February 2006 Archives

Damn, someone set up a Wikipedia page about me. Now I've truly arrived on the Web...

A week ago, on February 22, Chris Pirllo, uber geek, decided to take a break from Google:

I've been growing increasingly concerned over how Google is starting to do more... and the world is just letting it do more without asking questions (because most users trust the brand blindly). Google is everywhere. I want it to be everywhere, but I also don't want it to be everywhere - because that's very scary. I trust that they will continue to "do no evil" (as opposed to "do know evil?") - but perhaps there's such a thing as "too big?" I have to prepare for the worst.

...

I'm going to live without searching for anything on Google (or using Google software) for a week... ohmygod.

You’re a better man than I am, Charlie Brown: I don’t know if I could do it. I’ve said for years now that without access to the Internet I feel like part of my brain has been turned off, but when I really think about it, it’s Google that makes my brain feel bigger. I mean, sure, there are plenty of other search engines out there, but Googling something has become so instinctive and automatic to me that to have to stop and think about where I’m gonna go to search throws a big ol’ spanner in the works.

Is Chris right, though? Maybe... There’s a Google seach box built into Safari, the browser I’m using, and there’s something a little insidious about that. Ask.com just killed Jeeves in an attempt to better compete with Google. When cartoon spokesmen are getting axed, has it all just gone too far?

How’s it going for Chris? He’s blogging the experience, of course, and yesterday he decided to extend his experiment for another week.

I was surfing around looking for something for a film review I’m working on for FlickFilosopher.com, and I came across Mike Godwin’s blog -- he’s the former lawyer for the Electronic Frontier Foundation for whom, as you may already know, Godwin’s Law is named. But anyway, this isn’t about Godwin’s Law the law (which has to do with how likely it is for someone to invoke Nazism and Hitler in an online discussion -- see Wikipedia for a complete rundown and analysis of the law) but Godwin’s Law the blog.

Here I am, madly in love with my new iBook with its 1.5GB of RAM and 1.4 GHz processor and its large (for a laptop) millions-of-colors screen and especially with OS X, with its floaty 3-D windows and buttons and drag bars with their metallic sheen and it’s all just so luscious and intuitive... and here’s Godwin’s blog:

I find the idea that “blogging” could be on its way out is a rather bizarre one -- it’s akin to the idea that “database-driven Web site publishing” is on its way out. So I’m glad to see I’m not alone in thinking how weird is this “cottage industry in Whither Blogging? articles,” as Jason Fry at The Wall Street Journal calls it. Fry just gets the big It in a way that other journalists bitching about blogging don’t seem to.

For instance, one of the “Whither Blogging” pieces -- by Clive Thompson in New York Magazine -- contains this curious passage:

Octavia E. Butler, considered the first black woman to gain national prominence as a science fiction writer, died after falling and striking her head on the cobbled walkway outside her home, a close friend said. She was 58.

[from the AP via SeattlePI.com]

Much of the news coverage of her death -- and consequently of her life -- have pointed out, not inaccurately, that, as a black woman in a white male arena, she was a genuine pioneer. But she leaves a much more enduring legacy not just to the geek community but to the world as a whole. Her fiction, like her novels Parable of the Sower and Dawn, elevated SF to the level of literature.

It was, perhaps, a result of her extreme outside perspective on American culture: To be one of those weird science fiction readers at any time prior to the last ten or 15 years or so was to automatically be an outsider. But white male SF fans could at least pass for “normal,” were granted an entree into the mainstream by dint of their skin color and gender. But Butler’s view would have been from a very different standpoint, and the metaphors of her fiction (such as the relationship between the humans and the very alien aliens in her Xenogenesis series) cast us all into the position she must have perceived her own as. She made us all feel, in some ways, what it must have been like to be her. Science fiction is, as far as I’m concerned, a controlled experiment to discover what it means to be human -- how much can you change about our bodies, our minds, our lives, before we’re no longer human? Butler’s fiction, in some ways, changed the idea of what the control could be, made us turn around and look in a different direction for the starting point of humanity. It may seem like a small thing, but it isn’t.

SF writer Steven Barnes, quoted in The Seattle Times, says:

"I consider Octavia to be the most important science-fiction writer since Mary Shelley."

And he’s absolutely right. Shelley invented SF, and Butler made it art of a world-class stature.

Wish I’d known about the first Comic-Con in New York City earlier than, oh, the week before it happened: it sounds like it was a ton of fun. Says ManhattanOffender.com:

The ambience, a cross between islamic fundamentalism and pure camp, is catching and mystifying at the same time.

(ManhattanOffender.com has lots of pix and junk.)

This is major evidence of the triumph of the geeks:

The Javits Center was packed tight all weekend for the first New York Comic-Con—as Newsarama reports, Saturday's crowds were, thanks to an aggressive local media campaign, "not a lot in terms of a comic book convention, but a lot in terms of a rock show." As people lined up all over the front of the convention center, the earliest panels began before many fans had even gotten onto the main floor; the show had completely sold out by 12:30 and state police were keeping a tight rein on people coming in and out of the exhibition.

[from GalleyCat]

Like a rock show.

[spoilers]

SG-1 takes up “Arthur’s Mantle”:

Got a coupla questions:

When did Albert Brooks join the SGC?

Take me to your leader...

This is what happens when geek toys take over the world but geeks themselves don’t get to decide how to use them:

Tech makes working harder, not easier

Most U.S. workers say they feel rushed on the job, but they are getting less accomplished than a decade ago, according to newly released research....

The biggest culprit is the technology that was supposed to make work quicker and easier, experts say.

[from Reuters via CNet News.com]

You can’t blame the technology for this: computers are still just stupid machines that do what we tell them to do. All the cool tech would make work quicker and easier if the suits who make corporate decisions didn’t interpret “hey, workers are working quicker and easier” to mean that “hey, we can give workers more work to do.”

In honor of Brokeback Mountain, guys with big hats: Roy Rogers, NYC's naked cowboy (who, yes, is always almost naked, even in the dead of winter, in the middle of Times Square), and our Fearless Leader.

So, a year after he began his micropatronage experiment, uber blogger Jason Kottke has thrown in the towel, deeming the venture somewhat less than successful:

One year ago today, I asked the readers of kottke.org to become micropatrons and support my efforts in producing the site for a year. Over the course of three weeks, people generously sent in their financial support[1], giving me enough to pay my salary for the entire year[2] and not have to bug you about it every few days. So the year is up and I've been trying to think about what to say on this occasion for, oh, about six months now, but I'm undecided even now. I guess I'll start with the important bit. I'm not going to be asking for contributions again. Part of it has to do with the reasons outlined at the bottom of this post. I haven't grown traffic enough or developed a sufficient cult of personality to make the subscription model a sustainable one for kottke.org...those things just aren't interesting to me.

His definintion of failure is rather interesting, though:

I’ve known about The Elephant Sanctuary in rural western Tennessee for some time, though it’s not open to the public: it’s near where some friends of mine live, and in fact they helped build the fence around the huge site. But I was reminded about the important work the organization is doing by a piece that was running on CNN over this past weekend (you can see the online version of the story here): Sanctuary founders Carol Buckley and Scott Blais have just finished a rescue of a group of pachyderms from the Hawthorn Corporation, which had abused and mistreated creatures in its supposed care.

It’s best just to let the Sanctuary explain its mission:

...before it has barely gotten started:

There was a power outage at my house over the weekend, and the Stargates didn't tape. So I've missed both of Friday's episodes. Back to blogging through the gates next weekend...

So I'm in the lobby of the Sheraton Boston, where there's free wifi for hotel guests, though the hotel doesn't go out of its way to actually tell you this or anything. And I'm exhausted and just starting to come out of the alcohol fog I acquired last night and I'm totally and utterly rejuvenated creatively, in a lot of ways. The two primary things that are stick with me from this con:

• I couldn't believe how many people showed up for my solo half-hour discussion this morning on The Princess Bride. I read a bit from the manuscript for my upcoming book Behind the Screen: The Princess Bride, and everyone laughed and hallelujahed in the right places, and that was really gratifying. I resolve to continue writing about movies...

• On the other hand, I was entirely outclassed at the panel on blogging. There was Kathryn Cramer, who is teaching people how to use Google Earth to investigate natural disasters and taking on corporate criminals and private militaries, and Cory Doctorow, who is pushing back hard against all who would limit personal privacy and intellectual freedom, and there was me, who blogs about LEGOs and movies and Dilbert cartoons. I felt like the little kid temporarily granted permission to sit with the grownups. I resolve to try to get a bit more serious in my blogging...

Next con: I'll be popping into Lunacon in New Jersey next month, just for the Saturday, though I don't know if I'll be on any panels -- I need to talk to the con organizers about that. But I will definitely be speaking at I-Con on Long Island at the end of March. And I'm keeping my fingers crossed that I'll be able to go to WorldCon in Los Angeles in August, and that the con will actually want me to speak. Working on that...

There's a perception that geeks -- particularly science fiction fans -- are so wrapped up in knitting Spock ears or whatever to be fully involved in anything going on outside the fannish world. But I gotta say that my "Bush spied on me" T-shirt, which I'm wearing today, is a big hit, and there's a guy wandering the con wearing a tricorn hat and a T-shirt that reads "Tyranny Response Team," Boston being something of a bastion of American freedom and such, at least in earlier eras.

Still, every panel seems to descend into a discussion of trying to figure out just what the hell is happening on Lost.

Here's some meta-blogging: it's 4:49pm, and I'm about to go into my panel on blogging with Teresa Nielsen Hayden and Cory Doctorow and others. Cool...

Speaking of LEGOs, the lower-tech, non-Mindstorm building blocks are practically an artistic medium unto themselves in the geekiverse. There’s the lowbrow appeal of The Lego Suicides, which is sick, sick, sick performance art... and damn hilarious. You’ve got the cinephiles expressing themselves in celluloid and plastic brick at BrickFilms.com. LEGOS are perfect for sculpture, as Nathan Sawaya demonstrates at his The Art of the Brick:

Wired is on the curious case of the LEGO people. No, not these LEGO people...

[from PodBrix]

...but the not-plastic folks at the LEGO company. It’s like this:

I'm at Boskone this weekend, which ironically means that I missed the Stargates on Friday night -- too much cool happening at the con to sit in my hotel room and watch TV. But I'll catch up with the taped episodes, hopefully on Monday night, so watch for Saturday Stargate-blogging on Tuesday.

The scary jade tree that is conspiring with the scary aloe vera...

Say it ain't so, Johnny -- say it ain't so. You ain't sold out on us, have you? I mean, we all managed to overlook the fact that Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl was based on a theme-park ride. But there's no way to avoid the fact that your mug is now gracing the packaging of chocolate-covered sugar bombs.

Why do you make us cry, Johnny?

This is almost as bad -- not quite, but almost -- as the ain't-third-degree-burns-grand Star Wars Pop Tarts...

As I head off to Boskone, herewith the last word on Arisia, and it’s all about the cool and geeky artists whose art I enjoyed, some of whom I got to meet, too.

The hit of the art show was for me, I think, the extremely cool items from My Mad Lab, way-neat Tesla coils and brains in jars and other such necessities for the evil lair. This unnamed artist’s stuff is hands-on, too -- press a button and something lights up; press another button and the oozy liquid in the jar with the brain gurgles. I’ve got a pickled alien baby in a jar (seriously -- I’ll show you some time), but it does not light up or gurgle.

Argh! This damn show is driving me crazy!

The blockbuster Russian vampire film Night Watch arrives in U.S. theaters tomorrow (you can win some goodies related to the film over at my FlickFilosopher.com), so I figured I'd take a look at some bloodsuckers. So: Bela Lugosi as the ultimate vampire, the Lost Boys, and Stargate Atlantis's Wraith, whose suckitude I can't say enough about.

One of these stories is honest-to-God real (culled from the San Francisco Chronicle, actually), and the other is honest-to-God fake (culled from The Onion). Can you guess which is which?

Kerry Makes Whistle-Stop Tour From Deck Of Yacht

Onion or AP?

Bush talks of health in speech at Wendy's

Onion or AP?

Politics continues its journey beyond satire...

You’ve seen that TV ad with the guy who travels a figurative seven circles of hell to get to an actual human when he calls his credit card company, right? (“For a shinier credit card, say Yes.” “No!”).

If you’ve ever had that frustrating experience of trying to navigate your way through a menu that’s more a maze worthy of containing a minotaur, then you will appreciate gethuman cheats, which may achieve a new high of geeky public service. The site lists dozens (hundreds, maybe) of companies and the secret phone keystroke that will take you directly to a real live actual human being, although probably one in India. (“During prompts, press * then # twice” -- quick, which meganational globocorp doesn’t want you to know that?)

There’s cheat codes, and then there’s cheat codes. Someone’s earning lots of Whuffie for this site.

It’s not out till July, but you can already preorder my book Behind the Screen: The Princess Bride from Amazon. I’ll be doing giveaways and selling autographed copies at FlickFilosopher.com, but if you can’t wait for that, preorder away.

I can’t tell you how exciting it is to see this page up at Amazon. This is a relatively short book, but it’s by far the longest thing I’ve ever written, and there were times when the workout my brain was getting was downright torturous. (Who was it who said, “Writing is easy: you just sit down and open a vein”? Well, that’s how it felt at times.) And here’s some evidence that maybe it’s all been worth it.

[crossposted at FlickFilosopher.com and Cinemarati]

David Wong at Pointless Waste of Time rants smartly about The 10 Best Sci-Fi Films That Never Existed. Now, bad SF -- which this is really a reaction to -- is hardly a plague that has specifically afflicted Generation X, but David makes a particularly generational argument when it comes to the badness (and hence the missing goodness) of one of the entries on his list. I won’t tell you what film is it -- go read his piece; it’s quite insightful -- but here’s the start of his thesis:

Ask yourself: how did the same people who gathered in naked, stoned crowds for this... [image of Jimi Hendrix rocking hard] ...grow up to make this show a hit: [image of ‘Everybody Loves Raymond’ DVD set]

Minor quibble: he forgot to mention The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai: Against the World Crime League. Which they promised us at the end of Across the Eighth Dimension. I’ve never really gotten over that betrayal.

Because his first novel, Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, blew my mind the way science fiction used to, back when I was a kid and it was all fresh and new.

Because the alternate economy he created for Down and Out -- based on reputation and represented by a “currency” called Whuffie -- goddamn might actually work.

Alone today, and feeling okay about it? Then you’re not alone:

Forty-three percent of adult Americans, or 87 million people, describe themselves as single -- but only 16 percent are looking for love, the survey by the Pew Internet and American Life Project found.

Fifty-five percent of US singles say they have no interest in looking for a romantic partner. That feeling is especially pronounced among women, or those who have been divorced or widowed.

[via Yahoo! News]

Or maybe you’re not alone but can’t stand the sickly sweetness of this invented holidays traditions? Then you’re not alone either:

This Valentine's Day, retailers are thumbing their noses at hearts and redirecting arrows at Cupid himself.

Traditionally sweet symbols and sayings are getting tweaked in the card and gift aisles, resulting in teddy bears that are more wry than warm and fuzzy and candies that are more sarcastic than saccharine.

[from USA Today, via Yahoo! News]

Bah. Who needs love, anyway, when we’ve got the Internet?

(Virtual candy hearts personalized at ACME Heart Maker)

Scott Adams nails the tragedy of the girl geek:

There's more...

Before I head off to Boskone, I should finish telling you about Arisia, which I attended last month. The other panel I wanted to share the results of is “Is Lost the New Gilligan’s Island,” on which Tom Restivo, Kristin Burger, Michael Pederson, and I (again serving as moderator) tried to find the analogues between the two stranded-on-a-deserted-island series. Actually, we spent maybe 20 minutes of our allotted hour on that -- the discussion kept turning back toward trying to figure out just what the hell is happening to the survivors of Flight 815... and we decided we liked the detour just fine.

But here’s what we did kinda agree on during those 20 minutes:

Just a reminder: I’ll be a guest at Boskone in Boston this coming weekend. Here’s an idea of what I’ll be up to (subject to last-minute changes, of course):

Friday, February 17, 7:00 pm
Ghosts on TV: Why are there so many spirits on the screen these days?
Patricia Bray, Don D'Ammassa, MaryAnn Johanson, Paul Levinson, Faye Ringel
While the traditional ghost story is slow to revive, ghosts in episodic TV are now commonplace. What is behind this phenomenon in series from "Rescue Me," "Ghost Whisperer" and the like? How do the hauntings (benevolent or malevolent) affect the show and the audience?

Friday, February 17, 8:00 pm
"The Hidden Fortress" and Star Wars
MaryAnn Johanson, Jim Mann, Timothy P. Szczesuil
Did George Lucas get many of his brilliantly original ideas for the first "Star Wars" from a certain lighthearted 1058 Japanese black-and-white epic? The panel will specualte wheter Lucas ever actually said, "Help me Akira Kurosawa; you're my only hope." (Then -- watch the movie later at Boskone and make your own decision!)

Speaking of rabid Star Trek nerds, remember Tony Alleyne, that English guy in Trekkies 2 who redecorated his whole apartment to look like the Starship Voyager, partly hoping to start this up as a business, redoing the pads of Trekkies all over the globe? Well, it turns out:

He took out two huge loans and ran up debts of over £100,000 on 14 credit cards marketing his idea and paying for the merchandise and has filed for bankruptcy.

[via Ananova]

Alleyne’s site, 24th Century Interior Design, is still up -- it’s kinda sad, the breathless cluelessness of it. I don’t mean to make fun of Alleyne: I guess even geeks can misunderstand their fellow geeks. As he told Ananova, “I was convinced Trekkies all over the world would want a house like mine and pay me to do it.” Makes ya wanna go, Dude, c’mon...

Xer television touchstone The Electric Company has arrived on DVD -- hallelujah, hallelujah! It’s still surprisingly entertaining, even if you already know how to read... as I note in my short review of the new best-of set over at FlickFilosopher.com.

You’ll also find, over at my other site, the chance to snag one of two copies of the set I just happen to have sitting around. Simply write a funny caption for a still from the show, and if you make me laugh, you might just win.

In the meantime, check out this interview my buddy John Muir conducted with actor Paul Dooley, who was the head writer at The Electric Company in its first season. Who knew?

I saw the Leonard Nimoy/Aleve ad the other night, and it cheesed me off. Yeah, it’s cute, I guess, that the painkiller helps Nimoy do his Vulcan salute in front of a crowd of rabid Trekkies, but why do the Trekkies have to be such rabid nerds?

Attend an SF con with me, and you will see that I am the first to rag on the really nerdy, raised-by-wolves, totally unsocialized fans, and I’m completely with Dorothy Parker in that whole “if you’ve got nothing nice to say about people, come and sit next to me” thing. But even I have to admit that the worst of the scary fen are not like the costumed idiots depicted here. It surprises me that some big name fans, like SF and comic writer Peter David, are so enamored of the ad: “The new funniest commercial of the evening [Super Bowl evening, he means], although probably only because we're fans.” But see, it’s precisely because I am a fan that I’m so bothered by this commercial. It disses us geeks, and it misrepresents us, and that makes me mad.

(You can watch the ad here -- scroll down to the subsection headed “Bayer.”)

Much, much better is the way-geeky MacGyver ad that MasterCard ran during the Super Bowl. Mac is an uber geek, but this 30-second minifilm doesn’t make fun of him so much as it celebrates him -- there’s gentle ribbing involved, sure, but it’s lovingly done. The folks behind this ad -- including Richard Dean Anderson -- clearly have a deep adoration of Mac and his scientific dorkiness. The same can’t be said of the Nimoy ad -- someone saw a chance to make fun of Trekkies, and took it.

SG-1 goes "Off the Grid":

I'm loving the leather...

...but when did Teal'c turn into Ripley?

The team on Atlantis says "The Long Goodbye":

It's official: Atlantis is just like bad fan fiction...

(screencaps snagged from GateWorld and Atlantica)

Just when you thought all the cool stuff on planet Earth had been discovered:

Australian and other scientists have found a "Lost World" in a remote Indonesian mountain jungle, home to exotic new species of birds, butterflies, frogs and plants as well as mammals unafraid of humans despite being hunted to near extinction elsewhere.

[via the Sydney Morning Herald]

And:

Archaeologists have discovered an intact, ancient Egyptian tomb in the Valley of the Kings, the first since King Tutankhamun's was found in 1922.

A team led by the University of Memphis found the previously unknown tomb complete with unopened sarcophagi and five undisturbed mummies.

[via BBC News]

Coolness factor aside, though, the spirit of scientific inquiry and exploration is vital to the continuance of our civilization today -- and by "our" I mean every damn one of us on this planet. As Daily Kos diarist DarkSyde explains in a rant about the need to keep up the fight against the antiscience forces assailing American society today, particularly if we're to wage an endless war:

The lesson of this tale is plain: Science is not a buffet from which we can pick and choose ahead of time. Science is a box of chocolates, you never know what you're going to get. What research will bear military fruit and which will not is beyond our power to predict, but within our grasp to produce. Cruise missiles, body armor, suppression fire, Combat Air Support, Night Vision Goggles, M*A*S*H units, artificial blood, prosthetic devices ... Electric lighting and antibiotics alone have saved untold thousands of limbs and lives on the battlefield and here at home. One never knows when an investment in science will mature or which one will pay off, but the dividends for all of us along the way are nothing short of magnificent.

Amen.

I hit the wrong keystroke working with an image of Mrs. Kennedy, and this is the result. Pretty cool, I think. Photoshop is so neat.

That's geeks for ya: Leave it us to turn the most contentious issue troubling the world -- at least at this nanosecond -- into a nugget of pop-culture detritus. And so we have Mohammed Dance, which is doubly geekalicious in that it not only reduces a major battle in the ongoing global culture wars into an online tchotcke, it also invokes nerd nostalgia by harkening back to the Web's glory days of 1998.

Or else we slap it on a T-shirt.

If only folks would embrace the One True Carbo-Faith, we could all live together in peace and harmony and alfredo sauce. If you've been touched by His Noodly Appendage as I have, then join me in a celebratory dance! (suggested by a wag on Metafilter)

I've spent the past week eating, breathing, and dreaming code as I've updated my FlickFilosopher.com with Movable Type with a bloggy format. It's gonna make things much easier for me in the long run, but these few days have been hellish as I learn MT's language and CSS and other Webbish goodies -- I've been dropping off to sleep (reluctantly) at like 4am every night, seeing code in front of my closed eyes and thinking, Oh, I must do ABC, and surely I can make XYZ happen somehow. And then the hours fly by the next day as I experiment with code.

So, here's the spectrum of hackers, a level to which I cannot even aspire: The amazing gals (and guys) who programmed the first computers, like ENIAC, and thank god for them, because without their pioneering working I'd still be publishing fanzines with a typewriter and a Xerox machine instead of having the lovely Web as a soapbox; Matthew Broderick in WarGames, with whom any geeky Xer surely identified as a teenager; and Sandra Bullock in The Net, cuz man, that was a dumb movie, and she was about the least believable computer nut ever.

I don’t disagree with Newsweek’s contention that Stephen Colbert of The Colbert Report is “the age's semiofficial pundit,” and I’ll even grant that it’s probably intentional that they did up the fake pundit like David Strathairn-as-Edward-R.-Murrow -- you know, a sort of endlessly regressive commentary on the state of journalism today, where filmmaker George Clooney, who was in Attack of the Killer Tomatoes, is now a reasonable voice to scold modern journalists for being such wooses, which is what allows Colbert to thrive as semiofficial pundit in the first place.

But clearly Newsweek misses the irony that it’s because of its own cowardice and that of its fellow mainstream outlets that Colbert’s satire thrives. There’s no hint whatsoever in the piece about Colbert that anything that Newsweek has done or hasn’t done might have some connection to Colbert’s success. In fact, there’s a huge bubble of cluelessness at work here about the state of culture -- pop and otherwise -- as people under 50 or so see it today. Check this:

Colbert can access the most offbeat information in a nanosecond. When he interviewed Colorado Rep. Mark Udall, Colbert asked him about his three failed attempts to climb Mount Everest. Colbert: "Don't take this the wrong way, but doesn't that make you a quitter?" Udall: "I don't think the Q word applies to me. Maybe the L word." Colbert, seriously and instantly: "You do know the L word is 'lesbian'."

Is Newsweek serious? That “the L word” means “lesbian” is a tidbit of trivia so obscure and distantly removed from the awareness of decent folk that it’s worth noting? Who is Newsweek’s audience, unfrozen cavemen living in secret government laboratories cut off from all outside information? Anybody watching Colbert is plugged into pop culture enough to be aware of the Showtime series, even if they’ve never seen it.

They really don’t get it, do they?

I can’t quite put my finger on the why of it, but I think we just saw the end of Boomer dominance of pop culture. Well, I didn’t see it, actually, because I didn’t watch the Super Bowl, but that’s where it happened, at halftime.

It’s not that the Rolling Stones -- the ur prophets of sex, drugs, and rock ‘n’ roll -- were performing at the supreme symbol of American aggression and consumerism and aggressive consumerism -- you know, about as far from the counterculture as you can be. The Stones sold out years ago; the Rolling Stones-branded credit card was, I’d have thought, about as selling-out as they could go, but even if this appearance proved me wrong, it was just a matter of degree.

I don’t think it happened, either, when the halftime producers banned people older than the band -- not older than the band members, older than the band -- from watching the concert stageside (though they later loosened that restriction somewhat). And it wasn’t, either, that those same stageside fans had to pass a criminal background check that none of the band members themselves would have passed.

I think it happened when the producers killed Jagger’s mike for the last word of the line “You make a dead man come” in the song “Start Me Up.” The spirit of defiant rock music died right then. “No sex, please: we’re Americans,” is what that moment said. So much for free love.

Sex? Not so much. Drugs? Not unless it’s Viagra. Rock ‘n’ roll? RIP.

Major geeky kudos to John Aravosis, master and commander of AmericaBlog.org, who has been riding cell-phone companies hard lately over their complete willingness to treat their customers like dirt.

It started last month, when John discovered a nasty open secret about the cell phone records of you and me and everyone we know:

Sprint joins growing list of wireless companies whose customers' phone records are available to anyone for $89.95
by John in DC - 1/13/2006 02:19:00 PM

Sprint today joined Cingular Wirless and T-Mobile as cell phone companies whose customers' private cell phone records are available online for anyone to buy for as little as $89.95.

A friend earlier today bought the cell phone records of AMERICAblog writer Joe Sudbay (Joe in DC) from CellTolls.com. These included the dates and numbers of 91 calls made to and from Sudbay's Sprint cell phone in November and December 2005. CellTolls is the same company AMERICAblog used yesterday to buy the T-Mobile phone records of former presidential candidate General Wesley Clark. And last Friday, I used LocateCell.com to easily buy my private Cingular Wireless cell phone records. (It appears that LocateCell and CellTolls are operated by the same company.)

No word yet from any of these companies as to why their customers' allegedly private cell phone records are readily available to anyone with an Internet connection and a credit card.

John has stayed on the story like a bulldog even as the mainstream press has started to pick it up. Which is a vital and necessary service, particularly for those of us who have come to depend upon the Net and remember the days when things like phone services were considered public utilities, not a way for corporate executives to fatten their own personal coffers. As we hear more about the greed and cravenness of these corps -- as they bend over for the Feds’ illegal eavesdropping programs and plot to turn the Internet into private shopping malls that we peons will have to pay through the nose to use -- work like John’s is ever more important.

Sam doing what he does best: relaxing...

In "honor" of James Frey and his fabrications, herewith the liars: Ben Kenobi, with whom we disagree about that whole "certain point of view" thing; Pinocchio, who at least learned his lesson before it was too late; and Richard Nixon, who was too a crook.

The Victorian Internet has finally kicked the bucket:

After 145 years, Western Union has quietly stopped sending telegrams.

[from LiveScience]

But we’ll always have steampunk...

So there he was, like a kid caught with his hand in the cookie jar, taking a tongue lashing from his disappointed mom. Who had trusted him, and he had abused that trust and let her down.

It was rather delicious to see James Frey sitting there on Oprah’s couch and just enduring it. Delicious because he deserved it, the lying rat -- no, he’s worse: he’s a lying rat who’s made a bloody fortune off his lies. And he has proved himself even worse-worse on Oprah: he’s a sniveling lying rat who doesn’t even have the balls to claim his lying as his own and say, “You know what, Oprah? Yeah, I lied. And you ate it up. And so did your sheeplike viewers. And now -- heh -- I’m gonna go lie on a beach in the Caribbean. Suckers.”