Disorderly Content

(...and if you get the title of this post, you're old!)

Thanks to a friend on the forum I mangle manage, the year that's behind us presented in song:

Bad enough that The Phone Company will screw its customers by revealing anything the government wants without even a hint of due process. But now it's revealed that AT&T has shut off all those illegal wiretaps. The reason? The FBI is behind in paying its bills. No cash, no screwing. Yep, sounds like prostitution to me.

The Huffington Post's RSS feed has way too many entries, so I can understand if you've tried it and given up. Still, every now and then something shows up and makes it all worthwhile. Herewith is one such example:

I am not gay with a coked up page
I am not gay with the underaged
I am not gay when I tap your foot
I am not gay keep your big mouth shut
I am not gay in a bathroom stall
I am not gay, not gay at all

I am not gay with a wide, wide stance
I am not gay in my senator pants
I am not gay with a cat in a hat
Here's my card--what do you think of that?
I am not gay in a bathroom stall
I am not gay, not gay at all

I am not gay in an Idaho paper
I am not gay please hide my caper
I am not gay in my childless marriage
I am not gay in a baby carriage
I am not gay in a bathroom stall
I am not gay, not gay at all

I am not gay with an undercover dick
I am not gay--no, not a lick
I saw some paper on the floor
I picked it up--no, nothing more
I am not gay in a bathroom stall
I am not gay, not gay at all

Let me be clear, I am not vague
I dearly love my Mrs. Craig
I am not a sad old perv
My only desire is to serve
I am not gay in a bathroom stall
I am not gay, not gay at all

Among the too many podcasts on my iPod and iPhone are The Slate Explainer Podcast, which answers some interesting and often topical question, and The Onion Radio News, which, despite what you may have heard, can generally be distinguished from real news headlines by its believability. But today I tought I might have had the two reversed. I began listening to a Slate Explainer from a couple of days ago and couldn't believe my ears. The question? "Why Don't Miners Carry GPS?" Hello? Do we really need three and a half minutes to explain that GPS satellite signals don't penetrate through walls, much less a mile of rock? Makes me wonder how The Onion can write satire when reality is so self-satirizing.

It's always an iffy thing, trying to calculate the exact moment when it's okay to make jokes about a tragedy. And of course the specifics of the joke matter too; not just any joke at the expense of the victim will do. I'd normally be at least a little bit on edge about anything that smacks of 9/11-related humor. But not in this case, largely because the connection is so tenuous.

Boing Boing pointed me to 4/29truth.com, a wingnut site that sees a conspiracy in the recent fuel-truck-destroys-a-freeway incident here in the Bay Area. As the site's blogroll makes clear, the author is making a connection between the "truth" of this incident and the "truth" of the World Trade Center attacks. And just as with the wingnuts who claim conspiracy on 9/11, this site cites its own set of unassailable "facts":

• The bridge should have easily withstood the thermal stress caused by pools of burning auto fuel.
• If steel from those overpasses did soften or melt, I’m sure we can all agree that this was certainly not due to auto fuel fires of any kind, let alone the briefly burning fire under that bridge.
• 800°C is near the maximum flame temperature of hydrocarbons burning in air without pre-heating or pressurization of the air, well below the melting temperature of steel.
• It is impossible for fire to melt steel.
• The section of the bridge appears to have fallen straight down, exactly as it would have from demolition charges.

Uh huh. So maybe whoever it was who "really" brought down the WTC needed another disaster to make the first one more believable. Sure, that makes sense.

I've been catching up with my favorite podcasts after two weeks on the East Coast. Listening to a two week old episode of Washington Week on PBS, I was struck by the credulous tone with which the reporters described the liquid bomb plot uncovered by the British authorities. With the hindsight of time, are they still so sure of the accuracy of what they and we were told?

It's hard not to be cynical, given our experience with this president and his... um... people. But this story seems to have so much to be cynical about. Like the news that the Brits had been watching the plotters for over a year and only pulled the plug because of pressure from the White House. That the plot wasn't remotely imminent, if it were even a practical risk. (For more on that, you might enjoy this article, called, fair-and-balancedly enough, "Was British terror plot a load of crap?".) And that the arrests came just a couple of days after primary losses for a couple of staunch supporters of our War on Terror or War on Terrorists or whatever they're calling it these days.

I just have to ask: are the lives of American travelers being screwed with just so the Bush Administration can look competent in fighting this very real threat? I don't question the threat, mind; only the competence, honesty, morality, wisdom, ethics (heck, let's throw in grooming habits and taste in music) of those who fight it.

It's official: George W. Bush, the most powerful man on the planet, is also a "moving/falling object". That's how the President was described in an official report on his two wheeled collision with a Scottish constable. The Scotsman newspaper quotes from the recently released report on the incident last July, where Bush demonstrated an inability to ride, wave and speak at the same time. Apparently, the most powerful man on the planet has the attention span of a small child. Which explains a lot, come to think of it.

And to think I actually considered relocating to Florida. Well, not seriously. But I did fly out for an interview, although I think I knew it was a bad idea shortly after getting off the plane.

What causes me to muse so? A followup to a piece I first saw yesterday on Boing Boing about cops in Miami-Dade and Broward Counties who threatened people who asked for complaint forms. An undercover reporting team got hidden camera footage of one of the officers browbeating a requestor, which I suppose is still better than the other kind of beating. The cop even chased him out of the building when he refused to knuckle under.

But the story even gets better. Today's update has that officer trying to take the news station to court to keep the public from seeing the story. The judge in essence told him to get stuffed. As well he should.

Sorry for the paucity of posts (with their absence of alliteration, of course). Last week my new job had me actually working, which plays havoc with my blogging time. And energy. And time.

But this item I saw in a couple of places was too good to let pass without acknowledgment. It's a big deal when H&R Block has to report a hit to earnings. But it's even better, in that wonderful schadenfreude sense we can all relate to, when the reason for the shortfall is that they botched their own taxes! Makes you wonder how anybody can trust these guys to keep the IRS from the door. Me, I did mine with TurboTax. And I already have my refund, although some spammer claiming to be the IRS is offering me a sixty-odd dollar refund if I'll just click on some link they've thoughtfully provided. Yep, tax time just gets better and better.

(Read about the H&R Block story on Slashdot.)

Yeah, I know; it's only news when he doesn't. But you have to love it when Mr. No Spin gets it right back in his face, as he does in this video from MSNBC's Keith Olbermann. Keith's channeling of Bill as Ted Baxter's just gravy.

(Thanks to TV Squad for this one.)

I don't know when I had the revelation that I shouldn't automatically accept what I read, or that although I can trust what I see and hear, I can't trust their interpretation. But I have to assume that the next generation will have that particular revelation sooner, thanks to the prevalence of blogs and "gotcha" journalism. Or maybe they won't see it as a revelation in the first place. Maybe finding out about Santa and the Tooth Fairy will help younger generations avoid a blanket belief in the written word.

I mention all this because of an article on JOHO The Blog that dissects press coverage of a Wikipedia kerfuffle from a few weeks ago. The original story was about a bogus entry that claimed that a respected journalist had a role in the JFK assassination. In the end the culprit was found and confessed, the entry was removed and some small policy changes were enacted for Wikipedia contributors. But the press coverage was of the "Emperor has no clothes!" variety, identifying major flaws in Wikipedia's processes and even in its concept. It's as if the mainstream press wanted to put up a sign that says, "See? You can't trust these guys either!"

On JOHO, David Weinberger points out how the press got the story wrong, and why those mistakes matter. Because although the truth is buried in their coverage, the conclusions they present are at variance with that truth. And I have to wonder how many times the press misinterprets events so badly, whether the record is ever corrected, and how many people go on believing the original version.

Thanks to Boing Boing for making me take a second look at this one.

Yeah, I know; the rest of us left for the 21st a few years ago. Still, it's nice to see my favorite country get with the program. (Okay, maybe only my second favorite. But I digress.)

What am I talking about? The powers that be in Canberra are planning to legalize something we here in more modern societies take for granted: the right to tape television shows and rip music from CDs to MP3 players. Yes, it's true; using a VCR or an iPod for anything but prerecorded content is a criminal act in Oz. Which makes most of the country's population criminals. (Shows you how well the law is working, don't it?) Kind of ironic, given Australia's history.

Spotted on Slashdot which got it from the Australian edition of News.com. Of course, being Fox, they may have gotten the whole story wrong.

Apologies for the big gap since my last post. Combine a week in Vegas with some of my Scaper friends, a suddenly hyperactive job interview process (unexpected this time of year) and a bout of the flu, no doubt contracted among the Vegas hordes, and I've had too many other things to deal with to be blogging much. But now I'm slowly coming back to life. And the final wrinkle in an interesting civil liberties story couldn't pass without a mention.

I refer to a story that's been making the rounds recently about a University of Massachusetts student receiving a visit from Homeland Security after requesting a copy of Mao's Little Red Book. Various newspapers picked up the story, several people said it sounded like an urban legend but were stuck to explain how a UMass professor confirmed the story, and we all were left wondering if this was an example of government excess gone mad (certainly a likely explanation given this particular administration) or of a hoax taking on an explosive life in the blogosphere. Now we learn that the supposed victim of the DHS visit made the whole thing up. Which of course should give pause to anybody who believes something just because it sounds plausable and appears in a bunch of newspapers.

Then again, with the discovery that Our President (well, somebody voted for him) has authorized the spooks to listen in on any and all conversations, including Internet traffic, in violation of even the incredibly lax laws put in place by the sheep in Congress, it's not surprising that we'd believe a story like this. I'm trying to remember; in the Bush family is George W the Big Brother? Or would that be Jeb?

The St. Peterburg Times has a deeply disturbing story about an executive Wal-Mart tried to have arrested. His crime? Purchasing while black. I can't decide if it's worse than an incident like that can happen or that the people who perpetrated it, upon learning of their mistake, didn't fall to their knees in apology.

A recent episode of Wait Wait... Don't Tell Me on NPR mentioned a closed captioning foulup that once described Alan Greenspan as suffering from "an enlarged prostitute". Andrea Mitchell, newsperson and Greenspan's wife, was alleged to have replied, "He should be so lucky". Which is funny if not particularly illuminating.

Not so what I have to assume was a typo on The Today Show this morning, which referred to Bill O'Reilly as being in the No Spine Zone. Think Progress has the screenshot, which they swear hasn't been altered. At last, somebody other than Al Franken tells the truth about the bloviating O'Reilly.

While scanning the blog posts in my RSS feed this morning I came upon a link to the American Red Cross donation site, which is being hosted by Yahoo! Stores. I clicked on an amount, went to check out and got an error. It seems that I couldn't get a secure connection to Yahoo's payment system. Tried again a little while later and was able to complete the transaction and get my donation on the way.

Which suggests that the server was just too overloaded the first time to take my pledge. Which is sort of a bright spot in its way, if there really are so many people showing their support that Yahoo! is having trouble keeping up. If you can't get in, please keep trying. It's the least we can do.

Back when I used to read a lot of mysteries, I remember feeling let down pretty regularly when it came time for the solution. Problem was that all the complexity of the detective's (or detectives', as the case may be) analysis and deliberations were replaced by the far more mundane details of the resolution. Much as I loved Nero Wolfe, I always felt that the denouement was the least interesting part of any story.

Why, you must be wondering, am I bringing this up now? Especially with a posting title that evokes the laws of Kashruth? This all came to mind when I noticed a blog entry on The Huffington Post with the intriguing and, to me anyway, impenetrable title of "$2M Fight Between Van Halen And The Baltimore Orioles". What was the connection between an aging rocker and a baseball team? The snipped on the blog didn't help; it expanded on the headline but didn't answer the question of why Van Halen and the Orioles are in court. For that I had to go to the article.

Where I got my answers. And suddenly the connection between a band and a ball club was clear. Should have been obvious, I suppose. Maybe my mind is going. But if it was, would I be aware of it?

A friend sent me an article from Editor & Publisher about an interesting dilemma faced by the editor at the Seattle Times. When a citizen expires, um, in the act, as it were, is it newsworthy? What if the other participant, uh, well, um, is a, how shall I put this, equine American?

Guess we should be grateful there aren't pictures.

You have to feel sorry for newsmen... oops, sorry, make that newspeople... when there's a breaking story that just refuses to provide any news right at the moment. But it might, y'know? Any second something might happen. Just not right now.

Anyway, here's one blogger's version of the endless reportage when there's nothing to report. Good stuff.

Oh, and as long as I brought up the PC thing regarding newsperson vs. newsman, I was listening to a podcast of On The Media where they interviewed rightwing nutjob Nancy Grace (who I assume is on CNN because Fox can't have all the rightwing nutjobs). And when the interviewer referred to a jury foreman, Ms. Grace immediately corrected him with foreperson. And yet there's an anti-liberal bias in the assumption that all PC crap comes from liberals. As a liberal myself, at least some of the time, I refuse to consider Nancy Grace one of us...

A piece on the PressThink blog about the Downing Street Memo and the failure of the press to pick up and run with the story, makes a strong case for the blogosphere as a sort of court of last resort for news that didn't get the attention it deserves. Whether through malicious intent, incompetence, fear of reprisal or just exhaustion, the mainstream media doesn't always get it right. Heck, sometimes they get it horribly wrong. But now there's a place for a story to build, one which doesn't rely on people who have already rendered judgment and who, being human, hate to admit they missed something important and would rather wait for it to go away.

So we bloggers (and in including myself I take a tiny share of credit which I don't deserve, at least not yet) really do represent a change in the rules of the game. When those in power lie and manipulate, and when those others in power who are supposed to catch the others in those lies and manipulations fail at their job, there's still a chance for the truth to come out. As Winona Ryder said in Heathers, there's a new sheriff in town.

The Huffington Post points to a Washington Post article in which Bob Woodward tells the story of his first meeting with Mark Felt and how he went on to become the most famous anonymous source of our age. Having grown up with Watergate (the hearings coincided with the summer after my freshman year at college), I remain fascinated with that time and still have a belief that politics matter and that politicians can sometimes do the right thing. It's a mark of how far we've come that what Nixon did in secret, knowing it couldn't stand public scrutiny, our current administration does openly, even contemptuously. The times they are a-changing. And not for the better.

Who needs The Onion when the real news is so ridiculous? Yesterday, Reuters had the story of how Canada's Prince Edward Island was restricting the opening hours of its suicide hotline to 9-5 weekdays. Budget cuts, you know. Which makes perfect sense. I mean, how often do you feel suicidal when you aren't at work?

And then we have this San Francisco Chronicle story about a photo op of the Governator filling in a pothole in San Jose. Which wouldn't be much of a story, except that the pothole didn't actually exist until a road crew dug it up a few hours earlier. Glad to know there aren't any real potholes Arnie could have filled in for the cameras.

By now I'm sure you've read about how a Newsweek article that claimed military interrogators at Guantanamo had flushed a copy of the Koran (Quran?) inspired protests in Afghanistan that left fifteen dead and more than two hundred injured, and that the article is unsubstantiated and likely false. Ignoring for a moment the irresponsibility of publishing a story with such tenuous basis, I have to wonder if those in the Moslem world who were driven to violence by it will stop and reconsider. How many will accept that it was all a terrible mistake? How many will continue to believe the original story? And how many will make a conscious choice to believe it, because it plays to their own prejudices about the western world? It's one of the sadder aspects of human nature that we continue to be angry and self-righteous, even when it is revealed that the cause for that anger was an error.

Not that this turning out to be an error is much solace to the dead and injured. Somehow a retraction doesn't seem like enough of a response.

Update 05/17: And now the pendulum swings back. Several news outlets, including an interesting piece at Salon (watch a commercial for free access), question both the idea that it was Newsweek's reportage that started the riots and the suddenly conventional wisdom that no such desecration took place. An article by Molly Ivins enumerates all the reports of Koran abuse before Newsweek ran its story. Surely that pokes a hole in the whole "It's Newsweek's fault" scenario. To say nothing of the White House demanding more than an apology from the magazine. When exactly did they/will they apologize for getting the whole WMD claim wrong?

Perhaps the most fascinating story in tech over the past couple of years has been the attempt by SCO to claim ownership of the core technology in Linux. This has led to SCO suing Linux provider Red Hat, Linux advocate IBM and several of SCO's own customers, including Autozone and Daimler Chrysler. Following the case has been made far easier due to the efforts of Pamela Jones, the prime mover behind the Groklaw website. Groklaw has followed every twist and turn of the various legal cases and SCO's various public utterances, which are often surprisingly out of sync. It has done so by quoting from public court documents and from a range of first person accounts of hearings in the cases, as well as providing carefully thought out commentary on what it all means.

Groklaw is clearly positioned in opposition to SCO's claims. Needless to say, the other side has been less than pleased, and that they've done what they could to discredit the site. Those efforts have been nasty, although nothing like the firestorm over a vicious and, as best I can tell, completely irrelevant attack on Ms. Jones by industry reporter Maureen O'Gara. That attack was withdrawn by the publications that initially ran it, which might have been the end of one particularly ugly chapter in the story.

But then the publisher of Sys-Con Media, which employs Ms. O'Gara as an editor and ran the story, made the mistake of accepting an interview with Free Software Magazine. And in the interview he makes it clear that he doesn't believe his magazines or Ms. O'Gara really did anything wrong by printing personal information about Ms. Jones and her family, or by the use of some pretty vile language along the way. The editorial staff at LinuxWorld Magazine plainly disagrees; they resigned this morning in protest at Sys-Con Media's failure to meet minimum levels of journalistic decency and ethics.

Me, I wonder where the SCO saga will go next. And I hope the former editors at LinuxWorld all find gigs at publications that know the difference between industry reportage and personal attacks.

Dan Gillmor, formerly a columnist for the San Jose Mercury News and now a citizen journalist and advocate for open media (or something like that - it's easier to describe than it is to name) has a link to a wonderful exchange between Jeff Jarvis, formerly of TV Guide, People and some real newspapers, and Bill Keller, executive editor at The New York Times. What's wonderful about it is that it considers real issues of journalism and the people it purports to serve. With all this instant communication technology, in both directions, how should the news media model of largely one-way communication change? (I for one have no doubt that it should change, a view I share with Mr. Jarvis.)

I was going to call this one "Use a browser, go to jail" until I tried to compare the Boing Boing blog entry to the BBC entry it references. The first link talks about someone who tried to make a donation to tsunami relief using the text-based Lynx browser, which triggered fears of a hacking attempt. The attempted donor was arrested and is out on bail. The tone is of confusion by a paranoid charity and overzealous police. The BBC article, on the other hand, has none of this. They give no indication of a misunderstanding. As far as any reader can tell, this is an unsuccessful hacker who hasn't been convicted. Yet.

So which is it? Where did Boing Boing get the misunderstanding story? And why isn't there any corroboration for that more benign and far more entertaining version? Enquiring minds want to know...