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.

Keith Richards + Pepe Le Pew = Jack Sparrow?

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Okay, I have to see Pirates of the Caribbean now!

[Johnny Depp’s character Jack Sparrow] wears a red bandana and black eye makeup. His hair is beaded and he has three braids dangling from his chin. And his teeth are gold. Depp loved the idea of giving this 18th-century buccaneer a Rastafarian look. But he says the main inspiration for this character was Rolling Stones guitarist Keith Richards with a bit of everybody’s favourite cartoon skunk, Pepe Le Pew, thrown in for good measure.

“I was trying to figure the pirates of the 18th century and what it was all about. Initially you think money and all that. But I think it also had much more to do with freedom and to be out there moving forward. I sort of thought that pirates would be the rock ‘n’ roll stars of the 18th century. The greatest rock ‘n’ roll star of all time, the coolest rock ‘n’ roll star of all time, is Keith Richards — hands down. And Keith is very — I mean, you spend time with him and he’s very much a pirate.”

But when it came to conveying Jack Sparrow’s romantic nature, Depp immediately thought of Pepe Le Pew.

\”What I love about Pepe Le Pew is that this guy is absolutely convinced that he’s a great lady’s man. And he’s a skunk! You’re watching those cartoons and this guy falls deeply in love with this cat, and the cat clearly despises him.

“But Pepe Le Pew takes it that she’s playing hard to get — that she’s shy, poor thing. I loved that character’s blindness — no matter what the actual reality is, this guy sees only what he wants to see.”

Depp considers Pepe Le Pew the sort of character who was able “to run between the raindrops.” And that, he says, is how he envisaged Jack Sparrow.

(from Pirate’s Gold, via Anita)

The Passion

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Dad sent me a link a few minutes ago to this story on BeliefNet about a new film from Mel Gibson depicting the last days of Christ, which looks to be causing a bit of controversy.

But then, don’t all films about Christ cause controversy — especially before they’re released, when nobody can actually make an informed decision about any aspect of the film? Ugh. But anyway. The uproar at this point seems to be that Gibson has endeavored to create a brutally accurate depiction of the beatings and torture that Jesus went through.

Gibson, who has not yet found a studio to release the film, is a devout Catholic and was determined to show fully the torture and painful death of Jesus.

The creator of the bloody film about William Wallace, Braveheart, has not scrimped on the gore: scene after scene in the trailer, on numerous movie websites, feature a battered and bruised Jesus staggering through the streets of Jerusalem covered in blood.

The film, which cost 15 million pounds and is solely in Aramaic and Latin, has caused controversy in the US, even before a single image has been released.

First off — the film is “solely in Aramaic and Latin”? Wow. That, in itself, is pretty impressive.

The trailer itself (which I’ve mirrored on djwudi.com) looks quite interesting — and not nearly worth the controversy that it’s generating, given the subject matter at hand. I find it amazing and somewhat ridiculous that movie after movie comes out with incredible amounts of blood and gore, with nary a comment (Gibson’s own Braveheart won a multitude of awards, and it had some of the most violent battles I’d seen on screen), yet when someone dares to show the crucifixion without prettying it up, people get all up in arms.

Now, if the movie comes out and turns out to be theologically reprehensible, then people might have something to complain about. However, I doubt that that’s going to be the case, given Gibson’s well-documented devout Catholic views. It remains to be seen whether it will be groundbreaking in any way aside from not flinching away from the abuse that Jesus took, but I don’t think that Gibson is suddenly going to turn blasphemer.

For a good look at what Jesus had to endure, take a look at this article from the Blue Letter Bible site, “Medical Aspects of the Crucifixion of Jesus Christ“. I used to have this article (or one very similar to it) on my computer, and it’s a fascinating document.

Lastly, one caveat about the trailer that I did notice, and bothers me a little bit if Gibson was going for accuracy in his portrayal of the crucifixion. Jesus is shown being nailed to the cross through his palms. While this is a very popular depiction, it’s very medically unsound. From the above linked article (emphasis mine):

The patibulum was put on the ground and the victim laid upon it. Nails, about 7 inches long and with a diameter of 1 cm (roughly 3/8 of an inch) were driven in the wrists. The points would go into the vicinity of the median nerve, causing shocks of pain to radiate through the arms. It was possible to place the nails between the bones so that no fractures (or broken bones) occurred. Studies have shown that nails were probably driven through the small bones of the wrist, since nails in the palms of the hand would not support the weight of a body. In ancient terminology, the wrist was considered to be part of the hand.

Ah, well. The movie’s due to be released next Easter, so we’re not likely to find out much more about how good it actually is until then. Aside from the one gaffe of the placement of the nails, though, it definitely looks interesting, and I’m looking forward to finding out more about it.

Dean support in Washington

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Speaking of the Stranger, I just happened across an article that looks at the ever-growing support for Howard Dean (and John Kerry) here in Washington State.

Dean has also won the support of former state party chair Karen Marchioro, who says she went to the annual meeting of the Democratic National Committee in February as a Kerry supporter, but was won over to Dean after hearing his fiery speech and after meeting him personally. She sees a regional divide in the party, with Left Coast insiders more amenable to Dean’s call for a head-on confrontation with the Bush administration and its policies. She recently attended a California party convention where hordes of party insiders expressed support for Dean’s candidacy after hearing him speak, she says.

Due to my work schedule, I haven’t been able to show up at any of the local Dean meetups or gatherings, unfortunately — they’re all scheduled for Wednesday evenings when I’m at work. Dean is supposed to be here himself on Monday, August 25^th^, though, as part of the “People-Powered Howard Sleepless Summer Tour“, and I may just see if I can escape from work early that day to show up.

Losing a voice

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Many years ago, Anchorage used to have two newspapers in town. The Anchorage Daily News was the more liberal of the two, while the Anchorage Times was the more conservative. It’s been long enough now that I don’t remember all the details, but after a while, the Anchorage Times closed its doors, and Anchorage became a one newspaper town. These days, all that’s left of the Times is an editorial column called Voice of the Times that was created as a way to continue a separate editorial voice in the city.

Currently in Seattle, a similar situation is developing. Seattle’s two newspapers, the Seattle Times and the Seattle Post-Intelligencer have been operating under a joint operating agreement for the past few years. The Seattle Times now wants out of the JOA, however, and it’s looking more and more likely that Seattle may soon become a one-paper town if the Times gets its way.

Having been around for the loss of the Anchorage Times, I have to say, I’m not looking forward to losing the P-I. While in Anchorage we were lucky enough to keep the more liberal of the two papers publishing, here in Seattle, the P-I is the more liberal of the two papers, and it’s the one were likely to lose. Beyond even just the editorial slant of which paper survives, though, I think that it’s important that there be more than one major public voice in a city, especially one the size of Seattle.

Once the Anchorage Times folded, I felt that there was a marked decrease in the quality of the Anchorage Daily News. Without the constant competition and opposing viewpoints, there just didn’t seem to be as much drive left at the ADN to keep up the quality that it had had before, and it wasn’t long after the fall of the Times that I stopped bothering to read the ADN on a regular basis. It just felt like much of the heart and fire that used to drive the paper was no longer there without the Times to challenge it.

On the bright side, though, Seattle does have two good weekly newspapers — the Stranger and the Seattle Weekly. This weeks edition of the Seattle Weekly has a wonderful story looking at the history of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, and ruminating on everything we could lose if the P-I is forced to close.

The P-I’s newsroom culture in the 1960s and 1970s was far more freewheeling than what the staid management of the Times could have handled. At the Times, reporters wore sport coats and ties and trimmed their hair neatly and were largely a well-behaved bunch. The P-I was a newspaper that tolerated long hair and beards among its male staff at a time when those were firing offenses in many of the country’s newsrooms. It would, in the mid-1960s, send future novelist Tom Robbins and gonzo writer Darrell Bob Houston, both then copy editors, and cartoonist Ray Collins to cover Timothy Leary’s LSD conference in Berkeley, Calif. It ran a Hearst-dictated editorial endorsing Richard Nixon in 1972 but then allowed a group comprising more than half its news staff to take out an ad in their own newspaper endorsing George McGovern.

[…]

Frank Herbert, author of the Dune series and one of the most successful sci-fi novelists of all time, wrote the first Dune book while covering higher education for the P-I. He retired from daily journalism in 1971 after optioning Dune to a movie studio. Tom Robbins quit the P-I in 1970 and moved over to the Washington coast, where he eventually wrote Another Roadside Attraction, the first of seven novels. He now lives in La Conner.

There are a lot more good stories buried in the article. It may be nearly hopeless, but I’d be very disappointed if the Times ended up being the sole daily newspaper in Seattle.

Internet based campaigning

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Doc Searls has started keeping an eye on Dean’s campaign lately, and he takes a good look today at some of the tech issues the campaign might face as they continue to gain momentum.

Take the matter of comments.

That last post has 117 comments. Other comment piles below other posts number 40, 76, 101, 21, 71, 136, 156, 152, 98, 132 and so on. These are near-Slashdot numbers.

They are also unmoderated. In fact, there is no way to moderate them (in a Slashdot sense) on a Moveable Type blog. Or on any type of blog, far as I know. Other than by taking them down.

This apparently happened to a post by Richard Bennett to the comment list at a Dean blog entry on Monday. I was later told by email from a friend close to the Dean Campaign that the deletion was a mistake (by a campaign worker, not Dean) and that the campaign has a no-censorship policy on the blog. (One that also applies, presumably, to Dean’s guest posts on the Lessig blog, where the largest comment pile currently numbers 183.)

Dean and his campaign have been doing an incredible job of embracing the technology available to them, and doing everything they can to use it to their advantage. The comments on their posts not only keep discussions of key topics active long beyond when the initial post goes up, but also provides excellent fodder for campaign tactics and ideas.

It’s fascinating to watch, and seeing others far more of note to the Blogosphere than I take notice of it themselves is wonderful.