I had such a great haul of gifts at this year's birthday, I'm already planning what I want for 2003. This Fire Bible is now tops on the list.

Just when I thought TV couldn't get any better, along comes The Real Beverly Hillbillies.

CBS is resurrecting "The Beverly Hillbillies" as a reality series.

The network will soon begin casting for a weekly half-hour series that will follow the adventures of a rural, lower-middle class family -- yes, there will be a granny -- as they are transplanted from their humble digs to a Beverly Hills mansion. The project is tentatively titled "Real Beverly Hillbillies.

Coolio;Tiffany; Married...with Children's David Faustino; surviving Milli Vanilli lip-syncer Fabrice Morvan; Baywatch babe Traci Bingham; enriched popster Vitamin C; Lorenzo Lamas of Falcon Crest fame; Brady Bunch star Barry Williams; and Price Is Right spokesmodel Nikki Schieler Ziering.

All going through boot camp hell under the sadistic eyes of real-world Marine drill sergeants!

And they said TV couldn't do better than Celebrity Boxing.

If you're into Leonard Nimoy or Hobbits, you chould check out this weird shit.

Apparently this guy is selling these cool matchbooks on Prince Street about a block off West Broadway in New York for between $5-$20. Will somebody please buy me one?

Had a hum-dinger of a party last night. I was expecting a quiet barbecue with a few friends, but it turned into a full-fledged evening of fun, that ended, reluctantly, at 4 AM. I was really overwhelmed by how wonderful it was. Thank you to Anna, Janie, Terry, Nick, Vinnie, Trish, Gary, Charlotte, Beck, Karen, Alexis, Dave, Dave's friend (sorry, you arrived after the mint julips, so your name escapes me), and of course to mystery surprise guest #1, Mike Gregory.

I knew you were coming all along, man.

National Enquirer Scooped Again
James has published some unauthorized secret photos of my birthday yesterday.

For those of you who thought I was hallucinating about that Guiness spaghetti record, here's the story. What an honor to have that happen on my birthday!

Let's make a hole in one

More Candian News:

Montreal comic Marc Audette, deftly imitating the voice of French-Canadian diva Dion, chatted with Spears on the telephone about each woman's charity foundations.

After a few minutes of mutual admiration, Audette got down to business and invited Spears to come to Montreal and visit "her club" -- in reality, a popular Montreal strip joint.

I give this argument an F for coherence. It's from C/Net, where Editor Charlie Cooper argues that because the software industry has employed a lot of people, we should leave the copyright protections that built it alone. You could have made the same argument in the 1890s about Standard Oil. The question remains: what's a fair amount of time to give someone a monopoly? Larry Lessig says 10 years. The status quo is 70. Honestly, I think it you'd need to study more than the high profile cases to understand how long it takes to get a fair return on copyright. Oracle and Microsoft are one thing, but what about the little-known songwriters, who get discovered at the end of their careers? What about the semi-successful software companies?

Still, it's pretty clear to me that at a certain point of time these franchsie monopolies (like the Windows operating system) no longer deliver useful returns to the public and hurt innovation.

Nintendo seems to be going for a Guiness record in front of my house today. No shit: the world's largest bowl of spaghetti.

I see our air traffic safety policies continue to protect us from people who don't understand how batteries work.

Quit Playing That Blasted Song!
Up early reading yesterday's paper, I catch the following Chronicle comment on the impending baseball strike:
Major League Baseball, which took such pride in helping heal the wounds of Sept. 11, is managing to undo much of the goodwill it created by playing "God Bless America" thousands of times at ballparks across America.

Suddenly, Canada cannot be avoided. I just read that Chretien is quitting.

You gotta love a national leader who slugs a reporter. He's still got that Trudeau-era "rock star" mentality that reminds us all of a more complex time.

More on Denham's book. The Barnes & Noble listing has a couple of write-ups on it. Who of us will be the first to submit a reader-review?

An email from Siobhán (who will be visiting SF in about a week) this morning: This MUST be worth a blog:

For years, Hollywood guilds have bemoaned the fact production has emigrated to Canada, which offers cheaper costs. But now shooting in downtown Vancouver has created a Canuck conundrum as street workers are demanding compensation for the business they lose thanks to filming.

You've got to love that Canadian sense of fairness.

Maybe it's because I'm supposed to be in Canada right now (damned money!), but I've been thinking about my former home and native land today. There's a Pico Iyer article in the June 2002 Harper's that talks about how Canada may be the one country where global fraternity really has a chance.

Iyer sees the English Patient, with its wounded, de-nationalized characters, as the first in a new genre of literature, "outside the categories of the Old World's order" and he calls Toronto "the safest city in North America and, by the reckoning of many, the one with the richest literary culture."

New York? Bah! A has-been.

My favorite part of Iyer's article, however, is when he talks about the alienating legacy of Canada's policy of state-engineered multiculruralism (he says pundit Neil Bissoondath describes it as "an attempt to rectify injustices of the past by creating new injustices for the future") and concludes that "multiculturalism is far better handled by writers of fiction than by writers of laws."

So I took Laura Denham's yoga class at the Chinatown Y last night. It was fun going back to the first place I ever tried yoga, and nifty that I knew the instructor there.

She told me that her book is in stores everywhere now. So go buy it! It's only $10, and if you shop now, you get the rare 1st edition with Mike Arago's name spelled wrong.

Apparently the Chronicle will be reviewing it soon, and there's a reading in Oakland this September. I'll keep you posted.

I found out last night that Francis Ford Coppola lives on the same street as me.

I was at a community meeting at the church next door, listening to about 100 people talk about the homeless problem in North Beach. They asked you to show your ID at the door -- apparently the idea was to keep the meeting open to local residents only and prevent whatever professional homeless advocates who might have wanted to crash from dropping in.

Coppola runs this organization here in SF called North Beach Citizens. It's been around for about three years now, and has been kind of controversial. Mostly for pissing off its neighbours by allowing a bunch of strung-out homeless people to drop in and then drop out onto the sidewalk. They were having a meeting tonight to get new ideas from the community and Coppola ran the show. It was pretty interesting seeing him in action. Never have I met someone who looked more like they did on TV.

He was trying to do the right thing, soliciting opinions from the community, but his organization has been criticized for not really integrating with North Beach and for having a high rate of turnover. Coppola is reputed to be hard to work with, and you could kind of get a taste of that anytime someone disagreed with him. There was this one dude behind me who suggested that our local supervisor had put pressure on the organization to change their drop-in policy for the homeless, and Coppola simply lost it when he heard this.

"I am personally insulted" he yelled at the guy, and he started charging down the room toward him. "He had nothing to do with this!" I thought he was going to slug the guy.

Anyhow, these meetings seem more about being able to say you consulted with people than anything else. Some of the audience ideas for helping the homeless were half-baked waste-of-time ideas that would never get implemented in a helpful way -- things like "have a homeless person of the month award" for the one who is nicest to tourists.

It's one of those problems that everyone wants to solve in abstraction, and to banish in practice.

Got up this morning. Quit one of my crappy freelance jobs. Went for a swim. I feel reborn!

Anna just sent in a pretty funny link. She writes:

Leave me alone, I've had a hard life!

boo hoo

http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&ncid=yadayadayada

Well this made me feel better. An email about my controversial story:
I just wanted to thank you for your excellent article "No Free Dinner
for Free Software" recently on Wired news. It was well written,
well-researched, and an interesting read. A lot of other articles on
Wired news have confused open source and free software (one even
mentioned RMS as the inventor of open source!), but yours didn't.

I look forward to reading more of your articles in the future!
Thanks,
Colin
(just another GNU hacker)

Back from the most insane week of my life since Nick's 30th birthday. Linuxworld 2002 will be hard to forget. I got a call this morning from someone I wrote about in this story, saying I totally misquoted him. But you did say that. No I didn't. But it's in my notes. I remember it. Kind of a yucky feeling, but I'm sure his boss is bugging him for some of those quotes.

I also wrote a story about Bozuman! My new personal corporate hero.

I see the Meadster's womanning the picket lines in support of the ILWU. One thing that really brought home the Administration's labor myopia to me was Hendrik Hertzberg's piece in this week's New Yorker contrasting the nobility of those Pennsylvania miners with the overpaid rapacity of their corporate masters.

I feel bad for those Pennsylvania miners, who risk their lives for about $40,000 a year, but I have to admit that I have less sympathy for the ILWU. As storied as the ILWU's history may be, I think even Harry Bridges would agree that their situation in 1930 was more desperate than today. I mean the average ILWU worker's wage is somewhere around $100,00 -- not bad, even in 1930 dollars. I'm not down on them for that. The industry has cut so many jobs in the last 70 years, that the few who remain employed deserve to be well paid, and I definitely support their right to strike. It just makes it harder for me to feel their pain.

As far as I'm concerned, the real labor issue in the shipping industry has been the destruction of the merchant marines in this country. Why have we allowed that to happen? And why do we allow dangerous ships paying slave wages, fostering inhumane conditions, and flying flags of convenience to unload goods in our ports? Why can't the sailors working on those ships earn a living wage? And why did the once proud merchant marine tradition die in our country? Nobody ever seems to talk about this, but I think it's a serious labor issue.

Well, you've got to admire Melissa for putting her marching where her mouth is. And she's right that the Feds have no business fixing the negotiations like they have. Maybe I should follow suit and join the Baseball Players Union when they strike. I'll bet they have great food on the picket lines. :-)

There's aging gracefully, and then there's throwing an alternator through a pub window after people laugh at you for being dressed up as a cowboy.

And the worst way to get their respect...
Just watching the 11 o'clock news, I hear Jason Priestly talking to a reporter on Saturday about how a pretty-boy actor like him had to work to get the respect of professional race car drivers. "The best way to get the respect of the other drivers is to beat 'em," he said.

The next day priestly drove his car into a wall at 180 mph.

So this dude hijacked the domain name of the Al Quaeda web site and was recording all kinds of information about who was hitting it for five days, before people realized that he was in charge. He tried to notify the FBI about this (presumably information on who was hitting the Al Quaeda discussion boards might be of interest to the FBI), but alas...

When Messner took control of alneda.com, he immediately contacted federal authorities. "The frustrating part was that it took me five days to actually talk to someone (in the FBI) who had a working knowledge of the Internet, and by that time the opportunity was gone.

Meanwhile, here in the US the government is posting army guys with rifles to intercept an apparent plot to crash a plane into the Golden Gate Bridge.

Jimmy's blogging

They say a picture is worth 1,000 words. Anna's out to prove itwith her brand new, breaking-all-the-rules visual blog.

In an effort to avoid work and the North Beach Jazz Festival (which is going on a few hundred yards from me right now), I've been fixing up Filbert. For those of you who haven't seen them, check out the Study in Panic I did with Leni a few years ago. The Gallery of Panic is really worth checking out if you're a fan of the many faces of Leni. The idea was build a successful .Com on a series of e-greeting cards based on these photos. They were to be aimed at the "daughters who worry about their mothers" niche. There would be cards wtih captions like: "Where were you when I called last night?" card. "Have you been taking your pills?" "Who was that strange man my friends saw you talking to?" "I really wish you would take public transit, mom." and the classic, "It's mothers day and I'm worried." card.

I had one of these as a screensaver for a couple of years, and it gave me a great sense of serenity. Try it out.

I've also fixed the Dave's 60th Birthday index so you can see all the photos of his big party, in case you missed them.

Janie just sent me this NY Times link about how Microsoft is exhibiting at Linuxworld (which I'll be covering next week. Hightlight: I get to interview Larry Ellison). Microsoft has been advertising, off and on, in Linux Magazine for about a year now, so it's not a big surprise that they'd be at this show. I think the biggest surprise, really, is yet to come. There is a real, tangible shift in how business developers create and deploy IT systems going on right now, and the long and short of it is that a large part of Microsoft's most promising growth markets are being taken away from it. Linux is cutting into Windows server sales. Apache is taking away from Microsoft IIS. MySQL is affecting Microsoft SQL Server sales. The schools are churning out year after year of Linux enthusiasts, and they're starting to replace people who learned IT in the Microsoft/Novell world.

The reason that IBM gave Microsoft the keys to the store by letting them do the OS for the PC was because it make no sense that the OS would become the proprietary part of the PC. As Sun Microsystems Scott McNealy pointed out when I interviewed him recently, do we care about the OS in our VCRs? In our cell phones? In our cars? Of course not. Why should we care about the OS in our PCs?

That's what Linux and open source software really represents. Software that we don't need to care about. And believe me, after going through the nonsense that was Windows XP, I really don't want to care anymore.

The gun nuts are really having a bad week. According to this story, Charlton Heston may have altzheimers.

Here's a really interesting story about the legacy of 9/11 on US biometric policy. It's the best story I've read in Wired news in quite some time. I hope they use this reporter again. :-)

Here's a strike against the gun nuts

According to the NY Times
Unlike many candidates in tough primaries, Representative Bob Barr of Georgia did not shoot himself in the foot on Friday.

Instead, a gun he was handling at a supporter's house went off and shattered a glass door. Nothing else was damaged — except perhaps Mr. Barr's standing as a gun safety advocate.

My faith in the blogging community is renewed. According to the front page of blogger.com, there was a new blog created every 1.5 minutes in July. And Melissa's was one of them. Best of all, sources tell me that there are even more blogs about to start up.

Stay tuned.

I was just beginning to believe that our little blogging community had lost its momentum, when who should surprise me with a couple of nifty little entries, but Nick. My second favorite is the one where he ask the rhetorical question: have we "traded face to face verbal communication for some lame ass web page?"

No doubt a similar criticism was leveled against the printing press in its day.

Setting aside the irony that someone as, uh, reserved as Nick would have the temerity to critique anyone's party conversation, and the double irony that it took a blog, and not a dinner party, to extract this insight from our suddenly loquacious friend, I think there's something deeper going on here.

On the day I found out about the 711, I had spent the day at a Java Virtual Machine conference in a faceless hotel in downtown San Francisco. As I was sitting in the basement room, getting ready for the first talk, air systems blasting recycled air all about me, and over it all the talk of 175 geeks catching up on technology and political issues in their strange little world, it occurred to me that the Internet is supposed to be the next great step in human communications and yet.... it was created by a group of people who are completely communicatively incompetent. At least by human, face-to-face, slap my back and I'll bugger your mother, chimpanzee-squared, primeval, mammalian, rolling in the jungle standards.

I've been to about a million technology conferences and I can say with some authority that, at heart, the people who created the Internet are not themselves great communicators.

I guess there are two ways you could look at this.

1) Is the Internet simply a kind of cane for those who can't otherwise communicate? Back in the day, we used to say, "On the Internet, nobody knows you're a dog," and it's true that it is liberating to let thoughts and ideas simply stand as they are, with not any bullshit referencing indicators like whether or not they were uttered from a pair of full beautiful lips. Does it generally make things better?

2) Or is the Internet an unneeded crutch? Does the fact that these losers and geeks cooked it up mean that it really disfavors all of the cool things about human interaction -- the widening nostrils, the smells, the unspoken instinctual top-dog/bottom-dog clutch and grab for survival? Is it less human than it otherwise would have been. Does it generally make things worse?

You could almost see the evolution of human communication as a kind of revenge of the nerds. First there were the great orators, then the great writers, and now.... the great instant messagers?

I went to meet Anna downtown the other day, for a drink before Karaab's opening. Since it was downtown, we decided to meet at the usual downtown rendezvous, the 711 Club. This was our Friday after work hang out, back in the day when we all had regular jobs, and I always like to drop in whenever I get the chance. The 711 had these cool 30's-style, classically themed images carved into its walls. I always thought of greek gods when I saw them. It was dark and diverse and comfortable -- all in the ways that a good bar should be, and it was always such fun popping in off of the downtown bustle of Market and Third into the congenial and civilized atmosphere of my favorite downtown bar. They had that old German barkeep who'd tell you that Bittburger "tastes like titty" if you asked him how it was.

When I got there, early with anticipation, the doors were closed. Not locked. But the 711's doors were never closed during bar hours, so I knew something was up. And when I opened the door -- horror of horrors -- the bar was gone, the walls had been smashed, as if some madman had been offended by their subject matter and my favorite downtown watering hole was definitely no more.

Rest in peace 711. Hello Lefty O'Douls.