Miasma: Writing

Is the Baghdad Blogger for real? Paul Boutin says 'probably'

Fri, 21 Mar 2003 07:39:09 GMT

"fact-checked the Iraqi blogger" [Daypop Top 40] A: Probably. Speculation continues that Dear Raed, the weblog of a young man in Baghdad who posts under the name Salam Pax, is a hoax, perhaps even a disinformation campaign by the CIA or Mossad. A month after Computerworld published a story quoting a "terrorist" who turned out to be a one of their former writers pranking them, it would be foolish not to wonder. [...] A traceroute on Salam's most recent originating address got as far as Transtrum, a unit of the Lebanon-based ISP TerraNet. Requests for further routing info from Transtrum went unanswered, but senior network engineers who looked at the headers for me in the US think they're legitimately from Iraq. Details on Iraq's network can be found in this Salon story by Brian McWilliams, the same hacker/journalist who duped Computerworld and cracked the "send email to Saddam" mailbox on Uruklink. - Salam's blog is hosted in Santa Clara, California, at a high speed co-location facility along with the rest of blogspot.com. This seems obvious to Net veterans, but an MSNBC article's wording misled some readers into believing the site is served from Iraq. Salam posts his blog remotely using Blogger's editing software on a PC. That means blogspot.com (aka Pyra, now a division of Google) has IP records of his previous posts in their log files. No luck getting them yet. - Yes, blogspot.com was one of the domains blocked by Iraqi network administrators in January, possibly in response to Slammer. But Salam and other Iraqis know how to use Web proxies and other tricks to get around the blocks. - Salam Pax is a pseudonym composed of the Arabic and Latin words for peace. But he has signed what may be his real name in personal correspondence to another blogger. - At least one American has received a package from Salam, apparently mailed from Jordan where the titular Raed (a friend for whom Salam says he originally created his weblog) lives. - Salam posted this morning to say BBC reports that state radio had been taken over were false. He was right about that. In the end, it's still a matter of faith. Yes, I think he's really in Baghdad. And so far, he's still alive and well.

Josh in Kurdistan's hilarious & true observations of US media on the ground

Fri, 21 Mar 2003 06:09:50 GMT

The Media. So Syria threatened to kill the official who had given them permission to cross the border, and that got CNN to move. [The Other Side] [...] There a lot of serious, professional journalists here, several of whom were here (or other parts of Iraq) for the first Gulf War and a few of whom are real experts on the region. There are also a lot of clowns. The worst offenders, naturally, are American TV. A sample of what they[base ']ve done: Last fall, CNN came to Kurdistan through Syria, which used to be the easiest way to get here. Syria gives you a two week visa, and you have to be in and out of Kurdistan in that time. CNN, however, apparently decided it wanted to stay longer. Syria wants to keep decent relations with Iraq and Iraq didn't like CNN being in Kurdistan, so it asked Syria to kick them out, and Syria did, but CNN refused to go. So Syria threatened to kill the official who had given them permission to cross the border, and that got CNN to move. Then Syria closed the border to all journalists. And, this is according to a local who worked with CNN, president of the Kurdistan Democratic Party Massoud Barzani personally appealed to the president of Syria to let CNN [^] but no one else! [^] cross the border again. This made the rest of us unloved hacks have to go through a much more difficult procedure to get in through Iran. Now CNN, and several other American TV networks, have hired government press officials at salaries much higher than their government pay to work exclusively for them. These are the people that everyone has to use to get an interview with government officials, and now you have to hope they have enough time to pity you and help you out while they[base ']re taking a break from carrying ABC[base ']s tripod. I[base ']m told this is somewhat of a standard practice in these situations, but that doesn[base ']t make it any less distasteful (not to mention a violation of the US Foreign Corrupt Practices Act). One night a couple of weeks ago I couldn[base ']t get to sleep because of the sound of a truck idling loudly in the street below my window. It was unloading sandbags into the breakfast room of the hotel. The next day, following the trail of sand, I saw that it led to the fourth floor of the nine-floor hotel, the one rented by FOX. They have covered every window with sandbags, and a reliable source tells me they paid $5000 for this. Unless they[base ']re expecting Erbil to become another Sarajevo or Beirut (a scenario very far from likely) it[base ']s not clear what exactly they[base ']re protecting themselves against. And I can[base ']t imagine what the people below must think, having survived several wars in the past decades. Now FOX has spearheaded an effort to militarize the whole hotel, shutting off the surrounding streets and, they tell us, when the coalition troops come we will have American and British military guards in the hotel. Why doesn[base ']t this make me feel safer? While there are some assorted anti-American elements here, journalists are not at the top of their list. But soldiers sure will be! And now that there will be some here, right smack in the middle of the city rather than on the base far out in the country, the hotel will be a much juicier target. Thanks, FOX!

I'm addicted to this Kurdistan journalist's blog

Fri, 21 Mar 2003 06:04:30 GMT

This is Josh Kucera's weblog, called The Other Side. It is the first thing I've seen of the so-called "warblogs" that actually IS a warblog, meaning real reporting from a person ON THE GROUND in a dangerous place. More dangerous than I would like to think, as I watched on CNN tonight as air raid sirens went off about 40 km from Erbil. What Josh is doing is even more sobering to me when I hear that CNN has more than 600 journalists working in the Mideast, covering the Iraq war, but only DOZENS in Kurdistan. Most of the CNN folks are sitting tight in safe places, or places marked safe inside dangerous zones. I will have to quote in here the great post Josh did on the presence of the TV media in Erbil too. It is very funny. When I think of what the blog idealists promise with grassroots journalism in this social movement, I mostly hear talk talk talk. They say they scoop traditional media. They say they can blog things live. They show it by blogging their favorite tech conference. Whoo hoo. Here's a clue: it is a very small cadre of journos who actually spend all of their time covering tech conferences. Most of them are busy beating out their stories the hard way. Oh, and this post of Josh's below, about the exodus from Erbil? I read it on his blog several HOURS before CNN and other sources started filing their stories. I sat down at work that day, read Josh's blog, and then started in on my daily tasks with the tv monitor on near my desk as always. I didn't see this story cross until much later that afternoon. Not that traditional stories are what Josh's focus is on. He has to file those for money. In this blog, his accounts are personal, immediate. And I just think that is so fucking cool... Miasma

War Panic in Erbil. Today is the first official day of war panic in Erbil. Yesterday everything looked much like it has since I got here. Today many shops are closed, there are fewer cars in the street and people tell me their neighbors are fleeing the city for towns further towards the Iranian border. My translator's family all left for their hometown of Koy Sanjak, which is closer to the Iraqi lines but which they feel is less of a target. Shopowners are emptying their stores, putting their stuff in more secure locations in case there is looting during the war. Most people... [The Other Side]

Press button, increase power?

Sat, 15 Mar 2003 07:26:01 GMT

If the audience had developed enough rhetorical sophistication for critical thinking (the way the Bush adm uses rhetoric, you would think they were selling swampland in Florida and American people are all marks), maybe words would not function as power buttons for speakers. On the other hand, I don't doubt that "Hasty Generalization" was the most common logic error I marked on freshman comp papers simply because that was what my students HEARD around them most the time: a baldfaced statement without support or evidence, backed simply by the assumption that saying something makes it so. Aha! We have not been transported to the pre-Enlightenment days of the Inquisition. Oh no, we are actually in the mystical Kabbalah days, where to name something is to control it, and words are magic, literally, magic words. Umberto Eco in Foucault's Pendulum would be proud. Miasma A clinical description of moral aphasia.

"Flag conservatives" like Bush paid lip service to some conservative values, but at bottom they didn't give a damn. If they still used some of the terms, it was in order not to narrow their political base. They used the flag. They loved words like "evil." One of Bush's worst faults in rhetoric (to dip into that cornucopia) was to use the word as if it were a button he could push to increase his power. When people have an IV tube put in them to feed a narcotic painkiller on demand, a few keep pressing that button. Bush uses evil as a narcotic for that part of the American public which feels most distressed. Norman Mailer at the Commonwealth Club, Feb. 20, 2003.

[Tom Matrullo's Stuff]

About time someone brings in hypertext theory

Sat, 15 Mar 2003 07:17:08 GMT

Thank you Anne Galloway. Sometimes I think the blog universe thinks they invented the idea of the link, when hypertext pushed on what can be connected associationally far better than some blog software that seems unnecessarily hierarchical and based on outline-driven structures. True, blog technology helps the WEB become more hypertextual in a two-way, dialogic fashion, but it still ain't the Akashic. Miasma Can blog trackers step into the same river twice?.

Anne Galloway is thinking about tracking and representing ever-changing meanings among blogs:

...we're looking at constantly shifting contexts, shifting uses, shifting practices, shifting meanings, shifting understandings. To represent that, to nail it down, with only quantities of points of connections suggests that our social experiences of blogging can be effectively, and adequately, defined in terms of linear and causal relationships based on the transmission of data quantities. We always talk of networks and nodes, but didn't hypertext originally offer us more flexible, more rhizomatic possibilities? It seems to me that blog and blog-related software (like aggregators) seek to control - if only by filtering and structuring - the flow. And that's not very sociable if you appreciate serendipity.

This is an important insight. It will be posted on Stir when servers allow. Meanwhile, we might do well to consider how our notions of "content" and "memes" serve to constrict how the possible relations among blogs and the speech within blogs is represented by current tracking products. More to come... Your thoughts welcome.

[Tom Matrullo's Stuff]

Push me, Pull you: Poynter Institute & Tom Matrullo on information exchange vs information hoarding

Tue, 04 Mar 2003 05:38:15 GMT

I wrote about this same principle in the story on this blog, called Response to Clay Shirky: 2 Systems for Creating Value. In short, information, knowledge, is like money, it only really gains value if it circulates, a democratizing principle. On the other hand, for those who want short term gain, hoarding seems to consolidate power, that is, if the money or information already has value. The reason this works through an elitist principle is that the hoarder or society protecting various "holy of holies," whether that be technical arcana, religious insight, kung fu, or a big vault at a big fucking bank, is that it seems to confer power to the gatekeeper position. In a democratized or distributed system for creating value, the rising tide floats all boats. But introduce widespread hoarding into the equation, and elitists construct borders and gates and gatekeepers. Values diminish as people do without the thing being hoarded, and you have to distribute some of it or let more inside the gate for value to again accrue. The professional longevity of Alan Greenspan I think in some ways depends on the fact that he has deeply internalized this principle. The utter stupidity of the Bush adm, which is rumored to be not going to reappoint Greenspan due to has non-party line comments on the tax cut (and because maybe Bush assumes the HW Bush recession was actually a Greenspan "attack" on his daddy), is revealed by just how deeply this administration slept through Economics 101. Miasma

Poynter sees the point.
What is the trade-off when a newspaper (or other institutionalized journalistic entity) offers a blog, but requires people coming because of a major story to register to see it?
I'd suggest to news sites that require registration and find themselves in a similar situation that they turn off user registration temporarily -- or at least turn it off for stories about the big breaking story...
That's Steve Outing, a very bright journalist long involved with the Net, on Poynter Online. He points to Sheila Lennon's site, Projo.com, which moved its newspaper blog about the Station fire outside the registration barrier because the news need was greater than the, uh, whatever the need is (death wish?) that causes news entities to require people to register to see news. This is the news blog I described yesterday (scroll down to A community's journal).
[Tom Matrullo's Stuff]

Logical Fallacies and The Rush To War

Tue, 04 Mar 2003 05:13:43 GMT

Logical Fallacies and The Rush To War. Dave Koehler of PhillyBurbs.com has written an outstanding summary of the logical fallacies used by the Bush administration to try to convince the world at large of the necessity of invading Iraq in the absence of any sort of compelling evidence. If you think Bush is full of it, but couldn't put your finger on how, exactly, read the article. If you think Bush is making a good case for invading Iraq, read the article anyway. [kuro5hin.org

Let's review them, shall we?

One of the favorite methods of the current administration is a false dilemma. This is when only two choices are given when, in reality, there are more options. Right after 9/11 you heard, [base "]You are either with us or against us,[per thou] in the fight against terrorism. Actually, countries can be both against terrorism and not an ally of the U.S. More recently, many countries are showing that they are both against a pre-emptive war and against the current Iraqi regime. [...] Another arguing device is the argument from ignorance. This involves claiming that what hasn[base ']t been disproven must be true. We hear Iraq hasn[base ']t shown that they do not have WMD, therefore they do. The real burden of proof is on the party making the claim. The U.S. and/or U.N. must prove that Iraq has WMD. It is impossible for Iraq to prove that they don[base ']t. An argument portraying a series of increasingly bad events is called a slippery slope. This is used effectively by gun-control opponents who suggest handgun registration will eventually lead to government confiscation of all guns. On Iraq, we hear how Saddam will develop WMDs and give them to terrorists who will then use them on America. While this is one possible chain of events, it hardly justifies a pre-emptive attack on a sovereign nation. [...] Criticizing a person or group instead of an issue is called an ad hominem attack. The current talk about France by many Americans is a perfect example. It is not only childish, it distracts from the real issues. France is not obligated to go along with every American idea because we saved them from Nazi Germany 60 years ago. [...] Another common device we are seeing is a fallacy of exclusion. Colin Powell and President Bush have both talked about aluminum tubes being used for uranium enrichment for use in nuclear weapons. They always fail to mention that according to U.N. nuclear inspectors the tubes were actually conventional rocket artillery casings. They also mention Iraq[base ']s use of chemical weapons against Iran in the 1980[base ']s. They again leave out that we supported Iraq at that time in their war against Iran, and basically ignored the use of WMDs at that time. [...] Arguing a claim is true based on someone being an expert on the subject is known as an appeal to authority. In our case, the experts are defectors from Iraq. Powell claimed defectors reported there were 18 mobile biological weapons labs cruising around Iraq. First, these defector[base ']s stories are suspect due to their obvious dislike of Iraq. I[base ']m sure they would be happy to tell the U.S. what they wanted to hear if it hastened the destruction of the Iraqi regime and they could return to their homeland. More to the point, chief weapons inspector Hans Blix said his men had examined some of the trucks and found them to be food-testing labs. [...] Why is the Bush Administration using these deceptive techniques to rush us into a war with Iraq? Is there any solid evidence that Iraq still processes weapons of mass destruction and has ties with terrorist groups? A few audio tapes and fuzzy satellite photos are not proof. All we hear is the same anecdotal evidence repeated over and over again. President Bush has said that if Saddam and his generals [base "]take innocent life, if they destroy infrastructure, they will be held accountable as war criminals.[per thou] Isn[base ']t the United States about to take innocent life and destroy infrastructure?

What I've found in all the listservs I've been on since 9/11 is that there are TWO things Americans need most in this world. I've hollered and yelled, "Oh my kingdom for just these two little things!" They are: 1. For everyone to retake 8th grade civics class, with particular focus on the US Constitution and the Bill of Rights. 2. A university-level course in rhetoric and argumentation, Logical Fallacies 101, if you will. If we just had these two things, fewer people would be DUPED by stupid and poorly constructed arguments. I swear, it is if the Enlightenment never happened, and all those poor postmodernists NEED the Enlightenment to rebel and rail against. Would you take such a precious thing away from them?! Miasma

I google. You google. He-she-it googles. We have googled. We will google. And we will give the trademark police the finger. Tito, give me a kleenix. My legs have turned to jello.

Wed, 26 Feb 2003 04:50:31 GMT

Verbing Weirds Google [Slashdot] And this, from the American Dialect Society Mailing List, documents an interesting part of this most curious postmodern phenomena. For what is next, the trademarking of words like "stuff," or "dog" or "cheese?" Miasma [TM][R]

Date: Tue, 25 Feb 2003 06:44:02 -0500 Reply-To: abatefr@earthlink.net Sender: American Dialect Society Mailing List Comments: To: "DSNA list," From: Frank Abate Subject: FW: Google trademark concerns Comments: To: ADS-L@LISTSERV.UGA.EDU Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Dear lexos and others: Paul McFedries gives us (see below) a classic instance of what happens when the growth of the language cuts across someone's proprietary interest. Of course google is used as a verb. And why not? It only makes sense, it is short, it is fun, it works. And what the Google (TM) lawyer knows, but does not say, is that the company he represents cannot do anything about its use as a verb, legally. They cannot sue, as one cannot claim proprietary rights to a verb. Jesse Sheidlower recently pointed this out to me; apparently it is an explicit part of US law re trademarks. So the lawyer is really merely trying to get Paul McF to do something that he need not do, but hopes he will be scared into it by having received a letter from a corporate attorney -- enough to get anyone's attention. I'll bet it was sent certified mail with a return receipt requested -- that always impresses (and scares) people. The bottom line on this is the following: 1. The English language has a verb, google. It is new, but it is in widespread use, and this can be documented. 2. It is perfectly right and legal for dictionaries to cover this new verb, or any new usage for that matter. 3. The company Google apparently has a trademark interest in the use of the term "Google" (whether capital or not), but legally, by statute, can only protect that use as anything other than a verb. So, if someone were to come along and set up a similar service to what Google does and use the word google on that service, then Google could sue to stop that. They could even, conceivably, get a cease-and-desist order from a judge to stop that use instantly, during the waiting period for a trial on the matter. This is within their legal rights as trademark holder, assuming that they have filed for a trademark for the exclusive use of the word commercially. 4. Paul McF -- or any lexicographer or dictionary publisher -- can and should cover the language as they see fit. They should not feel restricted by trademark issues, as regards whether they report on actual, documentable usage. That sort of reporting is the same as what journalists do, and so, in a sense, if not in actual, legal fact, is protected by the First Amendment as a matter of free speech. Reporting on usage is not a violation of another's commercial interests, at least not unless the circumstances are VERY unusual. 5. The best policy to follow in cases like this, as regards how a dictionary should handle these sorts of things, is to report on the usage and have the evidence ready to back up what the entry says. If a term is a trademark item or may be a trademark item, it is good practice to acknowledge this explicitly in the entry, in a note or in the etymology. Having done that, the entry should report on the usage. 6. Finally, it is good practice to put a general note in the front matter of a dictionary (or equivalent place for an e-dict) saying that the mention of "trademark" (or similar words) in any of the entries does not affect the actual legal status of the term, but is merely an acknowledgment that the lexicographers have found in their research that there may be a trademark (or similar) claim with regard to certain terms in the dictionary. In short, Usage trumps Legality, in this instance, at least. Frank Abate

What it means to be starved

Tue, 25 Feb 2003 07:57:20 GMT

Just throwing some emphases below. Tom Matrullo brings an interesting perception to most things.

to our senses.
"lp2"
I posted this in one of Shelley Powers' comments, amid a discussion of Google/Pyra, and intended to elaborate it a bit:
...we keep thinking in terms of news reportage and commentary as having greater or lesser authority as it has more or less power to represent some external reality. Big Media has decided it can also represent "our" internal reality, as when it mourns for us. I doubt this can remain viable, especially now that we do have a means of sharing what we experience, as opposed to having Tom Brokaw read it to us. The pointillistic representational realm of blogs, especially when coupled with the semantic potentialities of Google, could lead to a richer, more vibrant realm that does not replace journalism, but provides a more resonant context in which news reports can be contemplated.

I like that reference, "pontillistic representation" pulls in feelings of movements in art.

The basic idea is simple: In the 18th century, as cafes and salons brought people together, public conversational spaces opened up, connections between persons, ideas, and disciplines were forged, things began to happen. Things we still live inside of, like democracy by revolution, historiography, etc.

Like an Awakening of those who have been asleep, or at least rendered sonambulistic by one-way Old Media force feeding and mind-fuck.

The U.S. has been derelict in keeping up a certain level of public conversation. Quite some time ago, any semblance of it was replaced by corporate messages artfully tricked out to seem like a mirthful bouquet of harmless, because mindless, bits of disjointed information, guided by no intellect, curiosity, imagination, or passsion.

Derelict? The US has often been mocked for anti-intellectualism, and while Mark Twain-style frontier-speak and plain-talking is to be valued, stupidity and ignorance are not, and these are things Americans, for all their ingenuity, have not perceived how much to the world we appear dupes, lacking full critical facilities--too easily conned by an authoritarian appeal. The only culture that fares worse are the Germans, who spawned a great university system, yet still love to march.

Meanwhile, people starved for these attributes of intellect keep finding that some of the time, they may be found on the Net, on blogs like Shelley's, for example. Oddly, this very exhibition of spirited dialogue is pooh-poohed, occasionally by the very bright folks who take the trouble to share their intelligence.

These "bright folks" are a euphemism for Old Media journalists, no? And while they share their intellect, they also share the heady sense that the 4th Estate is entitled to its accoutrements of power, and jealously guards its gatekeeper position because it feels threatened, as threatened as the 1st and 2nd Estates felt with the rise of the merchant & guild class in the waning years of the Middle Ages (or Dark Ages, if you will, for it took such a revolutionary overthrow to emerge from the imposed hardened arteries of darkness, and so it will take now.

Sharing what we apprehend, filtered through several minds capable of informing and disproving each other, offers glimpses of possibilities of larger representational richness than what we've grown used to. Reflex dismissal of the possibilities inherent in this new public space for speech - before they've been explored - is not uncommon in the wake of the blogger/google hook-up. It seems premature. A few short years ago, no one saw Google coming.
[Tom Matrullo's Stuff]

I've found reflexive dismissal is simply the arrogance of power, and when corporate journalists wear this cloak, it betrays something worse, a reluctance to ask hard questions, the questions journalists are supposed to ask, because they could disturb the status quo. Miasma

Mercola.com: Petabyte Disk Drives in Seven Years--What Does That Mean for You?

Tue, 25 Feb 2003 07:29:21 GMT

It drives me utterly mad with lust. It makes me think about Marshall McLuhan and how the media shapes not only messages but also cultures that spring up, facilitated by such media. More on that below. Miasma, the pistachio-eater

Petabyte Disk Drives in Seven Years--What Does That Mean for You?

"So just how big is a petabyte drive and what could you put on it?

One certainty is that you will not fill the space with personal jottings or reading matter. In round numbers, a book is a megabyte. If you read one book a day for every day of your life for 80 years, your personal library will amount to less than 30 gigabytes. Remember a petabyte is 1 million gigabytes so you will still have 999,970 gigabytes left over.

To fill any appreciable fraction of the drive with text you[base ']ll need to acquire a major research library. The Library of Congress would be a good candidate; it is said to hold 24 million volumes, which would take up one-fiftieth of your disk. So you could fit 50 Library of Congresses on your petabyte drive.

OK, I'd accept that as a good start! But soon I'd need more space. [G]

Other kinds of information are bulkier than text. A picture, for example, is worth much more than a thousand words; for high-resolution images a round-number allocation might be 10 megabytes each.

And this is being generous. Most images from a digital camera are one to four megabytes, not 10. How many such pictures can a person look at in a lifetime? I can only guess, but 100 images a day certainly ought to be enough for a family album. After 80 years, that collection of snapshots would add up to 30 terabytes. So your petabyte disk will have 970,000 gigabytes left after a lifetime of high quality photos.

Again, I'd need more time. I'd have plasma screens rotating images on poster-sized screens in every room. By then we would be using wall-sized screens, so eventually I'd want more bandwidth too. I am ever the bandwidth pig, but even more so, for I become a digitally-driven Ansel Adams with an 8x10 view camera if you give me world enough and time.

What about music? MP3 audio files run a megabyte a minute, more or less. At that rate, a lifetime of listening--24 hours a day, 7 days a week for 80 years--would consume 42 terabytes of disk space. So with all your music and pictures for a lifetime you will have 928,000 gigabytes free on your disk.

Surely the revolution in musical tastes, less overdetermined by playlists and rotations and scarcity and monopolies and more by choice will give us all great evolving and self-selected jukeboxes and the entire Library of Congress Library in audio books too. Great works of literature shall be our room wallpaper, as now I am listening to poetry collections from Audible. To each house a closet rack of servers, and to each house a good night! Not to mention peer-to-peer satellite-fed Net Radio from whatever house may choose to share with the peers it designates, or perhaps those peers who subscribe?

The one kind of content that might possibly overflow a petabyte disk is video. In the format used on DVDs, the data rate is about two gigabytes per hour. Thus the petabyte disk will hold some 500,000 hours worth of movies; if you want to watch them all day and all night without a break for popcorn, they will actually fill up your petabyte drive if you have a lifetime of video on it as it will give you 57 years of video....

Ooh, the bandwidth I could suck with wall-size video. I will soon run out!

Still another nagging question is how anyone will be able to organize and make sense of a personal archive amounting to 1 million gigabytes. Computer file systems and the human interface to them are already creaking under the strain of managing a few gigabytes; using the same tools to index the Library of Congress is unthinkable.

Hardly. We will have advanced home searching systems on par with Google. We will have new interfaces, new GUIs, new navigational metaphors. We will swim in VR and use the multi-layered approach of the software I saw demonstrated once called "Cloud." Oh for the infinite layering!

Perhaps this is the other side of the economic equation: information itself becomes free (or do I mean worthless?), but metadata--the means of organizing information--is priceless.

The notion that we may soon have a surplus of disk capacity is profoundly counterintuitive. A well-known corollary of Parkinson[base ']s Law says that data, like everything else, always expands to fill the volume allotted to it. Shortage of storage space has been a constant of human history; I have never met anyone who had a hard time filling up closets or bookshelves or file cabinets.

But closets and bookshelves and file cabinets don[base ']t double in size every year. Now it seems we face a curious Malthusian catastrophe of the information economy: the products of human creativity grow only arithmetically, whereas the capacity to store and distribute them increases geometrically. The human imagination can[base ']t keep up." [Mercola.com, via LibraryPlanet.com]

[The Shifted Librarian] I think she means our brains will explode. Frankly, I can't wait. "Thus, if we cannot make our sun stand still, then we will make him run." Andrew Marvel, To His Coy Mistress Miasma

Sitting on the moral high ground

Tue, 25 Feb 2003 05:47:09 GMT

Salon.com | Raise Limbaugh's blood pressure! Keep Salon in business [Daypop Top 40] [chest tumping alert!] Yup, I am a Salon subscriber, premium service. I resisted for a long time, but eventually admitted that I was powerless over my addiction, and I had to turn it over to a higher power along with doing a searching and fearless moral inventory... Wait, wrong meeting. Sorry. What I mean is that I sucked it up and bit the bullet after long resisting, because I don't believe in the subscription model on the web, and figuring I'd resent it even as I resent having registered for the NYTimes site and having been a long time hater of the Time Warner Pathfinder site in the mid-90s asking me to sign over rights to my first born child before I could even log on... As in, this STUNK of OLD MEDIA. But then I did it. I wanted an article dammit! And since I know how to get around the NYTimes archive fee charge (not gonna tell how...), this is the ONLY one I did cough up for. Funny thing happened on the way to being co-opted. I started really using the premium service and liking it. Liked the little music compilation thingie too. Not to mention the Mother Jones and Utne Reader subscriptions. Good will. Then they added blogs, and I'm still happy even tho my blog isn't in that club. Worse, I would be sad if Salon went away in a way that I would not be sad if Slate went away (has it gone away?). Obviously I subscribe to it in my news feed reader and Radio aggregator. I like its righteous ballsy streak. I miss Suck.com, and that sucks. There are a lot of things we could and do miss because VC interpreted the dot.com bomb as an excuse to take leave of what little imagination and vision the pathetic souls had in the first place. So they say Salon spends too much money and lives too high in its offices. That these periodic death throes are con jobs to get more money and get propped up a bit longer. To that, I say, "What the fuck? It is a hell of a lot better than those far more periodic beg-fests on public radio and television, and I cough up for those every 5 years or so when I am flush and when the guilt hits me." Salon is like a less serious and more mouthy version of NPR, and for that I love it. And if you need more reasons, here's their version of a beg-fest. Come on, y'all. Cough it up. It isn't as bad as you might think. Miasma

Did you ever get the feeling that some people want you dead? Last week's flurry of news stories about Salon's imminent demise produced another wave of hate mail from those eager to dance on our grave. (The fact that Salon never seems to actually die -- despite the tone of absolute certainty in these perennial press obits that this time, yes, it MUST be going under! -- never diminishes these letter writers' bloodlust.) [...] Stan Willock offers these words of consolation to Salon readers: "[They] will still have PBS, where hundreds are misinformed and entertained at taxpayer expense, as well as CNN, ABC, CBS and NBC. All are losing viewers to the fair and balanced Fox News Channel and to conservative talk radio. Best of luck looking for a new job. Hopefully you qualify as a member of a preferred group (person of color, female, gay, lesbian, etc)." [...] Salon -- and I -- take all these attacks in stride. As Ishmael Reed observed, "writin' is fightin'." When you publish a rambunctiously independent daily in a time marked by conservative backlash and martial fever, you're bound to make some enemies. And we're proud of those we've made over the years, from Ken Starr to John Ashcroft and, of course, the right-wing guidance counselors at the Wall Street Journal's editorial pages. [...] Chris Broderick wrote, "As a subscriber, I don't really know what I can do, but damn, there's got to be a way. With the way things are now in the world, I really rely on you people to give the news that I perceive to be the truth. I am so goddam frustrated with the mainstream media and their neglect of truthful reporting. It's going to be like a death in the family if you guys go down." Mark E. Michael e-mailed: "I stumbled on you a few years back and then told my wife and her sister about this great e-zine (as it was once called). You have given us some wonderful memories, but we don't want them to end. And we cannot let right-wing voices be the only ones heard. There are elements in the government that wish to silence dissent and do it permanently. There will be no marketplace of ideas, only the authorized, approved one ... How can Salon be saved?" [...] If every one of our 53,000 subscribers brings in just ONE additional subscription, Salon will finally break even this year. In the current economic climate, advertising cannot be counted on to secure Salon's future. But YOU can help do that by buying at least one gift subscription. The enemies of a free and critical press -- like the ministers of information at the Wall Street Journal -- want to write off Salon as dead. With our voice silent, there will be one less bullhorn to question the wisdom of our country's current direction. The world is becoming increasingly dangerous. As reader Mark E. Michael warned, don't let the "authorized" version become the only one you read. Help us fight the good fight. Thank you. -- David Talbot Editor, salon.com

I Just Don't Get the Appeal of Outlines...

Sat, 22 Feb 2003 07:42:29 GMT

Like, what is this shit anyway? Outlines are HIERARCHICAL . They are Old Media and Old News. Hypertext and hypermedia subvert hierarchies. So why would we want to reinscribe hierarchy after having just broken free of them with this hyperlinked version of old Vannevar Bush's Memex machine? Old Vannevar had no truck with hierarchies. Well, in his Memex machine, at least. He found they inhibited the exchange of scientific information that should be associationally linked instead. Then you can take a look at Alvin Toffler in PowerShift. Not exactly a guy I think that highly of, but that book popularized a lot of anti-hierarchical ideas, such as the idea of a Flexfirm that undermines the hierarchy of the org chart and bypasses what he calls "smokestack era" gatekeepers and turf guardians. Nah, I just don't figure where all this love affair with outlines is going, but that the folks at Radio/Manila made a toy for outlining, and all the good little bandwagon folks piled on without thinking about the relationship of outlines to hierarchical structures, structures that are oppressive and most definitely do not fit the interactive associational linking structures of New Media. Miasma living with outlines. Like Russ, I too live in a world of outlines.

The built-in outliner in Radio UserLand has a lot to offer, including timestamps and weblog integration.

Weblogs are rendered outlines from how I look at 'em.

[Adam Curry: Adam Curry's Weblog]

Ted Nelson better duck, Google is upstaging ol' Vannevar

Fri, 21 Feb 2003 06:52:53 GMT

Vannevar spent too much time chasing aliens with MJ-12. I wonder if his Memex machine would have been as dynamically shifting, as well-modulated as a thermostat up to the minute as some of the blog ecosystem measures are becoming by using Google APIs to shape constant evolving hyperlinked images of the blogosphere. Wouldn't it be cool if there were a way to visualize that thermostatic shifting, live and in a 3-D mapping system? Miasma

The Google Memex.
On the Trail of the Memex: Vannevar Bush, Weblogs and the Google Galaxy

"While blogs are creative and often charming tools in the hands of individual bloggers, by harvesting the collective power of armies of bloggers, the power Google stands to wield in online publishing begins to stagger the imagination....

If Google[base ']s PageRank algorithm is the shimmering star of the cyberspace firmament, it presides over a vast array of fellow travelers and hangers-on. For all intents and purposes, Google owns the Web, by virtue of its superior and highly popular search engine. It owns the history of the Internet, thanks to GoogleGroups, which searches over 20 years of Usenet archives. It owns the present, thanks to GoogleNews, which constantly scans the front pages of thousands of online newspapers, deduces which stories editors around the world consider the most important, and snags the headlines and lead paragraphs from those sentences to assemble a patchwork quilt that exposes news readers to a wide variety of editorial and political opinions....

The future of intellectual life, as mediated by hypertext, may well be defined by collaborative, member-driven [base "]writerly[per thou] communities such as Slashdot (where extremely brief [base "]articles[per thou] are drowned out by hundreds posts, which are then sorted and rated by volunteer moderators who separate the wheat from the chaff) or Wikipedia (a user-created encyclopedia, created two years ago and recently collecting its 100,000^th user-authored article)." [dichtung-digital]

And one ring [Google] to rule them all? Will it own the past, present, and future (breaking news, "where should I go next")? Dennis G. Jerz sent me the link to his article, saying that he had already written the article and submitted it to his editor when the big news broke. A few modifications, and voila - serendipity.

It's an interesting article, so read the whole thing.
[The Shifted Librarian]

Forget Samuel Pepys, what if God had a blog?!

Fri, 21 Feb 2003 06:44:06 GMT

God's Blog

"I think I'll make one more minor change before I go. I'm going to designate one of the new Mammal species as the Planet caretakers during my absence. I'm going to program them a slight appendage modification, called an 'Opposable Thumb' and I'm going to boost their CPU capacity a little.

With these enhancements, this species (which I've decided to call 'Primates') will have dominion over the rest of the Planet so they can keep things under control while I'm gone.

Oh, and blogging will be light for a few millennia until I get back from the Seventh Dimension." [via Jarrett House North, via McGee's Musings]

[The Shifted Librarian]

The Three Stages of Blog-awareness

Fri, 21 Feb 2003 06:40:31 GMT

The Three Stages of Blog-awareness

"One of my lawyer friends who is tech-savvy and runs a cool website has recently been made aware of blogs. After a few weeks of studying the blog phenomenon he sends me an E-mail and reports the following:

'OK, a couple of weeks ago I knew nada about the subject of blogs. Here is my take on the 3 stages of blogging:

1) There must be something to blogs because so many people are into it, but I don't have a clue.

2) OK, it does seem kind of cool and there is much, much more to it then I expected. I just don't see any really practical applications.

3) Oh my God, the things I can do with this are coming to me faster than I can keep up with.'

Well, looks like another one has been assimilated. We who have already been assimilated know that resistance is futile. Apparently, he's working hard in his laboratory on some new fangled way of doing things that will revolutionize the world. Man, I love it when the complete absence of a plan comes together." [Ernie the Attorney]

This is so true! Come to the SLS Tech Summit about blogging on Thursday, February 27, and skip directly to step three. Pass GO and collect $200! :-)

[The Shifted Librarian]

Now Bloggers Can Hit the Road

Fri, 21 Feb 2003 06:36:04 GMT

Question: How can SmartMobs mobilize when they gotta sit and tap out the letters on their phone? I keep coming back to a thing I saw at the MIT Media Lab some years ago, one of the guys developing wearable computers. He had a SWEET way of typing, better than handrwriting, better than these keypads. Chording. That's right, it was a thing you held in your fist, no visual contact with the "keys," you TYPE like chording a guitar, a variation of how braille words, I think, or Sign Language, the alphabet kind, or even like Morse code. Very simple system where you do one-handed chording and by doing it, type letters. The guy with the computer battery in the sole of his shoe and the screen in the corner of his glasses (what Neal Stephenson would call a "gargoyle") said he could do it faster than keyboard typing. He said sometimes if he was just thinking, his hand just automatically started chording. Now what ever happened to that device?! Miasma

Now Bloggers Can Hit the Road. Mobile weblogging, or moblogging, is the latest trend in the world of blogs. New software allows users to update their weblogs remotely with cell phones and other handheld devices. By Peter Rojas. [Wired News]

Lesson on Basic Premise of Weblogs

Sat, 08 Feb 2003 03:43:43 GMT

Doc Searls and Chris Gulker pick up the discussion of the Washington Post. To Doc and Chris, both of whom wear both hats, professional and amateur, consider that many news reports are quotes and connective text, nothing more. The blogging world is just the quotes. You get to find your own authorities and instead of getting soundbites, you can hear all they have to say. Some reporters say it's revolutionary to publish the full text of their interviews on the Web but I say that's second best. When the reporter takes notes he or she is selective, they can't write down everything, and they introduce errors, incorrectly writing down what was said. Better to give the keyboard to the authority and let them say it in their own words. That's the premise of weblogs. [Scripting News]

Correction on Film post of 10/31

Fri, 31 Jan 2003 05:25:20 GMT

Not sure how to go back and edit that far back, so I will post a correction pointed out by someone who stopped by, that I incorrectly attributed the Bergman parody film I love so much to Woody Allen, when it is actually the people listed below. So sorry. Glad to get it right here. Hey, thank you B Andrews for the correction. My bad. Not Woody Allen. 'Love and Death' must be what stuck in my head, but "Die Duva" is the film I was referring to here, the one I got the biggest kick out of. I may go back and correct the post, but here is the corrected poop: the dove (de düva) Directed by George Coe & Anthony Lover 1968

With a quick synopsis from http://mason-west.com/Bergman/dove.shtml: This short film is a parody of two of Ingmar Bergman's best known films: Wild Strawberries (Smultronstaellet) and The Seventh Seal (Det Sjunde Inseglet). The dialog, seemingly in Swedish, is actually Swedish-accented English with most nouns ending in "ska". The principal character, Professor Viktor Sundqvist, 76, is being driven to a lecture at the university, when dove droppings splatter the car's windshield. Detouring at his uncle's old house, his mind wanders back to his youth, when Death came to a family picnic to claim his sister, Inga. Knowing that Death is a gambler, Viktor has Inga challenge Death to a single-point game of badminton for her life. While they are playing, a dove flies above, soiling Death's cape, and distracting him enough to miss the birdie. Having won the game, Inga is free, and she and Viktor run off for a swim in the lake.

And, as the late great Madeline Kahn would say in the film, "Phallica Symbol?" (Subtitle: "Would you like a cigar?") Miasma

Dumping on Creative Commons?

Tue, 14 Jan 2003 05:19:48 GMT

Believing in Copyright and a Public Commons. Dumping on Creative Commons, Arnold Kling (or a headline writer at Tech Central Station has posted an interesting essay called... [Dan Gillmor's eJournal] Dan Gillmor:

I'd like to address the following statement from Kling's essay: The Commons enthusiasts believe that content publishers earn their profits by using copyright law to steal content from its creators and charge extortionary prices to consumers. No, that's not what I believe, though it does happen on occasion. What I do believe includes the following:
Copyright is a good thing, not a bad thing.
Copyright has been abused by the copyright industry in a number of ways including endless extension of terms and relentlessly aggressive political pushes to restrict fair use and other rights of customers.
The copyright cartel has stolen from the public domain -- from all of us.
Some balance is needed.

Tom Matrullo on Taking Ideas Seriously

Tue, 14 Jan 2003 05:13:39 GMT

Tom Matrullo: but seriously.

I was going to blog the bit below about Seyla Benhabib's essay, Taking Ideas Seriously, anyway, but it seems even more pertinent in view of some reax to what I wrote the other day about wooly blogging vs. media. Dave Rogers and Tom Shugart weighed in appreciatively, and AKMA has clinched the award, if one is ever bestowed, for "Best blog headline containing the term 'Matrullo'." [update: Steve Himmer too - more on his very suggestive line of thought anon] AKMA also pointed to a set of citations from Jonathan Delacour connected by the theme of historical ignorance. The piece by Joan Didion speaks for what many have less eloquently felt. Delacour expands on the notion of historical ignorance in a later post, briefly but pointedly marking both ends of the riddle at the heart of originality and much else, namely, the duel between the power of alleged classical authority on one hand vs. the potential solipsism of the individual (and the new) on the other:

is it not also possible that we are writing ourselves into an existence of which only we are aware?

He goes on to suggest big questions that should be the subtext of just about any lecture touching upon valued works of the past:

What to do? In immersing oneself in the past do you not run the risk of disengage from the present? What happens when the old turns out to be infinitely more fascinating than the new?

I would suggest that such questions not only should be latent in the dialogue of reading the past, but in fact always are there. It takes a mighty effort on the part of teachers and students to ignore them, as happens every day. And it's here that the Benhabib essay takes on an added value for me, addressing as it does the matter of a teacher who happens to be a philosopher (Heidegger), and his students, as this relationship has been examined in two recent books by Mark Lilla and Richard Wolin. In the process of dismantling both books, Benhabib seems to me to offer a fine instance of how the relationship of the general to the individual in history might usefully be approached. So, as I was going to blog: The austere Seyla Benhabib kicks some serious ass in this essay in the Boston Review - a simultaneous meditation upon Ricoeur's suspicious hermeneutics, the legacy of Heidegger, the relationship of philosophy to political and biographical choices, Jewish nationhood, and the problem of failing to read closely those writers who problematize all of the above in their work. She rocks.

...we wallow in the particular and revel in salacious detail, whether it be Wittgenstein?s homosexuality, A. J. Ayer?s promiscuity, Foucault?s ?sadomasochistic? experimentations in the gay subculture, Dewey?s sexual shyness, or Hannah Arendt?s affair with Martin Heidegger. The ease with which moral judgments are passed on the lives and passions of others and the titillation derived from cutting intellectual giants down to size are indicative of our own culture. Citizens in a republic of voyeurs, we are intent on microscopic moralism, incapable of appreciating more gracefully the contradictions, tensions, and ragged edges of all lives and unwilling to take ideas seriously, as something more than bandages for personal wounds.

( - thanks to wood s lot for pointing to the Benhabib essay) Your thoughts welcome.

[Tom Matrullo's Stuff]

We Media, Redux

Fri, 10 Jan 2003 03:32:21 GMT

We Media, Redux. I have a short piece in the current issue of the Columbia Journalism Review on a topic that will be... [Dan Gillmor's eJournal]

Writers with good ears adapt Lord of the Rings

Thu, 09 Jan 2003 05:17:29 GMT

Very nearly every example is dead on. I love stylistic imitation exercises! This is so much fun! I can't help but honor the wonderful writers by quoting my favorites, what in my judgment at least, are the best of the best. Miasma

"examples of prose from The Lord Of The Rings if it were written by other authors" [Daypop Top 40] jayjay writes: If I were to tell you the true story behind the unmaking of that ring...that ring!...you would think me mad. Horrors such as are scribed in ancient tomes of eldritch evil cannot compare to the terror...the cruel, cold, braincrushing terror!...that we felt in the lair of that foul spirit which raimed itself in arachnid form, that vile scavenger, that horrid arcane leech lingering at the border's of Sauron's Black Land... -The Ring-Journal of an Anonymous Hobbit, by H.P. Lovecraft Eowyn felt her heart flutter when she saw him. His raven hair flew in the breeze off the plain, and his piercing eyes caught her gaze as if by magic. He bore a kingly attitude; surely he was a prince. Her mind turned to forbidden things, things which would be forbidden to the King's niece, but surely allowed for a free shieldmaiden. She knew that she was made to love this ranger. -Mark of the King, Danielle Steele Byan Ekers writes: Smeagol writhed in corruption, his lifelong attempts to collectivize the Hobbit economy had twisted his soul and body and brought ruin to the Shire. "Precious," he muttered. "Precious colective good giving according to need." He shuddered at the thought of the unbroken individual standing proudly over a conquered plain with the Ring, and felt jealous that the wholesome power could not be his. -Lord of the Rings, by Ayn Rand. gonsoron writes: "Gandalf, Gandalf! Take the ring! I am too small to carry this thing!" "I can not, will not hold the One. You have a slim chance, but I have none. I will not take it on a boat, I will not take it across a moat. I cannot take it under Moria, that's one thing I can't do for ya. I would not bring it into Mordor, I would not make it to the border." -excerpt from Dr. Suess's FOTR. Mighty Maximino writes: By Neal Stephenson (heavily borrowed, and eerily appropriate) Frodo, the Deliverator, belongs to an elite order, a Fellowship of nine members only. He's got esprit up to here. Right now, he is preparing to carry out his only mission that matters. His armor is silver like the light of the full moon, jangling only slightly with its decorative gems. An arrow will bounce off its dwarvenmesh weave like a hammer off an anvil, but excess perspiration wafts through it like the winds over the charred plains of Gorgoroth. All the arrows of all the hunters in the world couldn't cut it against this one. When they gave him the job, they gave him a sword. The Deliverator never looks for trouble, but some Orc might come after him anyway---might want his armor, or his cargo. The sword is tiny, aero-styled, lightweight, the kind of sword a Hobbit would carry; it cuts quickly into load-bearing beams without visible effort, and when you get done using it around evil, you have to sheathe it, because it glows in the dark. Ranchoth writes: The King of the Nazgul (KotN) fingered the safety buckle that secured the shortsword in it's scabbard. It was modeled after the Gladius design, making it wholly inadequate for going up against Elven armour, but it was perfectly suited for being jammed in the collarbone of a Hobbit 'merc, without calling too much attention to it's owner. His XO, "Camel" Khamul had used a similar weapon in numerous CoIN missions in North Gondor, where he had been sent to disrupt "Elrond's" supply fellowships sneaking down the Is-ild-ur trail. The KotN smiled, even without a head. This mission was almost going to be a mead-run. Taking out a squad of sleeping halflings was going to be easier than slaying Wyvyrns sitting on a tarmac... -Hunt for the Ring, Tom Clancy Nerrie writes: Of the great War of the Ring, and the tast Of that Forbidden power, the long and Arduous trek, thru[base '] fiery, blasted plains With faithful Hobbits and treacherous beasts To Chaos[base '] edge, and there to cast the One To endless fire and eternal death: Sing Heav[base ']nly Muse, that in Rivendell did[base ']st First teach of the Rings of Power forgéd, In the beginning how the Dark Lord Sauron Brought into the world from fiery depths Of Doom this ring of gold, pouréd into[base ']t His Malice and his Evil; I now Invoke thy Aid to my Adventrous song That struggle as it might to take to th[base ']air Though will I drag from bottomless perdition Things unattempted yet in Prose or Rhime And justifie the ways of men to Elves. LotR, by John Milton RadioWave writes: We were 20 steps from the exit when the giant flaming Balrons first appeared over our heads. These weren't your normal giant flaming Balrons but some sort of interdimensional Maia that would sit and spin in mid air before dissolving before your very eyes and sneaking up behind you. Gandalf had the pipe and I had the ring which, so far, I had been able to resist trading to the local drug lords for another package of white. Gandalf was shouting random Macrohydration spells while simultaneously trying to not trip over his robes and fall face first into the local pools of goo. Legolas took another drink from his flask and, once again, began explaining how elves were different than humans and much, much mellower. - Hunter S. Thompson tracer writes: Legolas allowed himself the luxury of allowing himself the luxury of a stray thought. What new treachery is this? he mused at the form coming slowly toward them through the world-haze. He reached out with senses sharpened by years of Elvish training. It looks like ... no! That cannot be! It must be a vision. Nazgul spies must have poisoned my lembas. But the self within himself knew that his lembas was uncorrupted, that the vision that he saw now was not merely of a possible future but of an inevitable future. Yet still it strode closer, and closer, its pointed white hat contrasting sharply with the dull oceans of unbroken forestland and mountainrock behind it. Galdalf lives! "I am no longer Gandalf the Grey," the wizard intoned, his white stillrobes glistening in the day's heat. "Through the Trial of the Balrog I came close to death, but now the sleeper has awakened! I shall now be called ... Gandalf-Muad'Dib, the Mithrandir, the Lisan Al'Maia!" -- from Ring Messiah, by Frank Herbert Michael Ellis writes: On this particular evening, something changed hands quietly in the back of a hobbit-hole in the Shire many miles from the dark realm of Mordor. A small, metallic something. Something which could be accurately described as a circular loop of shining metal. The land of Middle Earth was almost oblivious to the change of ownership, which was wonderful for the two parties concerned. The trade went unnoticed among the citizens of Rivendell, it escaped the Nazgul completely, and even the dark lord himself continued straight on with his day without noticing. This was a pity for him, because it was exactly the thing he had been searching for all these years. -- from The Mostly Harmless Ring of Power, by Douglas Adams ITR champion writes: In summer, the scorching sun above Middle-earth sears the land. Perched high on the dome of the sky, it bakes everything down, forcing the Hobbits, the Elves and the men to do their work quickly and retreat to their homes, staying in the cool shade while the orb of light attacks them from overhead. During the winter, on the other hand, the sun only climbs above the horizon for a few hours each day, and then dips back and plunges the world into darkness. The snow drives downward, the winds howl, and everyone, men, Elves, Dwarves, Hobbits, and Orcs, can feel the chill penetrating to their bones. Frodo had set out from his home in the Shire, hoping for a chance to see the real Middle-earth. While his official purpose for the journey was to destroy a magic ring in the fires of Mount Doom, he had really accepted the invitation to join the quest because he viewed it as an opportunity to experience the genuine outside world. He had heard stories, of course, about how Hobbits who left the Shire, although naïve and ambitious at first, would eventually turn against the other cultures with scorn, and would long for their cozy hobbit-holes, their elaborate tea parties, their pipes of tobacco before second breakfreast. [base "]Is it true what they say about hobbits who journey eastward, that we all eventually lose the spirit of adventure and just want to return to our cozy homes after a few months,[per thou] he asked Gandalf once as they sat around the campfire, but the wizard declined to provide a direct answer. Regardless, he had remained inquisitive during the flight from the Nazgul and the stay at Rivendell. But as each day passed and the winter grew colder and more ominous, the dark bulks of the Misty Mountains loomed on the horizon up ahead. Their peaks seeming to be lost in the cloud cover, the mountains dwarfed everything, blotted out everything. Their massive bulks weighed on the members of the Fellowship, and the swirling snow seemed to wrap around them, cutting off and suffocating them. There, on the slopes of the Caradhras, Frodo suddenly felt small and insignificant, as if nothing that a little Hobbit could achieve would ever amount to anything more than that, snowflakes whirling in a storm. from A Passage to Mordor, by E. M. Forster diddlysquat writes: WB Yeats The Lake Isle of The Grey Havens I will arise and sail now, and sail to the Grey Havens, And a small tower build there, of mithril and magic made: Nine ent friends will I have there, a hole for the hobbit free, And live alone in the pipe weed glade.

What I'm Reading Now

Wed, 08 Jan 2003 02:59:02 GMT

I'll give both books a thumb's up recommendation. The longer one reads quicker than the shorter one, but oddly, since intuition led me to them in Borders (something Amazon hasn't figured out how to do yet because I always fuck with the database), there is a serendipity in how the themes of these books reflect each other. Or maybe I just got a thing for uncatagorizable iconoclasts, eh? Read this one last weekend in a single sitting: The Woman Who Wouldn't Talk: Why I refused to testify against the Clintons & what I learned in jail by Susan McDougal with Pat Harris. Intro by the fairly newly outspoken Helen Thomas (speak it girl! those were a lot of years of keeping quiet, so it is catchup time!). I was scanning this one in Borders, mostly looking to see if anybody I know from Arkansas was mentioned. 4 hours later and halfway through the book, I knew I had to buy it. Very eye-opening on Ken Starr and the OIC--that stuff will blow your mind. I didn't expect this, but the best part is her experiences in prison. Despite the cliche' of this kind of "making lemonade" approach, which is totally predictable, I have to say I came away feeling that this woman was born to face this particular life trial that would lead her to prison. I usually don't go with religious/karma stuff at this level because that is just too easy, too obvious. The easy answer seems like a ploy and it usually is. I don't know what to tell you except maybe I'm a sucker, because despite my predisposition to discount this kind of a story, I came away totally believing that the purpose of this woman's life, what she was MEANT to do, involved finding and meeting those women in prison. More power to her. The other book is Why Orwell Matters by Christopher Hitchens. Again, a surprisingly easy read. I was actually prepared for something more scholarly and wonky, sort of like The Orwellian Moment, a book I worked on for the University of Arkansas Press. I was rolling on the floor when Hitchens took on Raymond Williams (that part was so wonderful!), and I'm still not finished, but I am loving this book. I think what Hitchens intended is what I'm feeling right now, a welcome relief from the false dilemma fallacies that dominate US political thought right now thanks to the Bush adm, all this "If you're not with us, your against us" bullshit. It is so oppressive and obnoxious on listservs especially, with all these newly empowered conservative but pitifully bad rhetors. Hitchens lays out the conflicts on the right and left that would leave Orwell out of the overly polarized rhetoric. He didn't exactly side with either the right or the left, but Orwell remains as he always was, whether shooting an elephant or down and out in Paris and London, one of my very favorite people. What a fun read this book is! Miasma

Fast Company reminds me why writers like Po Bronson drive me batshit

Fri, 03 Jan 2003 07:17:52 GMT

And why the magazine Fast Company used to drive me batshit. Hated that magazine. Below is a response I wrote on the Fast Company web site. A festering brood I've had about this for some time. Nothing against the guy personally, but Po Bronson needs to take responsiblity for the bullshit mythology his writing and others' helped to create.

What Should I Do With My Life? [Slashdot]

I hate to rain on the parade, but Po Bronson is a comodifier of mythologies. He finds a horse and rides it. There were stories that needed to be told when Po Bronson was repeating endlessly the myth of the Entreprenuer Hero getting rich and taking names. Po Bronson only had one narrative then and he's looking for a new one now because that one was a bill of goods. We are the suckers if we buy snake oil from the same guy twice. How much more interesting would the world have been in the late 1990s if magazines that accepted articles by Po and his ilk had actually been interested in some OTHER narrative than the Entreprenuer Hero, like the story of waste, or of foolish business plans, or of fiddling while Rome burns? I didn't submit any article queries to magazines in those days because there was no way in hell I was going to try to turn my stories into the far more marketable but less journalistically true commodified mythos of the Entreprenuer Hero. There are a lot of good books to read about the lives of real working people by writers like Studs Terkel or Mike Rose or even Barbara Ehrenreich. Mr Bronson is trying to do their schtick because he is a writer who doesn't know what to do if he doesn't have his commodified and marketable narrative mythos already spelled out for him. If he had even half of he larger sensibilities of the 3 writers above, maybe he could open the eyes of those pitiful Fast Company cheerleaders. God save us from this book. Miasma

Academics try to straighten out DMCA: Don't hold your breath

Thu, 02 Jan 2003 03:27:48 GMT

The Chronicle of Higher Education: College Groups Challenge Copyright Office on Exceptions to Digital-Copyright Law. The groups made a similar but unsuccessful appeal two years ago. But this year, in a departure, the groups are faulting the standards the Copyright Office uses to determine whether exceptions to the anti-circumvention provision should be granted. [Tomalak's Realm] In a letter to the Copyright Office, the groups say that a section of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, known as the "anti-circumvention provision," needs to be revised to permit "fair use" of copyrighted material for research and teaching. Researchers and scholars maintain that they must be able to bypass the access-control devices and view digital texts and images without fear of breaking the law. The groups note that academic users have long been able to view nonelectronic copyrighted material under existing fair-use provisions of copyright law.