Brilliant

Posted on August 11, 2003

Allow me to preface this by saying that, in general, I’m not a big consumer of celebrity news/gossip. I find that most of the time, frankly, I just can’t muster up the energy to care about who’s divorcing whom or which boy band member is dating which overaged actress. This sort of gossip strikes me as harmless but boring, but it must be doing something for somebody because we as a society seemingly can’t get enough of it.

So, I’m standing in the checkout line at the grocery store today after work and it’s taking foooooooooorever — the guy at the head of the line is trying to pay with a check from the Bank of Yemen or something — so I idly glance at the magazine rack. That’s when I find out that a huge bombshell has apparently hit the world of Hollywood gossipmongering:

• Ben Cheated on J. Lo! Can She Forgive Him? (Star Magazine)
• “Ben Cheated With Me” — Affleck’s Lover Tells All (National Enquirer)

Now, I would I have thought that the massive stink-bomb that is Gigli would have finally killed people’s appetite for news of Ben Affleck and Jennifer Lopez. But the tawdry details of this story are on so many magazine covers that it would seem obvious that I’m very wrong.

And then I thought about it some more, and I came to another conclusion: whoever Affleck & Lopez’s publicist is, they are freaking brilliant!

I mean, think about it. Your clients are starring together in the most ridiculed and least profitable movie of the year. Every story that could be squeezed out of their lovey-dovey relationship has already been written. Where do you go from there? How do you keep them square in the public eye? Well, a good fight certainly might do the trick! Especially one that’s larded down with illicit sex, and that offers both men and women a chance to vicariously identify with your clients in ways they find titillating (men get to fantasize that they’re Affleck screwing anything that moves, and women get to sympathize with wronged-woman Lopez). The story that is trumpeted in the tabloid headlines certainly fits the bill on all these points — it gives the gossips a whole new angle on the relationship to write and chatter about, which means your clients’ heroic conquest of the tabloid-media world can have a new lease on life.

The first rule of manipulating the media is that journalists must always have a story — and by “story” I mean a narrative, some tale that turns their piece from a simple collection of facts into a living, breathing thing. Left to their own devices, they’ll come up with that narrative on their own; but journalists are as lazy as the next person, so if you provide them with a narrative, odds are they’ll just run with it rather than go to the trouble of digging to see how well it actually fits the facts. (This is as true of political or business journalism as it is of tabloid celebrity gossip, by the way.) The “cheating” story shows that the couple’s publicist knows this well; note how it transforms their story, throwing out a stale, tired narrative line (“beautiful couple bucks Hollywood odds to try and find happiness”) and seamlessly introducing a new one (“cheating fiancee’s humiliation places glamorous relationship in jeopardy”). It even has a cliffhanger aspect — will she dump him or won’t she?

And, from your perspective, the best part is that this new twist on the story is that it provides opportunities for even more reinvention, regardless of how it turns out. If she forgives him, you can pitch “how-we-overcame-our-difficulties-and-stayed-together” inspirational stories; if she dumps him, you can pitch “why-men-can’t-be-trusted” bitter lonelyhearts stories. There’s upside either way! (Unless they split up and you’re stuck with Ol’ One-Expression Affleck as your client rather than Lopez… but even then there’s plenty of gold to be mined from the Maxims of the world.)

Of course, there’s always the possibility that the stories are true and not a concoction designed to reinvigorate the couple’s PR offensive; but since I didn’t read any further than the headlines, I’m probably not the best person to ask whether or not that’s the case. I like to think, though, that it isn’t. Not because I think Affleck is above cheating or Lopez is above pitching a public hissy fit, but because I like to think that somewhere in Hollywood there’s a publicist who’s sharp enough to save their clients even from a disaster the size of Gigli. You just can’t help but admire someone who’s that good at what they do.

UPDATE: Looks like Affleck is now distancing himself from Gigli, as well as from the whole concept of the Ben-and-Jen movie. Maybe the storyline is tilting in the direction of a tearful breakup. I wonder how long they can milk this stuff before they have to reinvent the story once again?

Make Firebird Even Faster

Posted on August 11, 2003

OK, if you use Mozilla Firebird as your browser, you’re gonna want to try this. Turns out that adding the following line to your user.js file will REALLY speed up page rendering:

user_pref("nglayout.initialpaint.delay", 0);

If you don’t know about user.js, you should. It’s a file in your Mozilla profile where you can store personalized preferences to change how the browser looks and works. It’s just a text file, so it’s easy to edit — just find the file, paste in the line, then save and close the file. Once you restart Firebird the change will be active. (If you don’t know where to look to find your profile, this Web site will tell you where to look. Or, you can just install the ChromEdit extension, which allows you to edit user.js right in the browser.)

Props to Stuart Langridge for the pointer.

The Moral of the California Recall

Posted on August 8, 2003

Larry Lessig on what the hoopla in CA tells us about modern American politics:

One might say, who could possibly resist such a loophole. That whether it is honorable or not, what politician would forgo the chance to become President or Governor, regardless of the means?

Yet we should remember that many believe that Nixon made essentially this choice when he refused to fight the results in Illinois and thus let Kennedy become President. In his moral universe, that’s not how an executive should become an executive.

It is a measure of this Enron era that neither our President nor over 200 candidates in this California recall election live up to the moral standards of even Richard Nixon.

Hidden RSS Feeds

Posted on August 6, 2003

You know what I hate? When someone launches a blog, but doesn’t bother providing an RSS feed. (I’m almost at the point now where a site may as well not even exist if it doesn’t show up in my newsreader.)

You know what I love? When the software they’re using generates an RSS feed without telling them 🙂

That’s the case with Bill Maher’s new blog, for example. There’s nothing on the site to indicate an RSS feed of any type. However, I’ve found that often you can discover hidden feeds on sites just by taking the site’s URL and trying these file names with it:

• index.xml
• index.rdf
• rss.xml

Many popular blogging packages spit out feeds using these file names by default, without even asking, so you occasionally get lucky — and that’s the case with Maher. He’s spitting out an RSS 1.0 feed at this address:

http://www.safesearching.com/billmaher/blog/index.rdf

Nice, now I get my daily dose of Maher right in my newsreader! Huzzah! Now, if only he’d make it official so folks don’t have to play Blog Archaeologist to find it…

I’m Sure You Can Sympathize

Posted on August 6, 2003

Gosh, I wish I had a dime for every time I’ve heard this after asking someone out…

There Is Justice In the Universe

Posted on August 5, 2003

A couple of numbers from the first weekend in theaters of the Ben Affleck — Jennifer Lopez epic, Gigli:

• Total US Box Office from opening weekend: $3.8 million
• Total production cost of film: $54 million

Sounds like Ben and Jen are going to have to scale down the size of the wedding cake a tad…

Hackworth on Rumsfeld, Guerillas, And the War

Posted on August 4, 2003

Salon’s running an interesting interview with Col. David Hackworth, one of the most valorous and decorated soldiers America has produced in the last half-century, and a man who has been tireless in his advocacy for the average soldier through his organization Soldiers for the Truth. He’s speaking out now to let people know how the logistics folks over at the Pentagon are screwing over the warfighters, the men and women whose hides are on the line in Iraq, and how the conflict there shows signs of degenerating into a classic guerrilla war.

Hackworth on how the U.S. Army fights guerrillas:

The mistake in Vietnam was we failed to understand the nature of the war and we failed to understand our enemy. In Vietnam we were fighting World War II. Up to now in Iraq we have been fighting Desert Storm with tank brigade attacks. The tanks move into a village, swoop down, the tank gunner sees a silhouette atop a house, aims, fires, kills and it turns out to be a 12-year-old boy. Now, the father of that boy said, “We will kill 10 Americans for this.” This is exactly what happened in Vietnam; a village was friendly, then some pilot turns around and blows away the village, the village goes from pro-Saigon to pro-Hanoi.

America has never been capable of fighting the [guerrilla]; from [Gen.] Custer who fucked it up, you can fast-forward to today. [In Iraq] they are proving it again. The U.S. military never, never learns from the past. They make the same mistake over and over again.

Hackworth on how the supply chain isn’t working:

[Rumsfeld] did not provide enough troops or the logistical backup, because his Army was not staying, it was coming home. So who needs a warehouse full of shit?

One letter I got today, written by a sergeant in a tank unit, said that of its 18 armored vehicles — Bradley or Abrams — only four are operational. The rest were down because of burned-out transmissions or the tracks eaten out. So it is not just the shitty food and bad water — a soldier can live with short rations — but spare parts, baby!

The only good news he shares is that the new head honcho in the theater, Gen. John Abizid, is what he calls a “snake eater” — a soldier who understands how to fight guerrillas, and isn’t afraid to buck the Army’s big-iron send-in-the-tanks mentality to get it done. Let’s hope he’s right.

Putting Your “Rebate” To Good Use

Posted on July 31, 2003

Dan Gillmor has an excellent idea for what you should do with your upcoming tax “rebate”.

Guess who’s blogging now?

Posted on July 31, 2003

The answer is… Bill Maher. Sweet! He’s a funny, insightful guy — this should be good.

Bombshell: The Valerie Plame Affair

Posted on July 30, 2003

OK, enough is enough.

How many abuses of power is it going to take before someone calls the President to task? For someone who rode into office on a promise to restore honor to the White House, he’s been looking a lot more like Richard Nixon than George Washington lately. Now there’s new evidence of Nixonian behavior — this time the White House has actually blown the cover of a secret agent looking for weapons of mass destruction, just to get back at one of their political opponents.

Don’t believe me? Search Google for “Valerie Plame“.

See, here’s what happened. Remember Ambassador Joseph Wilson? He’s the fellow who flew to Niger way back when, on the request of the CIA to look into British leads (obtained from Italian sources) indicating that Iraq could have been trying to buy uranium there. Wilson checked it out, concluded the leads were false, and reported such to the government — which meant he was pretty shocked to see the Niger-uranium claim turn up in the President’s State of the Union address. When he said so to the media, the whole flap that some folks are calling “Uraniumgate” began.

The White House has been trying (unsuccessfully) ever since to find a way to discredit Wilson. One approach they tried a few days ago, though, is what brings Valerie Plame into our story. On July 14th, conservative columnist Robert Novak wrote a column about the controversy in which he “outed” Plame — who is the wife of Ambassador WIlson — as a covert operative:

Wilson never worked for the CIA, but his wife, Valerie Plame, is an agency operative on weapons of mass destruction. Two senior administration officials told me his wife suggested sending Wilson to Niger to investigate the Italian report. The CIA says its counter-proliferation officials selected Wilson and asked his wife to contact him.

So the line the “senior administration officials” fed Novak was that Wilson’s mission was less a serious investigation and more an example of nepotism run wild — that he got the job because his wife recommended him, and for no other reason. But Novak’s CIA sources indicated that wasn’t how it really went down. And with each new fact that comes out about the affair, it seems more and more clear that those CIA sources were the ones telling the truth.

Liberal economist Paul Krugman was the first to call the Administration out for its treatment of Ms. Plame. The conservative journal National Review set out to demolish Krugman’s assertion, but, remarkably, they had to backtrack when their investigation turned up evidence that he was on the mark (and since the name of the column where the verbal origami took place is “Krugman Truth Squad”, you know they’d have blasted him if they could have).

Then, New York Newsday weighed in with their own piece in which they got independent confirmation from their own intelligence sources that Plame was indeed an undercover operative, and that the White House’s allegation that Plame got Wilson the Niger job was bogus:

Intelligence officials confirmed to Newsday Monday that Valerie Plame, wife of retired Ambassador Joseph Wilson, works at the agency on weapons of mass destruction issues in an undercover capacity — at least she was undercover until last week when she was named by columnist Robert Novak….

A senior intelligence official confirmed that Plame was a Directorate of Operations undercover officer who worked “alongside” the operations officers who asked her husband to travel to Niger. But he said she did not recommend her husband to undertake the Niger assignment.

As the story emerged, one journalist asked White House spokesman Scott McClellan about it flat out, prompting a series of classic non-denial denials from McClellan:

Q: The Robert Novak column last week identified the wife of Ambassador Joseph Wilson as a CIA operative who was working on WMD issues. Novak said that identification is based on information given to him by two administration sources. That column has now given rise to accusations that the administration deliberatively blew the cover of an undercover CIA operative, and in so doing, violated a federal law that prohibits revealing the identity of undercover CIA operatives. Can you respond to that?

MR. McCLELLAN: Thank you for bringing that up. That is not the way this President or this White House operates. And there is absolutely no information that has come to my attention or that I have seen that suggests that there is any truth to that suggestion. And, certainly, no one in this White House would have given authority to take such a step.

Q: So you’re saying —

MR. McCLELLAN: I’m saying that that is not the way that this President or this White House operates, and I’ve seen no evidence to suggest there’s any truth to it.

Q: Are you saying Novak was wrong in saying that it was two administration sources who were the source for —

MR. McCLELLAN: I have no idea who “anonymous” is. I often wish —

Q: It’s not anonymous. He says senior administration officials.

MR. McCLELLAN: That would be anonymous.

Q: Well, that would be senior administration —

Q: Like the guy who briefed us last week?

MR. McCLELLAN: Whether it’s anonymous senior administration officials or just anonymous sources, it’s still anonymous.

Q: Is Novak lying? Do you think he’s making it up?

MR. McCLELLAN: I’m telling you our position. I’ll let the columnist speak for himself.

Q: You’re saying, flatly, it did not happen, nobody —

MR. McCLELLAN: I’m telling you, flatly, that that is not the way this White House operates. I’ve seen no evidence to suggest that there’s any truth to that.

Q: That’s different from saying it didn’t happen. Are you saying, absolutely, it did not happen?

MR. McCLELLAN: I’m saying no one was certainly given any authority to do anything of that nature. And I’ve seen no evidence to suggest there’s any truth to it. I want to make it very clear, that is simply not the way this White House operates.

(Note how McClellan never says it didn’t happen, only that “no one was certainly given any authority to do anything of that nature”; and how he won’t say Novak is wrong, only that “that is not the way this White House operates” and “I’ll let the columnist speak for himself”. We haven’t seen verbal parsing this fine since the golden days of Bill Clinton. And it’s worth noting, too, that the Newsday piece quotes Novak on the record as saying that the story came straight from the “senior Administration officials” he originally cited — “I didn’t dig it out, it was given to me,” he told Newsday — so it’s hard to see what else he should do to speak for himself, exactly.)

Since then, there’s been a steady trickle of articles confirming and expanding upon the Plame affair, from a variety of sources:

• The Nation: “[T]he Bush administration has screwed one of its own top-secret operatives in order to punish Wilson or to send a message to others who might challenge it.”
• CBS News: “The ‘two senior officials’ who blew [Plame’s] cover to Novak probably did something illegal. They certainly did something vile.”
• The Washington Post: “Sen. Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) asked FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III to investigate whether Bush administration officials identified the wife of former ambassador Joseph C. Wilson as a clandestine CIA officer, an allegation published on July 14 in a syndicated column by Robert Novak.”
• Time Magazine: “Has the Bush Administration declared war on a former ambassador who conducted a fact-finding mission to probe possible Iraqi interest in African uranium? Perhaps.”
• The Hill: “We know that two senior members of the Bush administration intentionally blew the cover of an undercover CIA officer whose job is combating weapons of mass destruction (WMD) proliferation. And their motivation was pure politics. The president should find out who they are, reprimand them or, preferably, fire them. But instead of being outraged, he doesn’t even seem to care.”

So there’s a lot of open questions about this ongoing affair. Who were the “senior administration officials” who outed Plame to Novak? Were they acting as rogue operatives (as McClellan implies), or on someone else’s orders? If they’re rogues, shouldn’t the Administration be trying to ferret out who’d be so unpatriotic as to compromise ongoing intelligence operations involving weapons of mass destruction to further a petty political agenda — and if not, why not? And if they’re operating on someone’s orders — if the White House spin machine is willing to compromise a covert operative (and everybody who ever worked with her, since any contacts and collaborators she’s had will now be under suspicion just by association) to fight a partisan fight — who gave those orders, and how fast can we send them back to whatever hole in the ground they crawled out of?

“We Are Under Siege Out Here”

Posted on July 28, 2003

The Arizona Republic is running an interesting letter from a GI stationed near Baghdad that describes the situation on the ground in Iraq. Nothing revolutionary, but it’s dispiriting to see our soldiers stuck under such conditions. When will they (and we) find out the terms of their new mission? When will the Administration tell us all how they plan to finish what they’ve started?

Thunderbird 0.1 Released

Posted on July 28, 2003

Mozilla.org is pretty quiet about this for some reason, but yesterday they shipped the first official release of the Thunderbird mail client, Mozilla Thunderbird 0.1. It’s still a little rough around the edges (come on, it’s version 0.1!), but it’s made a lot of progress in a short time. Here’s hoping we see it move along as fast as Firebird has.

Wolfowitz: “Whoops”

Posted on July 24, 2003

Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, the brilliant mind behind the Iraq war, has made a startling confession:

He was wrong in many of his assumptions about how such a war would unfold.

Paul D. Wolfowitz, briefing reporters after a 41/2-day trip to Iraq, said that in postwar planning, defense officials made three assumptions that “turned out to underestimate the problem,” beginning with the belief that removing Saddam Hussein from power would also remove the threat posed by his Baath Party. In addition, they erred in assuming that significant numbers of Iraqi army units, and large numbers of Iraqi police, would quickly join the U.S. military and its civilian partners in rebuilding Iraq, he said…

Career civil servants who had helped plan U.S. peacekeeping operations in Haiti, Bosnia and Kosovo said it was imperative to maintain a military force large enough to stamp out challenges to its authority right away. Gen. Eric K. Shinseki, then-Army chief of staff, thought several hundred thousand soldiers would be needed.

Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz rebutted him sharply and publicly.

“It’s hard to conceive that it would take more forces to provide stability in post-Saddam Iraq than it would take to conduct the war itself and to secure the surrender of Saddam’s security forces and his army,” Wolfowitz told the House Budget Committee on Feb. 27. “Hard to imagine.”…

Retired Army Lt. Gen. Jay M. Garner, who was appointed to be the first civilian coordinator in the occupation, said in an interview that he asked Wolfowitz for an expert on Iraqi politics and governance.

Wolfowitz turned not to the roster of career specialists in the State Department’s Near Eastern Affairs bureau, but to a political appointee in the bureau: Elizabeth Cheney, coordinator of a Middle East democracy project and daughter of the vice president; she recruited a State Department colleague who had worked for the International Republican Institute.

So he ignored the advice of experts on peacekeeping, convinced himself that the Iraqi Army would change sides and become a crackerjack colonial police force, and, when asked to provide an expert on Iraq to help get things running again, passed over the advice of all the experts in the entire State Department to give the job to a friend of his boss’ daughter.

I’ll give Wolfowitz credit, it takes guts to admit a set of bloopers on that scale. But it’s a pretty damning indictment of the thinking that led us into this mess, that’s for sure.

9/11 Report Finds No Iraq Link to al-Qaeda (RETRACTED)

Posted on July 24, 2003

This just in off the UPI wire: the report of the joint Congressional inquiry into the 9/11 hijackings, which will be made public today, will reveal that the U.S. government had no intelligence linking Iraq to al-Qaeda prior to launching the war. I always suspected this was the case (the alleged link always seemed a little tenuous to me), but it’s striking to see it stated so plainly.

What’s more damning is that some members of the committee that produced the report charge that the Administration threw monkey wrenches into the process to prevent the report from being released before the war could be started. The committee was formed last Februrary and completed the report this January — three months before the start of hostilities — but the Administration forced it to be kept secret until now by alleging that parts of it were too sensitive to be declassified. In all cases those allegations proved to be off base, but they did keep the report out of the news until now — almost eight months after it was completed.

In fairness, the only committee member who’d go on the record for the story is former Democratic Senator Max Cleland, who lost his seat in the Republican upset of 2002. Losing his seat might mean that Cleland has an axe to grind. However, considering that he lost mostly because of a campaign backed by the Administration that portrayed him as soft on national security — even though Cleland is a Vietnam vet who lost both his legs fighting in that war — he may also feel he’s the only member of the committee who has nothing to lose by telling the truth. We’ll know more when the report hits the streets later today.

UPDATE (7/25): Well, it appears that UPI is retracting the story. In the words of Emily Litella, “neeeeever mind”. (And don’t give me flak about passing it along, it’s not like UPI is the Drudge Report.)

Thoughts On the Recent Unpleasantness

Posted on July 24, 2003

Well, since I’ve been such a fervent Mozilla advocate in this space, I figured I should say a few words about the stuff that went down last week for Moz, and what I think it means for the future. (Since it all happened while I was off on vacation, I’m playing catch-up, I know — bear with me.)

In case you haven’t heard, there was a pretty significant shake-up at AOL/Time Warner, the corporate parent of Netscape, which was the primary backer of the Mozilla project. They essentially killed the Netscape division, laying off all the Mozilla developers and cancelling any future development of the Netscape browser suite. The recently released Netscape 7.1 will be the last Netscape release. While AOL won’t be backing Mozilla development financially anymore, they did give the project a kind of severance package: the creation of the Mozilla Foundation, a not-for-profit organization to manage the continuing development of Mozilla technologies. AOL has given the Foundation a starting grant of $2 million and the permanent ownership of all Mozilla-relevant trademarks and images. (Other companies, including Red Hat and IBM, have pledged to also support the Foundation.) They’ve also managed to get Mitch Kapor to serve as the Foundation’s chairman.

So, what does this mean in practical terms?

(more…)

Vacation Pix

Posted on July 24, 2003

Following up on my earlier post about my summer vacation, I just got some digital photos from the trip e-mailed to me, so I thought I’d share…

This is the view out across the Gulf of Mexico from the resort we were staying at. The whole area is very oriented towards traveling by boat, moreso in a lot of ways than traveling by car. Everything from tiny runabouts to giant yachts can be found tied up at the resort pier.

Took this shot on the ferry to Cabbage Key, one of the minor outlying islands in the chain. The waters around the islands are full of dolphins, and when the younger ones feel playful they like to run with the ferry and show off for the tourists. The louder you hoot and clap, the higher they jump out of the water.

Here’s Our Favorite Geek on the aforementioned ferry.

And here he is again, this time maxin’ and relaxin’ in the main pool. I was every bit as relaxed at that moment as I look. The moral of the story here is to keep an eye open for relatives with cameras before you let the sun and the water convince you that it’s the perfect place to take a nap.

Ouch

Posted on July 23, 2003

Think of the weirdest break-up experience you’ve ever had. Now, read this story:

CNN.com – James Brown reveals breakup in full-page ad

So, whose was weirder — yours, or the hardest working man in show business’? 🙂

Corporations: Bringing the Third World to You!

Posted on July 23, 2003

There’s been lots of noise lately about IBM’s recent announcement that it was moving white-collar jobs overseas, primarily to India. The always-provocative Philip Greenspun has an interesting take on it: how corporations, besides just moving American jobs to the Third World, have succeeded in many ways in importing the values of the Third World to America:

An American has a First Amendment right to free speech. A corporate slave, however, generally forfeits his right to write about things that happen in his workplace as a condition of his employment and as a condition of receiving serverance pay after he is fired. Because the typical corporate slave spends 60 hours per week commuting and working effectively this means that he has no right to write about anything that happens to him for most of his waking hours. If the slave wants to get promoted he probably is wisest not writing or saying anything too controversial even if it does not regard work…

America as traditionally conceived is a place of middle class opportunity and reasonably equal wealth distribution, unlike Third World countries in which a ruling elite collects all of the cookies. A corporate slave will take home, on average, 1/500th the pay of his top managers.

Something to think about in these troubled times…

Palm Ships New Tungsten T2

Posted on July 23, 2003

Looks like Palm has finally caught on to how pathetic its Tungsten T offering is when compared to its more recent Zire 71 and Tungsten C products — they’ve just released a revised version of the T called the Tungsten T2 that ups the memory and adds the same brilliant transflective color display that the Z71 and T-C offer (the display on the original T is nowhere near as nice).

I still haven’t found what I’m looking for, though — a simple, $200-$300 device running PalmOS 5 that offers Bluetooth, an option to add Wi-Fi, and a Stowaway XT keyboard. The Zire 71 is the closest I’ve seen, but it’s at the high end of that price range, and lacks Bluetooth. Sony is too busy building lust objects for the gadget obsessed to focus on the low end. Handspring has just folded. Is there anyone out there with a device like the one I want?

What I Did On My Summer Vacation

Posted on July 23, 2003

I went to South Seas Plantation, a resort on Captiva Island in Florida’s Gulf Coast. Captiva is God’s own country — a tiny, beautiful island with white sand beaches that stretch out forever. My family’s been vacationing at South Seas since I was a tot, but I hadn’t been there in ten years, so it was amazing to go back and be reminded of what I’d been missing.

After a week of playing beach bum at Captiva, I’ve got a nice suntan — which, for those of you that know me, you’ll know is a Big Deal since usually I’m about the whitest white man on the face of the Earth. I also got a chance to do some summer reading while working on said tan; sitting next to my beach chair were:

• Island of the Sequined Love Nun, by Christopher Moore — a goofy, funny novel about the adventures of a private pilot who gets mixed up in a cargo cult on a tiny Pacific island; and
• The Metaphysical Club, by Louis Menand — a fascinating tour through the intellectual life of America from 1840-1920, with sharp portraits of several key figures who contributed to it.

I also managed to start working on a new short story (no computers at South Seas, so I had to write with ballpoint pen and ruled notebook — how retro!), discover the ridiculously funny new TV show Most Extreme Elimination Challenge, and — most importantly — catch up with my family, who I almost never see anymore since they live in Ohio and I live in D.C. (sigh)

Now, though, it’s back to the daily grind… such is the plight of the non-independently-wealthy 🙂

More Airline Security Follies

Posted on July 22, 2003

Here’s some more evidence that common sense is not so common among the folks guarding our skies… civil rights activist John Gilmore was recently ejected from a British Airways flight to London.

His crime? Wearing a 1″ button that read “Suspected Terrorist”.

That’ll show al Qaeda! Good thing they make all their people wear buttons clearly identifying them as such.

John Robb is Back

Posted on July 22, 2003

Hey, after a prolonged absence from the blogosphere, it looks like John Robb has returned! Cool!

The Man Speaks the Truth

Posted on July 22, 2003

Whaddaya know, Howard Dean has been guest-blogging over on Larry Lessig’s blog — I apparently missed it while I was on vacation. The man makes some good points, too:

As a doctor, I’m trained to base my decisions on facts. This President never adequately laid out the facts for going to war with Iraq — perhaps, as it turns out, because the facts were not there. I opposed the war not because I’m a pacifist — I’m not — but because the evidence presented did not justify preemptive war. I opposed needle exchanges for drug addicts until I saw the empirical evidence that showed how such exchanges reduce the spread of disease. I changed my position, and I’m proud of that. Facts are a better basis for decisions than ideology.

“Facts are a better basis for decisions than ideology”. There’s refreshing words to hear from a politician!

Aim High

Posted on July 21, 2003

You know, in this life, it’s important to have aspirations.

Just not this guy’s 🙂

I used to build things

Posted on July 21, 2003

The title says it all… (sigh)

Some wisdom on the subject of working for a living, from Thoreau’s Walden:

Not long since, a strolling Indian went to sell baskets at the house of a well-known lawyer in my neighborhood. “Do you wish to buy any baskets?” he asked. “No, we do not want any,” was the reply. “What!” exclaimed the Indian as he went out the gate, “do you mean to starve us?” Having seen his industrious white neighbors so well off, — that the lawyer had only to weave arguments, and by some magic wealth and standing followed, he had said to himself; I will go into business; I will weave baskets; it is a thing which I can do… He had not discovered that it was necessary for him to make it worth the other’s while to buy them, or at least make him think that it was so, or to make something else which it would be worth his while to buy. I too had woven a kind of basket of a delicate texture, but I had not made it worth any one’s while to buy them. Yet not the less, in my case, did I think it worth my while to weave them, and instead of studying how to make it worth men’s while to buy my baskets, I studied rather how to avoid the necessity of selling them.