Wow, these Bumpuses are big! They came over the year after the Mayflower.Check out this Bumpus Family History Page. Don't forget to click on the "Bumpus Brother's" Main Page and "The Traditions of Bumpas Origin" by Rev. Robah F.Bumpas. Triva note: there's a Canadian Davison link here -- I've always felt like there was a little bit of Bumpus in Pete. Perhaps this is why.

This may seem frivolous, but I'm in love with this guy's name "We are pleased at the member approval of DSML v2 as an OASIS Standard," commented Winston Bumpus of Novell, co-chair of the OASIS Directory Services Technical Committee.

In case you've ever wondered, here's why radio sucks, and why I'm listening to Spinner as I write this. Just as TV needed cable to make it suck a lot less, so too will Internet radio shake up things in the radio industry, I hope. A more un-imaginative gaggle of dimwits, I can't imagine.

You think croquet is dangerous? In San Francisco, letting your children near the state police (and their painful batons) can lead to felony child endangerment charges.

Is it just me or does Rowan Atkinson look like an extra from the Sopranos?

When Croquet Goes Bad Canadians Wield Mallets. Need I say more?

The war on terror continues. This time, keeping us safe from injured war on terror vets. When will they figure out that they need to expect the unexpected, not a repeat of last year's attack?

But this wasn't in the Dale Carnegie book! This article is interesting, because it's about a Palestinian suicide bomber who claims she backed out of her mission after actually thiking about what it might feel like for her vicitms -- and because her fellow terrorists wanted her to wear sexy clothes. According to the story, "Said said some of the suicide bombers, men and women, were socially isolated -- such as one bomber who suffered from epilepsy -- and were trying to gain social acceptance."

Here's one of those Library of Congress reports published before Sept. 11, explaining what's going on with terrorism and weapons of mass destruction. A scary read, it quotes my buddy Dostoevsky, saying,

While nothing is easier than to denounce the evildoer,
nothing is more difficult than to understand him.

More required reading: Malcolm Gladwell is my favorite New Yorker writer. He has an article in this week's New Yorker about the "myth of the lone inventor." He writes about Philo Farnsworth a driven, possibly Mormon, inventor with a remarkable resemblance to Willem Dafoe who invented television in the late 1920s (just a few blocks from my house, as it turns out), only to have his invention nicked from under him by RCA's David Sarnoff, who went to be known as "the father of Television."

Gladwell's point is that this is the good thing that corporations do. Rather than stifle invention, they free inventors up to actually work on the things that matter. Farnsworth himself was distracted by frivolous lawsuits, investor troubles, fires -- all problems that corporations are designed to shield "creative" types from. He also points out that it is unreasonable to expect one person to be the sole inventor of complex technologies like the television or the sewing machine. In fact, Farnsworth solved one major part of the broader television puzzle -- the image dissector -- but RCA engineers were already filing patents in this area when Farnsworth was a 16 year old farm boy in Utah.

The sewing machine example is useful because that invention didn't really take off until a bunch of the patent-holders finally stopped suing each other and formed a trust to collectively market the invention. Apparently that's how Singer was born.

I think these stories are illustrative of the broader intellectual property issues that are surfacing today. Even with non-digital inventions like television and the sewing machine, and radio and flight the collaborative benefits of sharing information far outweigh the individual benefits of patents and secrecy. If patent law had been too strong, any one patent holder could have theoretically held back the development of any one of these inventions. And yet this is precisely what the US Congress and Patent Office is doing to the high-tech industry. Allowing things to be patented that, if free, would benefit the industry as a whole, and failing to come up with reasonable ways to both reward innovators and encourage innovation. If things as basic as one-click-ordering are patentable, only companies that can fight of a quarter million dollar lawsuit can really afford to get involved in online retailing. Could you imagine if the jingling bell on a store's front door were patented and if everyone who wanted to use one had to pay $500/year for the "invention?"

She should have patented it. As I recall, Anna had an idea roughly like this about two years ago.

Further Anna reading. One of her favorite books is Irving Stone's "Men to Match My Mountains." It's a fun and fast-paced romp of a history book about the opening up of the western United States. I didn't realize until today that the title was taken from a Samuel Walter Foss song.

Listening to the radio this morning, the big thoughts are coming fast and furious.

*Why is there so much talk about the Catholic Chruch's abuse of children, when everyone ignores the fact that there is also abuse of the elderly? Let the man retire. For God's sake.

*Why do we talk about the Wisdom of the ancient world and ignore that of the modern world? Is there nothing to be said for free speech, the abolition of slavery, women's rights, fast food?

*What have they done with the Near East? It seems to have disappeared. Once apon a time, we had the Far East (for which Columbus set sail -- China, Japan), the Middle East, and the Near East. It seems that what was once the Near East is now called the Middle East. What was once the Middle East is now nothing, and the Near East... well that seems to have fallen off the map.

*Here's another article on how the music industry is blowing it with file-sharing. Isn't file-swapping just another form of advertising?

So this was the first Memorial day since 1997 that we've spent without Jason Marty. Though had a fabulous time at Jason and Marla's wedding last month, it's still kind of sad that we're not together right now. We hardly know what to do withourselves, what with all of this free time.

I guess we've been watching movies to fill the void. Last night it was Ghost World; today The Cat's Meow, and this evening it'll be "Evil Dead 2."

I see that PT Anderson tied for the Best Director award at Cannes this year. The premise for his new film, Punch Drunk Love seems a bit dodgey at best. For one thing, it stars Adam Sandler. Here's a synopsis.

Premise: This "sweet romantic comedy" is about the owner (Sandler) of a struggling phone-sex business with seven abusive sisters who soon finds that three thugs are chasing him. Meanwhile, one of his sisters tries to set him up on a blind date with a woman who plays the harmonium (Watson), but it doesn't quite work out. Eventually, his hobby of collecting pudding coupons pays off, and he's able to win enough frequent flyer miles to take a trip to Hawaii, in a quest to find the mysterious girl...

Particularly inspiring is this comment from Producer Joanne Sellar: "After Magnolia, which was a huge, dark, challenging movie. I think Paul wanted to make something that was contained, uplifting and sweet."

One of the best moviegoing experiences of my life was watching Dean Martin in "Kiss Me Stupid" at the Roxie sometime around 1996. There was a packed house of worshipers at this event -- I remember some of them had a larger-than-life poster and when Martin first appeared in the film, his car breaking down in Climax Nevada, everyone in the theatre started screaming "Dino! Dino!"

Joey Bishop's son (Larry?) spoke after the film -- remembering what a nice and quiet guy Dino was, and I think speculating on how Dino's son's death really did him in. Maybe I was intoxicated, but I left the theatre feeling that Dean Martin was a role model and a comic genius. A minor obsession had been born.

A month or so later, Anna and Mike and Candace and I hit Tosca hard after work one Friday, drinking perfect martinis at its long oaken bar; smoking too, because that was permitted back then. We were perfect San Franciscans, relaxing, with nothing but weekend ahead of us. We climbed up Columbus, boisterous and alive, and rented Ocean's Eleven from the video store and then went to Filbert where we put on some Dean Martin music, danced, drank more, and eventually passed out in front of the film. I have this memory of me struggling to wake up as Anna's dad returned to the house (he was staying with us then, I think) to see a comatose pile of 20-somethings at 10 p.m. on a Friday night.

I loved Ocean's Eleven before I ever saw it. This was because of Maudlin's Eleven -- the SCTV parody that I'd seen about 10 years earlier. Maudlin's Eleven was so funny because it mercilessly went for the same swagger and style as Ocean's Eleven, but with contemptible actors like Bobby Bitman, Sammy Maudlin, Bill Needle, and William B. Williams (and of course Johnny Puleo & His Harmonica Gang).

I watched Stephen Soderbergh's remake of Ocean's Eleven a few days ago, and I think he would have done better had he worked off the SCTV script instead of his own. In fact, after watching the film, I had no idea why Soderbergh even bothered to bill it as a remake. The first movie was a comedy, lazily done, where the Rat Pack was basically playing itself. It was all about style: Dino playing "Ain't That a Kick in the Head," Frankie getting massaged by chicks in fluffy sweaters, Shirley Maclean drunk out of her mind. This was Vegas in its glory days, and these were the people who made it glorious. A friend of mine, Kevin, says that the original movie failed because it didn't come close to capturing how funny those guys actually were in Vegas, but I disagree. I think the Rat Pack was funniest by accident. Remember, I learned to love them through SCTV, and sometimes the line between irony and appreciation is blurred. Dino and Frankie were buffoons -- they acted cooler than ice, but really they were buffoons.

There's more to the story. The original Ocean's Eleven was good, not because of the acting, or the script writing, or the cinematography (though the last scene is one of my favorite in film), but because it captured a certain sense of style. You can imagine 12 year old boys talking like Frankie & Dino the next day at school, vying with each other to remember snippets of dialogue, acting the coolest parts of the film out with each other.

In the original, Las Vegas is almost a small town. This was the time when Casinos were owned by families -- mob families some times, but families. It was the kind of place where the casino staff would know you by name and you didn't have to be an international multi-billionaire to be considered a high roller. And the Rat Pack a kind of family -- GI's who didn't necessarily make out so great after the war and who, 15 years later, finally decided to take what they had coming to them. And they are denied the spoils of their work in a really delicious way. Someone actually dies in the original -- a plot point that was appently too intense for the remake.

If the original was a heist comedy about family, the remake, like Las Vegas today, is an earnest fable about the corporation. Brad Pitt, Julia Roberts, George Clooney, these are corporate brands. We have no delusions that these people somehow like each other or have any real history together. They were selected by a multinational entertainment company because they represent brands that people will pay money to see. In an effort to embrace the American Family, Las Vegas today has abandoned the sense of family it had back in 1960. The three casinos targeted in Soderbergh's heist -- Bellagio, the MGM Grand and the Mirage -- are all owned by a publicly traded company called MGM Mirage -- not by a tough-as-nails Andy Garcia businessman type. All stip casinos offer a virtually identical product, just in different wrapping paper.

And, see, that's the problem with the remake. It pretends that everything is as intimate and connected as it was back in 1960. The "11" in the remake are a gang of some sort, who know each other somehow. But how? There is a kind of implied familiarity that never gets explored during the movie. People talk about Matt Damon's dad ("a hell of a guy"), but not much more is ever said. There is some sense of a "past" between the characters. Apparently Juila Roberts and George Clooney once had some sort of chemistry together -- that is invisible to the casual observer. I wish the characters had been some sort of super-high-tech band of corporate mercenaries fighting another super-high-tech band of corporate mercenaries. I wish that Clooney & co. had represented a rival casino that was being knocked off the same night ad that the two heists had somehow run into each other. This business of lamely trying to humanize the whole business just rang hollow to me. Sure Clooney was just doing it for Julia. Right. Whatever. If they wanted that, they should have gone as a comedy. And it seemed like the Eliot Gould character was written with that idea in mind, but his little ridiculous tale of the "only three heists in Las Vegas history" is so wildly out of place in the movie, it just makes things worse.

I just got this email from Anna. She's having an interesting first week. She wrote:

"OK, this is new. The hospital just went in to "lockdown". Shooting nearby or
something -- I can't get the story cause I'm locked in my office. "

Here's the story, as best we know it. The scary thing about this is that this shooting happened a block from Dave & Vinnie's place. They're both OK, but apparently the guy who did the shooting is still on the loose (hence the lockdown at St Luke's, which is about six blocks from the crime scene; they don't want him just running in there).

Anna's been temping at St. Luke's Hospital in the Mission this week. I have this image of her living out some sort of ER fantasy, but she says it's not like that. It is, however, a pretty intense place, and she's coming home every night with very interesting stories about the world of non-profit medicine in the US. All said, it makes me feel better about humanity, though I'm lonely without her in the house.

Theme of days without Anna: 'Another Day' by 4 Hero. Memorable line, "I gotta get up." (It's repeated like 1,000 times in the song). Intellectual Property transferred courtesy Spinner.

The future of Intellectual property. This is the theme of 2002. Here's what the Constitution of the US says about it. Article I, Section 8, Clause 7.

Congress shall have the power... "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries."

This is the seed that has grown into US copyright and patent law. When you think about "property," this notion of a "limited Time" is usually not part of the idea. You don't buy a kitchen table for a limited time. You buy it for as long as you want to keep it. So I think this metaphor, intellectual "property" is fundamentally misleading. I mean, we have a notion of "property tax." Have you ever heard of anyone paying an intellectual property tax? When copyright was first introduced to the United states, things that people wrote would go into the public domain, unless they wanted to copyright them. In that case, you would register for a copyright. This would allow you to collect royalties for 14 years, after which, your writing went into the public domain. Now, everything that is written is copyrighted -- by default -- and the copyright protection lasts until 70 years after your death.

So what happens if you want to put something in the public domain today?

Copyright is kind of like the mail system right now. It's almost impossible to opt out of. This was the point made by the people backing the Creative Commons project. They point out that artistic words in the public domain have helped develop the arts (could you imagine if the Catholic Church held the copyright on the Bible? You wouldn't even be able to swear if these new analog-to-digital blocking laws were enacted.) Disney, they say, was built by ripping off the Brother's Grimm. So shouldn't I eventually be able to rip off the Lion King? The other interesting point made by the Creative Commoners is that the vast majority of copyright revenue comes from the tiny minority of works. So the majority of this material is in cold storage -- unable to be riffed on by others, and not even generating revenue for the copyright holders. What's the point?

I interviewed Scott McNealy -- the CEO of Sun Microsystems (the folks who brought you Java) -- and he was talking about how scary it is that the next generation of Internet standards (SOAP, WSDL, UDDI) are being designed with this notion of RAND (Reasonable And Non-Discriminatory licensing). Like many scary concepts, this one basically means the opposite of what it claims. If you're reading this on my blog, this is because a number of earlier Internet standards HTML, HTTP, TCP/IP are all being used to ensure that the story I post on Filbert.net is readable on your own computer -- whether it's a Mac, a Linux box, Windows, whatever... The idea behind RAND is that companies would reserve the right to charge royalties for any of the next generations of applications that are built on the Internet. For most people, this really just represents expense and vendor control where it didn't really exist before. From my perspective, this is a step back to the proprietary Compuserve, Prodigy, and AOL networks that we had before the Internet Remember them? They sucked.

Is it possible that the Las Vegas phone system is controlled by hackers working for the mob? Here's another possibility: maybe the people handing out all those porn flyers on the Strip are simply dumping them in the desert. I've never seen anyone take one, after all.

This is what strikes me as noteworthy about the fact that the Bush administration was warned before September 11th.

1) Bush was on his ranch fixing fence-posts on August 6 when he received an intelligence briefing warning him that O-Bin was thinking of hijacking aircraft.

2) When California Governor Gray Davis warned of a possible terrorist threat to his state in November, he was blasted (though not, apparently by Bush) and Bush's Homeland Honcho said:
"Obviously, Governor Davis thought that one thing he could do to enhance the security of people using those bridges was to make a public announcement... We did not encourage him to do so."

3) Finally, here's a scary note from the Boston Globe:
There was other evidence on the record. In 1995, Philippine officials told the FBI of a stunning plot: Bin Laden associates were developing plans to hijack commercial airliners and hit the Pentagon and other US targets, including large buildings in New York and San Francisco.

Flin Flon -- Canada's new biotech hub.

Still on the music and new media kick. Maybe we should just blame the Copyright laws.

And as Napster crashes and burns, the music industry tries to kill off yet another line of business.

If you're in to Aphex Twin, you'll find this insanely cool.

Yes there was an earthquake here last night. No I didn't feel it. It was centered about 70 miles south of San Francisco, in Gilroy (home of garlic and SF quarterback Jeff Garcia), and it was a 5.2, which is a pretty gentle earthquake, as these things go. A 5.7 scale earthquake is five times as strong, and that's where things start to get interesting. The 1989 earthquake was 7.0; the 1906 was 7.8.

What's really interesting (from the link above) is that between 1912 and 1978, there were no earthquakes measured above a 5.5 magnitude, but between 1858-1911, there were 16. It's as if the pressure gets released, and then spends 60 or 70 years building up, and then the earthquakes resume. According to this graph, we've had 4 greater than 5.5 since '79.

The Studs of Filbert
--a one-part series

Mikey & Bikey

I like champagne for breakfast, long walks on the beach, candle-lit dinners, and having a little fun every now and then

Still on the Mothers theme: here's a story about what happens when ma leaves a loaded gun lying around the house. It's just more proof that guns don't kill people. Video games do.

Software tip of the week: getting rid of pop-up ads. If you are hate those annoying pop-up ads as much as I do, you should try Pop-up Stopper. There's a free version here; I've been using it for a couple of months and it's reminds me of the halcyon days before the Web became annoying.

It's Mother's Day, and that means one thing in our household. A discussion on whether or not we need a holiday for our mothers to know that we love them. My long held belief has been that Mother's Day serves the opposite purpose: it let's us perform a meaningless ritual (paying for something: flowers, cards, chocolates) so we don't have to do the kind of meaningful things that actually indicate love. Once again, form triumphs over function.

Personally, I hate being told when to express my affection for people. Birthdays I can handle, but these stupid Hallmark Holidays always rub me the wrong way -- Valentine's Day, Father's Day, International Secretary's Day... give me a break. I resent the intrusion into my personal life.

Anna says that the holiday has probably caused more harm than good... giving moms a target date for disappointment, when things don't follow the Hallmark script. Certainly that's been my experience. The most memorable Mother's Days in our family have been days of disappointment rather than celebration.

Anna Jarvis, the woman who's credited with as the Mother of Mother's Day, died a bitter old (childless) woman, who regretted ever coming up with the damned scheme. As this story explains, in 1923 she launched a lawsuit to halt the holiday when she realized how far people were taking it. "This is not what I intended," Jarvis said. "I wanted it to be a day of sentiment, not profit!"

America seems to be going out of its way to suck today.

People who don't know when to quit

Racist snobs.

Homicidal snobs.

Homicidal maniacs

Out of step with the world again.

Warren Buffet is a security expert

And Microsoft has enough money to buy every major professional baseball, basketball, football and hockey team in America.

While there's no doubt that the record industry's move to a digital medium should shake things up, it's always fun to watch the old industry trying to clamp down on the new. I think that file-swapping is just too damned popular, and the culture of fileswapping too deeply engrained in the record industry's consumer base for it to be stopped right now. And I think it would be bad for the industry to succeed at stopping file-sharing. The problem, as I see it, is that the industry model isn't really geared toward innovation. I think there is room for the music industry to simply adopt file-swapped music as a new tier in its distribution model. If they could standardize a compelling enough file-swapping service (a la Napster), then they could control what would and what would not become premium content. The thing is, the standard would have to be open enough that everyone would use it, and differentiated enough from premium content (e.g. cds) that people would still participate in the more traditional markets.

The problem I see with the RIAA's thinking is that they act as though there were no new markets to open up -- as though everyone on the planet is "into music" and there is nothing they could do to make their product more compelling to people outside of their customer base. It reminds me a lot of the introduction of the VCR -- that too was supposed to turn all of us into pirates and destroy the already flagging movie industry, remember? Instead, it made the film industry more relevant than ever because it enabled a more active customer base -- customers were better able to nourish their individual obsessions and participate in a whole new tier of distribution. Though, yes, we could copy videos and redistribute them amongst friends (I realize it's a lot easier to do this with online music) -- most of us are willing to pay $3 or $4 bucks to rent a movie -- the quality isn't as good; the experience isn't the same. Today, more people watch movies than ever before, and a large part of that is because this lower-end distribution tier (the video store) has helped make the film industry's brands (Julia Roberts, Tom Cruise, etc...) bigger than ever.

For about 20 minutes, people thought that the publishing industry was going to be trashed by digital media -- CD-ROMS, e-books, whatever. Instead, the Internet overcame a technical obstacle (finding the damned book you wanted and getting a quick review of it) that had been holding back the publishing industry. Personally, I believe that Internet-delivered audio books on tape could be a whole new distribution tier for the book industry (which at least acknowledges that it has room to make converts), but we'll see whether or not RIAA-type paranoia prevents this from ever happening.

Just as not everyone wants to pay $10 to see Spiderman in the theatre, not everyone will pay $20 for the latest Brittany Spear's CD. Even with file-swapping, the art and the tactile sense of participating with, and owning part of an artist, will keep the high end of the market rolling. This is a country where people will pay $3 million for a baseball. They'll still pay $20 for a cool-looking CD of Brittany.

Incredibly, the music industry still labors under the delusion that it is providing a tactile product with a determinable value. But the industry isn't about buying music. It's about communing with artists. And the more sacraments of communion they give us, the more we'll want.

My dad arrived in town last night for a 1 week visit, so today is link day!

Prince Phillip's greatest hits.

Emperor Norton was one of the most famous and colorful of 19th century San Franciscans. He's the subject of a proposed monument that may or may not get built in my neighborhood (my first story for the neighborhood association newletter is about this), and he may or may not be the subject of a Sean Penn movie -- apparently Mr. Penn is doing research on Emperor Norton right now. After a disasterous bid to corner the rice market, Norton lapsed into insanity and declared himself Emperor of the United States. He printed his own money (which was accepted in SF) and issued decrees, firing politicians, calling for the building of the Bay Bridge, and (allegedly) banning the use of the term "Frisco." This piece makes the interesting point that Norton was the most democratic of monarchs, because his ridiculousness served to underline the stupidity of a hereditary nobility. It's good to see Prince Phillip following in Norton's footsteps.

Another interesting tidbit on monarchy from Qatar's Gulf Times, claiming that monarchy actually helps prevent tyranny.
"In Britain, the monarchy is not just a focal point of national pride it is also a bulwark against tyranny. It ensures that a dictator cannot come to power as there is no vacancy at the top." In this spirit of anti-tyranny let me be the first to suggest we call a spade a spade and proclaim Bush the King of the US. We're halfway there already, why not go the full mile.

More classic Hitch. This link, a leftie-on-leftie debate about the Middle East. Hitch's best line, he calls the 'Koran a "10th-rate penal code" and to suggest that, if the book indeed represents the word of God, "then it was a very bad day for Him." As if to reassure everyone that he was engaged in an equal-opportunity offend-a-thon, Hitchens opined that God was also having a bad day when He dictated the Pentateuch and most of the New Testament.'

I'm too busy to be blogging right now, but I have to link to this amazingly stupid statement by Wayne LaPierre, executive vice president of the National Rifle Association, where he compares Americans for Gun Safety (a gun control group) to a terrorist organization. The word "terrorist" has become so overused, its meaning is becoming soft and fuzzy. People that slop around language like LaPierre see things in black or white. There is good or evil. People are either terrorists or freedom fighters. The fact that they express themselves so crudely just serves to underline the fundamental lack of sophistication of their thinking.

Janie left today. We had a lovely dinner together last night, followed by a walk over Russian hill and some Mochi ice cream (if you click on one link today, make it this one. This is one hell of a translation) & sake, a brief argument about gun control, and then a walk through Macondry lane.

Driving back from the airport today (getting out of our parking space was tough because of the parking terrorist who hijacked our driveway's freedom), the Road Runner Song came on the radio and it brought up some painful memories. I always hated the bloody Road Runner. Too smug. Wile E. Coyote was clearly the smarter of the two, and the Road Runner never actually deserved any of his great victories. They claim he "never bothered anyone," but he certainly buzzed old Wile E. a time or two in an aggressive and bothersome fashion. I really hated the fact that Wile E. would order and build these insanely elaborate ACME traps, only to have the Road Runner violate a fundamental law of physics and somehow escape. As a kid, I felt betrayed. Clearly the only reason Road Runner always won was because the animators simply wanted it that way. The deck was stacked. The cartoon was a sham. Everything that was supposed to be cute about Road Runner (and Tweety Bird for that matter) began to seem loathsome to me. More than anything I wanted the Wile E. to catch him some day. To take that smug look and wipe it off his face with a 12 gage ACME shotgun. This was a precursor to my life as a nerd. The clever suffer. The anointed use their connections -- as usual -- and get off scot free. I became more and more annoyed by the show's relentless propagandizing for the stupid cute elite. Bugs was OK because at least he was clever, but because of the obvious favor he was shown, I couldn't help putting him in the same class as Tweety et al. I grew to hate the Bugs Bunny Road Runner Hour. I started watching Canadian television instead. I'd go to school on Monday and have nothing to discuss with my friends. I became a social outcast. I began to think like Wile E. Coyote. ACME constructions of unimaginable proportions -- not to kill Road Runner, no, but to prove my worth. The more I thought like Wile E, the more estranged I became until he was the only character I related to. But why couldn't he -- just once -- catch that damned Road Runner? Why did the show have to taunt me so?

Now I realize that it was a kind of terrorism.