Requested: Penguins and Monkeys

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Requested by Candace:

Penguins…..definately penguins….Oh! And monkeys too! :P

Penguin slap

Penguins, huh? And monkeys? Well, there’s two critters that don’t generally appear together as a topic. Hm…

I picked up my love for penguins (platonic, I assure you, you sickos) from dad, for the most part. When dad was working for the Alaska Court System, his office was practically wallpapered with pictures of penguins. He had little penguin figurines on his desk. Stuffed penguins on his shelves. Even a three-foot tall stuffed Emperor penguin in one corner. Penguins everywhere!

And — if I remember correctly — it all started through dad’s love of kids.

Dad’s been working as a custody investigator for years (first through DFYS, then the Alaska Court System, and now freelancing after his retirement). It can be something of a rough job, as he spends his days interviewing families that are splitting up for one reason or another and determining which parent should wind up with custody of the children. It can lead to some tough situations and hard days, but it can also be very rewarding for him, through working with the kids and doing what he can to make sure they’re placed in the best situation possible.

(Now, what follows comes from memory, so I may not have it quite exactly right. The gist should be pretty accurate, though.)

Because he spent a lot of time talking with young children, he always made sure to keep various toys and stuffed animals in his office for them to play with. Being a fan of Bloom County, one of the toys he had in his office was an Opus the penguin doll. After one of his sessions with a child, the kid came back later for another session and brought along a picture they had drawn for dad of his penguin, which he then put up on his wall.

Later, another kid came in, saw the Opus doll and the penguin picture, and drew another one. Co-workers started to notice that there were a few penguins in dad’s office, figured that “hey, this guy must like penguins,” and got him a penguin calendar. Or another stuffed penguin. Or a little penguin figurine. And on, and on, and on…

After a while, it was difficult to look anywhere in dad’s office without seeing a penguin. And — perhaps as evidence that immersion therapy really does work — a perceived thing for penguins eventually became a real thing for penguins.

Me being my dad’s son, and sharing much of his sense of humor and love of the absurd, it’s not all that surprising that I’d pick up on all this. It certainly helped that I grew up reading Bloom County, of course, but penguins are such silly, fun little birds that it’d be tough not to like them anyway. I don’t have the penguin wallpaper effect going on that dad did for years, but I do have a little stuffed penguin that sits atop my computer monitor that Prairie got me a while ago, and I always make sure to stop by the penguin exhibits when we go to a zoo. Definitely my favorite animal out there.

Monkeys, now. That’s a little tougher for me. Candice had a purple monkey in her truck, and Prairie has a pink monkey in her car, but that’s about my only association with monkeys at the moment. I do have a couple of monkeys in my past, though (whether or not you want to include some of my friends on that list is entirely up to you).

Me, Kermit, and Charles Wallace in 1991

For a long time, I had an arm-puppet monkey with a little squeaker air bulb in his mouth that I liked playing with. More importantly, though, was the one stuffed animal I had as a kid — Charles Wallace (named after the little boy in Madeline L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time).

Charles actually looked more like a dog, with his big floppy ears, but for some reason I always considered him a monkey. I had him for the longest time (and still do, I’m sure, I believe he’s in a box up in Anchorage at the moment), and even had mom perform surgery on him at one point after a fight between my brother and I when we each had ahold of one of Charles’ legs, tugging back and forth…and Charles got suddenly neutered.

iTunes “Heat” by Kronos Quartet from the album Heat (1995, 7:41).

Gallimaufry 5

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The weekly music meme: ten songs at random from my music collection, plus assorted rambling.

  • The Shamen, ‘Phorever People (Shamen Dub)’, off of Phorever People: The Shamen were one of the early-90’s techno groups that I liked a lot. Not quite as good as Utah Saints, but definitely further towards the top of the heap than many other acts, able to produce entire albums that were listenable, rather than just the odd single here or there. This is a fairly trancy ‘dub’ mix (no vocals) of one of their singles that didn’t quite break as big on the scene. Sounds like something that’d make a good background piece for the soundtrack of a tech-heavy film.

  • The Prodigy, ‘Diesel Power (Snake Break)’, off of The Fat Mixes: I’m pretty sure that The Fat Mixes isn’t an official album — at least, I’ve never found any official word about it. I downloaded it a long time ago, when I was first exploring the world of Napster (back when the world of Napster was worth exploring). It’s a collection of various remixes of tracks off of The Fat of the Land, some mediocre and some that are very impressive. The one downside is that as I’ve never found a real copy of it, all I have are mid-bitrate .mp3s that don’t sound nearly as good as I wish they did.

  • Sunscreem, ‘Love U More (A Version)’, off of Love U More: One of my favorite songs of all time. Bright, bouncy, and happy (tempered with some occasionally somewhat disturbing lyrics), saying that no matter what happens, “you know you could never make me love you more.” This one never fails to put a smile on my face when I hear it. While this version’s off of the single, it’s nearly (if not entirely) identical to the version on their album O3 — the various remixes on the single were rather boring.

  • Tag Team, ‘Whoomp! (There It Is)‘, off of DJ Bass Mix: Aaah, the joys of having been a DJ…and a DJ who every so often had to cater to popular tastes, even when they weren’t exactly up my alley. Still, as far as 90’s one-hit-wonder hip-hop songs go, this one really isn’t that bad. Best, though, was ending up with an acapella version, which allowed me to run the vocals on top of My Life With the Thrill Kill Kult‘s’A Girl Doesn’t Get Killed By A Make-Believe Lover (‘Cuz It’s Hot)‘ — and that worked a lot better than it really should have.

  • The Art of Noise, ‘Dragnet ’88’, off of Best of the Art of Noise: Experimental art-techno group The Art of Noise’s take on the Dragnet theme, done for the 1988 movie starring Tom Hanks and Dan Aykroyd. I have no memory of whether or not the movie is any good, but I really like Art of Noise, and the samples they’ve sprinkled throughout the song are fun (“You’ve got a lot of repressed feelings, don’t you Friday? Must be what keeps your hair up.”)

  • Mickey Hart and Planet Drum, ‘Indoscrub’, off of Supralingua: Planet Drum is ex-Grateful Dead drummer Mickey Hart‘s world music project, focusing primarily on various forms of ~~sitar~~ drumming and percussion. Good percussion has a tendency to catch my ear, so I picked this one up on a whim one day when I ran across it browsing at random. Good stuff, though it all sounds similar enough that I’d be hard pressed to tell one track from another by ear.

  • Bedhead, ‘Crushing‘, off of WhatFunLifeWas: A long time ago, I came across a review of this album on the ‘net that was so well-written and so complimentary of the album that I went out and picked it up based solely on the strength of that review. Lucklily, I wasn’t disappointed in the least — while it’s not my normal style of music (strictly guitar, bass, and drums, rather than the electronic-heavy music I tend to gravitate towards), it actually often reminds me of a lot of ambient music: lots of flowing themes, vocals that don’t overpower and often blend right in with the instruments, and very relaxing. A little hard to describe, but highly recommended.

  • VNV Nation, ‘Arclight’, off of Empires: Due to my DJing in Anchorage taking me away from the goth/industrial music that got me started and into more standard dance/techno/pop stuff, I ended up losing track of what was going on in the goth/industrial world for a good few years. Because of this, I’ve only recently been coming across artists that I’m finding I like a lot: Beborn Beton, Covenant, Wumpscut, Velvet Acid Christ…and VNV Nation. Time after time, I’d hear a song at The Vogue, ask the DJ what it was, and it would be VNV Nation. Eventually, I picked up two of their albums (Empires and Futureperfect), and they’re both excellent. This is very much where my tastes lie these days (and as I’m still working on discovering much of this stuff, recommendations are always appreciated!).

  • Pigface, ‘Lost Track’, off of Preaching to the Perverted: The Best of Pigface: I’ve mentioned before that Pigface is one of my favorite groups. This is a short, but very fun little track, one of the many “B-sides” on their recent “Best of” compilation two-disc album. Not much more than percussion here, just a couple minutes of heavy drumming with some odd little electronic bleeps and bloops to spice it up a bit. Sounds like the beginning of a work in progress that never made it much further than what it is.

  • Liam Howlett, ‘Section 7‘, off of Prodigy Presents the Dirtchamber Sessions, Vol. 1: Technically, the stores list this as a Prodigy album — which, since The Prodigy basically is Liam Howlett, isn’t strictly wrong — but as this album is all mixwork and no strictly original compositions, I keep it filed under Liam’s name. It’s an incredible disc, too, letting Liam show off both his DJ skills and his insanely comprehensive record collection, both of which he does handily. This track alone samples LL Cool J, Digital Underground, Uptown, and Cold Cut, and most of the other tracks on the album sample two to three times as many individual cuts over the course of each mix. Good stuff.

And this week’s bonus track…

iTunes “Sir Psycho Sexy” by Red Hot Chili Peppers from the album Blood Sugar Sex Magik (1991, 8:16).

Death of a Spammer, in a Place Called Hope

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THIS STORY IS FICTION

Death of a Spammer, in a Place Called Hope

By Todd F. Bryant
Staff Writer

HOPE, CA — In this dusty Mojave town, pop. 5000, which averages roughly one murder per decade, Sheriff James Wilcox recently encountered the first serious crime he was unable to solve in his 25-year law enforcement career.

“Incidents like this don’t happen here,” said the 50-year-old Wilcox, who has one deputy, his daughter, and operates out of a converted construction trailer with a single makeshift cell, which is rarely occupied. “We’re not exactly Crime City, U.S.A.”

The crime was murder. The victim was a local resident, a white male, 42, shot six times in the chest and arms. The time was roughly 4 p.m. The location was the post office. There were no witnesses. The Hope post office is staffed only 4 hours a day, but the lobby doors are unlocked around the clock so that residents can access their post-office boxes. The victim, Keith James Lawrence, unmarried, was gunned down in the post-office-box area.

“Heidi [his daughter] and I knew this was going to be a tough one,” said Wilcox. “Nobody around to see it. Nobody even heard any shots. Not even a suspicious vehicle seen in the area. Just bad luck for us. It happens.”

It was during the autopsy that things took a turn for the weird. The medical examiner noticed an obstruction lodged deep in the victim’s throat. He reached in and pulled out the objectÐa can of Spam. “I knew then that we had something that was maybe out of our league,” said the examiner, Dr. Anu Ram, a surgeon at Mojave County Hospital. “I mean, we don’t know anything about serial killers here, and I told Jim [Wilcox], ‘This is really scary. It’s probably some guy traveling around killing random people, and this is his signature.'”

It is perhaps only in small rural towns like Hope that a can of Spam and murder wouldn’t immediately conjure up an obvious hypothesis. Wilcox, while not oblivious to the existence of the World Wide Web and email, did not have an Internet connection and hadn’t heard the word “spam” used in the context of junk mail. It was only when Wilcox talked to his daughter on the phone two days after the crime (she had gone out of town for a scheduled visit with her husband’s relatives), that the pieces began to fit together. “I told her the victim had a post-office box there, that it had letters in it, with money in the form of money orders and cash, generally five dollars each, and it appeared he was running some kind of a business selling information for a few bucks a pop. It looked legitimate to me, so I wasn’t focusing on that. And then I told her about the can of Spam.”

“I knew right then, or at least I thought I did, what the motive was,” says Heidi Jensen, 29, who has worked with her father since she was 17. “I said, ‘Daddy, this guy is a spammer.’ And he goes, ‘A what?’ And I’m like, ‘A spammer, he sends out those messages, you know, “make money fast” and “get a new mortgage” and stuff.’ He had no idea what I was talking about. He refused to believe that spam could be a motive for murder. I’m like, ‘Daddy, you’re not on AOL, you don’t understand.'”

But Wilcox was not one to ignore what he calls his daughter’s “intuition.” He acquired an expert in computers–by calling the local computer store, and securing the services of a clerk for $10 an hour–and examined Lawrence’s Dell computer hard drive and dozens of CD-ROMs. “It was true, this guy was a spammer,” said Wilcox, who is now well-versed in Internet lingo. “He had literally millions of e-mail addresses, and lots of bills from different ISPs, and we determined he’d been doing this for about two years. He grossed about $5,000 a year from it.”

At that point, Wilcox called the FBI, who sent an agent to help him scan Lawrence’s email and snail-mail records for any particularly hostile messages. Not surprisingly, they found quite a few. In fact, they found so many that they stopped cataloguing them when they reached 200.

“This case is impossible,” said Wilcox, shaking his head. “I mean, if you add up all the spam recipients who threatened his life directly, that’s probably ten thousand right there, probably more. And really, it’s the ones that don’t make overt threats who are usually the perpetrators in grudge cases like this, because the folks who write the poison-pen letters get it out of their system. So now you’ve got to add all of the other people on those CD-ROMs to the list. There’s roughly 20 or 30 million suspects in this case, all over the world.”

Wilcox tracked down a few more manageable leads. “I thought maybe one of Lawrence’s acquaintances might have killed him, knowing he was a spammer, and made it look like a grudge crime. But, no, that didn’t really pan out. I couldn’t find anything substantial there.”

Both the Mojave Sheriff’s department and the FBI classify the case as open. At this writing, ten weeks after the murder, no suspects have been interviewed.

“Will [the killer] do it again?” Wilcox asks. “I don’t know. But I don’t think he was mad at Stanley Lawrence the person. I think he was mad at spammers. And there are a lot of spammers out there.

“And I’ll tell you this much: I wouldn’t want to be one.”

For more information on just what this is all about, check in with Brian Flemming.

(via John)

iTunes ”Bizarre Love Triangle (Hot Tracks)“ by New Order from the album Hot Tracks 15th Anniversary Collectors Edition (1997, 8:05).

Judy Bachrach on FOX News

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How wonderful. Judy Bachrach, from Vanity Fair, was on FOX News earlier today and completely ambushed FOX anchor Brigitte Quinn. Rather than a cute fluff piece on the inauguration, Bachrach launched into an indictment of the forty million dollars being spent on Bush’s parties rather than on anything useful.

Oliver Willis is hosting the video, which is so worth watching. Ryland was kind enough to type up a transcript, which you’ll find below the cut…

Read more

Engine Ice

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Engine Ice

This picture wasn’t taken by me, I just thought it was incredibly cool! A friend forwarded it to me along with the accompanying text explanation.

“We had a mixed-precip event last night as the temperatures started rising above freezing and the snow changed over. The ramp was a sheet of slick wet ice, and even with crushed stone (urea) spread, it was glazing over as quickly as we could deploy it. As flight 1830 was coming into the stand, I motioned to the deck for them to proceed very cautiously, which apparently they’d been doing for the whole taxi (it took a long time between calling on-deck and getting to the gate).

When it finally pulled in, we noticed what is in the attached picture. None of us had ever seen it before. Very cool. I ran and grabbed my camera. I apologize for the quality, since it was melting off quickly as the fan had stopped spinning I just pulled out the camera and took two quick snaps. I guess I didn’t have a steady hand in the rain!”

(via The Usual Suspects)

All Request Saturday

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Here’s an interesting idea, stolen from Terrance, who stole it from Stay of Execution: an all-request day.

Something about me you’d like to know? Something you’d like me to ramble on about? Pick a topic, any topic, and drop it in the comments. Come Saturday, I’ll go through what (if anything) is there and start babbling.

Of course, if nothing appears, I still reserve the right to go on about whatever I damn well please, so don’t think that by not suggesting anything you’re any more likely to get me to shut up. :)

iTunes “Situation (The English Breakfast)” by Yaz from the album Don’t Go/Situation (1999, 9:04).

Prior art for ‘nofollow’ blocking

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With the addition of rel=“nofollow” to our arsenal of anti-spam tools, there’s a certain level of chatter about the ability to add a block element to a webpage to delineate certain areas of the page that should not be indexed by Google or other search engines.

Most of the time I see this mentioned, credit has gone to Brad Choate’s post from Feb. 2002 for first advancing the idea. However, the idea itself dates as far back as Jan. 2001 in Zoltan Milosevic’s Fluid Dynamics Search Engine, a shareware site-specific search engine.

I used the FDSE on my site for a while (starting Feb. 6, 2002), and found its support for blocking sections of pages from the search engine to be incredibly useful.

For instance, the sidebar on my site changes frequently: on the front page, the linklog updates often, somtimes multiple times a day; and on the individual pages, the ‘related entries’ list can change over time as new entries are added and the pages are rebuilt. Because of this, it’s not uncommon for me to see people arrive through Google searches for terms that were in the sidebar of a particular page when Google’s spider crawled my site, but have since disappeared.

In another situation, try using Google to search my site for an instance of when I’m actually talking about TrackBack: as the term “TrackBack” is on every single individual entry page, the noise to content ratio is weighted in entirely the wrong direction. If I had the ability to block off the sidebar and the TrackBack section header, these problems could be avoided.

FDSE allowed me to do just that — and part of what I liked about it was that it used the same syntax as the standard robot commands used in robots.txt files or meta tags. From the FDSE Help Pages:

FDSE supports the proprietary “robots” comment tag. This tag allows a web author to apply robots exclusion rules to arbitrary sections of a document. The tag has one attribute, content, with the following possible values:

  • noindex – the text enclosed in the tag is not saved in the index
  • nofollow – links are not extracted from the text enclosed
  • none – enclosed text is not indexed nor searched for links

Values “index”, “follow”, and “all” are also valid. In practice they are ignored since they are the unspoken defaults.

This feature is expected to fit the customer need of preventing certain parts of a document – such as a navigational sidebar – from being included in the search.

Example:

<HTML>
<BODY>

    This text will be indexed.
    <a href="foo.html"> this link will be followed </A>

    <!-- robots content="none" -->

        This text will NOT be indexed.
        <a href="bar.html"> this link will NOT be followed </A>

    <!-- /robots -->

    <!-- robots content="noindex" -->

        This text will NOT be indexed.
        <a href="bar1.html"> this link WILL be followed </A>

    <!-- /robots -->

    <!-- robots content="nofollow" -->

        This text WILL be indexed.
        <a href="bar1.html"> this link will NOT be followed </A>

    <!-- /robots -->

    la la la

</BODY>
</HTML>

For the example of a navigational sidebar, the “noindex” vale would be the best choice.

This syntax was designed to match the robots META tag.

For documents which have both the “robots” META tag and the “robots” comment tag, the most restrictive interpretation will be made, always erring on the side on not indexing or not following.

According to the above cited help documentation, Milosevic introduced this functionality in v2.0.0.0031 of the FDSE, and a quick check of FDSE’s version history dates that release to Jan. 26th, 2001 — four years before even a hint of its functionality was added to the major search engines, and just over a year before Brad’s post went up (no disrespect at all is meant to Brad here — different people have the same ideas fairly often, after all, and it’s an equally good idea no matter who came up with it — I’m just trying to give credit where credit is due, since this is a technique I’m actually familiar with).

Obviously, I’m fairly happy about seeing rel=“nofollow” gain support with Google and the other search engines. Equally obviously by this point, I’m sure, I’d love to see a block-level implementation made available, and I think Milosevic had a good approach. It’s easy to implement, follows already established conventions (robots.txt and meta tags), validates (as it’s simply an HTML comment), and allows for a little more control than a simple on/off ignore switch would.

Battling the spammers

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Over the past few days, I’ve noticed off and on that my webserver has been extremely slow to respond — less obviously when just browsing pages, but attempting to connect to the Movable Type interface was increasingly difficult, often resulting in nothing but timeouts and connection failures.

I had a hunch that I knew what was going on, but I wasn’t entirely sure at first. I logged in to the server locally — something I haven’t had to do in a while — and realized just how badly the machine was bogged down when the OS X user interface was almost as unresponsive as Movable Type. Not a good sign. Once I made it in and got a terminal window up, I ran top -u 15 to see what was going on.

Not surprisingly, every entry that top displayed was a perl process, with mysqld occasionally clawing its way to the top for a moment or two. Now I was almost entirely sure that one or more of the sites I host was under a major automated comment spam attack, as even with MT-Blacklist installed and refusing the majority of the submitted comments, it would require a certain amount of processing for each request, and while I’m not sure just how many a minute were being submitted, it was obviously enough to bring my server to its knees.

So, seeing if I could kill two birds with one stone, I renamed all the comment and trackback scripts on the webserver, figuring that this would kill any in-progress attack and in doing so, confirm that it was a spam attack. Sure enough, as the multitudes of perl processes slowly worked their way through to completion, top started running faster (it had been updating once every 6-10 seconds, rather than once a second) and other processes started to show up on the display. After about two minutes, there wasn’t a single perl process on top‘s list, top was updating at its standard once-per-second frequency, and the computer’s UI was responding as it should.

The downside to this technique is that it breaks comment and trackback ability. Easy enough to fix, though, with a quick change to MT’s config file and a rebuild of the sites. So, the comment scripts have been renamed, and I’m in the process of rebuilding the sites to reflect the new script locations.

And you know what?

Even in mid-rebuild, I’m already starting to watch the number of perl process climb. One or two I’d expect while rebuilding the site, but I’m currently seeing anywhere from two to ten at a time. I’ve got a really bad feeling that whatever spammer has me targeted has a script smart enough to scrape the pages to find the script locations, no matter what they are named.

This — in a word — sucks. Outside of turning comments off entirely for the targeted sites, which really doesn’t thrill me, I’m not sure where to go next.

Guess for now I’ll just have to keep an eye on things and see how they go.

rel=“nofollow” : Massive weblog anti-spam initiative

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Wow. Straight from Jay Allen:

Six Apart has announced in co-operation with Google, Yahoo, MSN Search and other blog vendors a massive joint anti-spam initiative based on the HTML link type rel="nofollow".

The initiative is based upon the idea of taking away the value of user-submitted links in determining search rankings. By placing rel="nofollow" into the hyperlink tags of user-submitted feedback, search engines will ignore those links for the purposes of ranking (e.g. PageRank) and will not follow them when spidering a site.

[…]

It is important to note that while the links will no longer count for PageRank (and other search engines’ algorithms), the content of user-submitted data will still be indexed along with the rest of the contents of the page. Forget all of those silly ideas of hiding your comments from the GoogleBot. Heck, the comments in most blogs are more interesting that the posts themselves. Why would you want to do that to the web?

Now, the astute will point out that because links in comments/TrackBacks are ignored by the search bots, the PageRank of bloggers all around the blooog-o-sphere will suffer because hundreds of thousands of comments linking back to their own sites will no longer count in the rankings. And that is most likely true. But that inflated PageRank, which was a problem created by the search engines themselves, is the rotting flesh that the maggots sought out in the first place. If you ask me, I say fair trade.

In the end, of course, this isn’t the end of weblog spam. But because it completely takes away the incentive for the type of spamming we’re seeing today in the weblog world, you will probably see steady decline as many spammers find greener pastures elsewhere. That decline combined with better tools should help to make this a non-issue in the future. Every little step counts, some count more than others, and history will be the judge of all.

Very cool. Also very similar to a technique I was using a couple years back, though that was geared to blocking off areas of the site to ignore rather than affecting individual links. Either way, though, it’s a big step forward. I’m especially heartened to see the list of competing companies and weblogging systems that are participating in this.

Tip of the Slung

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A very interesting thread popped up on MetaFilter yesterday (though I just found it this evening) after Las Vegas weatherman Rob Blair fumbled during a broadcast:

KTNV-TV, Channel 13, fired weekend weather anchor Rob Blair on Sunday, a day after he made an on-air racial slur about Martin Luther King Jr.

Jim Prather, vice president and general manager of KTNV, said Blair “stumbled” during a weather update at 7:55 a.m. Saturday but added that “this kind of incident is not acceptable under any circumstances, and I’m truly sorry that this event occurred.”

Blair was delivering the extended forecast when he said, “For tomorrow, 60 degrees, Martin Luther Coon King Jr. Day, gonna see some temperatures in the mid-60s.”

About 20 minutes later, Blair told viewers at the ABC affiliate, “Apparently I accidentally said Martin Luther Kong Jr., which I apologize about — slip of the tongue.”

He offered a full apology during Saturday’s 6 p.m. and 11 p.m. newscasts.

At 6:11 p.m., co-anchor Christina Brown, who is black, announced, “Right now we want to pause for a program note. Rob?”

Blair, seated at the news desk with co-anchors Brown and Shawn Boyd, said, “On a weather report earlier this morning, I made an accidental slip of the tongue when talking about the Martin Luther King holiday, and what I said was interpreted by many viewers as highly offensive. For that I offer my deepest apology. I in no way intended to offend anyone. I’m very sorry.”

MetaFilter user wbm\$tr posted a link to the story under the title “Unforgiveable Dumbness“:

Weatherman fired for on-air MLK day racial slur. I hope someone has video because I wouldn’t mind seeing this dood go out like a sucka.

From the start, there were two basic ways of interpreting the event, neither of which were very easy to verify without being able to see a video of the incident in question in order to attempt to determine just how egregious the slip-up was. Either it was a Freudian slip indicating nascent racism on Blair’s part — and fairly obviously, this was wbm\$tr’s assumption — or it was nothing more than a verbal fumble, replacing the ‘j’ in ‘Junior’ with the ‘k’ in King and recovering partway through.

Discussion on MeFi went back and forth…

I kind of doubt he intended to say it. Who would think they could get away with it? Who would do it to make a point? Nobody, really. Seems like an honest, unfortunate slip of the tongue. The apology was definitely warranted, but it sounds a bit reactionary to just fire him. I guess I’d have to hear the audio to be sure, though.

— Hidalgo

From the article “I made an accidental slip of the tongue when talking about the Martin Luther King holiday, and what I said was interpreted by many viewers as highly offensive. For that I offer my deepest apology. I in no way intended to offend anyone. I’m very sorry.””

I love how no one actually admits anything anymore (there was a recent ask metafilter post about this). There is a difference between saying “I said something offensive and I’m sorry” and “what I said was interpreted by many viewers as highly offensive… I’m sorry” (emphasis added).

I love that we’ve come to this. The message suddenly becomes “I said something that some people found fault with, and for just those people, I’m sorry if you were offended.” Real big of him.

— mathowie

As much as I suspect it slipped out because he uses that term in private, I should mention it is possible that he joined “king” and “junior” and caught himself midway. I once called an (Asian) friend a ‘gook’, because I blurred ‘geek’ and ‘goof’. I assure you, I was mortified, and until I clarified (and I think my horror made him believe me) he wasn’t too happy either.

— John Kenneth Fisher

God forbid if I ever said something I didn’t mean too.

It is certainly reasonable to think that he wouldn’t do this on purpose. Can you imagine how you would have felt to realize that not only did you screw up, but that you just said what you did on television on this holiday?

I am sure he was miserable. And, I would be too.

— UseyurBrain

I love how some people can be so sure this guy is a racist because of an article that gives no indication of whether the slur was intentional or a slip of the tongue. Without a video (or some corroborating evidence of him being a racist in some other facet of life), there is absolutely no way to tell whether he is deserving of the label.

The Closest I came was, “Martin Luther Jing Kunior”

But what about “Martin Luther Kun– (i mean) King Junior.” Need video evidence, and I tend to suspect it was innocent.

— rooftop secrets

At this point, it probably would have just eventually petered out, with some people convinced that Blair was a closet racist, and others equally convinced that it was an unfortunate slip of the tongue (for the record, I fell into the “unfortunate slip of the tongue” camp, being quite prone to similar slip-ups on a not irregular basis).

Then another MeFite came forward — and this time, it was someone who actually had some “insider knowledge” of the incident.

It’s interesting how quickly folks are willing to assume the worst without having seen the video clip. Our PR guy (who is black and gay, for what it’s worth) is the weatherman’s best friend. He is in the process of writing an op ed piece in defense of his friend which I will post when it is ready. Briefly here is the version I was told by our PR guy: This was the weatherman’s first on-air job. He is part American Indian and was raised going to black churches. He didn’t say what he was accused of saying, he simply got momentarily tongue-tied and wasn’t even aware that there was a problem until the station received one (1) phone call complaining. He then apologized on three separate broadcasts. The first he heard of being fired was when he opened the Sunday paper that morning.

— [agatha_magatha]

As promised, here is the op ed piece from Linton Johnson Chief Spokesperson, Department Manager, BART Media & Public Affairs. I would post a link, but it hasn’t been published yet.

As a black person, I am stunned, outraged and completely appalled with these so-called “African-American leaders” and everyone else who is joining in to call Rob Blair everything short of a racist. And I know Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. would be appalled, too.

During Dr. King’s “I have a dream” speech, he said that he wanted his children (and everyone else) to “…not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character…”

Well, as the son of a family heavily involved in the civil rights movement, and the nephew of a board member of the national NAACP, and most importantly, as a close and longtime friend of Rob Blair, I know the content of Rob Blair’s character. I can attest to the fact that he embodies the spirit of Dr. King, Jr. 

The baseless outrage people are expressing is a classic example of reverse racism. I say baseless, because people, including these so-called black leaders, are condemning Rob based on an incident even they admit they never saw!

They presume Rob is a racist, or harbors racist feelings based only on what a few people thought they heard him say.

First of all, if you look at the tape, it’s impossible to even understand what Rob said when he stumbled over Dr. King’s name.

But because Rob looks white (for the record, he’s part Native American) they rushed to judgment and automatically assumed that Rob said the word, “coon.”

Then they rushed to judgment once again and are now saying that clearly anyone who says “coon” must either be racist or harbor racial issues.

Think about it! Had a black person stumbled over the same word, do you think anyone would’ve heard “coon?” What’s more would they demand the black person’s termination? No!

Why should it be any different for Rob? Everyone who knows him can attest to the fact that Rob Blair embodies the spirit of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

If you knew Rob, you’d know he grew up singing gospel music in a black children’s choir.

If you knew Rob, you’d know he’s a man who most of his life has worshiped in Black churches.

If you knew Rob, you’d know he’s a man who made not one, but two trips to Jamaica to help rebuild the country after Hurricane Gilbert destroyed parts of it in 1988.

If you knew Rob, you’d know he’s a man who as a radio personality in Indiana, worked on projects to help bridge the racial divide in schools.

That is the content of Rob’s character. Judge Rob by the content of his character, not by the color of his skin. I assure you, Dr. King would.

— agatha_magatha

Being able to have someone with actual knowledge of an event like this happens all too rarely, and I’m very glad that agatha_magatha was able to come forward with the information they did. While the thread dies out soon afterward, there was at least one MeFite able to come forward and apologize for jumping to the wrong conclusion earlier.

well, based on what agatha_magatha has reported, i regret my earlier condemnation of the man.

it’s just that i’ve seen far too many people make “slips” like this and then swear up and down that b/c they’re friends with a few black people that they couldn’t possibly be racist or ever think any racist thoughts. which is absurd: i’ve yet to meet a person who is truly free of biases based on the construct known as race. so i’ve stopped giving people the benefit of the doubt with regard to this sort of thing, though, as always, if someone apologizes and is sincere, i’m ready to move on.

anyway, if it means anything, a_m, here’s one mefite (and black, though not a leader) who will look in the general direction of las vegas and say, “i apologize for unjustly convicting you in the court of public opinion, mr. rob blair.”

— [lord_wolf]

As of when I’m posting this, wbm\$tr has yet to make another appearance on the thread.

iTunes ”Sunchyme (Sash Extended)“ by Dario G from the album Sunchyme (1997, 5:40).