSON DANDY
hello mr. nelson dandy i don`t know who r u but i can
help u on certain rules of my own made see u r
investing some heavy amount in my account i don`t mind
but the govt will mind certainly so i bhave more than
4 accounts if ur relly interested u can contact me i
want 100% of bank interest than only iam reddy for
agreement.
> JNR, the first son
> of DR.NELSON STEVE DANDY, who was recently murdered
> in the land
> dispute in Zimbabwe. I was furnished with viable
> information from the
> world trade center here in Amsterdam-Holland and
> decided to write you. Before the
> death of my father, he had taken me to Spain to
> deposit the sum of
> THIRTY FIVE MILLION, FIVE HUNDRED THOUSAND UNITED
> STATE DOLLARS ONLY (USD$35.5M).In a security
> company, as if he has foreseen the looming danger in
> Zimbabwe.This money was deposited in a Box as Gold
> and Diamond to avoid much demurrage from the
> security company. This amount was meant for the
> purchase of new machines and the chemicals for the
> farms and the establishment of new farms Swaziland.
>
> This land problem came when the Zimbabwe president
> MR ROBERT MUGABE introduced a new land act that
> wholly affected all rich farmers and some few black
> farmers. This resulted to the killing and mob action
> by Zimbabwe war veterans and some lunatics in the
> society. In fact a lot of people were killed because
> of the land-reformed act of which
> my father was one of the victims. It is against this
> background that I and my family who are currently
> staying in Amsterdam decided to keep the money in
> Madrid Spain,since the Law of the Netherlands
> prohibits a refugee (asylum seeker)to open any
> account or to be involved in any financial
> transaction of this magnitude. As the oldest son of
> my father, I am saddled with the responsibility of
> seeking a genuine foreign account where this money
> could be transferred without the knowledge of my
> Government who are
> bent on taking everything we have got. The
> Netherlands Government seems to be playing about
> with them.I am faced with dilemma of investing this
> amount of money in Netherlands for the fear of going
> through the same experience in future since both
> countries have similar history. Moreover, the
> Netherlands foreign exchange policy does not allow
> such investments from asylum seekers. As a
> businessman,whom I have entrusted my future and my
> family in his hand, I must let you know that this
> transaction is risk-free. If you accept to assist me
> and my family, all I need you to do for me is to
> make arrangement to make a trip to Madrid Spain so
> that you can
> non-resident account which will aid us in
> transferring the money into my account you will
> nominate in your country or elsewhere. This money I
> intend to use for investment.
>
> I have options to offer, first you can choose to
> have certain percentage of money for nominating your
> account for the transaction, or you can go into
> partnership with me for a proper profitable
> investment of the money in your country. Which
> options you choose, feel free to notify me please,
> contact me with the above E-mail address or call me
> briefly with the above telephone number and I will
> call you back for more details on the subject. I
> implore you to maintain the absolute secrecy require
> in this transaction.
>
> I wish you the best of luck.
>
> Thanks and God bless.
> Sincerely yours
>
> MR. NELSON DANDY (JNR.)
It's either:
a) Someone replying (in full dupe mode) to a Nigerian Scam Letter, who somehow managed to get my e-mail address as a Bcc: recipient; or
b) A bizarre variant on the NSL in which it's engineered to appear like someone replying to the NSL in full dupe mode. Perhaps to attract unsuspecting do-gooder recipients of the reply into e-mailing the poor sod who appears to be falling for it, to warn him off. For the purpose of-- what, I don't know. Harvesting a single working e-mail address? Seems like an awful lot of work and social engineering.
One possibility assumes immense moronicity in the people involved. The other assumes a quite astonishing level of Machiavellian plotting and espionage-type forgery.
And these days, thanks to Klez and friends, I honestly don't know which is less plausible.
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09:47 - The Burden of Proof
http://littlegreenfootballs.com/weblog/?entry=4642
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"It's all a matter of perspective," some say. "What we call terrorism others call fighting for survival."
Well, check this out, via LGF:
I went to see the minister of education at his home in Riyadh. Mohammed Ahmed Rasheed and half a dozen deputies, men in long white robes and headdresses, arrayed themselves on chairs against the walls and worried their beads. They talked fondly about time spent at American universities — Stanford, Indiana, Oklahoma, Michigan; Khedir al-Qurashi, the vice minister for girls' education, spoke of his love of Hoosiers basketball.
They were defensive about American suspicion of the religious hard-liners' influence on boys' schooling. "Why don't you go to Israeli math textbooks and see what they're saying — `If you kill 10 Arabs one day and 12 the next day, what would be the total?' " demanded one deputy. Agreed another: "If 5 or 8 percent of our curriculum has to be changed, then 80 to 90 percent of the content of American media has to be changed."
Huh. Yeah. Why don't we?
Why don't we confront the blatant hypocrisy in our own mass media? Why don't we wake up to the obvious hegemony of the Zionist conspiracy in everything we read, hear, think, and teach our children?
Every week the blogosphere uncovers some new example of what's being taught to children in Saudi Arabia and Egypt-- to recite that Jews are "apes and pigs", that learning math is less important than memorizing the Koran, that the US is a hypocritical Jewish-run entity who can't stop the Righteous from learning the truth about Jews. But this is terribly one-sided. Why don't we rub our eyes and wake up to the much worse irrational zealous anti-Muslim bias in our own popular culture?
Could it be...
Just maybe...
...that there isn't any?!
These guys seem to understand the principle of the statement that "information wants to be free", but as yet they exhibit no comprehension of the reality of the world in which that principle applies. How best can I illustrate it? Hmm-- okay, I know: Only one of these societies in question has a blogosphere.
Those who wish to apologize for the unbelievable level of irrational, taken-on-faith, absorbed-from-the-imams anti-Jewish hatred that can be found in the Muslim world need to help out their cause by uncovering one example of what this interviewee is accusing exists. Just one.
Will their failure to do so convince them of anything but the even greater power and penetration of the Zionist Conspiracy? No, probably not.
But hey, all our laundry is out in the open, dirty or not. Paw through it. Go right ahead. Information flows freely here. Nothing's stopping you. You can see all the ideological weapons we have at our disposal. We have nothing to hide.
Of course, that's the mistake the Minbari made.
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| Tuesday, November 5, 2002 |
01:20 - What is wrong with some people?
http://www.lileks.com/bleats/archive/02/1102/110201.html#110602
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You know, there are content producers in this world, and there are content consumers. I don't hold that one group is inherently superior to the other; people are just inclined differently. Some people create, because it's in their nature; and some people hoover, because it's in their nature. That's fine. Diff'rent strokes and all that.
But I've just got to say: it takes one hell of a content consumer to write the thing quoted at the end of today's Bleat. And I don't mean that as a compliment.
If it's any consolation, James-- the good Fairy can only dream avariciously of being someone who has so much e-mail to answer that it becomes burdensome. And his anonymity is proof enough of the shame it causes him.
The rest of us consumers are fueled by 91-octane Bleats. Don't let one guy with a bomb-laden harbor dinghy cause an oil crisis for the blog world. Gratitude? A four-digit inbox means five or six digits' worth of grateful-- but silent-- readers.
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Brian Tiemann
