Found this little item buried in the New York Times today.

Laura Bush has postponed a White House symposium on the works of Emily Dickinson, Langston Hughes and Walt Whitman after some of the poets invited said they hoped to use the event to protest American military action in Iraq.

Noelia Rodriguez, the first lady's press secretary, said the event, originally planned for Feb. 12, had been designed to celebrate the written word. "While Mrs. Bush respects and believes in the right of all Americans to express their opinions," Ms. Rodriguez said today, "she, too, has opinions, and believes that it would be inappropriate to turn what is intended to be a literary event into a political forum."

And I thought the Alcatraz swim was intense. From the New Yorker.

The most attention I received for a swim was when I swam across the Bering Strait. There was an incredible amount of media interest, but, more than that, I got letters from people all over the world who were eager to see the Cold War end.

Apparently the Bering Strait swim took Lynne Cox 2 hours. The article in this week's New Yorker is about her 25 minute swim in Antarctica, where the water temperature was 32 degrees. At one point, she says it was like swimming through a sno-cone.

A true 21st century eating tool: The Popcorn Fork.


Kinda like chopsticks, but easy.

Another depressing misstatement of the union last night. I found myself not only annoyed at Bush's inability to identify America's real problems, but at the weakness for his justification of an Iraqi invasion. You know what would have made sense? If he had said, "we need a country in that part of the world to totally be in our pocket, so why not go after the one that's least friendly toward us and the one that's the easiest to justify invading." That I could have at least understood.

But who ever expected a politician to say what he meant?

A more disturbing trend was the speech's subtle attempt to vilify the moustache. You've probably noticed by now that the Bush administration is virtually moustache free. Powell, Rumsfeld, Ashcroft, Condaleeza Rice -- no one in a position of real power has a moustache. And of course, two thirds of the Axes of Evil are run by men with moustaches.

This, I think was the motivation behind Bush's use of the word Hitlerism in the address last night. He said,

"Throughout the 20th century, small groups of men seized control of great nations, built armies and arsenals, and set out to dominate the weak and intimidate the world. [Hmm. Sounds familiar. Florida 2000 anybody?] In each case, their ambitions of cruelty and murder had no limit. In each case, the ambitions of Hitlerism, militarism, and communism were defeated by the will of free peoples, by the strength of great alliances, and by the might of the United States of America.

Hitlerism, militarism, and communism. So why is Hitler the only guy referred to by name here. Why not Nazism, militarism and communism? Because Bush wants to make the Hitler-Saddam link here. And what is the evidence for this connection? They both killed their own people, invaded neighboring countries without just cause... and they both had moustaches.



Or maybe Nazism was just too hard for Bush to pronounce.

Gone with the Bumsteads

This is a pretty funny take on the recent Supreme Court copyright decision that had me so upset. I've taken an excerpt of the comic I lifted off of Boing Boing to reproduce here:

My mystery lady from last week has been sighted again.

Another of Anna's great ideas snatched up: the great mascot movie.

Finally, the Democrats show a vague resemblance of vertebral support.

In speech, Kerry to call Bush policy 'dangerous'
The text attacks the Bush administration for alienating key allies, abandoning international agreements like the Kyoto Protocol on Global Warming, and ignoring its obligations to create peace and democratization proposals as ambitious as its war plans for Afghanistan and Iraq.

Another Marla image. This one contributed by a reader in Pakistan named Ahmed:

Welcome to Today's Weather!

Ozone (O3) - 1
Particulate Matter (<10 Microns) - 3
Anthrax - .25

The New York Times today reports that the EPA will soon be monitoring for biological weapons.

It will adapt many of the Environmental Protection Agency's 3,000 air quality monitoring stations throughout the country to register unusual quantities of a wide range of pathogens that cause diseases that incapacitate and kill.

This doesn't really comfort me, since we're already picking up all kinds of shit that causes disease, incapacitates and kills, and that data is being ignored. And can somebody tell me: When did the idea of staying inside because the air quality was so bad become OK? It's not. It's completely fucking outrageous.

It reminds me of TV News, which now dutifully lets you know if financial analysts are investors in the firms they're talking about -- completely side-stepping the issue of whether or not they're trustworthy or could possibly have other types of conflicts of interest.

If we measure something or name something, we've dealt with it just a little bit more than if we ignore it. And often, that's good enough for politics.

NEWSFLASH!

She wrote me!

Subject:
Wired: feedback: Story: Model Linux Geek an MS User Too?
From:
Marla
Date:
Tue, 21 Jan 2003 15:14:51 -0800 (PST)
To:
bob@NOSPAM.com

Dear Robert -
How delightfully bizarre it was to discover that I was the topic of your "mystery model" article. Yes, I am indeed the "geek girl next door" featured on the Linux World and Microsoft websites. I cannot tell you how much fun this royalty-free image adventure has been. I regularly receive emails from friends and colleagues who stumble across my image on websites, banner ads, etc...and now an article on Wired News! It's almost become a "where's waldo" kind of game and I'm always surprised to see where my face turns up next. I have to say, however, that your article was a sort of pinnacle. I must admit (although, not proudly) that I thoroughly enjoyed the speculation and debate over my "true" identity.

I am neither a Linux geek or .NET developer, although I am a Communications Manager at a custom software development company named Quadrus Development (http://www.quadrus.com). I am not a Mac user either - although I recognize that they are cooler than PCs. I am a recently married, 29 year old Canadian living near the Rocky Mountains in a city called Calgary. My photograph was taken while working as a copywriter at EyeWire (a royalty-free images company acquired by Getty Images). In fact, many other EyeWire employees were photographed for this photo title now for sale on Getty's site. Come to think of it, I wish I were getting royalties on my picture...I could really use a downpayment for a new home. Do you think Getty would be willing to share?

Anyhow, I just had to write and thank you for continuing this fun. I fully recognize that this must be my 15 minutes of fame...and, yes, I'm going to savor every moment :o)

Sincerely yours,
Marla

I think that mystery woman tip must have been bona fide as I just got a corroborative link to this blog.

Update on the mystery woman. I got an email tip in response to my story:
Subject:
Wired: newstip: Answer to question "Model Linux Geek an MS User Too?"
From:
Sean
Date:
Tue, 21 Jan 2003 13:33:20 -0800 (PST)
To:
bob@NOSPAM.com

The woman in the photo is Marla. She was a copywriter with Eyewire (since purchased by Getty Images).

At the time, she was a Mac user.

Case Closed.
Sean



A Mac user. I knew it!

This is a pretty funny story I wrote for Wired News. It raises some deep ontological questions for Linux geeks. You can see more IDG images of the mystery woman here, and here.

More Getty images can be found here, and here, and here.

I have to admit, I've become mildly obsessed with this woman, and if I ever met her, I'd ask her for her autograph.

Happy Birthday Nick Adams! I guess this means I'll be bowling by day's end.

In honor of the Supreme Court's Mickey Mouse decision, I've licensed the content of my blog under a Creative Commons license, so that people might be able to do something worthwhile with this in the event that Craque POT becomes a bullying multinational.

The one great point I've taken from No Logo is how completely annoying it is for these corporations to spend so much time invading our minds (I'm talking about a little thing called "mindshare" here -- that's what they call it) and trying to hammer their brand messages into our brains. As soon as people act as if these brands are part of their lives and try and be anything more than passive receptors of brand messages, their Constitutional rights to free speech (i.e. parody) are trampled with the steel-soled boots of trademark or intellectual property law.

OK, so we live in a world where corporate mythology has replaced religious iconography. Fine. But let us at least have something to say about it.

So why a Creative Commons license? Well, one of the side-effects of this corporate IP rapacity is that it's actually pretty hard to let people use your intellectual property. It used to be that things were in the public domain unless you registered copyright, but in the 1970s (in the US at least), every authored work automatically became copyrighted. This was nice for people who were too drunk or lazy to register copyright, but what about people who wanted their work in the public domain? Turns out it's actually pretty hard to shake this automatic copyright assignation and put your work in the public domain. This is one of the things the Creative Commons licenses are designed to do.

Now, I'm retaining copyright on what I write -- it's not going into the public domain -- but Creative Commons allows you some really easy (and legally sound) ways to assign certain rights to other people. The license I've chosen allows you to use my bloggings, so long as you give me credit and don't use it for a commercial purpose. You can click on the icon at the bottom of the right column for more information.

Mickey Mouse will never die -- or at least his copyright won't. In a violation of the spirit of the US Constitution, the Mickey Mouse copyright has been extended another 20 years.

Have a cluttered desk? Feel discriminated against? You shouldn't Clutter, it turns out, may actually be an efficient organizing principle.

Many companies these days—United Parcel Service and General Motors in America, for instance, and Asda, a supermarket chain in Britain—run “clean desk” policies, requiring employees to remove all evidence of work from their desks by the end of the day...

Trying to force workers to get rid of clutter and scan their papers into a computer system may be an expensive waste of time. Companies which do this may find that they create large, useless databases full of information that nobody ever uses.

Self-promo. How Microsoft is catching up to Java with it's .Net platform.

Speaking of aging rockers. I'm selling a piece of rock'n'roll history on eBay.

Hope I die before I get old

British rock star Pete Townshend, guitarist with legendary band The Who, on Saturday admitted paying to view Internet child pornography but denied he was a pedophile and said it was for research purposes.

Townshend, 57, said he felt "anger and vengeance" toward those who found child pornography attractive, and said he believed he was sexually abused as a child but could not remember clearly what happened.

"To fight against pedophilia, you have to know what's out there," he said, adding that he was involved in an anti-pedophilia campaign that had fizzled out.

Where's the "Crash?"

Helicopter Crashes Near Golden Gate Bridge

Interesting use of the word "crash," not that the media is hysterical or anything:

A helicopter crashed Friday in the waters just east of the Golden Gate Bridge.

Four people were rescued from the chopper after the 4:20pm accident. There were no injuries... [the pilot] was able to land the pontoon-equipped craft in the water without further incident... There was no apparent external damage to the craft.

Jack asked me a question a week ago, which I've neglected to answer. He wrote, "Bob, are you going to give us topics for the novels we all need to write?"

This was in response to my prediction that everyone would write a book in 2003.

Note that I said "book," not novel.

Anyhow, here are a few book ideas you can have, though if you're not thinking up the topic yourself, I'm not sure how far you're going to go.

1) The Encyclopedia of Human Experience. From giving birth to giving head, every significant human experience explained with that first-hand-almost-feels-like-you're-doing-it-yourself accuracy.

2)Donner Party II -- Starvation in Space. A science fiction thriller about a doomed party of interstellar settlers who resort to cannibalism when they make a simple math error on their trip calculations.

3)All Girl Convent Party

4)The Half Time Cookbook. 30 hearty recipes for dishes that can be whipped together during the half time break of a football game

5)Odyssey II. The first one was just a dream. Now it's time for the *real* 20 year voyage.

6)Passion Play. A loser guy can't get a date or finish his novel and then enters a magical world of imagination where he can get a date, but is an asshole, only to discover that his dad wasn't such a jerk and there is such a thing as human kindness in the world. We just need to learn it from the dolphins. He travels to Morocco and flushes his book down the finest flush toilet in Fez, page by page, and then goes into the desert to live with the camel traders. Then he moves to New York to start a career in advertising, but he's happy and married to the girl he never noticed when he couldn't get dates.

Meanwhile, one of the men who appointed Bush President of the US, is writing his memoirs.

His fee? $1.5 million.
Network he's agreed to speak on: News Corp's Fox News.
Publishing company that's paying the $1.5 million? News Corp's HarperCollins.

I've always felt that decision to overturn Florida's Supreme Court and make Bush the President stunk -- on both sides of the vote. Aren't the conservatives the ones who are supposed to support state's autonomy?

Italian Police Fabricated Evidence against Genoa Activists.

More than 100,000 people participated in the 2001 Genoa protests, most of them peacefully. Italian authorities, however, prepared for the protests by ordering 200 body bags and designating a room at the Genoa hospital as a temporary morgue (BBC, 6/21/01). Twenty thousand police and troops were on hand, armed with tear gas, water cannon and military hardware as authorities enclosed part of the city in a so-called "ring of steel," with many railways and roads closed and air traffic shut down.

The U.S. press routinely gloss over this militaristic response, instead invoking the demonstrations as proof of the threat posed by globalization activists. Even the killing of Carlo Giuliani-- a protester who was shot in the head, run over and killed by police after he threw a fire extinguisher at a police vehicle-- is recounted by U.S. media as a timely "lesson" for activists that, as Time magazine put it, "You reap what you sow" (7/30/01).

From Siobhan: Taliban strikes again in smalltown Catholic BUMBLEFUCK NOWHERE! Oh wait, it was Rock Machine...

Just another comment on our collective inability to perceive reality, thanks to paranoia.

When he opened it, he saw a white powder and immediately called police because he thought it was anthrax.

Bad news for quitters.

The 12-year study published in The New England Journal of Medicine found that the frequency of drinking was the key to lowering the risk of heart disease, rather than the amount, the type of alcohol, or whether or not it was drunk with food.

I went into our living room to turn the TV off last night, and found myself sitting through the last 1/2 hour of the "Greatest Moments of Cops." I'm always fascinated by the intensity of Cops, but there's something terribly wrong and unfair about the show. As we should know by now, you don't have to be black or have a mullet to commit a crime in this country, but Cops -- which bills itself as a 'reality' show -- only presents one side of the reality. As Michael Moore points out in Bowling for Columbine, we get a skewed image of reality, and these shows create an imbalanced picture of what actually threatens us. We don't see rich people getting arrested. Ever. And we don't see cops fucking up.

An article on how technology like blogging is helping to democratize some of the media. To tell you the truth, I think there will always be a small vocal minority of people who actually want to participate in their media environment. Most people have problems of their own, and besides, there's room for only so many active readers. If too many people start interacting with journalists, they'll stop listening.

The future: Blogging from your telephone.

FoneBlog is a comprehensive software system that allows mobile phone users run personal websites (called "blogs") by sending pictures, text and soundclips from their phone.

More self-promotion. Have you heard of Grid computing?

Self Promotion Moment: If you're into Web services standards or long acronyms, you can check out my latest article in Network World. I think this is the best art I've ever had associated with an article, but maybe I'm just a sucker for rabbits and bears in tuxes.

This from Siobhan: Was Christ a stoner? I think somebody's been smoking something.

Jesus was almost certainly a cannabis user and an early proponent of the medicinal properties of the drug, according to a study of scriptural texts published this month.

Wow. These "North Africans" didn't just have poison, they had "deadly" poison. Thank God for the War on Terrorism.

UK Police Find Deadly Poison, Arrest N. Africans
--By Michael Holden

LONDON (Reuters) - British anti-terrorist police said Tuesday they had found a small quantity of ricin, one of the world's deadliest toxins, in raids in north London that led to the arrest of seven north Africans.

This is from November, but I just heard about it now. Penn, of Penn & Teller, stands up for his rights with the Federal rent-a-cops at McCarran. Topless showgirls may be his reward.

He reached around while he was behind me and grabbed around my front pocket. I guess he was going for my flashlight, but the area could have loosely been called "crotch." I said, "You have to ask me before you touch me or it's assault."

He said, "Once you cross that line, I can do whatever I want."

I said that wasn't true. I say that I have the option of saying no and not flying. He said, "Are you going to let me search you, or do I just throw you out?"

I said, "Finish up, and then call the police please."

Choke of the week:

San Francisco 49ers stage the 2nd greatest playoff comeback in NFL history, but you've got to feel bad fo this guy, Trey Junkin. Six seconds to go in the game, the Giants can win if they make the 41 yard field goal, and...

Then, it happened: Giants long snapper Trey Junkin, their fourth long snapper of the season, and a 41-year-old man called out of retirement only for the playoffs, muffed the snap. It hit the grass before holder Matt Allen could set it, and the 49ers swarmed Allen. He rolled right, and tried a long, feckless pass downfield. Flags flew. Giants lineman Rich Seubert was downfield illegally, and the game was over.

Junkin, the snapper, was devastated: "I cost 58 guys a shot at the Super Bowl . . . I should have stayed retired."

I think Anna's quitting is rubbing off on me. We both feel kind of clumsy and uneasy these days. I feel listless too, but that seems to be my own damage, not Anna's. Reaching for a bottle of Aunt Jemima maple syrup this morning my sleepy hand wavered and then obliquely careened into a ketchup bottle. Miraculously, it found the perfect path, sliding the ketchup label precisely into the tiny crevice between my left thumb and its nail, and slicing a deep and painful paper cut at the tip of my thumb.

It was then, as my thumbnail started to cloud up like a bloody aquarium, that another idea from The Tipping Point hit home: We always talk about Band-Aid solutions as if they are somehow short-sighted and inefficient. But the Band-Aid is actually an incredibly useful invention. More often than not, the Band-Aid gets the job done and lets us get on with our lives. Maybe the pejorative idiom should be "coronary bypass solution," or how about "years and years of rehabilitation solution." Why do we look down so on cheap simple things that get the job done?

On New Year's Eve, Senior Mark and I had an interesting conversation about the similarities between pamphleteering and blogging, but perhaps there's another literary form that bears comparison: the diary. Though we focused on the power dynamics behind blogging (wide dissemination, low cost), if you study the actual literary form of the blog, it's obviously much closer to the diary. So why not use blogging to republish classic diaries -- especially those in the public domain? That's what This dude is doing with his republishing of the Diary of Samuel Pepys.

Reading Malcolm Gladwell's The Tipping Point landed me on the Oracle of Bacon this morning, where I discovered that my dear friend Leni Parker has a Bacon number of 2. According to the Oracle:

Leni Parker was in Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Circle (1994) with Amelia Campbell
Amelia Campbell was in Picture Perfect (1997) with Kevin Bacon

Two is a pretty good Bacon number. Apparently 2.8312, and not six, is the average number of steps needed to connect Bacon to any actor in the IMDB, but as The Tipping Point notes, Kevin Bacon is far from the most linkable actor in the history of Hollywood. In fact he's 669th. Elliot Gould can be connected to every other actor in only 2.63681 steps (He connects to Leni in two: "Leni Parker was in Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Circle (1994) with Jennifer Beals Jennifer Beals was in Let It Be Me (1995) with Elliott Gould"), but the king of them all is none other than Rod Steiger. Gladwell says this is because he's been in every kind of movie: from Oscar-winner, to B Movie, to straight to video. He works with everyone.

Could a greater miracle take place than for us to look through each other's eyes for an instant?

--Henry David Thoreau

It's flattering to be missed after just over 8 days' absence, but it makes me wonder if Blogging's mortal blow may have been delivered during our friend Vincent's 8 day absence between December 16-24, or perhaps it was that 10 day stretch from December 6-16? Surely Penelope's darkest hours were as the blink of an eye when compared to the anguish and tormented questioning that plagued Vinnie's faithful readers during those extended long dark nights of the blog.

But to answer the question, I don't believe that blogging is dead. Its spirit is alive and well in the good old Republique Francais.

I'm writing from my good friend Pete's house in Toronto, just hours away from my flight back to California and what will no doubt feel like the first real day of the Year of Getting Shit Done. New Year's Eve was magic. Our good friends Terry and Siobhan took the train down from Montreal and hosted this year's party at the Bay Bloor Executive Suites, just two doors down from my now-demolished former place of work, the Pawnbroker's Daughter.

New Year's is the mother of all rote holidays. Widely anticipated as the biggest party of the year, people always seem willing to make the effort to somehow out-party themselves on this day. But how to do that?

In fact there's a standard recipe that involves too much liquor, plastic hats, over-priced entertainment and baloons falling from the ceiling. These cookie-cutter New Year's events are usually about as exiting as communion to me, and I avoid them now like the plague.

Then there's the romantic getaway for two. Champagne, fireplace, and here we are as the world turns. I like this one, but you've got to admit that the New Year's aspect of it is little more than a peripheral aphrodesiac.

There is also the generic, invite a bunch of people over and get twice as drunk scenario, which I mastered sometime around my third year of University. This is the meat and potatoes of New Year's events. Satisfying but rarely memorable.

The event we had last night was my favorite scenario of all, however. The all night intensity-fest. The best people, love, madness, a 6 AM swim (this is optional), enough awkward moments to make the night interesting, and -- most importantly -- a universally revered sense of occasion. Though it's early in the morning of Jan 2, I am only now feeling like the party is actually over.