Happy Birthday Jacqueline

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Prairie and I spent a very pleasant evening last night at Jacqueline Passey‘s birthday party. There was a wonderfully odd mix of people there, as she’d invited people from all the various disparate areas of her life: webloggers, economists, libertarians, sci-fi conventionists, and school friends. Needless to say, this made for quite a few very interesting conversations over the course of the night, and we both enjoyed ourselves.

Her “crazy peace activist” friend Fred introduced us to a few pieces of slang that he’d discovered recently while following news from the troops in Iraq that he thinks might be recent additions to the long list of military slang soon to become part of the popular consciousness:

Salmon Day
You spend all day swimming upstream just to get fucked and die.
Adminisphere
The “powers that be” above your immediate superior.
Blamestorming Session
The process of determining who in the adminisphere is at fault after a salmon day.

We also met Mike Layfield, who created a Hexagonal Chess game that looks quite interesting. While I’m no huge chess player — my skill level is limited to knowing how the pieces move — the variant looks to be a fun twist on the game, and there’s even a java-based version I can practice on until I pick up an actual play set.

At one point we were treated to Jacqueline’s stump speech — she’s working on running as the Libertarian Candidate for Washington Secretary of State, and is working on getting the funds for her filing fee to officially launch her campaign. While I’m no Libertarian, I have absolutely no problems with the party doing their best to keep our elections as open as possible and keep themselves on the ballot, so I went ahead and donated a little bit to her campaign. Besides, I hadn’t brought a birthday present or card, so I figured it could count for that, too. ;)

Jacqueline had covered one wall of her apartment in butcher paper and left a box of crayons on the floor so that people could decorate her wall if they felt like it. At some point during the night, some unknown person scrawled a complex mathematical formula on the paper, and wrote “Limerick:” above it. This wasn’t discovered until later in the evening, after they left, and soon after the discovery most of the guests were gathered in the hallway, doing their best to solve the equation and figure out the limerick.

Now, my math skills are not anywhere near the level of math that had been written on the wall, so I knew I wouldn’t be able to help with solving the equation. However, while visiting the restroom, I started thinking about it, and realized that solving the equation probably wouldn’t help, as it would merely result in either a number or an expression, and wouldn’t actually produce a limerick — what they needed to do was find out how best to read the equation out loud, following the A-A-B-B-A structure that limericks use.

Unfortunately, by the time I got back to the group, one of the other guests — a math teacher at Shoreline Community College — had realized the same thing, and they were well on their way to solving the puzzle, so I didn’t end up contributing at all. Still, it was fun to watch everyone work it out, and Jacqueline got a kick out of having such a geeky party. :) She’s promised to post a picture of the equation along with the final limerick at some point, and I’ll point to it when she does.

At that point, both Prairie and I were pretty tired — I’d had to work the opening shift at work, so I’d been up since five in the morning (an incredibly rare event for me) — so we made our goodbyes and headed back to my apartment to crash out.

iTunes: “Hold On” by McLachlan, Sarah from the album Nettwerk Decadence (1993, 4:12).

Two from This Modern World

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This Modern World, currently under the stewardship of Bob Harris as Tom Tomorrow moves, kicks today off with two equally incindiary articles (though each for different reasons).

Item one: According to The New Republic, Bush requests Bin Laden’s capture in time for elections.

Okay, this one isn’t a surprise in the “gee, I didn’t see that coming” category…more in the “I can’t believe they’re this blatant about it” category.

This spring, the administration significantly increased its pressure on Pakistan to kill or capture Osama bin Laden, his deputy, Ayman Al Zawahiri, or the Taliban’s Mullah Mohammed Omar, all of whom are believed to be hiding in the lawless tribal areas of Pakistan.

[…]

This public pressure would be appropriate, even laudable, had it not been accompanied by an unseemly private insistence that the Pakistanis deliver these high-value targets (HVTs) before Americans go to the polls in November. …The New Republic has learned that Pakistani security officials have been told they must produce HVTs by the election. According to one source in Pakistan’s powerful Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), “The Pakistani government is really desperate and wants to flush out bin Laden and his associates after the latest pressures from the U.S. administration to deliver before the [upcoming] U.S. elections.”

[…]

A third source, an official who works under ISI’s director, Lieutenant General Ehsan ul-Haq, informed tnr that the Pakistanis “have been told at every level that apprehension or killing of HVTs before [the] election is [an] absolute must.” What’s more, this source claims that Bush administration officials have told their Pakistani counterparts they have a date in mind for announcing this achievement: “The last ten days of July deadline has been given repeatedly by visitors to Islamabad and during [ul-Haq’s] meetings in Washington.” …according to this ISI official, a White House aide told ul-Haq last spring that “it would be best if the arrest or killing of [any] HVT were announced on twenty-six, twenty-seven, or twenty-eight July”–the first three days of the Democratic National Convention in Boston.

Item Two: Children held and possibly tortured or abused in Abu Gahraib?

This one started with a German news report, and has started to find its way around the world’s news sites — at least, those not in the U.S. — and may potentially threaten Norway’s relations with the U.S.

Three days ago, a German TV newsmagazine called Report Mainz broadcast an eight-minute segment reporting that the International Red Cross found at least 107 children in coaliton-administered detention centers in Iraq.

The report also quotes from a yet-unpublished June 2004 UNICEF report, which (as near as I can tell through my crappy German) confirms that children were routinely arrested and “interned” in a camp in Um-Qasr. UNICEF seems particularly vexed with the “internment” status, since that means indefinite detention.

Another storm seems about to begin. Possibly a large one.

[…]

Hit the Norwegian links, and you’ll find that the local Amnesty International has stated that “Norway can not continue its military collaboration with the US in light of the alleged torture of children.” Norway actually listens to its activists; you’ll find that the Prime Minister’s office says it plans to address the situation with the U.S. “in a very severe and direct way.”

If this ain’t news, I don’t know what the hell is.

Okay, so maybe these aren’t the cheeriest stories to start your day with. Sorry about that. I’ll see if I can do better.

It’s illegal to photograph the Ballard Locks

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That is, it’s illegal if you look like a terrorist.

Being a Ballard resident, the Ballard Locks seemed like the best available subject for my project. I knew I’d be able to set up my tripod and work under fairly consistent conditions. Having spoken with the park ranger in charge of the facility on Monday, I also knew that I had every legal right to photograph from that location. So, I went to the Ballard Locks, in the rain, found the best location I could, and waited for passing trains and boats.

Within about thirty minutes of my setting up my tripod I noticed a lone security officer coming down the hill to ask me a few questions. Well, no…that’s not exactly accurate. He wasn’t politely asking me questions. He’d accessorized his ensemble with a ninety-pound German Shepherd, and was talking at me in authoritative and degrading tones. He wanted me to know that he was an authority.

[…]

I gave the cop my ID, and it was quickly whisked away by one officer to the top of the hill. I went on to express my sense of helplessness, shame, humiliation and anger about the confrontation. I insisted that I was a photography student and that I had done absolutely nothing wrong. I acknowledged my constitutional rights. I pointed to curious bystanders, and pointed out that they had cameras, but that none of the police were interested in them. I identified a man with a canvas and easel, standing directly underneath the train bridge, and asked why no one was asking him for his ID. In retrospect, I realize that I still wanted someone to say it to my face.

The police officer had failed to rebut my arguments, but he was definitely being a lot nicer now (which was quite welcome). He’d been explaining how the SPD are required to investigate all calls, which I said I understood, but I was still looking for some real accountability. That’s when one of the three non-uniformed men stepped forward, brandishing his badge, and began talking at me with his own rendition of the voice of absolute authority.

“I’ve listened to this for over five minutes. Look here. You see this?” Special Agent McNamara said, producing his badge. “This is a federal badge. We’re not with the rest of them. We’’re federal agents from Homeland Security…”

Meanwhile, of course, many other people — residents and tourists alike — are happily snapping photographs of the locks. But then, they’re not dark-skinned, so they don’t look like terrorists, and are safe.

This kind of crap is absolutely ludicrous. It’s exactly the kind of behavior that Bush and company are encouraging with stunts like Ridge’s recent “there’s a threat, but we don’t know what, where, or when, but it’s dangerous, but we’re not raising the alert level, but something could happen to somebody somewhere” stunt. And it’s so disturbingly close to Gestapo-style “let me see your papers” policing that it frightens and saddens me.

In some sense, I’m lucky, as a fair-skinned, red-haired caucasian. Much of the racial profiling that has become so apparently popular these days, I’m never going to have to deal directly with. But that doesn’t mean that I don’t see it, it doesn’t mean that I’m not upset by it, and it certainly doesn’t mean that I’m about to turn a blind eye to it.

(via Arcterex, Boing Boing, seattle.metroblogging, and others)

Spamalot

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Coming to Broadway in early 2005: Monty Python’s ‘Spamalot’, \”the musical lovingly ripped off from the motion picture, ‘Monty Python and the Holy Grail.\”‘

Starring David Hyde Pierce as Sir Robin, Hank Azaria as Lancelot…and Tim Curry as King Arthur.

If there’s any way I can find the time and money, it just might be time for me to find a way to visit New York.

(You’ve just gotta love the picture caption in that CNN article, too….)

(via Dori Smith)

iTunes: “Starship (Raumschiff) Edelweiss” by Edelweiss from the album Wonderful World of Edelweiss (1992, 4:02).

Meme fun

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This was originally a LiveJournal meme, but it was so goofy and intricate that I had to join in the fun. So. Bear with me.

  1. Take your LJ username and replace each letter with the corresponding number (A=1, B=2, etc…). If your name contains numbers, you’ll need to convert them to letters first before you can convert to numbers.
    • Michael Hanscom = 13 9 3 8 1 5 12 8 1 14 19 3 15 13 (Since I’m doing this here, rather than on LiveJournal, I’ll use the name I post under on this weblog — which, conveniently enough, just happens to be my real name.)
  2. Add all of the numbers together to create a kind of super number.
    • 124
  3. Make a note of the first digit of this number, then add the digits of the number together.
    • First digit is 1.
    • 1 + 2 + 4 = 7.
  4. Find the post of this number in your LJ. If you don’t have that many posts, add the digits together again. Keep doing so until the number is smaller than your pathetic number of posts.
  5. Take the digit you noted in step 3, and count that many words into the post.
    • Just
  6. Use the resulting word in a Google Image Search, and select a picture from the first page. Post the results for us all to see.

'Just Try It' from Anger Dog StudiosA quick note regarding this image: while it was by far the best of the images that Google found for me, it was found on this journal page (no permalink, entry “Wow wow wow!!!” from Jan. 25, 2004), where it had been re-posted from Anger Dog Studios. I debated re-re-posting it here, but liked the image enough that I decided to go ahead and toss it up with credit to the original artist, who I’ll also be e-mailing and asking formal permission to leave the piece up. There’s a lot more excellent artwork at Anger Dog Studios, too, so feel free to wander that way and peruse what’s available in their galleries.

Reading protected LiveJournal entries via RSS

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Being able to subscribe to an RSS feed for any LiveJournal weblog by adding /rss to the end of the URL is all well and good, but I’ve been grumbling for a while that the downside to that is that it won’t let you read protected “friends only” entries, as by pulling the RSS feed you’re not actually logged into the LiveJournal system.

Well, many thanks to Phil for pointing out a trick he picked up from Brent Simmons — if you add /rss?auth=digest to the end of the URL, and include the standard HTTP authentication at the beginning of the URL (username:password@ between the protocol and the server address), then the RSS feed will include the protected entries.

In other words, using my LiveJournal as an example (even though it doesn’t have any protected entries, it’ll work for demonstrating the URL changes)…

  1. LiveJournal URL: http://www.livejournal.com/users/djwudi/
  2. LiveJournal RSS feed: http://www.livejournal.com/users/djwudi/rss (which actually maps to http://www.livejournal.com/users/djwudi/data/rss)
  3. LiveJournal RSS feed with protected entries: http://username:password@www.livejournal.com/users/djwudi/data/rss?auth=digest

Update: It appears that at some point over the past few months, ending the URL with ?auth=digest is no longer necessary. Simply using the string http://username:password@www.livejournal.com/users/username/data/rss (where the first ‘username’ and ‘password’ set are yours, and the second ‘username’ is that of the journal you’re reading) seems to work fine.

NOTE: This is not a technique for “hacking” LiveJournal to allow you to read protected entries that you would not otherwise have access to! All this does is allow you to ‘log in’ to LiveJournal via your RSS reader so that you can read your friends protected entries just as if you were logged in to the LiveJournal web interface. I do not know of a way to read protected entries that you have not been granted access to, and I’m not interested in trying to find one.

iTunes: “Getting Snippy With It” by Rollins, Henry from the album Talk is Cheap, Vol. 1 (2003, 6:48).

Kill Bill – Part Three

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I actually heard a rumor about this a couple of weeks ago, but I just now got around to a quick Google to see if there was any truth to what I’d heard. Apparently there is — Tarantino is planning on a third part to the Kill Bill saga.

In fifteen years.

“I have plans, actually not right away, but like in 15 years from now, I’ll do a third version of this saga,” the director said at a news conference to promote “Kill Bill — Vol. 2,” which opens in Spain next month.

Tarantino said part three would focus on the daughter of a hired killer that Uma Thurman’s character bumps off early in her revenge spree.

So. Incredibly. Cool.

iTunes: “Comfortably Numb” by Band, The/Morrison, Van/Waters, Roger from the album The Wall Live in Berlin (1990, 8:02).

Another excuse called into question

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One of the many excuses for our invasion of Iraq (once we couldn’t find any WMDs or any connection to 9-11) was that Saddam was a bad, bad man and needed to be seriously spanked, as evidenced by the fact that he gassed his own people, ordering the use of nerve gas against Iraqi Kurds in Halabja in March of 1988.

And, just like all the other excuses we’ve been given, this one is being called into question, and may not be true.

Evidence offered by a top CIA man could confirm the testimony given by Saddam Hussein at the opening of his trial in Baghdad Thursday that he knew of the Halabja massacre only from the newspapers.

Thousands were reported killed in the gassing of Iraqi Kurds in Halabja in the north of Iraq in March 1988 towards the end of Iraq’s eight-year war with Iran. The gassing of the Kurds has long been held to be the work of Ali Hassan al-Majid, named in the West because of that association as ‘Chemical Ali’. Saddam Hussein is widely alleged to have ordered Ali to carry out the chemical attack.

The Halabja massacre is now prominent among the charges read out against Saddam in the Baghdad court. When that charge was read out, Saddam replied that he had read about the massacre in a newspaper. Saddam has denied these allegations ever since they were made.

…the CIA boss has gone public with his evidence, and this evidence has been in the public domain for more than a year.

The CIA officer Stephen C. Pelletiere was the agency’s senior political analyst on Iraq during the Iran-Iraq war. As professor at the Army War College from 1988 to 2000, he says he was privy to much of the classified material that flowed through Washington having to do with the Persian Gulf.

In addition, he says he headed a 1991 Army investigation into how the Iraqis would fight a war against the United States, and the classified version of the report went into great detail on the Halabja affair.

Pelletiere went public with his information on no less a platform than The New York Times in an article on January 31 last year titled ‘A War Crime or an Act of War?’

A little web searching led me to a copy of Pelletiere’s article from the Times.

The accusation that Iraq has used chemical weapons against its citizens is a familiar part of the debate. The piece of hard evidence most frequently brought up concerns the gassing of Iraqi Kurds at the town of Halabja in March 1988, near the end of the eight-year Iran-Iraq war. President Bush himself has cited Iraq’s “gassing its own people,” specifically at Halabja, as a reason to topple Saddam Hussein.

But the truth is, all we know for certain is that Kurds were bombarded with poison gas that day at Halabja. We cannot say with any certainty that Iraqi chemical weapons killed the Kurds.

…immediately after the battle the United States Defense Intelligence Agency investigated and produced a classified report, which it circulated within the intelligence community on a need-to-know basis. That study asserted that it was Iranian gas that killed the Kurds, not Iraqi gas.

The agency did find that each side used gas against the other in the battle around Halabja. The condition of the dead Kurds’ bodies, however, indicated they had been killed with a blood agent – that is, a cyanide-based gas – which Iran was known to use. The Iraqis, who are thought to have used mustard gas in the battle, are not known to have possessed blood agents at the time.

Now, there were enough records of human rights violations in Iraq under Hussein’s rule that I in no way doubt that he is a bad, bad man who needs to be soundly spanked. However, from everything I’ve read to date, it very strongly appears that he told the truth when he said that Iraq had no WMDs, and he told the truth when he said that he heard of the Halabja massacre through the media, and did not order the gas attack.

It’s a little sad when there seem to be more verifiable instances of Saddam Hussein telling the truth than there are of the Bush administration.

(via Holden)

West Coast Bloggers

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Hellz yeah, biznatch — West Coast Bloggers, REPREZENT!

West Coast Bloggers

Or something like that.

Do we get our own gang signs now?

(via Boing Boing)

iTunes: “1/3 of a Nation” by Bytet from the album First Bite (1993, 5:13).