Caught by the Zeitgeist

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I’ve been having a blast recently watching the effects of current trends on my little corner of the ‘net here at djwudi.com. Last October I ran across a website claiming to be a protest against the latest installment in the Lord of the Rings trilogy of films, ‘The Two Towers’, equating its title to the WTC attacks of Sep. 11th. Seeing this as something ridiculous and fairly laughable, I posted about it.

Over the past week and a half or so, as the release date for LotR:TTT has grown closer and closer, that entry on my site has suddenly been getting a highly unusual amount of interest. While I figure my primary regular readership consists of somewhere around ten people (mostly family and friends, but I know I’ve picked up a few other readers over the past few months), I do get a fair amount of one-time visitors finding my site through search engines, so when a comment popped up on that post on Dec. 9th, I wasn’t all too surprised. But then another comment appeared. And another. And another! What the heck?

I wondered at first if I’d been linked to from another, more high-profile site, but that doesn’t seem to be the case at all. After going through my referral logs, it seems that this is all just due to people finding that page through searches, primarily from Google. At the time of this writing, Googling for “two towers protest” returns my page as the third primary link, and according to my site statistics for the past week, that has become the third most popular page on my site (197 hits during the week of 12/8-12/14, just behind my index page at 220 hits, and the index page for The Long Letter at 279 hits)!

Fun to watch, certainly. Not sure if I’ve picked up any more regular visitors or not from all this, and while it didn’t really lead to any discussion per se (more a lot of somewhat amusing self-righteous indignation and rambling, for the most part), it is kind of cool to see one page on my site with eighteen seperate comments posted, mostly from people that aren’t regulars (that I know of, at least).

Y’all come back now, ya heah?! ;)

Who’s protecting Eli Lilly?

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Drug company Eli Lilly is the maker of the drug Thimerosal, a mercury-based preservative that used to be a common ingredient in childhood vaccines. There is now substantial evidence that due to the mercury content, Thimerosal may be the cause of autism in many, many children, and Eli Lilly has been facing a number of lawsuits from parents looking for some help in caring for their children that were affected by the drug from this company.

Unfortunately, at the last minute, a provision was inserted into the Homeland Security Act that protects Eli Lilly from these lawsuits, moving the suits from state courts to a federal ‘vaccine court’ where damages are capped at $250,000.

And apparently, nobody knows how this piece of legislation got into the bill.

Now there is a $10,000 reward being offered for anyone who can identify who inserted this provision into the Homeland Security Act.

Lots more information on the issue can be found on TomPaine.com’s links to articles, with Counterspin digging into the background a bit.

(Thanks to Tom Tomorrow for the heads-up.)

Goodbye Gore, hello…

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Now that Al Gore has decided to step out of the ring for the next presidential race, the field looks pretty wide open. A few months ago, or even now, there wouldn’t be much chance of ousting Dubya from office, but who knows where things might stand in a couple years. In the meantime, I don’t really know much about any of the other potential Democratic candidates, so it was nice to see a quick rundown on the current possibilities over on BackupBrain last Sunday. Definitely gives me an idea of who to keep an eye on.

Lieberman: He’ll definitely run. …but there’s not a chance in hell that he could win against Bush in the general. Deplorably, there are too many people in this country that still will not vote for a Jew for president.

Kerry: He’s already running. …my issue with Kerry is part of the problem that Gore has: he’s so cautious, you think that everything coming out of his mouth has been pre-digested, run by a focus group, and vetted six ways from Sunday.

Edwards: Not this time, John. He’s smart, attractive, and he’s from the South, all of which helps a winner. But he’s a first-term senator, and he’s still finding out how things work in Washington.

Gephardt: He’s run for president before. He lost. …under his fabulous leadership, last month Democrats lost the best chance to regain the House for the next decade. He’s on the wrong side of many issues for me.

Daschle: He’s been a crappy Majority Leader. Period. Last week, he let Trent Lott off the hook for his racist comments, for pity’s sake. He can’t see a friggin’ red-meat issue when it slaps him in the face.

Howard Dean: (who?) This guy is already running. …at the moment, he’s the candidate with the best lineup on the issues. He’s a doctor, has, by all accounts, been a pretty good governor, and is fiscally conservative and socially liberal. That works for me. …I like this quote: “I have no patience with ideologues. I think they’re fundamentally disturbed.”

Biden, Feingold, Dodd, Wesley Clark: Puh-leeze.

I’m Karl Barth

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“We reject the false doctrine that the church could have permission to hand over the form of its message and of its order to whatever it itself might wish or to the vicissitudes of the prevailing ideological and political convictions of the day.”

You are Karl Barth!

You like your freedom, and are pretty stubborn against authority! You don’t care much for other people’s opinions either. You can come up with your own fun, and often enough you have too much fun. You are pretty popular because you let people have their way, even when you have things figured out better than them.

What theologian of the Christian Church are you?

(Via Doc Searls [who also came out as Karl Barth])

Blogs: 1, Lott: 0

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It’s been really fascinating over the past week or so to see Senator Lott’s comments create such a stir (and rightly so, I’d say) — primarily because it’s entirely possible that his comment just may have gotten swept under the rug had the ‘blogosphere’ not started voicing their outrage.

John Podhoretz of the New York Post recognized the work that various bloggers did in keeping the story alive in his column last Friday. This, then, has led to an interesting debate on just how much credit really can go to the blogging world — during which a link was posted to a Washington Post column by Howard Kurtz that also credits the blogosphere with keeping the story alive.

Neat to be able to watch a bunch of independent writers across the ‘net catch the ‘big boys’ of media napping.

Giant sea sparrows?

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An article on Nov. 10 about animal rights referred erroneously to an island in the Indian Ocean and to events there involving goats and endangered giant sea sparrows that could possibly lead to the killing of goats by environmental groups. Wrightson Island does not exist; both the island and the events are hypothetical figments from a book (also mentioned in the article), “Beginning Again,” by David Ehrenfeld. No giant sea sparrow is known to be endangered by the eating habits of goats.

— Correction in The New York Times, Dec. 15th, 2002 (via Metafilter)

As mr_crash_davis pointed out, “Not ‘No giant sea sparrow is endangered by…’, but ‘No giant sea sparrow is known to be…’, just in case one turns up somewhere.”

You’re owed $20

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A while back, the music industry was convicted in court of price fixing. If you purchased any audio recording (vinyl, cassette, or compact disc) between January 1st, 1995 and December 22nd, 2000, you are eligible to file a claim for reparation.

At the moment, if there is a cash disbursement, it will likely be somewhere between $5 and $20 per claimant. However, if enough people file claims that the disbursement would end up less than $5 per claimant, then the entirety of the settlement fee would be donated to not-for-profit, charitable, governmental or public entities to be used for music-related purposes or programs for the benefit of consumers who purchased Music Products. I think that sounds like a damn good option, and seeing as how I’m prettty sure that just about everyone I know bought at least one album at some point during those five years, I think you all should file your claim.

Link via Boing Boing

Interesting Apple rumors

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Some unusually interesting (to me, at least, as both an Apple fan and a music fan) rumors surfacing over at /. today.

First came this post…

danamania writes “Apple’s latest promotion is a gimmick with Madonna, Tony Hawk or Beck’s signature, or a No Doubt logo, on an iPod. It seems Apple’s really pushing the iPod as a too-cool fashion accessory as much as a too-cooler MP3 player… is Maddie’s signature worth an extra USD49 over the standard iPod?” Instead of $50 for the engraved signature, you can spend $20 to print “Madonna’s Signature” in beautiful Helvetica.

Then, in the followup comments, someone claiming to be from Apple posted the following in two separate comments:

Comment one…

I’m posting this anonymously to protect my job. Not that they’ll fire me or anything, but why risk it?

For several years, we (Apple) have been working on ways of customizing computers and electronics. It all started back in the Power Mac Cube days, when we were looking into new injection molding processes. That worked okay, but we got a lot of flak from customers who thought the mold lines in the plastic looked like cracks.

Now we’re looking at custom laser engraving, trying to figure out ways to get the cost down to less than a dollar per square inch. The idea is that you will be able to order your laptop with anything at all engraved on the surface: your name, a logo, a picture of your kids, whatever.

This little promo is just some of the runoff from that work.

Oh, and incidentally, Apple isn’t doing this for the money. I don’t want to say anything else too specific, but there’s more going on between Apple and these artists than just this. Expect to see more interesting things in the coming months.

…and comment two…

Actually, it’s a hell of a lot more interesting than that. And I’m astounded that nobody’s guessed it yet.

See, the deal is that Apple’s management — Steve more than anybody else, really — sees the record companies kinda dropping the ball. People are happy with MP3-quality music, and they want to be able to buy it over the Internet. Current systems for doing that just suck. Since Apple controls .Mac, the OS, iTunes, the iPod, and QuickTime 6/AAC, they’re the only ones who are in a position to make a real end-to-end, easy-to-use digital music distribution system happen.

In the future, you’ll (assuming we can cut a deal with Apple Records on that nasty trademark matter) be able to plug you iPod into your Mac, browse a library of songs via iTunes, and download them directly to your iPod over broadband or AirPort. Micro-payment (well, semi-micro; on the order of a dollar per song) will be handled through the .Mac “one click” system, which Apple licensed from Amazon and already uses in iPhoto for buying photographic prints on line. The only DRM will be the stuff we’ve already go built into the iPod that makes it inconvenient, though of course not impossible, to copy music off of it once it’s been put on.

When we go live with this — which we’re hoping to do by the end of next year at the latest — we’re going to need some big names. That’s why we’ve been talking to Madonna, No Doubt, Beck, Dave Matthews Band, Moby, and some others.

Basically Apple is trying to do an end-run around the record companies and the RIAA. It’s not done yet, and it may not work, but the foundation is there and all that’s really left is to sort out the legal details.

If anybody finds out I’ve posted this, I’m out of a job, and I’ll probably end up with my ass in court. Hope this “anonymous coward” thing works as advertised.

The laptop engraving sounds very interesting, though I’m not sure how much I’d take advantage of it — though if I had the money to blow on a TiBook, I’d love to add a few extra dollars to get my tattoo design emblazoned on the lid.

The full-solution music idea sounds quite interesting, though. Seems to me that if anyone’s in a position to get this up and running, it’s most likely going to be Apple. A dollar a song sounds a bit steep at first look — it doesn’t drop the price significantly, if at all, over buying a CD from a store — but then, I just really started playing with .mp3 files this past year, and even then I’m pretty much sticking with my own stuff. Someone more into tracking down and finding music online may have a better idea of how appealing this idea might be.

Message from our sponsor

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We interrupt this program with a special bulletin.

America is now under martial law.

All constitutional rights have been suspended. Stay in your homes. Do not attempt to contact loved ones, insurance agents, or attorneys. Shut up. Do not attempt to think, or depression may occur. Stay in your homes. Curfew is at 7pm sharp, after work. Anyone caught outside the gates of their subdivision sectors after curfew will be shot. Remain calm. Do not panic. Your neighborhood watch officer will be by to collect urine samples in the morning. Anyone caught interfering with the collection of urine samples will be shot. Houses will be inspected for trace elements at noon. Anyone who fails to display the required embossed Mexican velvet painting of Alexander Haig on their living room wall will be shot. Cameras and surveillance equipment will be posted on all lampposts and streetlights. Anyone failing to attend required worship services on Sunday will be promptly arrested and dispatched to a re-education resort. Stay in your homes. Remain calm. The number one enemy of progress is questions. National security is more important than individual will. All sports broadcasts will proceed as normal. No more than two people may gather anywhere without permission. Use only the drugs prescribed by your boss or supervisor. Shut up! Be happy! Obey all orders without question. The comfort you’ve demanded is now mandatory. Be happy! At last — everything is done for you.

— Jello Biafra, “Message from our sponsor” from No More Cocoons

Written and performed back in 1992, I was listening to this spoken word piece by Jello Biafra tonight and it struck me how little has changed since it was written. Aside from the reference to Al Haig, this little pice of satire is just as relevant today as it was ten years ago. Kind of funny and sad at the same time, I think.

More on FOAF

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A couple days ago I was babbling about having finally created my FOAF file.

Today, Phil pointed out something I’d actually looked for the other day, but hadn’t managed to find: a web-based FOAF explorer that loads and parses FOAF files. If my babble of the other day was only somewhat comprehensible, seeing what can be done with these FOAF thingy-ma-bobs might make it a bit more clear.