The skyline is back

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One minor change to the site design here — I moved my shot of the Seattle skyline that I use over at The Long Letter to this weblog also. Even when that’s the only change, replacing that garish green with the black and white skyline gives a very different feel to the page. I like it. It’s a return to the cool blue/grey combination that I keep returning to.

Bright neon lime green just wasn’t “me”, anyway. ;)

Squirrel Monkeys

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Two pieces of news broke in one day yesterday.

Item one: “Microsoft acknowledged a critical vulnerability Wednesday in nearly all versions of its flagship Windows operating system software…[which] could allow hackers to seize control of a victim’s Windows computer over the Internet, stealing data, deleting files or eavesdropping on e-mails.”

Item two: “The Homeland Security Department has chosen Microsoft Corp. as its preferred supplier of desktop computer and server software, according to a statement issued late Tuesday. …perhaps most important to Homeland Security’s mission to get agencies communicating more easily, Microsoft will provide the standard e-mail software for the entire department.”

I loved Jeffrey Zeldman’s summary:

Let’s see what the government might have chosen in its effort to protect American lives from ruthless, technologically sophisticated terrorists:

UNIX, Linux
Inexpensive or free.
Requires some user knowledge.
Practically invulnerable to attack.
Mac OS
Costs money.
Easy to use.
Practically invulnerable to attack.
Windows
Costs money.
Easy to use.
Can be hacked by a squirrel monkey, thus is wide open to attack.
Produced by a company the Department of Justice found guilty of criminally abusing its monopoly power — a finding that is supposed to result in punishment, not in fat contracts bankrolled by taxpayers.

To the bureaucratic mind, the choice was obvious.

Sounds safe and secure to me.

Two more

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Two more quick links worth browsing, then I think I’m done with politics for the evening — there’s only so much bile I can choke back in one sitting, after all.

Incidentally, both of these come from Len, who I’ve been finding a lot of good stuff through lately. I seriously considered putting him in my recommended links post the other night — the only reason I didn’t is that he’s a bit more Dean-centric (not that there’s anything wrong with that!), while the three I chose are more wide-ranging. He’s still definitely worth checking on a regular basis.

Anyway. Two stories: first up, one about what Prairie deemed the “Passing Judgement on Poor Women With Bastard Children Act“. Secondly, more of Bush’s prior supporters are realizing that, to quote some old famous dead guy, “something smells rotten in Denmark…“.

Thoughtcrime

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Be careful what you read in public:

“The FBI is here,”Mom tells me over the phone. Immediately I can see my mom with her back to a couple of Matrix-like figures in black suits and opaque sunglasses, her hand covering the mouthpiece like Grace Kelly in Dial M for Murder. This must be a joke, I think. But it’s not, because Mom isn’t that funny.

“The who?” I say.

“Two FBI agents. They say you’re not in trouble, they just want to talk. They want to come to the store.”

[…]

Trippi’s partner speaks up: “Any reading material? Papers?” I don’t think so. Then Trippi decides to level with me: “I’ll tell you what, Marc. Someone in the shop that day saw you reading something, and thought it looked suspicious enough to call us about. So that’s why we’re here, just checking it out. Like I said, there’s no problem. We’d just like to get to the bottom of this. Now if we can’t, then you may have a problem. And you don’t want that.”

You don’t want that? Have I just been threatened by the FBI? Confusion and a light dusting of panic conspire to keep me speechless. Was I reading something that morning? Something that would constitute a problem?

[…]

Special Agent Trippi didn’t return calls from CL. But Special Agent Joe Paris, Atlanta field office spokesman, stressed that specific FBI investigations are confidential. He wouldn’t confirm or deny the Schultz interview.

“In this post-911 era, it is the absolute responsibility of the FBI to follow through on any tips of potential terrorist activity,” Paris says. “Are people going to take exception and be inconvenienced by this at times? Oh, yeah. … A certain amount of convenience is going to be offset by an increase in security.”

Welcome to America, ~~2003~~ 1984.

(via Tom Tomorrow and Len)

Pashazade / Effendi / Felaheen

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Something else for my reading list, courtesy of Thousand Faced Moon, who I found by wandering through TypePad’s list of recently updated TypePad blogs:

I’m impatiently waiting for Simon & Schuster to get off their butts and publish Jon Courtenay Grimwood’s Felaheen in the States. You’d think a science fiction series set in the Near East would be pretty darn topical these days, but the second book in the sequence, Effendi was only published here by Simon & Schuster in February. Bastards. Fortunately Ziesing gives me my fix when I need it.

Metallica smokes too much crack

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I couldn’t make something this bizarre up.

Metallica are taking legal action against independant Canadian rock band Unfaith over what they feel is unsanctioned usage of two chords the band has been using since 1982 : E and F.

“People are going to get on our case again for this, but try to see it from our point of view just once,” stated Metallica’s Lars Ulrich. “We’re not saying we own those two chords, individually — that would be ridiculous. We’re just saying that in that specific order, people have grown to associate E, F with our music.”

Metallica filed a trademark infringement suit against the indie group at the US district court for central California on Monday. According to the drummer, the continued use of the two chords causes “confusion, deception and mistake in the minds of the public”.

Think this is a joke? Here’s the official press release from Metallica’s site.

I hope this is a joke, a spoof, or some stupid publicity stunt. Whatever it ends up being, as far as I’m concerned, Metallica has just officially crossed over into the “too dumb to be food” category.

(via jc)

[UPDATE]{.underline}
D was just kind enough to inform me that, indeed, this is a hoax. It’s rare that I get taken in by hoaxes — good job!

Why did the chicken cross the road?

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Plato: For the greater good.

Karl Marx: It was a historical inevitability.

Machiavelli: So that its subjects will view it with admiration, as a chicken which has the daring and courage to boldly cross the road, but also with fear, for whom among them has the strength to contend with such a paragon of avian virtue? In such a manner is the princely chicken’s dominion maintained.

Hippocrates: Because of an excess of light pink gooey stuff in its pancreas.

Jacques Derrida: Any number of contending discourses may be discovered within the act of the chicken crossing the road, and each interpretation is equally valid as the authorial intent can never be discerned, because structuralism is DEAD, DAMMIT, DEAD!

Thomas de Torquemada: Give me ten minutes with the chicken and I’ll find out.

Timothy Leary: Because that’s the only kind of trip the Establishment would let it take.

Douglas Adams: Forty-two.

Nietzsche: Because if you gaze too long across the Road, the Road gazes also across you.

B.F. Skinner: Because the external influences which had pervaded its sensorium from birth had caused it to develop in such a fashion that it would tend to cross roads, even while believing these actions to be of its own free will.

Carl Jung: The confluence of events in the cultural gestalt necessitated that individual chickens cross roads at this historical juncture, and therefore synchronicitously brought such occurrences into being.

Jean-Paul Sartre: In order to act in good faith and be true to itself, the chicken found it necessary to cross the road.

Ludwig Wittgenstein: The possibility of “crossing” was encoded into the objects “chicken” and “road”, and circumstances came into being which caused the actualization of this potential occurrence.

Albert Einstein: Whether the chicken crossed the road or the road crossed the chicken depends upon your frame of reference.

Aristotle: To actualize its potential.

Buddha: If you meet the chicken on the road, kill it.

Howard Cosell: It may very well have been one of the most astonishing events to grace the annals of history. An historic, unprecedented avian biped with the temerity to attempt such an herculean achievement formerly relegated to homo sapien pedestrians is truly a remarkable occurence.

Salvador Dali: The Fish.

Darwin: It was the logical next step after coming down from the trees.

Emily Dickinson: Because it could not stop for death.

Epicurus: For fun.

Ralph Waldo Emerson: It didn’t cross the road; it transcended it.

Johann Friedrich von Goethe: The eternal hen-principle made it do it.

Ernest Hemingway: To die. In the rain.

Werner Heisenberg: We are not sure which side of the road the chicken was on, but it was moving very fast.

David Hume: Out of custom and habit.

Jack Nicholson: ‘Cause it (censored) wanted to. That’s the (censored) reason.

Pyrrho the Skeptic: What road?

The Sphinx: You tell me.

Mr. T: If you saw me coming you’d cross the road too!

Henry David Thoreau: To live deliberately…and suck all the marrow out of life.

Mark Twain: The news of its crossing has been greatly exaggerated.

Molly Yard: It was a hen!

Zeno of Elea: To prove it could never reach the other side.