You Can Now Subscribe to Comments. Let the Rejoicing Commence

Posted on March 8, 2004

OK kids, as a test I’ve added the nifty EZ Subscribe-to-Comments plugin to this blog. This means that you can opt to get notified by e-mail whenever a comment is posted to a particular item — very handy if you posted one yourself, and you want to know if anyone ever followed up. (Or if you just like stalking people via comment threads on random blogs. Either way, hey, it’s your lucky day.)

The only caveat at this point is that, if you choose to preview your comment, the form won’t remember if you told it to subscribe you — so when you see the preview and approve it for posting, you’ll need to click the “subscribe” option again or else it won’t take. I’m working on hacking the comment forms to make this unnecessary, but for now that’s how it is.

Spalding Gray’s Body Found

Posted on March 8, 2004

They pulled brilliant monologuist Spalding Gray’s body out of the East River today, confirming a lot of people’s fears (including mine). He’d been missing for two months.

Forgotten Hope 0.61

Posted on March 7, 2004

I’ve raved in this space before about the superlative Battlefield 1942 mod Forgotten Hope, but it’s time for the raves to begin again — the FH team has just rolled out the latest version of the mod, version 0.61. This new version adds so much new content to the game that I won’t even try to summarize it all; suffice it to say that the full 0.61 download is a whopping 1.2 gigabytes, half for new game data and half for new maps. That’s a lot of stuff! If you’ve got the bandwidth, though — and if you’re playing Battlefield 1942 online, odds are you do — it’s definitely worth it.

(The official site seems to be Slashdotted at the moment — go figure! — but you can still grab all the necessary files from PlanetBattlefield and FilePlanet, among other places, and there’s an authorized version floating around via BitTorrent as well.)

I Feel Better Already

Posted on March 5, 2004

The wise guys at whitehouse.org have posted the script for Bush’s latest campaign ad: “Our Nation’s Comforter“. Given the tenor of the other recently announced ads, I’d say this one should fit right in…

Are You Man Enough to Date the Pretty Pretty Princess?

Posted on March 4, 2004

In the spirit of Tucker Max, my friend Ann has added a new feature to her blog “The Plight of the Single Woman“: the official “Pretty Pretty Princess Date Application Page“.

Any guys out there who think they’ve got what it takes are welcome to test their skills at pitching woo by filling out the form and finding out for themselves…

Why Did Bush Let al Zarqawi Go?

Posted on March 4, 2004

Remember yesterday, when I told you about the Ashura bombings in Iraq, and how the prime suspect behind the attack was Jordanian terrorist Abu Mussab al Zarqawi?

Today NBC News is reporting that, in the months leading up to the war, the Bush Administration had several chances to capture or kill al Zarqawi and shut down his little operation — but they never got around to acting on any of them!

NBC News has learned that long before the war the Bush administration had several chances to wipe out his terrorist operation and perhaps kill Zarqawi himself — but never pulled the trigger…
In June 2002, U.S. officials say intelligence had revealed that Zarqawi and members of al-Qaida had set up a weapons lab at Kirma, in northern Iraq, producing deadly ricin and cyanide.
The Pentagon quickly drafted plans to attack the camp with cruise missiles and airstrikes and sent it to the White House, where, according to U.S. government sources, the plan was debated to death in the National Security Council…
The Pentagon drew up a second strike plan, and the White House again killed it. By then the administration had set its course for war with Iraq.
“People were more obsessed with developing the coalition to overthrow Saddam than to execute the president’s policy of preemption against terrorists,” according to terrorism expert and former National Security Council member Roger Cressey.
In January 2003, the threat turned real. Police in London arrested six terror suspects and discovered a ricin lab connected to the camp in Iraq.
The Pentagon drew up still another attack plan, and for the third time, the National Security Council killed it.

So let me get this straight. We have a known terrorist, manufacturing biological weapons, who the Pentagon asks three times for permission to take out — and they’re told that Iraq (which had no WMDs, and no connection to al Qaeda, remember) is more important? So we should just let this guy keep cooking up his batches of ricin in peace while we get down to the business of taking out Saddam Hussein?

Where the hell are our priorities?

Seriously, if Bush plans to run on 9/11 (and all the indications are that he does), I hope Kerry stuffs this sort of thing in his face. What kind of “War on Terra” is this guy running if he lets terrorists run around unmolested? Especially terrorists who go on to blow up hundreds of innocent civilians in highly sensitive parts of the world?

Amazon Introduces RSS

Posted on March 3, 2004

Check it out! Amazon now has tons of RSS feeds, showing the continuously-updated top sellers in dozens of categories, for your subscribing pleasure.

LucasArts Pulls the Plug on S&M

Posted on March 3, 2004

Get your mind out of the gutter — I’m talking about their decision to cancel the upcoming PC game “Sam and Max, Freelance Police“.

Sam and Max was the sequel to the classic 1993 game “Sam and Max Hit the Road“, and both were based on Steve Purcell’s awesomely funny Sam and Max comics.

Who are Sam and Max? Sam is a dog. Max is a “hyperkinetic rabbity thing”. Together they solve highly implausible crimes through the application of firepower, snack foods, and deus ex machina.

The comics are a riot. Take this bit from their Christmas special, “The Damned Don’t Dance”:

SAM: You must have had visions of sugarplums dancing in your head, little pal!
MAX: Oh, thank God! I thought it was a twitching, lemon-sized brain tumor.

Or this exchange, as the Freelance Police speed towards an encounter with an otherworldly evil in “Beast From the Cereal Aisle”:

SAM: Max, in America, it’s customary to drive on the right.
MAX: It’s turning into a damn police state, Sam!

Or this bit, when our heroes are captured by evil, highway-roaming, manatee-kidnapping pirates in the “On the Road” comic:

SAM: What ARE you guys? And why did you suddenly drop your half-assed pirate dialect?
PIRATE: We’re Buccaneers! We used to have mundane office jobs, working in cubicles with water coolers and coffee cups with clever slogans and those wacky calendars with photos of diseased-looking chimps wearing neckties.
SAM: But you’ve got hooks and peg legs.
PIRATE: Funny about that.

(Check out The Quotable Sam & Max for more quotes.)

Besides the comics, the ’93 game lives on in the memory of geeks everywhere. So a sequel seemed like a must-buy. But the suits at LucasArts have apparently decided to take the money they were investing in this product and plow it instead into some other highly creative venture, like another Star Wars game.

Great.

Thanks for nothing, LucasArts, ya big bunch of doorknobs.

Notes on the Ashura Attacks

Posted on March 3, 2004

Some interesting points being made around the Web about the Ashura bombings yesterday in Karbala and Baghdad:

• CNN puts the death toll at “at least 117”, with hundreds more wounded. The New York Times cites mortality figures ranging from 143 to “as high as 170”.
• Josh Marshall points out that, since the population of Iraq is less than one-tenth that of the U.S., an attack that kills 170 people in one day feels to Iraqis kind of like “what it would be like to have around 2000 people killed in one day in this country. And, of course, that’s not that different from the 3000 who were killed here on September 11th.”
• Juan Cole reminds us of the significance of Ashura in the Shia religious calendar: “For Shiites, Tuesday was analogous to Good Friday. And Karbala and Kazimiyah for them are like Rome and Jerusalem. One can only imagine the psychological impact of, God forbid, a huge truck bombing at the Vatican on Good Friday.”
• Meanwhile, in the city of Quetta in Pakistan, 40 or more Shiite worshippers were also killed, this time by gunmen. The New York Times article on the Iraq bombings cites an unnamed U.S. intelligence official claiming “no indication of any link” between the two attacks.
• U.S. government officials, including Vice President Cheney, are on record fingering Abu Mussab al Zarqawi as the prime suspect in the Iraq bombings. This is mainly due to the recent seizure of what is purported to be a letter from Zarqawi in which he describes a strategy of destabilizing Iraq by fomenting civil war between Sunnis and Shiites. If that is truly his strategy, this would certainly seem to be consistent with it. However, there’s been a lot of doubt about the validity of the “Zarqawi letter” up to now, mainly because it seems to go out of its way to make points that confirm that the Bush Administration’s plan in Iraq is working much more effectively than other indicators suggest; which is awfully convenient, considering that there’s no proof of the validity of the letter other than the word of the Administration. And it’s not like Zarqawi is the only one who would benefit from stirring up a hornet’s nest in Iraq.
• Either way, though, the good news is that there are indicators that the plan may be backfiring — Juan Cole reports that Sunnis are actually giving blood to help the wounded Shiites, in the name of Iraqi unity.

Watch this story. Lots of threads from various parts of the Iraq crisis are coming together within it.

McDonald’s To Stop Super-Sizing

Posted on March 3, 2004

In what sure sounds like a good decision to me, McDonald’s has decided to drop the “super-size” fries and cola menu items this year.

Say goodbye to those super-sized fries — McDonald’s is slimming down its menu.
The hamburger giant has started phasing out its trademark Supersize fries and drinks in its U.S. restaurants as part of an effort to simplify its menu and give customers choices that support a balanced lifestyle, a company spokesman said Tuesday.
By the end of 2004, super size will no longer be available at the nation’s 13,000-plus McDonald’s outlets except in certain promotions, McDonald’s spokesman Walt Riker said.
The move comes as the world’s largest restaurant company, and fast-food chains in general, are under growing public pressure to give consumers healthier food options in a nation that has suddenly become aware of its bulging waistline and the health dangers that come with it.

This is great news. McDonald’s is the chain that started the whole super-sizing trend, which led to a dramatic tendency in the whole fast-food industry towards what nutritionists call “portion creep” — increases in serving size that seem small when taken individually, but add up to a whole lot more food. The results have been fairly dramatic, as a look around at the bulging waistlines of Americans should indicate.

Two years ago, the Center for Science in the Public Interest put together an interesting study entitled “From Wallet to Waistline: The Hidden Costs of Super-Sizing” (PDF) that explicitly looks at the ancillary costs, like increased obesity rates, that have been incurred by the super-sizing (or, as the fast-foodies call it, “value marketing”) trend:

As portion sizes have grown over the past two decades, the prevalence of overweight and obesity among U.S. adults and children also has risen. Obesity is one of the leading public health challenges of our time. Overweight and obesity affect the majority of American adults (61%) (NCCDPHP, 2002). Obesity rates in adults increased by 60% between 1991 and 2000 (Mokdad et al, 2001), and rates doubled in children over the last 20 years (NCHS, 2001).
The negative health consequences of the rising obesity rates already are evident. Rates of diabetes (most of which is type 2, which is largely due to obesity, poor diet, and physical inactivity) rose 50% between 1990 and 2000 (Mokdad et al, 2001). In addition, type 2 diabetes rates are increasing in children. Obesity costs American families, businesses, and governments approximately $117 billion in health-care and related costs each year (US DHHS, 2001)…
Although portion sizes and obesity rates have grown in parallel, larger portions are not, of course, solely responsible for the current obesity epidemic in the U.S. Many factors influence body weight, including levels of physical activity and other dietary factors. However, excess energy intake is a major cause. According to U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) national survey data, Americans’ average daily caloric intake has risen from 1,876 kcal to 2,043 kcal from 1978 to 1995 (Lin et al, 1999). That 167-calorie-per-day increase theoretically works out to an extra 17 pounds of body fat every year (given no change in metabolism or physical activity levels). [My emphasis — JAL]

Now, McDonald’s didn’t start super-sizing for no reason. They did it because it boosts profits like crazy. Fries and cola are high-margin items; it costs them practically nothing to shovel some extra fries into your bag, and if they can charge you an extra quarter for doing so they come out way ahead. So it’s worth taking the time to praise them for being willing to make this decision before any court decision or public pressure campaign forced them to.

However, it’s also worth asking if this means they’re considering stopping or modifying the other, related practice they pioneered that has had a similar effect — “bundling”. This is the tying together of sandwiches, cola and fries into a “Value Meal”, usually at a slightly lower price than if you bought the three items separately. Bundling has a similar economic logic to value marketing (it lets them use those high-margin fries and colas to move the sandwiches faster), but it also has a similar public health effect — people who might otherwise just buy a sandwich end up buying more food than they need because they think they’re getting a “deal”, and once they’ve bought it they feel like they may as well eat it. Combining that with super-sizing meant that consumers were getting truly prodigious servings at the McD’s drive-through — but just cutting the super sizes doesn’t go all the way towards solving the problem. It is, though, a step in the right direction.

So It’s Kerry

Posted on March 2, 2004

Looks like it’s just about official.

Well. I won’t pretend that I think Kerry’s the best of the bunch we fielded this year, or even among the best. But in the spirit of credit where it’s due, congratulations to the Senator and his team for coming back from months of asterisk-level polling to pull it out in the end. I’m sure that the journey from front-runner to punchline and back to front-runner again has been quite a trip for all of them.

Now let’s see if they can prove me wrong about their abilities relative to Karl Rove and his wrecking crew. Here’s hoping.

Bottled Water, Straight From the Tap

Posted on March 2, 2004

We all know bottled water is better for you than plain old yucky tap water. Right?

Right?

Well, ask Coca-Cola, who have just admitted that their brand of bottled water, Dasani, is just treated tap water (at least when sold in the UK; the BBC broke the story, and no US journalists have followed up yet to see where American bottlers of Dasani get their water from). The irony is that this probably can’t be taken as a knock on Dasani, mostly because most tap water is of pretty damn high quality — unless you live in the District of Columbia, that is.

Rolling Your Own Scenarios in “President Forever”

Posted on March 1, 2004

The fine folks at Eighty Dimensional Software, makers of the absolutely addictive political game President Forever (a steal at $12), have given a nice gift to the community of players. The latest release of PF (registered users got a free patch, new buyers get it from the get-go) doesn’t just support playing the 2004 election cycle; it has a full scenario architecture, so that other campaign years can be dropped in later. The new release adds three new election years to the core game — 1960, 1980, and 1992 — and they have posted instructions on how to create your own scenario if you want to model a campaign other than the ones they’ve provided. As user-created campaigns start to spring up, they’re going to make them available for free download on their Web site.

This is an amazing product that just keeps getting better! You really should try the demo if you haven’t already; I guarantee that once you’ve played a few rounds in the demo you’ll see why it’s worth every penny of the $12 for the full version.

Grocery Strike Ends In Defeat

Posted on March 1, 2004

Remember the California grocery workers’ strike I told you about last month?

It’s over — the grocery workers lost.

(There’s a good analysis over at Daily Kos, too.)

Oh Well

Posted on March 1, 2004

There’s an old Yiddish saying: mensch tracht, Gott lacht. It means “man plans and God laughs”.

It’s as true today as it ever was. Still sucks, though. (sigh)

Confessions of a Moral Coward

Posted on March 1, 2004

I’m going to take a moment to use this space to do something that most readers will probably find somewhat out of character for me: I’m going to say thanks to President Bush. I want to do this because his endorsement of the “Federal Marriage Amendment”, the proposed amendment to the Constitution to forever outlaw gay marriage, has opened my eyes to something I never understood before now: the depths of cowardice, morally speaking, to which I had sunk on this issue before he acted. My thinking on this issue has undergone a transformation over the last few days, and I don’t look back on my old positions with a whole lot of pride.

Up until very recently I was a proponent of allowing civil unions as a way for government to “square the circle”, so to speak, on this difficult issue; to allow gays and lesbians the full legal rights of married couples, without stirring up the prejudices of the bigoted and the unenlightened. It seemed like the ideal compromise solution.

However, as events have developed — as I’ve watched the pictures of happy gay couples getting married in Massachusetts and San Francisco, seen the angry conservative response of the FMA, and heard the words of activists on both sides — I’ve decided that “compromise” isn’t really what civil unions are. No, civil unions aren’t compromise; they are appeasement, casting a whole class of people into a new “separate but equal” category, just to avoid rousing the displeasure of those among us with the least capacity for compassion.

(more…)

We’re Not Alone

Posted on February 27, 2004

CNet — “Google vs. the granola crunchers“.

The article makes an interesting point that I hadn’t known before:

The flap mirrors a similar one over marijuana advocacy. The proprietor of the Web site Free State Project recently complained that Google censored its ads promoting the legalization of marijuana. (Its ads previously appeared when people searched Google for the term “legalize marijuana.”)
Google said that it does not permit ads for drugs or drug paraphernalia. Company spokeswoman Cindy McCaffrey said that Google reserves the right to exercise “editorial discretion when it comes to the advertising we accept on our site. We are not censoring any sides of a political debate.”
Still, a Google search on the term “marijuana” shows an ad for a White House-sponsored antidrug ad.

Oh yeah, no way that’s promoting a “side of a political debate”. Nicely played, big G.

Awwwww

Posted on February 27, 2004

Apparently Macs are for lovers. Who knew?

Give Rodney A Shout-Out

Posted on February 26, 2004

Remember a couple posts ago when I pointed out Education Secretary Rodney Paige’s charming little comment stating that the National Education Association (NEA) was a “terrorist organization”?

Well, there’s now an online action center where you can tell Secretary Paige just what you think of rhetoric like that, courtesy of the Public Education Network. (Thanks to Eve Fox for pointing this out to me!)

Firefox: The Word Is Getting Out

Posted on February 26, 2004

Ben Goodger has posted some interesting numbers regarding what would appear to be a rapid uptick in popularity for Mozilla Firefox. Since its release two weeks ago, Firefox 0.8 has been downloaded more than 1 million times. This contrasts with 830,000 downloads for Mozilla 1.6 since its release in January. That’s pretty impressive, to beat in two weeks what it’s taken the suite more than twice as long to do!

If you haven’t checked out Firefox yet, don’t put it off. You don’t want to be the last one in your circle of friends to do it, do you? How will you feel if your grandmother e-mails you a link to a nifty new extension, and you e-mail her back that you’re still using IE, and she calls you up just to laugh at you ‘cuz you’re such a tool? Nobody wants that. So go grab Firefox and see for yourself why it’s better — before it’s too late!

Re-Election Über Alles

Posted on February 25, 2004

Even though I’ve been a pretty outspoken critic of President Bush, there’s one line of anti-Bush argument that I’ve never had much patience with: the Bush=Hitler analogy. It has always seemed to me to be a textbook example of lazy thinking; most of the people who make it only demonstrate that they don’t really know much about either Bush or Hitler.

However, in the light of Bush’s recent modest proposal, I have to admit that for the first time that type of rhetoric doesn’t strike me as completely ludicrous. Look, I know gay marriage is controversial; I know it makes some people uncomfortable; but I just can’t see how someone else’s gay marriage affects your straight marriage at all. All the overheated language about “debasing the institution” seems a tad misplaced in a country where one out of two straight marriages were hitting the skids even before gays had the option of civil union. As far as I can tell, the overheated language is just cover for a baser, uglier prejudice — and if it isn’t, if people really believe that their marriages are failing because of gays, that’s even worse, because it means they’re scapegoating a minority group for causing problems that in reality they have nothing to do with.

So we now have a President who proposes to take that minority-group scapegoating and write it into the Constitution. That’s just appalling. What kind of leader would do that? What kind of leader would take a document that has stood for more than 200 years as a living testament to the power of America’s ideals of liberty and inclusion, and tack on a provision designed to do nothing but pander to the fears of the bigoted? What kind of leader would choose to launch his campaign by telling people that their problems will be solved if they will only join with him in changing the law so that a particular minority group will forever be set apart, their freedom forever constrained, their liberty incomplete?

I can only think of one.

Pot, Kettle, Black

Posted on February 24, 2004

Well, this is interesting.

From today’s Washington Times — “Bush Attacks ‘Partisan Anger’“:

President Bush yesterday lashed out at his Democratic opponents for the first time in the 2004 campaign, charging his challengers with espousing “old bitterness and partisan anger” to mask their record of raising taxes and endangering Americans with a weak national defense…
In his speech, Mr. Bush also assailed the whole Democratic [Party] as offering no vision for the nation, only rhetoric that seeks to divide Americans.
“So far, all we hear is a lot of old bitterness and partisan anger. Anger is not an agenda for the future of America,” the president said, drawing applause.

From yesterday’s New York Times — “Education Chief Calls Union ‘Terrorist,’ Then Recants“:

Education Secretary Rod Paige said Monday that the National Education Association, one of the nation’s largest labor unions, was like “a terrorist organization” because of the way it was resisting many provisions of a school improvement law pushed through Congress by President Bush in 2001.
Mr. Paige made the comment in a private meeting with governors at the White House, just hours before the president stepped up the tempo of his re-election campaign with a speech attacking his Democratic opponents.
The secretary later apologized for a poor choice of words, but repeated his criticism of the teachers’ union as a group of obstructionists…
The governors who recounted Mr. Paige’s remarks were two Democrats, Jennifer M. Granholm of Michigan and James E. Doyle of Wisconsin, and two Republicans, Mike Huckabee of Arkansas and Linda Lingle of Hawaii.
Ms. Granholm said the governors were “all a little bit stunned” to hear the union described that way.

Ah yes. If only those Democrats would stop peddling their bitterness and anger! And see the sunny side of the street, like Secretary Paige!

Sheesh.

Call for Help: SSH Port Forwarding

Posted on February 23, 2004

OK, world, this problem is officially beginning to tick me off. So I’m calling for help — maybe one of you fine readers out there knows how to solve it…

The ISP that hosts my mail server requires me to make my IMAP connections over SSH, to keep them from getting hacked. Now, in Windows I use Bitvise Tunnelier to make this easy as pie, but on my home Linux box, things aren’t so easy.

See, here’s the thing. I know how to use SSH to do a simple port forward from the terminal. But what I want to do is have the system create the port forward at startup, and have it run silently in the background — no terminal or user intervention required. This is so that I can log in and fire up my IMAP client (Mozilla Thunderbird) without having to go through the process of launching terminal, keying in SSH command, etc. I want the whole port-forwarding thing to just be taken care of behind the scenes — the way Tunnelier does on Win32.

I’ve spent weeks crawling the Net, reading FAQs and HOWTOs, browsing Usenet, and generally dorking out on this question, to no avail. I’ve solved pieces of it — I learned how to use ssh-agent, for example, to allow passwordless authentication — but I can’t find any instructions that bring it all together.

It’s extremely frustrating. I can’t be the only #()!(@ Linux user out there who wants to access IMAP via SSH, can I? Or do all the other ones just do it from the terminal every time, and figure that’s as good as it gets because they haven’t been spoiled by Tunnelier? I have no idea — all I know is that I can’t find answers one way or another.

So, in true LazyWeb fashion, I’m throwing out a challenge. Post either (a) instructions on how to do what I describe above (have Fedora Linux silently create a port forward at system startup), or (b) a link to those instructions elsewhere on the Web, in the comment thread of this post. I’ll give your solution a shot, and if it works, I will pay $10 via PayPal to the e-mail address of the person who submitted it. In the case of multiple submissions, first one received wins — and I’m gonna go by time posted to the comment thread, so put it there rather than sending it to me by e-mail (so that others having the same problem can benefit from having the solution publicly posted).

So, whaddaya say, world? If you’ve got a link that solves my problem it’s a quick way to earn some beer money for the weekend. Hit me.

UPDATE (7/8/2005): I should mention that before anybody got around to giving me a solution to my problem that met the criteria outlined above, Mozilla integrated SSH tunneling to the IMAP support in their excellent Thunderbird mail client. So now I just set a couple of preferences in Thunderbird and I’m good to go; no need to manually set up port forwarding. Thanks, Mozilla!

Pakistan Pushing for bin Laden, Omar

Posted on February 23, 2004

Looks like the Pakistanis may have gotten off their asses, finally:

A massive land and air military operation on either side of the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan is now under way, with the main goals of catching leading commanders of the Afghan resistance, as well as Osama bin Laden and Taliban leader Mullah Omar.

Anyone see any other sources for this? Why aren’t we hearing about this stuff in the US press?

Nader’s In

Posted on February 22, 2004

The SOB has made it official. For what reasons, I have no idea.

P.S. Did I call it or what?

P.P.S. Dave Winer pushes back on the conventional wisdom:

If Nader is going to win the election for Dubya, then now’s the time to fix the bug in the process. Kerry isn’t nominated yet. Think. What’s the problem that Nader exploits? What’s so fixed about our political system that a minority independent candidate, who likely won’t be able to register in many states, is going to spoil it for.. who exactly is he going to spoil it for? Think. Is this the America you imagined when you were a kid? Why can’t we make it better? Why can’t we have a dozen people running for President?

Good questions all. Now would certainly seem to be a good moment for big thinking about how our democracy should work.