HOSTILE TAKEOVER OF ARTHUR ANDERSEN? Lawrence Kudlow says that Paul Volcker--the man who licked inflation in the early 1980s as the then head of the Federal Reserve--is planning "a hostile takeover" (Kudlow's phrase) of Arthur Andersen:

At 74 years old, and with nearly four decades at the U.S. Treasury and the Federal Reserve under his belt, Mr. Volcker appreciates full well the importance of the regulatory fine print. He is aware that Andersen is responsible for a string of government scrapes that includes Lincoln Savings and Loan, Colonial Reality, Waste Management, Home State Savings Bank and the Baptist Foundation of Arizona — with the document shredding at Enron topping the list.

Incredibly, not once did the accounting firm ever acknowledge wrongdoing, nor fire guilty executives, nor internally reform its operating practices following each of these cases. It was this inability to show any level of corporate contrition — in addition to the document shredding — that led the Justice Department to take such highly punitive action.

But Mr. Volcker's survival plan would change Andersen across the board, on the condition that the government drop its criminal case against the firm and instead reach a large financial settlement. Also, Andersen must finally acknowledge wrongdoing.

THE DOWNFALL OF NATE NEWTON: How did jovial Nate Newton, considered by many one of the best NFL guards of his era (1986-99) go from making millions of dollars playing in the NFL to shuffling handcuffed and humiliated into jails in Louisiana and Texas? The Dallas Morning News explains.

FINANCE ON THE FRINGE: Reason has a good article on check cashers in poor neighborhoods:

Here’s the irony: Markets are actually succeeding quite well in serving the financial service needs of Americans with low and moderate incomes. Such people have far more options and choices than they did 20, 30, or 40 years ago. To be sure, the steel bars and Plexiglas that cover the teller windows at check cashing outlets may not be pretty or genteel, especially when compared to the marbled lobbies and high ceilings of conventional banks. They may offend bourgeois sensibilities and notions of what’s just. But they also undeniably provide a unique and valuable service to their customers. Contrary to the opinions of critics who would regulate or legislate "fringe banking" out of business, the booming check cashing industry represents a market success worthy of celebration, not a market failure that demands more regulation.

THE PEOPLE'S BLOG: Oh, and it's April 1st in Norway as well...

SHIRLEY YOU CAN'T BE SERIOUS: It's April Fools day over at Sgt. Stryker's--err, Ted Striker's.

I wonder if Otto will ever get his own Web site...?

FRENCH CONSPIRACY UPDATE: Back on March 9th, we mentioned a French conspiracy Web site, which claimed the US faked the crash into the Pentagon of Flight 77. Orrin Judd says that now, it's not only a Web site, it's a book! Naturally, it's a best seller in France.... (shaking head).

Yahoo! News has an otherwise good Reuters article titled "Internet Making Steady Inroads Into Health Care", with this curious piece of bias in it:

As Hillary Clinton (news - web sites) found in trying to reform U.S. health care as first lady in the early 1990s, Clark was taking on a multiheaded beast that is mightily resistant to "fixing."

Geez, I thought only at Winston Smith's Ministry of Truth is an attempted takeover of an entire sector of the US economy called reform.

HAPPY EASTER AND PASSOVER: We'll be back with live stuff tonight or tomorrow. In the meantime, we have lots of articles here, essays here, photos of me doing silly stuff here, and for the latest news, Drudge and Instapundit are on the case today.

PRICELESS: Just click over to this link at Sgt. Stryker's Daily Briefing.

802.11 UPDATE: Good article in Forbes.com, called "The Great Wi-Fi Hope", picking up the 802.11 and Starbucks theme we mentioned here yesterday. (Thanks to Glenn Reynolds for mentioning us today on Instapundit!) Forbes says:

The Wi-fi wave has already linked up an estimated 10 million laptops, Palm handhelds and other gadgets in hundreds of small, extremely local wireless networks. Some of these are commercial--one firm put them in several hundred Starbucks coffee shops. Many others are "freenets," access points provided gratis by 802.11 devotees who are, in essence, seeding the business. Mesh enough of these networks together and you have a mini-Net free of the phone and cable monopolies that control the "last mile" of wiring into your house. That's why 802 threatens them the most.

"LIONEL MANDRAKE" ON THE QUEEN MOTHER:

The Queen Moher has died at the ripe old age of 101.

I am not a Royalist, by any stretch of the imagination. However, I did respect the Queen Mother. She was the only member of that family not tarnished by scandal, and had worked hard all her life.

Hitler apparently called her "The most dangerous woman in England". He was referring to the propoganda value behind the decision not to move the Royal Family out of London during WWII when Buck. House was hit by German bombs.

The Queen sends a telegram to each British citizen on their 100th birthday. She did send one to her Mother, signed "Lillybet".

The Royal Family will be weaker for her passing. It remains to be seen whether this is a good thing, a bad thing, or just a thing.

HOLLINGS' HOWLS WILL HAVE TO WAIT: Wired News says:

Sen. Patrick Leahy says a controversial proposal to embed copy protection in electronics gear will not become law this year.

Since Leahy is the powerful chairman of the Senate Judiciary committee, his opposition instantly boosts the difficulty Hollywood studios will encounter in their attempts to enact sweeping copyright legislation.

The Vermont Democrat said through a spokesman that he "does not" support the Consumer Broadband and Digital Television Promotion Act (CBDTPA), which Sen. Fritz Hollings (D-South Carolina) introduced this month.

Leahy had said during a hearing March 14 that he would block an earlier measure -- the Security Systems Standards and Certification Act -- that Hollings had circulated privately. But that was before Hollings had introduced the revised CBDTPA, which is not as far-reaching.

Jonah Goldberg's syndicated column references then-Senator Patrick Moynihan 1993 essay, titled "Defining Deviancy Down", which Goldberg describes as "one of the most influential articles of the last decade":

Moynihan argued that deviancy - crime, mental illness, out-of-wedlock births, etc. -- had become so rampant, had so thoroughly soaked into the culture, that we simply had to redefine the abnormal as normal to cope. By setting the bar lower, we comforted ourselves with the notion that the percentage of abnormal behavior was still manageable.

Moynihan's most famous example was the St. Valentine's Day Massacre. That event was a major turning point in American history, credited with helping to convince Americans to abandon prohibition. It warranted two entries in the World Book Encyclopedia. The actual details? Four gangsters murdered seven gangsters.

In the early 1990s, Moynihan noted, Los Angeles suffered from the equivalent of one St. Valentine's Day Massacre every weekend.

And, of course, we can say much the same about suicide bombings in Israel. Perhaps it's an admirable inclination to want to depict something like Wednesday's "Passover Massacre" as an aberration. But the fact is, suicide bombings and other violent acts are part of everyday life for Israelis and Palestinians. The aberrations are cease-fires and truces.

Both essays are well worth reading.

T.S. ELIOT ON JESSE JACKSON: OK, so he never said anything directly about Jesse Jackson, but Kathleen Parker quotes some very apropos Eliot at the beginning of her column on the man she calls "a nation of one":

"Half the harm that is done in this world is due to people who want to feel important. They don't mean to do harm - but the harm does not interest them. Or they do not see it, or they justify it because they are absorbed in the endless struggle to think well of themselves."

MARCH 27, 2002: There aren't all that many dates that are on the tip of the average person's consciousness. June 6, July 4, September 11, December 7 are probably the biggest dates (I'd add December 25, but last time I checked, most historians agree that Christ probably wasn't born on that exact date).

It's a safe bet that Wednesday, March 27, 2002 probably won't be memorized as a date by most folks. But what do you call a day that has three celebrities (Dudley Moore, Milton Berle, and Billy Wilder) die, along with 16 Israelis killed by a suicidal Palestinian; and also has President Bush signing Campaign Finance Reform into law (and being promptly--and quite appropriately--sued by the NRA)?

TREKKIES UPDATE: As I said here, we watched Trekkies earlier this week. The Digital Bits has an extensive interview with the film's director, Roger Nygard, including how the strange guy who built his own Capt. Pike wheelchair (complete with "one for yes, two for no" blinking lights) ended up in the film.

THIRD PLACES: Good article by Catherine Donaldson-Evans on FOXNews.com about "Third Places", an term which grew out of The Great Good Place, a book by Ray Oldenburg, was advanced by Virginia Postrel in her book, The Future and its Enemies, and lately has been picked up by Glenn Reynolds on his Instapundit site, and in a December 2001 Wall Street Journal article (reprinted here).

Donaldson-Evans says that:

The offices-away-from-the-office are frequently the ubiquitous chain coffee shops like Starbucks, or the loungy café bookstores like Borders and Barnes & Noble, where no one hovers over customers — even if they buy nothing and stay for hours.

Starbucks has actually capitalized on and encouraged the trend by making some of its stores "wireless." Patrons who subscribe to a Voicestream plan can bring their wireless-enabled laptops or pocket PCs to some Starbucks locations, boot up and connect to the Internet.

"We’ve known for quite some time that folks use our locations for work. People really tailor it to their needs," said Starbucks spokeswoman Megan Behrbaum. "We’ve heard of photo-desk folks in Starbucks uploading their images to the [news]papers."

University of Tennessee law professor Glenn Reynolds, a Foxnews.com contributor who has written about the phenomenon, said people have for centuries had the need for a "third place" to gather, other than home or work. And there's something about cafes that gets the ideas percolating.

Incidentally, the one problem I've had with Starbucks' wireless Internet service, is that often the clerks don't even know that they have the service! We have two Starbucks close to our house, and one knows they have wireless, the other is clueless. Fortunately, MobileStar, Starbucks' wireless 'Net provider, publishes an extensive list of wired Starbucks, and has fairly helpful customer support people.

ZERO TASTE: Rod Dreher, on The Corner on National Review Online says that t-shirts with "GROUND ZERO" on them are selling briskly in New York--too briskly for Dreher:

Look, I understand that tourists who come to New York want to go see Ground Zero. And I understand that they want to buy FDNY and NYPD t-shirts; we've all done that, and it's good to show solidarity with the Bravest and the Finest. But I do not understand the people who sell and who buy caps and t-shirts that say "GROUND ZERO." Honest to God, you see them downtown. I passed some dippy tourist moron wearing a brand-new GROUND ZERO ski cap the other day, and I wanted to slap him. A site of atrocity, a mass graveyard, a place of war crime -- commemorated as a souvenir! I bet that guy also has a t-shirt that says, "Somebody Who Loves Me Went to Auschwitz, and All I Got Was This Lousy T-Shirt." Hell, why not?

I suppose if New Yorkers are actually buying them, it could be taken simply as a sign of how tough they are, but as far as the tourists, I'm not at all surprised--at either the merchants selling the t-shirts, or the people buying them.

There are lots and lots of people out there with bad taste, weird taste, or no taste, and there's not much that can be done about them. As far as the merchants, they're simply responding to demand. When I toured the area in early October, with a friend who works in the financial district (in a building very, very close to the WTC) who took me down there to see the atrocities, already there were numerous street vendors selling trinkets, postcards and souvenirs.

A DOG'S LIFE: Gregory Hlatky, whose blog is called A Dog's Life, recently included us on his list of links. Greg describes his site as "Second-hand analysis, trite reflections, ill-informed opinions, ignorant observations, incoherent blitherings, beautiful dogs" (Greg's wife raises and shows Borzoi (Russian Wolfhounds)).

Thanks Greg!

NFL SCHEDULE UPDATE: John Clayton of ESPN has his take on the games with the best storylines in 2002.

FIRST THE OSCARS , THEN THE RAZZIES, NOW THE RINOS:

They're called RINOs - Republicans in Name Only, and now, they've even got their own awards, dubious to be sure, handed out by the anti-tax Washington group, Club For Growth.

Club For Growth President Stephen Moore said the RINO awards recognize certain Republican office holders around the nation who have advanced what he called "anti-growth, anti-freedom or anti-free market policies."

The chief Senate RINO is not too surprising...

OUR SOURCE WAS THE NEW YORK TIMES: Actually, a reader tipped us to this--The Times has a semi-regular column where they get a director to watch a classic film and comment on it. This time, it's Barry Sonnenfeld, the director of the Men In Black films, watching the legendary Dr. Strangelove. In many ways, especially compared to his later films, Strangelove seems to be Kubrick's most effortless film--but that's only because so much preproduction and preparation went into it. When I watched this month with 'Group Capt. Mandrake', I said to him, "I don't know if this is the best script ever written, but it's right up there. This is incredible writing."

And incredible directing as well. Speaking of Sonnenfeld, when we saw Black Hawk Down last weekend, we saw one the first trailers for MIB II. If the trailer is any indication (and we all know often they're not), It looks hilarious--with Tommy Lee Jones beginning the film as a Cliff Claven-like postal worker, complete with navy blue shorts and nobby, hairy knees, since Will Smith has zapped his memory at the end of the first MIB.

And speaking of Kubrick, on February 22, Nichole Kidman watched and commented on The Shining for the Times. At the moment, it's still available to read online. Good thing too, as Kidman's insights into how Kubrick directed The Shining are even more insightful than Sonnenfeld's into Strangelove.

REMEMBER SEALAB? I do, but just barely, from reading about it when I was a kid. It was the US Navy's 1960's deep-sea equivalent to NASA's manned space program. (Scott Carpenter played a role in both programs). Apparently, the program also had some Cold War applications:

Although a military oath prevents SeaLab participants from describing much of their work, some details have been unclassified. Some emerged in "Blind Man's Bluff," a 1998 bestselling account of Cold War submarine espionage.

In 1971, a specially-designed submarine, the USS Halibut, reached the floor of the Soviet Sea of Okhotsk. Divers, using work pioneered at SeaLab, ventured into the depths and retrieved Soviet test missiles. They also installed a tap on a phone cable that gave U.S. intelligence officials an inside look at the Soviet Navy.

"We proved it could be done," Tomsky said.

Details of the Navy's Okhotsk cable-tapping operations emerged after the arrest of a former employee of the National Security Agency who sold the secret to the Soviets. But SeaLab's role in the affair has remained classified until recently and the full story has never been told.

HOW TO WRITE A BOOK ABOUT YOUR FORMER EMPLOYER: Michael Lewis (who wrote Liar's Poker, one of the very best) tells all. Found via Bizquick.org, here's a sample of Lewis's advice:

If you don't want to actually write your book yourself -- if you're just hoping to be paid for dealing some inside dope -- it's unlikely what you have to say, or think you have to say, will make for an enjoyable reading experience.

Oddly enough, many of the Old Enronians who hope to tell their story are in exactly this position. They simply want money for what they saw and heard, and perhaps a bit of literary celebrity to go along with it. It doesn't occur to them that the primacy of their economic motives is what got them -- or, at any rate, their evil former employers -- into trouble in the first place.

5) If before you write a word of your story you are writing to people for advice about how to get started, forget about it. It's time to find another real job.

COMMUTER LANES RANT: Just added "I Really (HONK! HONK!) Hate (Get Out of the Way, you $&#*@!!) Commuter Lanes!", a "rant" I wrote for the last page of the Summer 2001 issue of Sport Z magazine. Normally, I tend to smoke a very, very mellow version of Tom Wolfe for my essays, but on this one, I combined it with a P.J. O'Rourke filter and a Joan Didion cigarette holder, with a pinch of Dennis Miller chewing tobacco. The result is a definite rage against bureaucracy (not to mention commuter lanes).

JAMES LILEKS' COLUMN IS A MUST-READ. He powerfully contrasts carefree life in America with death by terrorists in Israel. And I tip my fedora to his incredible writing chops.

ROBOT REPORTER UPDATE: Back on March 14th, we mentioned Wired's article on robot reporters, and later, suggested combining them with virtual sets. Tim Blair (by way of Christopher Cross) has some suggestions for model types.

VIRGINIA POSTREL ON HOUSING PRICES: Postrel's latest New York Times column looks at the difference in housing prices between "red" and "blue" America, and concludes:

[P]erhaps there is more to it than voters acting in their economic self-interest. Places like Charlotte, N.C., and Las Vegas seem able to grow and grow without ever setting off land-use protectionism.

"Outside of the coastal areas of California and the Amtrak Northeast Corridor, you don't see this phenomenon," Professor Gyourko said. "It may be that the civic culture is really different in those areas." Maybe there really are two Americas. "One allows development, and the other puts a lot of restrictions on it."

As to why, read her column.

KOYAANISQATSI IS COMING TO DVD! One of my favorite “head films” (Geez, I’m really dating myself with language like that) is coming to DVD as early as this fall. Despite its unreadable title, Koyaanisqatsi is a dazzling film, filled with stunning time-lapse, slow motion and speeded up cinematography overlaid on top of the music of Philip Glass. (It also has a not very subtle pro-environment, anti-human and anti-technology bias to it, but there’s no dialogue, and the film is ambiguous enough to also be read (as Roger Ebert noted) as a film celebrating the incredible cities and structures that man can build.)

One of the best movie double-bills I’ve ever attended, was when Philadelphia’s TLA (Theater of the Living Arts) Theater showed Koyaanisqatsi and 2001: A Space Odyssey one Saturday night in the mid-1980s. (You didn’t need drugs to feel like a space cadet after viewing those two movies back to back.) I’ve owned a laser disc copy of Koyaanisqatsi ever since, and can’t wait to get it on DVD.

In any case, here’s what the Digital Bits has to say about the subject:

we've gotten word that the classic 1983 film Koyaanisqatsi, which depicts life in motion in all its visual splendor, is finally coming to DVD. In late January IRE and MGM reached an amicable agreement that will allow the release of Koyaanisqatsi and Powaqqatsi on DVD as early as the Fall of this year, hopefully coordinated with the theatrical release of Naqoyqatsi by Miramax. Naqoyqatsi's release will coincide with the 20th anniversary of the premiere of Koyaanisqatsi.

GEEZ, BILLY WILDER DIED AS WELL YESTERDAY. The Internet Movie Database's home page says: "In an unbelievable boost to those who love to claim that famous people die in threes, Variety is reporting that writer/director/legend Billy Wilder died Wednesday night (3/27/02) of pneumonia in Beverly Hills. Mr. Wilder was 95." Wilder's most famous films include Some Like It Hot, the original Sabrina, Stalag 17 and The Apartment.

UPDATE: Here's an AP report on Wilder's death.

802.11 WIRELESS NETWORKING BLOG: As I posted on March 14, I'm a huge fan of wireless computer networking and Internet access. Turnkey Networking is a good looking blog full of 802.11b wireless networking news. Here's one item:

First wireless movie theater? It's not what you think: the Austin Wireless Group announced today that the Alamo DraftHouse Movie Theater at 2700 W. Anderson Ln. in North Austin, Texas, has full Wi-Fi access....From the press release: Typical theaters may not work well for this concept, but the Alamo DraftHouse has table seating for movie goers, so they can order drinks and food while watching the movie. So Internet use would not add anything more to the tolerated commotion that already exists with wait staff taking and delivering orders to the crowd. The group invites all comers on March 25th for Revolution OS.

NFL SCHEDULE ANNOUNCED: The NFL announced the schedule for their 2002 season today, according to this Yahoo Sports article. The season will:

kick off with the New York Giants hosting the San Francisco Giants on Thursday, September 5, on ESPN. It will mark the first time that the league has opened a season on a Thursday.

The first full slate of games will be on Sunday, September 8, capped by the debut of the expansion Houston Texans, who will host the Dallas Cowboys in another prime-time game on ESPN.

The first Monday night game has the Super Bowl champion New England Patriots hosting the Pittsburgh Steelers in a rematch of the AFC championship game. The contest also will mark the Patriot's first game in their new home, CMGI Filed.

The full schedule is available online here.

UPDATE: Peter King of Sports Illustrated lists his picks and pans of the upcoming season.

FLIGHT ATTENDENT MADE BOMB THREAT: The Washington Post is reporting that a Virgin Atlantic flight attendant was arrested for allegedly writing a bomb threat aboard a plane in January, forcing the London-to-Orlando flight to be diverted to Iceland:

Michael Phillipe, a 25-year-old French citizen, was charged with interference with crew members on an international flight, the FBI announced. He was scheduled for a hearing in federal court in Newark, N.J., on Thursday afternoon, a day after FBI agents arrested him there.

Phillipe faces up to 20 years in prison if found guilty.

On Jan. 19, Virgin Atlantic Flight 27 was en route to Florida when a threat was found scrawled on a bathroom mirror. The message, "American must die," was written in soap, officials said.

A second message, written on an air sickness bag, stated, "Bin Laden is the best Americans must die there is a bomb on board Al Quaida." It was Phillipe who reported finding the threats, authorities said.

If the charges are correct, it's clearly a Franco-American-style byproduct.

HOLLYWOOD VERSUS REALITY: Good essay by Ellen Goodman, comparing Hollywood's mangling of history with the outcry over Stephen Ambrose and Doris Kearns Goodwin's alleged plagiarism:

For Goodwin, sloppiness is cast as a career breaker. For Howard, a deliberate distortion of biography is a career maker. In one academy, a bad mistake is a capital cause; in the other Academy, editing and rewriting truth into falsehood is "just a movie."

What an odd, upside down, unbalanced sense of what's right and wrong and important. It reminds me of how John Nash--the real John Nash--described his return to reality: "I became disillusioned with some of the delusions."

This is the award-winning message: In Hollywood, the moviemaker was smeared with the truth. And won anyway.

TAKE THE CALVIN TEST! (What, I can't be Calvin Coolidge or Calvin Hill?) As seen on Bill Sulik's "Blithering Idiot" Blog--and curiously, he's Spaceman Spiff as well. Or maybe it's simply because Nina and Group Capt. Mandrake and I watched the horrifically frightening Trekkies last night (Mandrake is safely aloft on his mission, by the way). Trekkies, if you haven't seen it, is quite an astonishing documentary, with a cast that makes Reform Party conventions and the Star Wars cantina each look like a PTA meeting.

You are Spaceman Spiff! Zounds! You are the intrepid Spaceman Spiff, the engaging explorer ensconsed in an unending universe of exotic and evil extraterrestrials! You're brave, but you should give that dictionary a rest. Take the What Calvin are You? Quiz by contessina_2000@yahoo.com!

NEW YORK TIMES SAYS: FUN HARD TO FIND ON THE WEB. The Blogosphere replies: "speak for yourself!"

LORD OF THE RINGS JUNKIES UNITE: It's coming on DVD, on August 6th, and November 12th. Confused? The Digital Bits has all the answers. (Scroll up above where this link deposits you for even more LOTR info.)

TOGETHER AGAIN: CLINTON, STEPHANOPOULOS AND LUCIANNE: Did you ever see Nicolas Roeg's 1985 film Insignificance? (That's OK, nobody else did either). It was all about a fictitious mid-1950s meeting of Marilyn Monroe, Albert Einstein, Joe DiMaggio and Joe McCarthy in a New York hotel room. Lloyd Grove of the Washington Post reports that Bill Clinton, George Stephanopoulos and Lucianne Goldberg decided to recreate that movie in a Manhattan restaurant this week. Their meeting sounds even more surrealistic than Roeg's film.

MAY THE TEXT BE WITH YOU: Ever wonder what Star Wars would like if it was done in moving ascii text animation?

Nope, me neither. But these guys did--and it's the NRO Cool Site of the Day. (Maybe because of the other page on the site--watch Jar Jar die in ascii...)

Speaking of NRO, their "redesign number 9,023.02" is going some time to get used to--it's definitely a radical departure from their previous site designs.

ABOUT ME PAGE UPLOADED: Despite the often narcissistic feel of this Blog, it's amazing how much writer's block you can get when you have to write an "about me" page. I finally got around to it. Click here to read everything you ever wanted to know about me--and probably much, much more.

A TOM WOLFE MOMENT: Subtly ironic moment at Borders--buying a paperback copy of Hooking Up for Group Capt. Mandrake (a closet-Americaphile, which he hides under layers of stiff-upper-lipness), as part of a few going away presents, as he wends his way back to England. (His route is top-secret. He kept mumbling something about Wing Attack Plan R, OPE, CRM-114...)

On the cover of Hooking Up is Tom Wolfe, resplendent in his cream-colored custom tailored peak-lapeled double breasted suit, faux spats, and clock socks. The clerk, meanwhile, is somewhat less resplendent in lime green hair (much brighter than the institutional green of Mandrake's Blog), strange "My First Pony" T-shirt, and the most amount of piercings I've ever seen in one lower lip. There must have been close to ten of them.

Would her look qualify as Radical Chic? Funky Chic? Or merely Rococo Marxist?

MILTON BERLE, AGE 93, DIES: The Washington Post is reporting that Milton Berle, "the acerbic, cigar-smoking vaudevillian who eagerly embraced a new medium and became "Mr. Television" in the dawn of the video age, died Wednesday, a spokesman said. He was 93.

"He was responsible for the television set in your home today," [publicist Warren Cowan] said. "He put television on the map."

"Uncle Miltie" was the king of Tuesday nights, and store owners put up signs: "Closed tonight to watch Milton Berle." The program's popularity spurred sales of television sets and helped make the new technology a medium for the masses.

HOME AUTOMATION TIMELINE: Back around the middle of 2000, Home Automation magazine (then known as Popular Home Automation) changed editors, and a number of projects I was working on for the magazine got scuttled. Several of the articles went to Nuts & Volts, and the Virginia Postrel profile I had written eventually ended up in Flak, in an updated and abbreviated form.

Also in the works (until the idea was dropped) was a timeline of home automation and an accompanying article, which I had already begun to sketch out. While I would heavily revise it, here's that draft, which is hopefully a fascinating (if convoluted) look at the history of several of the components that would be considered part of home automation, including television, the personal computer, and X10 lighting and appliance control.

(I was of course, also planning to cover the the Internet. However, I was going to rewrite and condense material I had already written, and have since already uploaded to my site, so I deleted it from the draft for brevity's sake.)

BEYOND A DROUGHT: The New York Post is reporting that Mayor Bloomberg yesterday declared Manhattan's first drought emergency since 1989.

THE NEW HIGH GROUND, 21ST CENTURY STYLE: Brink Lindsey says that China intends to land a man on the moon by the end of this decade:

On Monday China launched Shenzou 3 into Earth orbit -- the third in a series of unpiloted test flights leading toward an eventual manned space program. China's stated objective is to achieve manned spaceflight by 2005, but analysts think that the first flight with Chinese "taikonauts" could come sooner. And the Chinese don't intend to stop in Earth orbit: Their goal is to get back to the Moon by the end of the decade.

I wonder how the United States would react if China does develop a serious manned space program. Could this be the ticket to shake the U.S. program out of its brain-dead space shuttle/space station rut?

REYNOLDS WRAP: Glenn Reynolds' latest Tech Central Station column is on the subject of Democrats vs. New Media:

There's nothing more likely to inflame the Web than a copy-protection bill that is a complete sellout to corporate interests, and that's what this one is.

Then there's the loss of moral legitimacy: It's hard to pose as friends of the little guy against Big Business when you're taking money from Big Business while taking long-established rights away from the little guy. (Scott Harshbarger of Common Cause calls this move "a shocking fire sale.")

If the Republicans have any sense, they'll be making an issue of this in the next elections, painting the Democrats as hypocrites who have sold out to Hollywood, and who are trying to reach, Big Brother-like, into the hearts of American televisions and computers. But even if they don't, a lot of Web denizens will be saying it, and it's likely to have a lot of resonance. Because it's true.

DUDLEY MOORE DEAD AT 66: The Washington Post is reporting that Dudley Moore, "who became an unlikely Hollywood heart-throb portraying a cuddly pipsqueak whose charm melted hearts in "10" and "Arthur," died Wednesday at his home in New Jersey, a spokeswoman said. He was 66."

Moore died at 11 a.m. EST, said publicist Michelle Bega in Los Angeles. The British-born actor died of pneumonia as a complication of progressive supranuclear palsy, she said.

There was more than a touch of autobiography in "10," the 1979 film in which Moore played a musician determined to marry a perfect woman. But the happy ending eluded him in real life. Four marriages ended in divorce.

He confessed to being driven by feelings of inferiority about his working-class origins in Dagenham, east London, and because of his height of five feet, 2 1/2 inches. In later life he also spoke of the pain of being rejected by his mother because he was born with a deformed left foot.

Moore starred in one of my favorite guilty pleasure films--"Bedazzled", a kooky British psychedelic takeoff on Faust, co-starring Moore's frequent sidekick, Peter Cook (recently remade into a surprisingly watchable, if far less silly version with Elizabeth Hurley).

DEADLY EXPLOSION HITS ISRAELI HOTEL: The Washington Post is reporting:

JERUSALEM –– A suicide bomber blew himself up in a hotel in the coastal resort of Netanya on Wednesday evening as guests gathered for a Passover Seder, the ritual meal ushering in the Jewish holiday. Witnesses said they saw five bodies; medics said at least 51 people were wounded.

Some of the wounded were seen staggering out of the lobby of the Park Hotel, which was plunged into darkness by the explosion. One man was covered by a blue blanket, and had blood dripping from his face, said witness Joel Leyden.

Leyden said he saw five bodies lined up on the sidewalk outside the hotel, including a woman dressed in her holiday best. Paramedics said at least 51 people were wounded, some of them critically.

It was not immediately clear if the attacker set off the bomb in the lobby or in the dining hall of the hotel.

MAXIM-UM SUCK UP: Andrew Sullivan has a story about a hilarious screw-up by the not-so-bright, chock-full-of-babes Maxim magazine, which tried to suck up to its readers by telling each city how wonderful it was:

Of course, the truly funny thing about Maxim's goof-up is when it got the delivery wrong and sent New York's copies to Philadelphia by mistake. If you received the wrong copy in Philly, you were informed that Philadelphia is " "a glorified piss break between New York and D.C." You were also told that the average inhabitant of such a city is "a lard-ass with arteries packed as tight as a Colombian airline passenger's G.I. tract." If only they'd had the balls to send that out in every copy, I'd respect them.

The whole thing reminds me of a story in Ray Coleman's biography of Eric Clapton. One evening in the 1970s, when Clapton was on tour, and piss-drunk, he asked his chief roadie what city he was in. "Cleveland", the roadie replied. Clapton went on stage, and dutifully shouted the standard clichéd, "GOOD EVENING, CLEVELAND!!!!!!!!" Dead silence. He was in Detroit, but his roadie had decided to play a little joke on his employer...

SPANISH PRIEST JAMS CELL PHONES: Good for him. But, as the article says:

The controversial technology is designed to create quiet zones in places like restaurants, movie theaters and libraries.

Commercial jamming systems are illegal in the United States, Canada and Britain, but some countries such as Australia and Japan allow limited use.

Spain has a legal vacuum, says NiceCom, the only Spanish company which markets the technology. It has been doing so for two years, and lawmakers are now discussing the issue, NiceCom spokeswoman Inma Jimenez said.

I've frequently read that cell phone jamming technology is illegal in the US, but I've never read why, or when this law was passed. If anybody knows, please email me--I'd love to hear the answer.

DEATH TOLL LOWERED IN AFGHAN QUAKE: Yahoo News is reporting that the death toll in Monday's Afghan Quake was dramatically lowered from 1800 to a current estimate of about 200.

The toll could go somewhat higher, he said, but was not expected to exceed "the low hundreds," [Ros O'Sullivan, project coordinator from Concern Worldwide] said Wednesday. That conclusion was reached Tuesday night during a meeting of the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, the International Organization for Migration, Medecins Sans Frontieres, Concern Worldwide, and other relief groups working at the scene.

Good. But still, it goes without saying that a nation of mud-brick houses faces huge risks when there's an earthquake. Back in early 2001, Jonah Goldberg wrote about the then recent earthquake in India which killed an estimated 20,000:

Modern buildings have a tendency to fall down less than squalid tenements or shantytowns. Especially when you're rich enough to make them quake proof.

So again you ask, why is this relevant?

Well, if you listen to what the anti-globalization protesters are saying at the World Forum in Davos, Switzerland, or at my local coffeehouse, you'd get the impression that they have the best interests of poor people at heart. Of course, it turns out they don' t.

Globalization is generally something rich people are against and poor people are for, which is funny since rich people are supposed to be greedy and poor people are supposed to be content. This is true about both certain conservatives and liberals but for different reasons. Conservative anti-globalists and trade unionists fear what globalization will do to people inside our borders. That creates problems to be sure, but it's not nearly so evil as a certain breed of liberal nostalgia which wants to make the world safe for righteous tours of impoverished lands where noble savages still live in huts and starve with surprising regularity.

Okay so maybe most of them don't live in huts, but they do live in a crushing poverty that so many liberals think is preferable to being forced to eat at McDonalds or drink Starbucks coffee.

OSCAR ROUNDUP: Reading John Podhoretz's column on the Oscars really pounds home what I missed by going to a movie rather than watching their awards ceremony. Apparently, I wasn't alone--since the ratings were the lowest ever. Which is why...

Matt Drudge says that Whoopi Goldberg is done as a host.

"Whoopi will likely be the fall gal," a top network source said the morning after the night before. "Next year, we want one person: Oprah Winfrey! It would be great!"

Just as NBC TONIGHT SHOW host Jay Leno has emerged as a new favorite to host the Oscars among influential Academy insiders."

Meanwhile, the Happy Fun Folks over at Happy Fun Pundit say:

There has been much written today about various problems with last night's awards, such as "In The Bedroom" being shut out, "Lord of the Rings" only winning a few technical awards, having to look at Whoopi Goldberg for four and a half hours, etc.

But most of the pundits are missing the real problem with the awards, which is that THEY ARE GIVEN OUT TO FREAKING MOVIE PEOPLE! It's like God himself came down and said, "You know what the problem is with movie people? Their egos just aren't big enough. How can we create a gigantic televised cluster jerk that will ensure that these clowns make even more outrageous demands and drag around even larger entourages of sycophants and losers? Because if there is one thing I can't stand, it's a humble Hollywood star."

They suggest replacing the Oscars with the Skunkies, an award show named after the Lockheed Skunk Works.

No, really.

UPDATE: Group Captain Lionel Mandrake links to an astonishing rant in Salon by Cintra Wilson. I can't help but read this and think that if this tone was used in say, National Review, the outcry would be staggering. Here's an excerpt:

The Academy sensed this attitude was lurking like a murky cloud of spiritual unease over Middle Earth, and it is my (admittedly hostile) perception that they said to themselves, "Well, the Oscars are already fucked this year, so let's honor our Negroes! It's been a while. Call Whoopi."

I used to call it the "Noble Cripple and Spade Year" -- it comes around every five years or so. When the Oscar Winner's alumni circle starts to look like the meeting table in "Judgment at Nuremberg," the Academy devotes a year to not looking like racist, Aryan-celebrity-eugenics-worshipping, cracker peckerwoods, and either gives an Oscar for the best dribbling retard performance, or jerks us off with a big, obvious, Slather the African-Americans With Trophies orgy to make up for the previous insulting, five-to-seven-year stretch when barely anybody of color was recognized at all, for anything.

SORRY FOR THE LACK OF UPDATES TODAY: An editor needed an article revised and turned around ASAP, so I haven't been able to update the Blog today. Look for new content tonight or tomorrow.

The X Factor Blog links to an article in Wired, which says that Cuba has banned PC sales to its citizens. Wired says:

Early attempts to confirm the information independently were unsuccessful. Dozens of messages to Cuban retailers and government officials in Cuba went unanswered. Cuba's spokesman in Washington, Luis Fernandez, was consistently evasive.

"If we didn't have an embargo, there could be computers for everybody," Fernandez replied when asked this question: Are computer sales to the public banned in Cuba?

The X Factor adds"That's like asking: "What did you want for dinner tonight, honey?" And getting the response: "I'll tell YOU a thing or two about Disneyland!" WTF?"

I'm surprised that they didn't do this sooner. Alvin Toffler has consistently written about how photocopiers and computers have almost always been illegal in totalitarian regimes, because they allow for easy dissemination of information (such as books and articles about how the free world differs from totalitarian regimes!). Toffler once mentioned how successful The Third Wave and Future Shock were in China and the Soviet Union, but he didn't see a dime of it, because it was largely distributed in bootleg form via photocopiers.

As I said earlier, I saw Black Hawk Down with a couple of friends and my wife on Sunday night. I had seen it previously, when it first came out, and loved it. I was surprised when the reaction of the rest of my group ranged between anger and indifference. One friend was angered because of the film’s story--our incursion into Somalia, and how our failure there lead to an effectively neutered foreign policy, and our weakened stance to the rest of the world, especially the folks in the Middle East. My wife was confused by the ambiguous, sort of hyper-documentary style of the film.

In a way, our disparity of views was shared by the critics themselves. Roger Ebert loved it. But over in National Review Online, John Podhoretz hated it, and Rich Lowry felt obliged to counterpunch. It didn’t help of course, that the Last Outpost-like theater we saw it had a lousy sound system (and a badly scratched print). The line that Sam Shepard, as General Garrison, says about “Washington, in its infinite wisdom, denied us the use tanks and an AC-130 Specter Gunship” was said so quickly, and not elaborated on, that the significance of it was easy to miss. When I showed her an article on what exactly an AC-130 is, she replied, “oh, now that would have been nice to have!”. No kidding. But as Podhoretz writes:

we cannot understand why Americans are in Somalia or why it's important to be watching the movie. Scott and producer Jerry Bruckheimer salute the bravery of the soldiers, which is funny, because they're both cowards. They can't bear to face the fact that the proximate cause for the disasters that befell the Americans that day in Somalia — and the horrifying consequences to America and the West in the quick pullout that followed — are due entirely to Hollywood's hero, Bill Clinton.

Oh, they know it. But they won't say it. And that tentativeness is one of the causes for the failure of Black Hawk Down to do much besides make you feel ill.

On the other hand, I loved it—when I saw it in February, I immediately ran out and bought Mark Bowden's book. (The Brothers Judd has a review of the book, and some excellent links afterwards, by the way). The book does a far better job of explaining the geopolitics and the impact of our disaster in Somalia, but the film itself is (to me at least—your mileage may vary, as witnessed by the rest of my gang last night) is a powerful, visceral look at the horrors of modern battle, and an huge, ringing endorsement of Colin Powell’s doctrine of overwhelming force.

Oh, and by the way, The Digital Bits says it will be out on DVD on June 11 of this year.

THE RAZZIES: With all of the talk about the Oscars, I've seen little in Blogland about the Razzies, their annual competitors, who handout awards for the worst films in Hollywood. This year, for the first time, a "winner" showed up in person--Tom Green, for Freddy Got Fingered. "Green was cited as 2001's Worst Actor, Worst Director, co-author (with Derek Harvie) of the year's Worst Screenplay and as Worst Screen Couple (Green and "Any Animal He Abuses")." Congratulations, Tom!

The other big "winner", with three Razzies, was Tim Burton's awful remake of Planet of the Apes. Hard to believe that the guy who directed the first two Batman films and Mars Attacks and other very quirky but watchable films could have directed such a mess. The day after we saw Apes, my wife and I saw Apocalypse Now Redux, during its brief run in cinemas, reminding us just how far it sometimes feels, that Hollywood has fallen.

WOODY, FATTY, AND DERSHOWITZ MEET AT INSTAPUNDIT: Woody Allen's appearance on the Oscars, Fatty Arbuckle, Alan Dershowitz and more--the secret connection revealed at InstaPundit.Com.

Actually, I was rather happy to hear that Woody Allen was on the Oscars. I still think he's a talented filmmaker, in spite of numerous films that seemed like he was trying to derail his own film career, and of course, the infamous Soon-Yi scandal. Allen had talked about making an appearance on the Oscars years ago (in Eric Lax's hagiography), and the first post 9/11 Oscar must have seemed like the perfect opportunity. Of course, I'm an old softie when it comes to Woody--he and Kubrick were favorite filmmakers of mine, when I was in college.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY, DVD! According to Bill Hunt of the The Digital Bits, "today marks the 5th anniversary of the debut of our favorite format into its initial test markets."

On this day, 5 years ago, I high-tailed it out to my local Good Guys and bought a Toshiba SD-3006 DVD player and three DVDs - Blade Runner, Dr. Strangelove and Legends of the Fall. And I watched them each about a dozen times that first week. Back then, there were only about 20 titles available and just a few thousand players were sold in the first week. Now look at us... more than 15,000 titles and over 28 million players later. DVD... you've come a long way baby!

Hunt wants the early adopters of DVD (from March and April of 1997) to email him with their stories. I guess I don't qualify, because I bought my player in January of 1998. On the other hand, I had a laser disc player since 1988. As I wrote in my Spintech essay on Citizen Kane, it's really pretty astonishing to see beautiful, crystal clear DVDs selling for $24.95 (and often less)--I can remember buying numerous titles on laser disc at prices ranging from $49.95 to $124.95. And I had to drive 30 miles to Philadelphia or Trenton to find 'em. Today, I can buy DVDs in my supermarket! Nice to see a technology succeed.

JUDD, RUFFINI, GOLDBERG ALL AGREE: Chris Matthews sounds like he's losing it. Orrin Judd writes on the Brothers Judd Blog:

Patrick Ruffini is right, These are the final days of the Chris Matthews show, Hardball, on MSNBC. How can we be so sure? Because he's making the same mistake that Geraldo Rivera made during the Clinton scandal, turning against his audience.

Geraldo Rivera became a cable hit by beating OJ Simpson like a rented mule. This made him a hero to middle Americans, sick of the mainstream media pussyfooting around the issue. Then he decided to defend Bill Clinton and has never been heard from since. He was supplanted during Impeachment by Chris Matthews, who despite impeccable liberal credentials, simply couldn't stomach Clinton's myriad outrages. But now, whether reverting to type or genuinely alarmed, Mr. Matthews has turned against the expansion of the war on terrorism and thereby risks losing his audience.

Judd says, "Look for Mr. Matthews to join Mr. Rivera in a yurt in Afghanistan soon..."

CLEMENZA WAS RIGHT: Writing in National Review Online, Victor Davis Hanson says "In some ways in our war against the terrorists we are like the democracies of the late 1930s. They knew that there was more to Hitler than his avowed quest for the return of the Sudetenland or the Alsace-Lorraine. They sort of suspected that an entire, venerable culture in Germany and Japan had gone off the deep end."

The truth is that there is a great storm on the horizon, one that will pass — or bring upon us a hard rain the likes of which we have not seen in 60 years. Either we shall say "no more," deal with Iraq, and prepare for a long and hard war against murderers and terrorists — or we will have more and more of what happened on 9/11. History teaches us that certain nations, certain peoples, and certain religions at peculiar periods in their history take a momentary, but deadly leave of their senses — Napoleon's France for most of a decade, the southern states in 1861, Japan in 1931, Germany in 1939, and Russia after World War II. And when they do, they cannot be bribed, apologized to, or sweet-talked — only defeated.

In the first Godfather movie, Clemenza told Michael Corleone , "You know you got to stop them at the beginning, like they should have stopped Hitler at Munich, They should never've let him get away with that. They were just asking for big trouble. " Hopefully we're smart enough to stop the new Axis, before history repeats 1939 all over again.

LIVE BY POLITICAL CORRECTNESS/DIE BY POLITICAL CORRECTNESS: I didn't watch the Oscars last night (my wife, "Group Capt. Mandrake", and another friend and I went to see "Black Hawk Down" before it left the theaters again (I had seen it before, during my "PB" (pre-blog) period) but I'm glad to see Halle Barry and Denzel Washington win--they're both fine actors, who've built solid careers in Hollywood. But I wonder if we'll ever see the day that race isn't an issue in Hollywood. (I'm not holding my breath.)

In the meantime, James Chen (by way of Instapundit), writes that Hollywood hasn't done a very good job of respecting Asian actors:

Why don't we ever hear about how Hollywood portrays and treats Asian-American actors and actresses? Can you imagine the crappy roles and stereotypes that Asian-American actors have had to endure through the years--even to this day? Sure, Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon won a few awards last year, but that movie featured non-American performers and was made and produced outside of this country. Asian-American actors and actresses almost never get lead roles in feature films, and if they do, it's usually time for them to either sign-up for karate lessons or apply the dragon lady make-up. And don't get me started about The Joy Luck Club.

Of course, if you live by this kind of political correctness, you die by it as well. By making such a big deal about race, Hollywood now faces the wrath of every minority. By the way, my take on "Black Hawk Down", and the very divergent reactions of my friends is coming later today. Meanwhile, Capt. Mandrake sees how it stacks up to When We Were Soldiers.

AOL A DRAG ON TIME/WARNER: The New York Daily News Online is reporting that AOL has been a significant drag on the performance of Time/Warner's stock price.

In one more stroke of bad news for the world's largest Internet and media empire, last week Lehman Bros. analyst Holly Becker shaved down her earnings estimates, hammering AOL Time Warner's already battered shares. The stock, which has underperformed peers like Viacom and Fox, closed Friday at $24.50, down 57% from its high of $56.60 last May.

Becker's concern is the same one that's plagued the media giant for months. Its AOL Internet division, once seen as the company's hot growth engine, just isn't generating high enough subscriber fees and ad dollars.

It's a stark turn of events for AOL Time Warner, which two years ago said it would lead the Internet revolution by combining the world's top online company with Time Warner's powerful old media assets, from magazine giant Time Inc., to cable TV titan CNN, to movie studio Warner Bros.

"There have been so many disappointments," said media investor Hal Vogel. "Their old media is underperforming and the new media is not moving ahead fast enough."

While in theory, (how does Matt Drudge type it out?) AOLTIMEWARNERTURNERBROADCASTINGCOMPUSERVE (and whatever else is in there) makes sense, when it was first announced, it sounded like one of those Beatrice-type companies that Michael Milken was so successful at busting up and getting more money for their original components than the combined enterprise was worth. Synergy doesn't always work, and it looks like this one is failing badly.

Now pundits are saying Time Warner shareholders would have been far better off if they hadn't agreed to sell to AOL. They're noting that, in hindsight, AOL chief Steve Case was the shrewdest guy at the podium back in January 2000 when he shook hands on the deal with Time Warner's Levin, just months before the Internet bust.

"Steve Case pulled off the ultimate in brinksmanship," said media investor Uri Landesman of Arlington Capital. "Where would AOL be trading now? It looks like he made a tremendous deal for AOL shareholders, and Levin made a poor deal for Time Warner."

DONALD RUMSFELD, HOSS: Matthew Hoy writes on his Hoystory Blog that there's:

More proof that Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld is cool. Earlier this week a Fox News cameraman was briefly detained and had his videotape confiscated as he filmed a traffic stop near the Pentagon. Fox News screamed bloody murder and got the tape back the next day. It also turns out that the cameraman got a $55 ticket for unauthorized photography. Well, when the cameraman went by the Pentagon on Friday to pick up his annual media credential, he found a handwritten note from Rumsfeld: "Greg - I'll pay your ticket, give Torri the amount. Best, D.R."

JUST IN TIME FOR EASTER: Marshmellow Peeps get their own official Web site. Just when you thought the Web wasn't complete enough...

LAW CATCHES UP TO ECOTERROR: The Washington Times has an excellent article by Valerie Richardson on the subject.

PICTURE OF WEBLOGS UPDATE: Back on Thursday, I mentioned Casey Marshall's Picture of Weblogs site. It's now listing this site. Through it, I found Kesher talk, a Blog on Jewish issues run by Howard Fienberg. Howard has listed me under "Sci-Tech Blogs". Thanks guys!

CHINA, A POLICE STATE. WHO KNEW??!! Glenn Reynolds, on his InstaPundit.Com site, has a link provided by a reader about a BBC reporter who seems honestly surprised that the People's Republic of China is a Police State. As Glenn says, "Even though it has, like, Starbucks and Pizza Huts and stuff! I can't improve on the description from reader Holly Watson, who forwarded the link:

The tone is priceless - he seems genuinely surprised at all this. At first I thought his defiance of the Chinese police thugs was brave - then I realized it was just stupid.

Next up: Beneath the brilliant orange sunsets of Houston's skyline, Rupert Wingfield-Hayes finds pollution-belching petrochemical facilities.

The BBC article, and its genuinely surprised tone reminds me of Jonah Goldberg's essay on (actual) headlines like "Scientists Say Men, Women Not Alike.", "Study: Parents Can Affect Teen Sex", and an article surprised that researchers have concluded that "Adolescents with tattoos are much more likely than other teenagers to be involved with drugs, alcohol or even gang violence."

Indeed, if you were to read any one of the stories I cited at the beginning of this column — men and women aren't the same, men dig sex while women like security, having two dads but no mom has an effect on the kids, etc, — to my great-grandmother, she'd say "I need a newspaper to tell me this?" (of course they'd have to be translated into Yiddish first). But today, and for the foreseeable future, we're gonna be treated to headlines that say, in effect, "Your Father Was Right: Bears Do Sh-t in the Woods."

And yes Virginia, China is genuinely repressive.

UPDATE: Group Captain Lionel Mandrake sees the BBC article a little differently:

The position [on Instapundit] is that the BBC reporter has only just woken up to the fact that China is a police state. That is not, in my not very humble opinion, true.

The article is written in very BBC-type language. The BBC tries hard (but doesn't always succeed) in remaining impartial with its reporting. It rarely comments, tries to stick to the facts and is unemotional in its reporting. That would be a rarity from what I've geberally observed in typical news reporting here.

I don't think the reporter was surprised to find out that China is a poice state - he just reported it in a very understated British way.

ANDREW SULLIVAN ON GAYS AND LIMITED GOVERNMENT: Sullivan writes in his latest “Daily Dish” Web log that “the natural politics for homosexuals is conservative-libertarian. Homosexuals have historically never done well under repressive leftist or rightist regimes; they are far more likely to flourish under limited government, low taxes, and a robust foreign policy.”

What the current war has further done, I think, is reveal how those alleged allies (in leftist fantasies) of gay people in the developing world are nothing of the sort. The "oppressed" of the Islamic world, with whom the gay left identifies, would throw most actual homosexuals off tall buildings or bury them under rubble. Islamo-fascism is one of the most powerful and terrifying homophobic movements since Soviet and Cuban communism and Francoite or Nazi fascism. So how on earth have some gay leftists instinctively sided with the allegedly oppressed other? The first political principle for any gay movement worthy of the name is freedom. That's what the left doesn't understand; and that's why their hold on the gay population is tenuous and eroding fast.

I think Sullivan is absolutely right on his first point—it seems absurd for homosexuals to identify with the left and its emphasis on statism, stasism, bureaucracy and regulation over freedom and laissez-faire policies. (And I suspect The Nation knows this all too well, hence their recent and hysterical attack on Sullivan. (Although Sullivan has gotten a hilarious slogan for his Web site out of it: “Makes Kissinger look like St Francis of Assisi.” I love it!)

As for Sullivan's second argument (the left's "hold on the gay population is tenuous and eroding fast"), I'm more skeptical of seeing any immediate results. But if they truly want to be a “big tent” party, there’s a huge opportunity for Bush and the Republican Party here. The question--the big, big question--is, how can they bring in gays without alienating their religious base? But if anybody can do it, it’s George W. Bush, with his soaring popularity, and he seems to understand how important inclusion is.

Read the rest of Sullivan’s thoughts on the subject—I’d like to think he’s a leading indicator of a real sea change in politics. If so, this should be quite an interesting decade.

UPDATE: Orrin Judd sent me a link to his review of Sullivan's recent book, followed by "a ton of links (the man is prolific and controversial) by and about him and these issues."

KUDLOW ON THE ECONOMY:Larry Kudlow's slant on Alan Greenspan and the current state of the economy:

On the economic side, the Fed statement confirms that official Washington now believes the recession is definitely over, and that a stronger-than-expected recovery has begun. How strong? Today, what we're looking at is much more of a normal recovery cycle than most people — including Mr. Greenspan — expected a month or two ago. In fact, we're actually looking down the barrel of a noninflationary economic recovery, one that will provide basketfuls of profit.

Kudlow goes on to describe how the recovering economy could impact the upcoming elections.

I'll believe the economy is really recovering when I start to see some sign that the markets are heading north. Right now, they appear to be locked in a trading range--and while the Dow may be creeping upwards it's like watching paint dry. I don't think most voters will believe the economy is recovering until they see significant upward movement in the stock markets--a few of those hundred or more point rally in the Dow days that make the evening news would be nice--and the Nasdaq has even more work cut out for it.

MUHAMMAD ALI, SONNY LISTON, GEORGE W. BUSH AND THE MIDDLE EAST: The secret connection will all be revealed by reading this post from the eclectically named Captain Scott's Electric Love Bunker.

BLOCKING ADS: I always feel a twinge of guilt when I employ a new program to block Web advertising. Having been self-employed for the last 12 years, I understand that everybody is in the self-promotion business, to one degree or another. I have ads for my tip boxes, and am an Amazon.com associate. My previous businesses have, at various times, relied on newspaper ads, telemarketers, and direct mail to build up clients. And today as a freelancer, I send out truckloads (OK, maybe cardboard box loads) of queries every year both via snailmail and email.

But the latter half of the twentieth century in America has had a constant running battle with advertisers and the general public. The answering machine and caller-ID help to cut down on telemarketers interrupting dinner. The VCR and ReplayTV help to cut down on TV commercials. In fact, I think it was George Gilder’s Telecosm, where he wrote that the next big trend in business is respect for their customers’ time, and not wasting it. (I think Gilder's usually pretty accurate in his predictions. But it would be nice if that trend would finally arrive!)

I believe that X-10 did their reputation a lot of damage with their seemingly omnipresent pop-up ads. Originally, X-10 was only known by us home automation freaks, because they developed the first (fairly) reliable home automation technology, back in 1977. Today, millions of Internet users know X-10 as “those jerks that put out the annoying pop-up ads for their webcams. I see them on every site I visit!”

I started using Pop-Up Stopper Pro with Internet Explorer a few months ago, because I was sick of those ads, and similar pop-up ads. (I’ve already given X-10 a reasonable chunk of my cash, and wife gave me a subscription to National Review, so it’s not like I’m boycotting those folks who use pop-ups).

Lately, I’ve started seeing those really annoying Macromedia Flash ads, where Alka-Seltzers fizz across a Web page, or ET flies across your monitor or things go splat, creepy crawlies creep and crawl, or other silly things interrupt a Web page you were trying to read. In a way, they're worse than pop-up ads, which usually open up behind a Web page, or can quickly be deleted. So earlier today, I downloaded FlashSwitch, to toggle Flash on and off.

I can’t help but think that somewhere hidden in the boilerplate of the CBDTPA, formerly known as the SSSCA, or whatever Fritz Hollings is calling it this week, is some legislation to block our attempts to block ‘Net advertising. I know Replay TV’s automatic commercial zapping feature has the TV networks annoyed. But geez folks, it’s not like we don’t see enough advertising already!

Nina and I saw Gunga Din on Friday night at the Stanford Theater in Palo Alto. What a fun movie--and one that there's no way could be made in these PC times. Unless of course, the producers hired Noam Chomsky as their technical advisor, to add a postmodern subtext that informs us how evil those mean old empire building Brits were.

The other curious element of Gunga Din is that it's one of the few films where Hollywood actually cast Cary Grant to play an Englishman. Most of the time of course, he was all-American, often as a Madison Ave. advertising man (Mr. Blandings, North by Northwest), or working for the US government (Notorious, Destination Tokyo). Today, whenever Hollywood employs Sean Connery, they build an elaborate backstory to explain why he's a Scotsman in a film full of Americans. Back then, audiences suspended disbelief and assumed Cary was all-American--because he was so terrific to watch.

Speaking of which, if you're reading this from the Bay Area, it will be playing these for the next few days, as the Stanford is in the middle of a Cary Grant retrospective.

PHOTO PAGES ADDED: I have no idea how these will load, or look, on other browsers. But I just uploaded a collection of photos of myself, playing with trains, battleships, and rockets, as well as a couple of my run-ins with celebrities. (That Chewbacca--what a nice guy. Some stars let their fame go to their heads, but he's one wookie who's got a solid, if extremely furry, head on his shoulders.)

NOTE: These pages are both fairly large (over 400K each) and best viewed via a broadband connection. Click here to view photo section.

Back in late January, the omnipresent Instapundit had a link to Bjørn Stærk's comments about the two types of people who quote George Orwell:

those who quote his fiction, and those who quote his non-fiction. When fiction-quoters find themselves in a debate way over their heads, they drag out their handy little Orwell toolbox, and throw out some ominous buzzword (Orwellian! Big Brother! Doublethink!), and then leave, considering the debate won. To them, Orwell is an excuse not to think, because any complex issue can be reduced to some 1984 or Animal Farm analogy. To non-fiction quoters, Orwell is a painful reminder never to stop thinking. You can read 1984 and emerge as much a blathering fool as you ever were, but read his essay on language, and it'll haunt you, forever poking at your self-importance and lazyness, as it has mine.

1984 is a brilliant book, and I'm sad to find yet another example that confirms my theory: It is always quoted foolishly.

I think the difference between Orwell's fiction and non-fiction quoters is a terrific observation, one that Jonah Goldberg runs with today. Goldberg quotes a couple of reporters who have recently used the phrase "Big Brother is back" or variants of it to describe cameras in schools or around monuments.

I could go on for pages. Variations on the phrase come up all of the time, in congressional testimony, editorials, news reports, press releases, political debates. But nobody sees the irony. Not only was Big Brother never here in the first place, but the knee-jerk belief that he was here reflects precisely the sort of ideological brainwashing 1984 was supposed to be warning us against. It is a popular myth, a bit of self-reinforcing hysteria that civil libertarians and the simply unthinking buy into without even knowing it. To ask "Is this return of Big Brother?" is only slightly more reasonable than to ask "Are we looking at the rebirth of Narnia?" or "Is the Bush administration concerned that when Superman returns, he might handle Saddam Hussein without consulting the White House?"

The roots of this Big Brother mythology are deep and intricate, but surely it arises in part because of the general liberal conviction that the past is bad and Big Brother is bad, thus — since we don't have Big Brother now — he must have existed in the past. I'm sure there are kids in Ivy League English classes right now who think that Big Brother existed in 1984 (the year) because that was the name of the book.

As much as I hate the idea of cameras at intersections (and they seemed to be all over the roads in London when I was there in 2000), I have to agree with Jonah when he says:

If the slippery slope is the rule, why have civil liberties become more secure since the internment of the Japanese or the isolated abuses of the 1960s — or the suspension of habeas corpus by Abraham Lincoln, for that matter? If we are going to use slippery-slope arguments, let us at least use the real-life examples Edmund Burke spoke of rather than invoke the fictitious apparition of a past that never was.

FROM QUAGMIRE TO "MISSION-CREEP": Yet another call the beware the Ides of March. Oh wait, we're past those. OK, yet another call (humorously issued by Jeff Jarvis) to beware The dreaded Afghan springtime:

Remember when we were told that winter in Afghanistan would be a killer, assuring us a quagmire?
Now we're supposed to dread the melting snows of springtime.The Guardian:

American military and intelligence chiefs are bracing themselves for an upsurge in guerrilla-style attacks from al-Qaida and Taliban forces in Afghanistan when the snows melt in a few weeks time.

As concern continued to grow among British backbench MPs of a possible "mission creep" in Afghanistan, the CIA director, George Tenet, warned that al-Qaida terrorists were poised to step up their activities following the spring thaw.

We advance from guagmire to "mission-creep."
I dread that Afghan summer.

LET'S PUT TWO AND TWO TOGETHER: A while back, we mentioned the Robo-Scribe, the robot news reporter. Last week, the New York Times ran an articled called Where the News, but Almost Nothing Else, Is Real. It's about the construction of a virtual reality set for KJTV's news in Lubbock, Texas.

The set, an enormous high-ceilinged room, would have remote-controlled cameras capable of swooping above and around it. Announcers would be able to take an open elevator up to a sweeping second story and walk across the exposed higher floor.

But this set would not be an elaborate wood, glass and metal affair. It would exist virtually, inside the hard drive of a Silicon Graphics workstation and the brain cells of its viewers.

OK, we've got the robot reporter, we've got the virtual reality set, need I say more?

Hey, Max Headroom, tanned, rested and ready...

POSTAL RATE INCREASE APPROVED: AP is reporting that Americans will be paying an additional 3 cents to mail a letter this summer.

The independent Postal Rate Commission on Friday gave its approval to an unprecedented agreement on postage prices, reached by the post office and nearly all of the businesses and organizations that normally fight rate changes vigorously.

All that remains now is for the postal governing board to set the date, probably around June 30.

The decision gives the post office "breathing room" after it was strapped by the economic slowdown and costs related to anthrax-tainted mail, said Rate Commission Chairman George Omas.

A couple of years ago, Rick Merritt, Executive Director of the non-profit watchdog group PostalWatch, while calling for a hiring freeze said,

“The Postal Service seems to be the only organization on the face of the planet that has invested Billions in automation technology without deriving any significant increase in workforce productivity. Only a government-sanctioned monopoly could raise prices and increase its workforce in the face of reduced demand for its services.”

Merritt went on to say, “The Postal Service is in a Death-Spiral, prices keep going up, quality of service is going down and the Postal Service continues to become a bigger and bigger mouth to feed. What America really needs is a Postal Patron’s Bill of Rights which; requires postal head-counts to shrink along with first-class mail demand, strictly prohibits the agency from regulating competitors and outlaws rate-payer subsidized forays into non-postal ventures.”

Given that big chunks of the American population have email, and electronic bill paying, the Post Office has to be the only enterprise not to understand that to increase business, you have a sale, not raise prices. Instead of letting the Microsoft trial grind on, couldn't we try to break this monoply up--finally?

Oh, and while a virus could kill my computer (in Norton we trust), you can't get Anthrax from an email. (But if you're reading this, you knew that already.)

AP is reporting that Maryland Public Television is retooling Wall Street Week, and in the process, Louis Rukeyser, its host, is being shown the door:

"They decided unilaterally not to proceed with me as the host of the show I created, wrote and maintained for 32 years," Rukeyser said.

"They then tried to get me to remain with the program in a senior-commentator capacity, but I decided I didn't want to have anything further to do with them."

MPT and Fortune magazine are creating a new version of the weekly program called "Wall $treet Week With Fortune." The show, slated to air in the fall, will feature Fortune editorial director Geoffrey Colvin and an undetermined co-anchor, MPT said.

Rukeyser's contract runs through June. He said the final edition of the show will air June 28.

I'm very sorry to see Rukeyser get the boot--his was one of the very few PBS shows I enjoyed watching, especially in the early 1990s, when I began my career as a financial planner, something I did until the mid-1990s, when I moved out to California, and sold my practice. Of course, in that time, we've seen the rise of CNBC, CNNFN, and Bloomberg (and of course, all of the cable news channels have daily financial shows as well), rendering a weekly financial show largely superfluous. It will be interesting to see how Wall Street Week does under its new hosts.

REMEMBERING 9/11: Glenn Reynolds writes:

JONAH GOLDBERG says we should work to remember the horror of 9/11, but that the TV networks are papering it over. Yeah, I know I mentioned that already, but at least you can link to this website, which I should have mentioned when I posted on Goldberg's piece the first time around.

Keep a case of Kleenex, or an airsick bag, or both, handy when viewing these images--they're truly a punch in the gut, and a reminder of the purpose of Operation Enduring Freedom. As Jonah wrote in his column, it speaks volumes about television news organizations and their fear that we're too weak to handle these images. And that's the whole point: putting the people who created them--savage, inhuman terrorists--out of business, and off the planet, permanently.

THE GLASS ENGINE: Found via "The Spirograph", JamesEdmunds.com has a link to a truly unique interface constructed by IBM to search the music of Philip Glass. I'm not sure how intuitive it is, but it's definitely a fun way to explore Glass's music--and somehow, very much in keeping with the flavor of Glass's style. I could definitely see museums or archives adopting this type of interface to view an online catalog of related works.

WE STILL HAVE NIXON TO KICK AROUND: Michael Potemra, on The Corner on National Review Online links to today's Washington Post, which has an article with transcriptions of some of Nixon's White House rants against drugs and homosexuality. Potemra writes:

Here's my personal favorite: "Let's look at the strong societies. The Russians. Goddamn it, they root [gays] out, they don't let 'em hang around at all. You know what I mean? I don't know what they do with them. Dope? Do you think the Russians allow dope? Hell no. Not if they can catch it, they send them up. You see, homosexuality, dope, uh, immorality in general: These are the enemies of strong societies. That's why the Communists and the left-wingers are pushing it. They're trying to destroy us." You know what I love most about this? The idea that the Soviet Union, less than two decades before its complete destruction, is a "strong" society because it tyrannizes over its own citizens. Well, we didn't take Nixon's advice and become more like the Communists. And guess which country is still standing.

MAP OF THE KNOWN WEB LOG UNIVERSE: Inspired by the work of Edward Tufte, A Picture of Weblogs has a huge Spirograph-like map of what looks like hundreds of Web logs. Found through Megan McArdle's blog.

SHIPS NO LONGER "SHE", MERELY "IT": "Group Captain Lionel Mandrake" is reporting (check out his source...) that:

Lloyd's List, founded in London in 1734 (making it one of the world's oldest daily publications), will no longer be referring to ships as "she". From here on they will be known as "it".

Hmmmm ...... sounds about right - given the soul-less nature of modern ship design. Imagine a fully-rigged tea clipper - the Cutty Sark - barelling down the English Channel in a 30-knot wind, bit between her teeth, close-hauled to the wind, racing to be the first into London with the new season's tea. Nobody with a romantic sould would call her anything but "she".

One is an incurable romantic.

I'm really curious as to why the editor of Lloyd's is doing this. Is this something that politically correct female sailors have been clamoring for? Have Oprah or Rosie gone on TV to decry the feminization of nautical pronouns? What do the women of DACOWITS think of this?

Hey, even on Star Trek: The Next Generation, set in a Marxist, uber-PC future, with the Federation modeled after the worst excesses of the UN, the Enterprise is still "a she".

(Slipping into John Belushi doing Capt. Kirk) "But for...how long?...how...long...?"

PACIFIC STOCK EXCHANGE TRADING FLOOR GOES BYE-BYE:

The Pacific Exchange (PCX) today announced that it is closing its San Francisco equities floor on Thursday, March 21, 2002. The PCX also announced that, on Friday, March 22, it is moving its equities trading operations to the fully electronic Archipelago Exchange (ArcaEx).

The PCX and its forerunner, the San Francisco Stock and Bond Exchange, have operated a trading floor for stocks and bonds in the city since 1882. The floor has been housed in the "Temple of Capitalism" at 301 Pine Street since 1930, but advances in technology have eliminated the Pacific's need for centralized, physical facilities to make markets in equity issues.

I wonder if the NYSE will ever close its trading floor, which also has got to be rapidly becoming superfluous in these days of electronic trading. And does this mean that telecommuting is not dead, despite all the panicking stories I read about it in late 2000 and 2001?

4 DIE IN US EMBASSY BLAST IN PERU: AP is reporting that an explosion outside the U.S. Embassy in Lima late Wednesday killed at least four people, local media reported. The blast comes three days ahead of a visit by President Bush.

Details about the dead and injured were not clear, and some reports said the death toll from the apparent car bomb was as high as 10. At least four bodies could be seen in the rubble, including a boy wearing roller skates, radio reports said.

A State Department official, speaking on the condition of anonymity, said no American citizens were hurt in the explosion. The official declined to comment further.

UPDATE: I don't know if this is a later or earlier report. But Matt Drudge has a link to a Reuters article, which puts the death count at seven.

A WORTHWHILE ENTERPRISE? Some amusing thoughts on Enterprise, the latest Star Trek series from Charles Oliver's Shoutin' Across the Pacific Web log:

I’ve seen almost all of the episodes of Enterprise. It isn’t great, but it’s probably the best first season so far for a Trek spin off. TNN has been running Star Trek: the Next Generation and I’ve seen all of the first two seasons of that show. I had forgotten just how bad those early episodes were. Clipping my in-grown toenail is less painful that watching anything from the first season.

Oliver's best riff, which Glenn Reynolds also picked up on was:

I figure that any civilization that can perfect faster-than-light travel, transporters that can move people tens of thousands of miles while only occasionally splitting them into good and evil twins and holodecks so realistic that the fake guns can kill people and the fake Moriarty can take over the ship can find a way to make Marxism work.

I've also liked the new series, but with reservations. The Andorians episode was quite a good piece of action/adventure, but the most recent one, with the "evil" hunters in camouflaged jump suits chasing shapeshifting wraiths, was just silly. I wonder if the 22nd century will need an NPA to protect the rights of non-military personnel to bear phasers, and hunt with them...

THE WORLD'S FASTEST PC? Speaking of nifty technologies, the BBC (also by way of GeekPress) is reporting on a customized PC, called the "Vapochill", clocked at a blistering 3 GHz:

The Vapochill PC takes an off the shelf 2.2 GHz Intel Pentium 4 processor and speeds it up to the record-breaking pace.

PCs which have been "overclocked" in this way are often unstable, because the whole system, including the memory chips and the interface circuitry, is run well past its design speed.

But the Vapochill takes advantage of the way that some computer circuit boards are designed to speed up only the processor and leave the rest of the system unchanged.

CAMPAIGN FINANCE REFORM CLEARS THE SENATE. THE DOW DROPS 133 POINTS. COINCIDENCE? Yeah, probably, but spooky. I really do hope that having been chastised for going wobbly on steel, Bush vetoes this thing before he goes wobbly on the First Amendment. We'll see...

By the way, I'm typing this entry from a laptop sitting on my back deck, via my wireless 802.11b rig, while listening to Miles Davis' Miles Ahead, with Gil Evans' sublime arrangements on headphones, via the laptop's CDROM. God I love technology!

ANOTHER DAY, ANOTHER CYBORG GETS HASSLED AT THE AIRPORT: Strange story in the New York Times, by way of GeekPress (which I found by way of Virginia Postrel's blog), which says:

Don't mess with airport security -- real-life cyborg learns that "resistance is futile". Due to increased airport security measures, Canadian engineering professor Steve Mann was forced to unplug all his cybernetic implants that help him augment his memory and vision. According to the article, Mann (who has worn these implants continously for 20 years!), found the experience extremely disorienting: "Without a fully functional system, he said, he found it difficult to navigate normally. He said he fell at least twice in the airport, once passing out after hitting his head on what he described as a pile of fire extinguishers in his way. He boarded the plane in a wheelchair."

It will be interesting to see how the airport security debacle plays out in the next five to ten years, as more and more people will probably have some of the cybernetics that Mann is testing. I'd also be interested to see what happens to Mann's lawsuit, and if he's able to rebuild his equipment.

BROCK ON FOX: Media Research Center's CyberAlert for 03/19/2002 has a transcription of David Brock's recent appearance on Fox New Channel. Among the many amusing moments during one of the few grillings Brock has recieved over his new book, in this case, by Fox's David Asman:

Raising Brock’s claims that former FBI agent Gary Aldrich misused a baseless allegation Brock had passed along to him, Asman asked: "We’re supposed to believe you, a person who has admitted that you’ve lied in print as opposed to an FBI agent who was assigned to two different administrations?"Asman, who was with the Wall Street Journal editorial page before jumping to FNC, showed how Brock was inaccurate in his claim about how the Journal had identified Aldrich.

MORE ON MOORE: Yesterday, we linked to an Instapundit Michael Moore update. Today, a reader of The Corner on National Review Online took offense at Moore's alleged nasty behavior, as reported in yesterday's San Diego Union-Tribune, and, according "The Corner":

wrote Moore to complain about it, calling himself a "former fan." Former Fan forwarded me the e-mail he received from Moore (mmflint@aol.com), reproduced here verbatim (except for the profanity): dear former fan, glad you are former! 'casue i don't need any fans who would believe that scummy anti-union paper! that pr--k who wrote that column is best friends with the guy who was married to my sister and abandonned her and the two kids there in san diego. so f--k him, f--k you. everything he wrote was a lie, and i plan on taking action. mike

PROFILE OF MY WIFE AND I: I was literally in the process of scanning this article, which I wrote for House of Business magazine in the fall of 2000, (now known as Broadband House), when I discovered that my wife's "virtual assistant", Terri Lee Romine, already has it scanned on her Web site. This is a pretty good look at the technology inside our home, that drives our two home offices. And Terri does a terrific job of assisting my wife in her legal practice, even though they're located 350-odd miles apart.

We've updated much of the technology featured in that article--we're on Windows 2000 now for the most part (a couple of PCs still have 98, and my main PC is 98/2000 dual boot), and we've also installed an 802.11b network which makes working all over the house (and outside, on the rear deck) even more flexible, but the general principles--that it's more than doable to largely run two businesses out of a single home--that's it's possible to mix business and pleasure (I often work out of our den, which doubles as a media room), are still very much up-to-date.

By the way, I noticed earlier today that Glenn Reynolds is still writing many of his Instapundit columns on a $400 eMachine. I used a heavily modified eMachine for a number of years (until I gave it to a friend when I bought the Win2000/98 PC that I now use as my primary business computer), and still have another one that's used in our guest room/study as a spare PC (with a TV card built-in, so guests can watch DirecTV). By the way, to paraphrase Glenn, nice of eMachine to help destroy the digital divide...

FAQ ME BABY!

Q: When will your Frequently Asked Questions page finally be up? I'm sick of reading "Coming Soon!"

A: It's online now! Click here to read it.

Q: When will your About Me page be done?

A: Good question. How does "in the not too distant future" sound?

Q: Really vague, but I guess it will have to do.

A: OK. On to the FAQs Page!

ZERO TOLERANCE FOR ASTHMA INHALERS: As someone who has suffered with asthma since he was three or four years old, I almost needed a puff from my inhaler after working myself up into a lather reading Catherine Seipp's article "Asthma Attack", with the subhead of "When 'zero tolerance' collides with children’s health", on Reason's Web site.

Seipp's article is full of terrifying run-ins with odious little school beaurocrats and teachers, including Seipp and her daughter (who also has asthma) and their incident with her school's principal, who quickly backed down from his "zero tolerance" policy preventing Seipp's daughter from carrying her own inhaler after Seipp called the Los Angeles Unified School District’s director of nursing. "Within an hour, I had a fax on Principal Baker’s desk saying that district policy (Bulletin Z-19, Attachment F) does allow students to keep medicine on hand with a note from their doctor. I sent a copy to his supervisor, and he backed down quickly."

Another classic is this one:

Ellie Goldberg of Newton, Massachusetts, advises parents of children with various medical problems how to deal with schools. She gets calls about asthma inhalers every day. One of the most memorable: "A person from Louisiana called and told me about a teacher who pulled a drawer out, spilled all the medicine out of the cups, refilled them randomly and said, ‘Gee, I hope this doesn’t hurt anybody.’" When Goldberg’s own asthmatic daughter was in the second grade, the school secretary mistakenly gave her Ritalin instead of her inhaler.

It's a long article, full of horrifying incidents like this, making you wonder if the kids should have stickers on their backpacks saying "You can have my inhaler when you pry my cold, dead fingers off of it".

Every parent of a child with asthma, or any other medical condition, should read this article--it's excellent.

SUPPLY-SIDE, PHILLY STYLE: Patrick Ruffini on tax cuts, and supply side economics, in Phildelphia:

Tax cuts are on the intellectual offensive in the City of Brotherly Love, even though I think the political will for them will lag far behind for a long while, if not forever. Remember, this is also the city with the most rapacious, violent unions in the country, where there's always a clamor for more "services" (ultimately a fig-leaf for paying Democratic precinct-captains-cum-city workers well above-average salaries to sit around City Hall offices doing nothing). It's great that city Democrats appreciate what we were saying all these years about the job-killing effects of high taxes. Now let's see them do something about it.

MICHAEL MOORE, HYPOCRITE: Glenn Reynolds has a couple of amusing Michael Moore updates today. I love this one:

Moore endorses chain restaurants over local ones, because small business owners vote Republican: "F*ck all these small businesses - f*ck 'em all! Bring in the chains. The small businesspeople are the rednecks that run the town and suppress the people. F*ck 'em all. That's how I feel." And it's all about how he feels, isn't it?

ORRIN JUDD ON THE FEDERAL RESERVE, which left interest rates unchanged today:

One of the problems with the Fed is that they tend to combat the problem that prevailed when they were young men. Thus, they were far too slow reacting to inflation in the 70s, because unemployment had been the big problem of the governors' Depression youths. Now they are fighting non-existent inflation because it was the big problem when Greenspan served in the Ford Administration.

I wonder just what it would take to get Greenspan to admit that inflation isn't the beast it was in the past?

Personally, I'm rather fond of the idea that Milton Friedman suggested last year in an interview:

"I've always been in favor of replacing the Fed with a computer." In essence, a PC could determine the economy's monetary base and consistently increase it by, say, 3 percent annually. "That amount of money would be created and distributed, either by buying up government securities or by financing current government expenditures," Mr. Friedman explains. "It would do that week after week, month after month, hopefully year after year."

MICHAEL JACKSON AND PEDOPHILIA: The Internet Movie Database's Movie and TV News has this article today, which Uthant could have lots of fun with:

An episode of a British comedy show that drew the anger of numerous child advocacy groups as well as the censure of two regulatory agencies provoked new controversy Monday when it was nominated for an award by the British Academy of Film and Television. After the nominated episode, which satirized the media's treatment of pedophilia, was aired last August, the country's Independent Television Commission and the Broadcasting Standards Commission issued orders to the network to apologize for airing the program. Culture Secretary Tessa Jowell charged that it contributed to the destruction of "all the boundaries of decency on television." In response, Channel 4's then CEO, Michael Jackson, defended the program and said, "We would not hesitate to ... transmit such a program again." On Monday, Britain's National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children issued a statement expressing "regret that a program that trivializes the abuse of children should be considered worthy of an award."

OK, so it's not that Michael Jackson. But it is a weird coincidence, isn't it?

DUBYAMAN? Matt Drudge links to this peculiar Reuters article about an Indian comic strip called "Dubyaman":

The controversial comic strip -- being exhibited in New Delhi -- was launched in one of the country's leading newspapers, The Times of India, after Bush vowed to bring Osama bin Laden to justice "dead or alive" after the plane attacks in September.

"The situation has all the elements of a black comedy. I saw an American style superhero -- in the mould of a comic book Superman -- but one who had the knack of tripping over his tonsils every time he opened his mouth," said Jug Suraiya, the writer of the comic strip.

"And so Dubyaman was born. A deranged superhero destined to skid on the banana peel of his own ineptitude," said Suraiya, India's answer to Art Buchwald

And Ted Rall as well, judging by the rest of the article. And notice how the writer of the piece (no byline is given) never comments on Suraiya's enormous moral equivalence, equating America's war on al-Qaeda with the terrorists themselves. And it ends with this doozy from Suraiya:

"In either case, today Dubyaman is no longer an individual but a state of mind: a combination of arrogance, ignorance and intolerance."

A state that Suraiya sounds intimately familiar with, himself.

THE BROS START BLOGGING: The Brothers Judd have succumbed to the world of blogging. Check out their Blog by clicking here.

Speaking of the Brothers Judd, Orrin and I exchanged a couple of emails on the merits of Norman Jewison's original 1975 film of Rollerball. Orrin was kind enough to link to my review of Rollerballon DVD. My comments on Orrin's review of one of the more offbeat of the 1970's post-apocalyptic distopian doomsday sci-fi films also follow his review.

Stanley Kurtz, writing on The Corner on National Review Online, says that the CampusNonsense site run by Josh Mercer’s "is more than just a conservative campus blog."

It aims to be a kind of clearing house for conservative blogs nationally, which are linked in the right-hand column. Click on Arizona State’s “Collegiate Conservative,” for example, and you’ll read the story of yet another conservative paper theft. Many of these papers were burned. (The Left seems to have entirely forgotten the terrible images of Nazi book burning.) CampusNonsense has also got a bunch of links to campus conservative papers. And the blog itself features entries by Mercer and others. Check out Harold Eustache Jr.’s account of what happens to black conservatives when they try to speak their mind. This blog is the future.

The Internet has long allowed anyone who can type to have a voice. I think the significance of blogging, is that it makes so much of the design and HTML work transparent, so it's easy to create a template and get content up there. Just choose a template and start writing, in many cases. And this CampusNonsense blog (and the other conservative campus blogs it links to) looks like something that's long overdue.

WHITHER FIREMEN? Eli Lehrer in National Review Online says:

Although few Americans needed reminding, last week's gripping television images of men rushing into the hellish infernos of the World Trade Center towers on Sept. 11 brought home the incredible workaday bravery firefighters must demonstrate. According to the United States Fire Administration, firefighters fall victim to two thirds of all fire-related injuries: Police officers, on the other hand, suffer only about three percent of all crime-related injuries.

Firefighters have done their job so well they may become obsolete in the near future. Modern buildings resist fires, technology useful against fires has improved, and as a result, fire-related deaths, injuries, and damages have entered a period of permanent decline.

Besides modern building technology, Lehrer says that other technologies and education have also helped to protect Americans from fire.

Mobile phones allow citizens to report puffs of smoke as soon as they appear while smoke detectors warn sleeping families to evacuate before smoke and flames threatens lives. Cheaper and easier-to-maintain helicopters, likewise, allow quicker responses to fires in distant rural areas while computers have simplified and improved dispatch for urban agencies. Fire-safety efforts in schools have played a role in a near-50-percent reduction in the number of fires started during children's play.

P.J. O'Rourke once said that whenever anybody pines for the "good old days" he has two words: modern dentistry. (I can heartily agree to that). And while many people probably loathe the manners (and often morals) of today's society, it's hard to argue with many of the advances of modern technology--especially when it comes to reducing fire.

As to how all of this will transform the profession of firemen (it is safe to call them that again after 9/11, right?), Lehrer has some excellent ideas in his article.

WI-FI NATION: On Thursday of last week, I posted about 802.11b wireless LANs.
Paul Boutin has a link to Wired magazine's list of more than 400 public 802.11b access points in America. It's bigger than WiFinder's database, and presented as a PDF file you can store on your computer for those times you can't get online.

On the same site, Boutin also has more information to refute those silly French conspiracists who don't believe that a 757 crashed into the Pentagon on 9/11.

Spent Sunday night having a wonderful Saint Patrick's Day dinner at home with friends, especially one from the east coast who likes Martinis almost as much as I do. However, this time around, I made a pitcher of Vespers, James Bond's Martini from an Fleming's Casino Royale. The recipe, for those who wish to imbibe, is:

3 ounces gin
1 ounce vodka
1/2 ounce Lillet blonde

Shake ingredients with cracked ice; strain into a chilled cocktail glass. Garnish with a lemon peel.

Like Bond himself, it's a drink that's smooth and deadly. Just hand Blofeld the keys to your Aston Martin ahead of time, if you plan to drink a couple of these at a party.

For more information about the Vesper, check out this page about it, and the many other wonderful libations on the same site.

For more information about Martinis in general, their history, celebrities who drank them, and much more, check out Barnaby Conrad's fun book on the subject,
The Martini : An Illustrated History of an American Classic.

THE TIMES, THEY ARE A CHANGIN'...Tim Blair (link by way of Joanne Jacobs) compares the protestors of the 1960s with the protestors of today, and he doesn't like what he sees:

1967: Give peace a chance
2002: Give police states a chance

1967: LSD is good
2002: Genetically modified food is bad

1967: Ban the bomb!
2002: Ban the burger shops, shoe makers, crop scientists, coffee stores, trade, business, and commerce!

1967: Think global, act local
2002: Think local, act anti-global

1967: Expand your consciousness
2002: Throw rocks

CRASH! Sorry for the lack of content today, but my wife's PC's hard drive is seriously on the fritz, and we spent much of the day trying to get things back to normal, so the Web site (unfortunately) got put on the back burner. Look for more on Tuesday. Hopefully.

HACKING THE EMPIRE: Harry Knowles of Ain't It Cool News apparently has screened a rough cut of Star Wars: Episode 2: Attack of the Clones. At one point in his description of viewing the film, Knowles wrote:

When I saw this, I screamed like a little girl. I mean it was like Uncle Tony grabbed my pantied ass. I jumped about 12 feet up in the air and squealed. WHAT A THRILL!

Knowles told Matt Drudge:

that while at a book signing in Austin this weekend he was extended a secret invitation by a mystery source for a private viewing at a hotel room during the South by Southwest Film Festival.

And Knowles says there's no way the LUCASFILM or FOX will ever figure out who gave him this extraordinary access.

"The source is so protected that Lucas will never find out. The film is safe. It won't be shown further. The source wanted ME to see it. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if the material was already safe back in Marin County as we speak!"

Knowles predicts that team Lucas has hit paydirt with a film that explains away many of the flaws of STAR WARS, EPISODE I: THE PHANTOM MENACE, including minimizing the presence of the heavily criticized character Jar Jar Binks.

THE FATAL FLAW: Spinsters.com has a post with a terrific line in it: "Who knew the fatal flaw to Communism is the fact that there’s no money in it?" The rest of the post by Lee Ann Morawski is quite good as well. And the other Spinster apparently writes from the same Borders as the Instapundit, thus proving The Vast Blog-Wing Conspiracy is growing by leaps and bounds.

EBERT, YOU MAGNIFICENT SONOFABITCH, I READ YOUR REVIEW! Roger Ebert has an insightful review of Patton as part of his "Great Movies" series. Ebert notes:

The most famous scene is the first one, Patton mounting a stage to address his troops from in front of an American flag that fills the huge 70-mm screen. His speech is unapologetically bloodthirsty ("we will cut out their living guts and use them to grease the treads of our tanks"). His uniform and decorations, ribbons and medals, jodhpurs and riding boots and swagger stick fall just a hair short of what Groucho Marx might have worn. Scott's great nose could be the beak of an American Eagle. The closing shot is the other side of the coin, a graying and lonely old man, walking his dog. Even then, we suspect, Patton is acting. But does he know it?

I watched "Patton" last week on laser disc (which reminded me that I've got to pick it up on DVD. The speech at the beginning of the film is surprisingly faithful to the actual speech given by Patton to the Third Army on June 5th, the night before D-Day, minus all of Patton's profanity, but with a subtle, 1960s-updating of "individual heroics" to "individuality".

As far as the film's great, if far more subtle, last scene, I'm surprised Ebert didn't mention its obvious Don Quixote homage. There's a huge windmill, silently revolving in the foreground of the shot, as Patton walks his dog.

And the film made great use of the German generals and their staff to deliver much of the expository information about Patton, using the distancing of the foreign language and subtitles to make their role in the movie less obvious.

It's funny, all of the flak that Nixon took from the left for watching, and being inspired by Patton, because Patton is the consummate war leader, who understood, far better than Nixon or Johnson seemed to during Vietnam, that "no bastard ever won a war by dying for his country. He won it by making the other poor dumb bastard die for his country." and that "war is a bloody, killing business. You've got to spill their blood, or they will spill yours." Yes, and it's a bloody, killing business no matter how much you sanitize it for TV, or try to be "merciful" to the enemy. Win the war--then you can show mercy.

Was Patton crazy? Delusional, maybe. A romantic, certainly. But as a war commander, he knew how to motivate his troops, and how to win a war: use overwhelming force, advance as quickly as possible, and fight like hell. I suspect he'd have a wonderful time if he were alive today, going through the Afghanis "like crap through a goose".

Anyhow, read Ebert's review--it's a very good article about an excellent film made by a most underrated director, Franklin J. Schaffner and co-written by Francis Ford Coppola, before he would go on to direct another film about an equally charismatic, if far more corrupt, leader.

By the way, for another review of Patton, and what a well-crafted film it is (especially for the time in which it came out), read Doug Pratt's essay from The DVD-LaserDisc Newsletter.

THE PARKING LOT AS ECONOMIC GUIDE: Nina Yablok, Silicon Valley's best business attorney, and Mrs. Ed Driscoll, says (on her Web log) that one of her personal leading economic indicators is parking lot space in malls. "Today I went to the Westgate Mall in San Jose. School's not about to start and it's no where near Christmas. It is slightly shy of Easter, but I don't know if that's normally a big shopping day. But at 2:30 pm the parking lot was exceedingly full. There was at least one car at the end of each aisle waiting for someone to leave. I finally went to Valet parking, which also had a line. And the Crocodile Cafe had a waiting list. So it seems that someone is at least thinking of shopping these days. Good sign for the economy."

Yes, it's an un-scientific survey, but I'd say this bodes well for Silicon Valley to recover its place in the economy in the coming months. And it's nice to know the Retail Support Brigade isn't shirking its duty these days!

HOW THE WEB WAS WON: Just added an essay that I wrote in 1998 for an abortive book project. It's both a mini-history of the Internet, and my own introduction to computers in the mid-1970s. I'd like think my writing style has come along way since I wrote this, but in looking back on it, I was surprised at how blog-like the piece was, with long quotes from outside sources.

SIX MONTHS LATER, SIX QUESTIONS: Michelle Malkin has six questions about some of the mysteries remaining after 9/11. Personally, I'd love to hear the real answer to #4.

TONY BLAIR MEETS ADAM AND EVE: "Group Captain Lionel Mandrake" says:

Tony Blair, Prime Minister of Britain, has taken his foot out of his mouth for just long enough to insert the other one.

The Times of London (there can be only one)*said today: On Wednesday Dr Jenny Tonge, the Liberal Democrat MP for Richmond Park, asked the Prime Minister whether he was happy for creationism to be taught in a state-funded school (she meant Emmanuel College in Gateshead) “alongside Darwinism”.

Mr Blair's answer?

“In the end, a more diverse school system will deliver better results for our children. If she looks at the school’s results, I think she will find that they are very good.”

Aaaaarrrrrggggghhhhh!!!!! This man is the Prime Minister - was that really the best (un)answer he could come up with?

* Forgive him folks. Capt. Mandrake is very, very British, and can't help remarks like this.

HOG HEAVEN: ESPN.com's "Page 2" section goes to Washington, with a variety of articles both amusing and serious on the Redskins, including this piece on the Skins' great offensive line of yore, the Hogs; an article by George Allen's daughter, Jennifer, on Richard Nixon's influence on her dad's playbook; and a terrific article by Thomas G. Smith, a history professor at Nichols College in Massachussetts, called "Civil Rights on the Gridiron", about how the Redskins, the last all-white team in the NFL, were finally integrated in the early 1960s.

There's an astonishing quote by George Preston Marshall's, the Redskins' then owner, who once said, "We'll start signing Negroes, when the Harlem Globetrotters start signing whites." Of course, there's (at least) two enormous fallacies in that statement:

1. The Globetrotters were (and are) an exhibition team. Everybody expects them to beat the patsies who play against them.

2. The Redskins were getting creamed as an all-white team, and they had to play in the brutally competitive NFL, and were losing their seasons--badly. But it took the Kennedy administration, along with societal, and economic pressures, to finally force Marshall to make what should have been an easy decision.

Anyhow, that article and the rest of the 'Skins pieces on Page Two make for great reading for any NFL fan enduring the painfully long off-season.

BIG BLU: The Washington Times' Inside the Ring column is reporting that the Pentagon is rushing to produce a new and bigger bunker-buster bomb for use against hardened targets, like some of the underground hide-outs used by Iraqi President Saddam Hussein. Developed for the Air Force by Northrop Grumman Corp. and called Big BLU—for bomb live unit, the BLUs "are so big that it will take a B-2 bomber to carry one of them, we are told. Three Big BLUs have been ordered by the Air Force on an urgent basis."

Armando Valladares, a writer who spent 22 years imprisoned in a Castro government gulag for opposing communism, says democracy will only return to Cuba when Fidel Castro disappears because there is no one in Cuba to replace him.

"It's not like in the old Soviet Union where one secretary of the (communist) party would succeed another one. The dictatorship in Cuba is like all Latin American dictatorships, once the leader disappears, the dictatorship disappears," he said.

I hope he's right--it can't happen soon enough.

For more on the horrors of Cuba, check out Jeff Jacoby's ongoing, three part story of his recent visit there.

RESTORING CLASSIC MOVIES: Interesting article on the incredible efforts going into restoring It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World by Robert Harris, who helped restore Lawrence of Arabia, Spartacus, Vertigo and other classic Hollywood films.

For decades, the major studios had shelved their most valued possessions in makeshift vaults (many outdoors) and beneath and surrounding the studio's stages. One studio kept their treasures in a converted bowling alley with minimal temperature and humidity control. Some studios had no air conditioning or control whatsoever - a running joke being that they had full temperature and humidity control - that of the temperature and humidity outside the walls. One facility was found to have piles of rusting film cans on the floor with a tell-tale rust stain around them. Overhead was a hole in the roof through which water was allowed to seep.

Then there is the horror story of one studio executive who felt that thousands of feet of the studio's most prized technicolor musical product was taking up far too much of the studio's storage space, and ordered all of the original film product to be dumped in the Pacific Ocean.

ETERNAL VIGILANCE AND THE NEW NEW JOURNALISM: Yet another reference to my Spintech article--thanks! By the way, the Eternal Vigilance site looks pretty cool. I'll definitely check it out in detail later today.

FIRST SGT. STRYKER, NOW GROUP CAPTAIN LIONEL MANDRAKE: My friend Steve Bail, an Englishman who has worked in Silicon Valley in the recent past, and no doubt will again, has started a blog, called A letter from the Olde Countrie, using the nom de blog of Wing Commander Lionel Mandrake, AFC, CBE, RAF, from Stanley Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove. In one of his early posts, he mentions all the things we lowly colonists do wrong.

But, you know what? In all my travels (and I have travelled qute a bit of this planet), I have never found so much energy. In everything they do here, the attitude is "Can do, now!"

It is sometimes said that Silicon Valley drives the US economy, which is not quite true. What is true is that they are trying things, thinking things, and doing things out here that much of the rest of the world will be doing when we've (I can say we - I work out here) finished ironing out the bugs.

Steve, whose knowledge of HTML is far greater than mine, has been a tremendous help in putting together my site, (and was instrumental in creating the little minibanner of mine that now adorns the Brothers Judd site), looks like he has a fun site started. Stop by there soon.

Oh, and Sug, don't forget to say your prayers.

After getting the core components of this site uploaded last week, this has been a wonderful “grand opening” week for www.eddriscoll.com. We were mentioned by The Brothers Judd, Sgt. Stryker, Blithering Idiot, and the esteemed Instapundit. Catholic Exchange updated my bio to reflect this site. My essay on blogs was published this week by Spintech, complete with a nice reference back to this site. (All of which did wonders for my stats page—thanks folks!)

Yesterday, we finally started showing up on Google and Yahoo’s radar screen as well. Because of the need to maintain taste and decorum at all times, I will resist using the efforts of Jonah Goldberg when he was writing his early G-File columns, and not use smut or material of prurient interest to boost my hits. Thus you won’t see me doing what an early G-File did to appear on the radar screens of more search engines:

So what can I write about that will get people in the door, as it were? Well, first, I can appeal to the biases of the search engines. I could cravenly include such things as FREE HOT, HOT, HOT, ALL GIRL-GIRL ACTION!!! TEEN LESBIANS GET IT ON IN STUDY HALL! FREE XXX XXX XXX XXX XXX XXX PORN. But that wouldn’t be right. I am a mature thinker, writer about affairs of state, and cultural conservative. To take advantage of the fact that people and search engines alike look for things like LIVE VIDEO OF LESBIAN LOVE GOATS wouldn’t be right. I should be writing about Chinese espionage and technology transfers. I should be dissecting the probe by House members Christopher Cox and Norman Dicks, which has exposed Asian spying. Hmmm. Cox, Dicks, members…Yes, that’s it; I should take the high road and write about Dicks and Cox and probing members exposing Asians.

Oops, I think I just did. Nevermind.

Seriously, watch for more updates to this site in the coming weeks, as I finally get my FAQs and “About Me” pages uploaded, as well as hopefully get a few more of my otherwise unpublished essays and articles added to the content. And of course, lots more of daily blogging action, but probably very little in the way of actual lesbian love goat action.

INSTAPUNDIT RETURNS FROM CALIFORNIA WITH HOT STORIES: Actually, I think Glenn either found them on the Web or had them emailed to him. But on his site today are links to two different California-oriented stories. The first is on Dianne Feinstein (DIANNE FEINSTEIN FELONY REVEALED!), who apparently had an aide illegally download a copy of Shrek from a peer-to-peer network (ala Napster or Morpheus) before a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing.

The second story is on "hungover liberal journalists" who are deserting Gov. Gray Davis' re-election campaign. Reynolds says his opponent, Bill Simon, "may turn out to be stronger than people think."

ALL'S NOT WELLS WITH THE TIME MACHINE: John Derbyshire reviews The Time Machine on National Review Online--and Derb is a huge Wells fan:

I therefore approached this new production of The Time Machine with a sort of open-minded resignation. The most I hoped for was to be given some glimpses of Wells's original magic, and to be dazzled for a few minutes by some of those wonderful special effects movie-makers are capable of today. Alas, even these very modest expectations were left unfulfilled. The magic is almost entirely absent here, the special effects feeble.

As little as there is of the atmosphere of Wells's creation, there is hardly any more of his story line. Grafted on to the front of the plot is a new motivation for the building of the time machine. The Time Traveler (he is given a name in the movie, but I have forgotten it) proposes to his sweetheart in New York's Central Park one snowy winter's night; but they are accosted by a robber, who shoots her dead. Inspired by grief, the Time Traveler builds his machine, and goes back the necessary few months to change the event. The intelligent viewer will wonder at this point how the Time Traveler avoids meeting himself... but his is not a movie for inquiring minds.

THE POST-9/11 LEFT: I try (and usually fail) to not pick too many links off of Drudge, Instapundit and Andrew Sullivan. But Sullivan has a link to an essay in the upcoming issue of Dissent called "Can There Be a Decent Left?". It's long but powerful reading, including this except (and yes, I know these are the same paragraphs that Sullivan quotes, but they get to the heart of the subject: where the left goes after (or, to be more specific, in regards to) September 11 and its aftermath:

The world (and this includes the third world) is too full of hatred, cruelty, and corruption for any left, even the American left, to suspend its judgement about what’s going on. It’s not the case that because we are privileged, we should turn inward and focus our criticism only on ourselves. In fact, inwardness is one of our privileges; it is often a form of political self-indulgence. Yes, we are entitled to blame the others whenever they are blameworthy; in fact, it is only when we do that, when we denounce, say, the authoritarianism of third world governments, that we will find our true comrades--the local opponents of the maximal leaders and military juntas, who are often waiting for our recognition and support. If we value democracy, we have to be prepared to defend it, at home, of course, but not only there.

I would once have said that we were well along: the American left has an honorable history, and we have certainly gotten some things right, above all, our opposition to domestic and global inequalities. But what the aftermath of September 11 suggests is that we have not advanced very far--and not always in the right direction. The left needs to begin again.

Read the whole thing for yourself.

MIT AWARDED GRANT TO DESIGN HIGH-TECH BATTLE UNIFORM: According to Newsday.com, the school said Wednesday it has been awarded a five-year, $50 million dollar grant to develop the armor, which could detect threats and protect against projectiles and biological or chemical weapons.

All this would be achieved by developing particle-sized materials and devices -- called "nanotechnology" -- nestled into the uniform's fabric.

Supercharged shoes could release energy when soldiers jump, propelling them over a 20-foot wall. Micoreactors could detect bleeding and apply pressure. Light-deflecting material could make the suit blend in with surroundings.

Thanks to Orrin Judd for submitting this link.

MAX HEADROOM MEETS R2D2:Wired News has an article on the Robo-Scribe, a robot reporter. It sounds like a good idea in theory, but which direction would it lean when it reports?

NEXT THING YOU'LL TELL ME IS THAT SHE'S NOT PSYCHIC...The Miami Herald says that "Miss Cleo, the Jamaican shaman and spokeswoman for a psychic hot line, was born in California, according to her birth certificate." I think somebody should investigate her hotline for a monoply status. Their ads are all over DirecTV, and lots of cable channels.

And yes, they're silly as all get-out, and I'm sure innocent people believe in Miss Cleo's psychic powers. But Reason had a good article about Miss Cleo, which said:

The state attorney general's office has subpoenaed Miss Cleo's birth certificate and other records in an effort to show whom she works for and where she has lived. The idea seems to be that Miss Cleo-a.k.a. Youree Harris, a 39-year-old Broward County resident-cannot document her claims of psychic powers and hence is guilty of fraud.

But that charge assumes Miss Cleo's customers really believe she's psychic. Surely at least some of them do not, viewing a Miss Cleo "reading" as no more than a lark.

The state appears to be on more solid ground regarding the strong-arm collection tactics of Miss Cleo's firm, accused of harassing people who don't even owe it money. Such tactics are particularly effective against less educated, lower-income segments of society.

LUMP IN THE THROAT SPEECH: Posted on the SteelNavy.Com Message Board is a speech from the captain to the crew of the USS John F. Kennedy, shortly before the new-on-station aircraft carrier launched its first strikes into Afghanistan on Sunday.

"For us this is a culminating point in space, a culminating point in time, and a culminating point in history. "Our enemy is a group of religious fanatics, who pervert the peace of Islam and twist its meaning to justify the murder of thousands of innocents at the Twin Towers of New York, at the Pentagon and in a field in Pennsylvania.

"They hate us and attack us because they oppose all that is good about America. They hate us because we are prosperous. They hate us because we are tolerant. They hate us because we are happy.

"Mostly, they hate us because we are free and because we will ‘pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend or oppose any foe to assure the survival and success of liberty.’

"Make no mistake - this is a fight for Western civilization. If these monsters are not destroyed, they will destroy us, and our children and our children’s children will live in fear forever.

Eventually, the captain said:

"Our namesake, John F. Kennedy, wrote, ‘a single person can make a difference, and every person should try.’ Tonight, WE can make a difference!

"We represent America in all its power and diversity. We are men and women, rich and poor, black and white, and all colors of the human rainbow. "We are Christian, Jew, and yes, Muslim. WE ARE AMERICA.

"This war will not be short, pleasant or easy. It has already required the sacrifice of our firefighters, our policemen, our soldiers, our sailors, our airmen, and our Marines. More sacrifices will be made. In the end we will win, precisely because we are those things that the terrorists hate - prosperous, happy, tolerant and, most of all, free.

Read the whole thing. If (like I did), you cried at the end of Saving Private Ryan, have a Kleenex or two handy.

NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC COVERGIRL FOUND, LOOKS WORSE FOR WEAR. According the article, it says she’s about 30, but she looks much, much older. (By way of the Kerstiens' Cursings blog, by way of Sgt. Stryker. Speaking of whom…)

SGT. STRYKER SAYS DRISCOLL “GOOD EGG”. Thanks! I originally interviewed the Sarge for my Spintech piece, because I thought his blog was a great example of how somebody with a unique slant can become his own publisher. Check out this story as a great example of something that’s probably not getting a whole lot of attention in the mainstream press, and probably should.

BLOGGER IS BACK--Another day, another long Blogger outage. But it's back, and so are we...

THE SEVEN FAT YEARS: When I wrote the piece below about the tobacco settlements, I pasted a link to Jude Wanniski’s The Way The World Works, because it appears that The Seven Fat Years, a wonderful economics primer by Robert Bartley (the former editor of The Wall Street Journal) is out of print. It’s probably available via a used book site such as Bookfinder.com, or some of the resellers on the Amazon Shops list. In the meantime, here’s a link to Bartley being interviewed by Brian Lamb on C-Span’s Booknotes from 1992.

THE LAFFER CURVE MEETS THE MARLBORO MAN: Excellent article in National Review Online’s financial section by Bruce Bartlett, senior fellow at the National Center for Policy Analysis. Earlier this week, we mentioned the Laffer curve (go to link for description). Bartlett does a thorough job of explaining how it applies to the onerous taxes tacked on by the tobacco settlement:

The truth is that the states never actually wanted smoking to fall. They wanted the money far more than they wanted healthier citizens. That is why no serious consideration was ever given to banning cigarettes altogether. After all, we ban any number of drugs whose negative health effects are considerably less than those that cigarettes are said to cause. However, banned products yield no revenue to governments.

Bartlett adds:

Many states are now considering steep increases in tobacco taxes to close budget gaps. However, I believe that moderate rates will bring in more money. High rates encourage smuggling and reduce consumption too much, causing revenue to fall. Eventually, states will have to decide whether it is more important to reduce smoking or get more taxes to spend. When that time comes, some may actually cut their tax rates to raise revenue, as some European countries have already done.

Wow, lowering taxes increases revenues! Whoda thunkit!

WIRED ON WIRELESS LANS:

The industry that provides wireless local area networks -- which give users wireless access to the Internet in public locations such as libraries, airports and coffee shops -- is becoming a crowded one.

So many companies are putting up wireless LANs that a recent report by investment research firm ARCchart found that WLAN providers could pose a risk to the success of next-generation (3G) wireless operators. The research firm said WLANs could eat up as much as 64 percent of 3G revenues in the next four years.

I have a feeling wireless 802.11 LANs are going to be big, really big (sorry to get all Shatnerian on you there). Cable television began in the late 1940s, when the first cables were strung to provide television reception to people whose antennas were blocked by hills. Nobody imagined then that people with perfectly good broadcast TV reception would pay to have cable run into their homes so that they could watch a hundred channels of all news, all weather, all movies, and all music videos.

Wireless today feels a bit like history repeating. Today, the first transmitters and repeaters that power wireless Internet and Ethernet networks are being strung up around a few cities, office campuses, and even high-tech residential neighborhoods. Hundreds of airports, hotels, and loads of Starbucks coffeehouses offer wireless Internet service to their customers. Even Amtrak has recently begun experimenting with wireless on a few trains. Wireless could change how people interact with the Internet potentially even more than cable modems and DSLs.

I first purchased an 802.11 wireless PCMCIA card for my laptop because I wanted to be able to work around the house and not have to worry about plugging it into a LAN outlet. It was only after I purchased the card, that I discovered that I could also get broadband (for a fee) at all sorts of other locations. It was invaluable on my last trip to New York in February, as I could use it at the San Jose airport, the Dallas airport and JFK, as well as several Manhattan Starbucks. I suspect that five or ten years from now, some sort of wireless broadband connection will be available throughout most cities.

BLITHERING IDIOT ANYTHING BUT--FILM AT 11. Nice words about this site from Bill Sulik, aka the "Blithering Idiot", although he sounds like anything but. Read his post on "the acceleration of the dissemination of information", during 9/11 for proof.

THE NEW, NEW JOURNALISM: My Spintech essay on Blogging is up, which features quotes from interviews I conducted with Glenn Reynolds, Joanne Jacobs, Sgt. Stryker and Marshall McLuhan. Tracking down McLuhan, who's been dead for twenty years, and getting his thoughts on the recent phenomenon of Web logs, wasn't easy, but I managed to find him, and smoke out an interview. Nice guy--really love that clip-on tie!

The other folks I interviewed were incredibly helpful (not to mention very much alive), and I can't thank them enough for their time.

MOTORIST, DUMMY IN HOV-LANE ACCIDENT, according to this The Seattle Times article.

A woman with a full-size mannequin as a passenger drove into the car-pool lane on Interstate 405 in Renton yesterday morning, triggering a chain of collisions involving six cars and two buses, according to the State Patrol.

The buses were carrying band members from Kennedy High School in Burien. Fifteen band members and one of the drivers suffered bumps and scrapes, but there were no serious injuries.

What citations the woman will be given isn't clear, except for driving alone in the high- occupancy-vehicle (HOV) lane.

"Her passenger wasn't breathing, and that's one of our requirements," according to Monica Hunter, spokeswoman for the State Patrol.

I did a backpage "rant" for Sport Z magazine last year about how absurd commuter lanes are, and how they take a perfectly functional four-lane highway, and through misguided social engineering, turn it into a parking lot. Here is the Reader's Digest condensed version:

Ever since I moved to San Jose in 1997, there’s been something about commuter lanes that has driven me nuts. It’s not just that they can take a perfectly functional four lane highway and turn it into three lanes of congestion, or that they increase the risk of accidents (but they can), it’s also that they go against all that once made California fun.

To the average person, “government” in the US means “elected officials”. But commuter lanes weren’t the result of elected officials. They were the result of faceless bureaucrats in Caltrans, the California Department of Transportation. As Joan Didion describes in her book The White Album, Caltrans introduced commuter lanes in the late 1970s to initially turn the 240,000 cars that traverse the Santa Monica freeway every day into 232,000. Naturally, after screwing that freeway, Caltrans spent an initial 42 million dollars of taxpayer money to begin the initial screwing of the rest of the state’s freeways.

And for that money, what did we get? The main results from commuter lanes are to make the people driving in them feel oh so superior to the single drivers to their right; and to make the people driving alone feel like worthless worms, stuck in traffic thick with constipation, unable to move, while a handful of cars scream past them.

AFRICA AND THE INTERNET: Interesting Reuters article titled Africa Struggles to Get Online.

A new innovation, the Internet has failed to take off in Africa for simple reasons. Two older inventions -- electricity and the phone -- are absent from large swathes of the continent.

Even in capital cities such as Accra in Ghana, where the Internet is a handy way of by-passing the country's poor international phone service, power cuts hamper computer use.

Here's another fascinating snippet:

In Ivory Coast, one of the more affluent countries in West Africa a decent computer costs about $1,000, well above the annual per capita income. The minimum monthly wage is $40.

Chuck Berry is right--I'm so glad I'm living in the USA.

BLOWS AGAINST THE EMPIRE: Orrin Judd emailed me a link to an excellent profile of Ira Stoll, who runs the Smartertimes Web site, which provides a daily fact checking and skewering of the New York Times.

Smartertimes' daily attacks on the Times over the past two years have proven that a small Web site can take on a venerable journalism institution. Indeed, with every passing morning, Stoll adds yet more of what he considers incontrovertible evidence to his case against the paper, claiming that "New York's dominant daily has grown complacent, slow and inaccurate."

The publication's simple premise -- a point-by-point take-down of the Times each day -- has been executed remarkably well by Stoll on his cleanly designed Web site, which is devoid of any graphic or textual excess. Each day's edition is written in crisp, decorous, sometimes condescending prose; in fact, Smartertimes seems to lampoon what it sees as the Times' self-importance by using the paper's own authoritative tone against it.

Stoll spent $1,200 to launch the Web site, which now receives between 1,000 and 1,200 visitors each day. The bulk of the publication's loyalists, however, are on the Smartertimes mailing list; over 5,500 subscribers now receive Stoll's free daily critique via e-mail.

Like Matt Drudge, Glenn Reynolds and Andrew Sullivan, Stoll demonstrates what one man with a modem can do to both keep an eye on traditional media (funny how they rarely seem to like coming under the same scrutiny that they themselves historically applied to say business, government, the military, etc.). And Stoll's efforts will really pay off in the coming months, as the New York Sun launches, which Stoll will be managing editor and vice president of. In the meantime...

Smartertimes may simply be one man's manifesto, read by a small group of like-minded Times detractors. But, if nothing else, it is further evidence that the balance of power has been tipped, however slightly, from the journalism institution to the reader. Stoll's Web site leads a burgeoning pack of similarly critical forums, devoted to evaluating everything from the San Francisco Chronicle to Dan Rather's performance behind the anchor desk.

After all, letters to the editor and corrections tucked inside the next day's issue are often not enough: Independent online outlets like Smartertimes, motivated by perceived media injustice, offer the opportunity for critical information consumers like Stoll to express their inner ombudsmen, providing a public service even their targets can appreciate.

THE RAIDERS HAVE A NEW HEAD COACH. The NFL's Oakland Raiders named Bill Callahan their new head coach Tuesday night. ESPN.com says:

In typical Raiders fashion, their big announcement was made quietly by fax and e-mail. The Raiders will introduce Callahan, a seven-year NFL assistant with no head coaching experience, during a news conference Wednesday at their Alameda training complex.

There was little suspense in the Raiders' decision. Though the team said it conducted an extensive search for its new coach, apparently considering former Minnesota coach Dennis Green and Kansas City offensive coordinator Al Saunders, Callahan was the clear favorite to continue Gruden's successful tenure -- simply because he never left the building.

I'm sure it's a coincidence, but that deer-in-the-headlights/mug shot photograph of Callahan on the ESPN page doesn't bode well for replacing the maniacally intense John Gruden, or surviving a long tenure with Darth Raider Al Davis.

I added Catholic Exchange to the links page earlier today (I was embarrassed to be told by their editor that there wasn't one already. In my defense, I did list all of the articles I've written for them to this date here. It's a nifty Web site, with a surprisingly wide range of material, from Alan Keyes to Michael Medved to (amazingly enough) from time to time, yours truly. There's even a section on food. Stop on by there soon, and tell 'em I sent you.

GORBACHEV SAYS COMMUNISM A HOAX. Writing on The Corner on National Review Online Jonah Goldberg says "Mikhail Gorbachev finally admits Communism was a hoax," and teasingly adds, "Now could someone please call the guys at the Nation and let them know?"

Oddly enough, when I first read Gorbachev's comments last night, I had a flashback to some of the recent material written by and about David Brock. Like Brock's recent writings, Gorbachev basically just called himself a liar and a hypocrite. In Gorbachev's case, for supporting a system that sent millions to their deaths.

Well, at least he's finally figured it out.

A DEAL TO BE REACHED IN THE BOSTON PRIEST ABUSE CASE? FindLaw Legal News is reporting:

The Archdiocese of Boston has reached a financial settlement with dozens of people who claimed they were sexually molested by defrocked priest John J. Geoghan, according to the plaintiffs' lawyer.

"We've resolved all issues," attorney Mitchell Garabedian said Tuesday morning.

Garabedian, who represents 70 alleged victims and 16 family members of alleged victims, would not say how much the settlement totaled, but it has been reported to be between $15 million and $30 million. Garabedian said the details of the settlement would be to announced later in the day.

CRUISE TO CRUISE AGAIN: The Internet Movie Database is reporting that Tom Cruise will be remaking that hoary old Roger Corman 1970s exploitation flick, Death Race 2000. In a way, this sounds like a smart move by Cruise, returning to a racing film after Vanilla Sky got pounded by both the critics, and has yet to crack the magic $100 million mark at the the US box office. (And cost $68 million to make, so probably needed two or three times that amount to turn a profit, once advertising, promotion, etc. is factored into the equation)

Back when Vanilla Sky came out, I wrote, on Stuart Robinson's terrific home theater Web site:

Vanilla Sky puts Tom Cruise firmly in Dark City, The Matrix, The Truman Show, etc., 'what is reality' land. And while I've enjoyed all of the above films, this film seemed like a mess, with awful dialog, a silly subplot involving plastic surgery, and pacing that makes Eyes Wide Shut (which I really liked incidentally, but then I've drunk gallons of Kubrick Kool-Aid in my college days) seem like Star Wars.

One underlying theme of the film seems to be "choose your cultural references carefully"--Cruise's life seems to be endless cliches of pop culture icons. He owns a publishing company ala Jann Wenner, drives a boss Mustang ala Steve McQueen in Bullit, walks through scenes that look like Dylan-esque album covers, at one point, wears a mask that looks like the one he wore in Eyes Wide Shut, etc.

Vanilla Sky is a remake of the Spanish/French film Abre los ojos ("Open Your Eyes"), which also starred Penélope Cruz--and on the plus side, Cruz and Cameron Diaz both helped to insure that the film *looks* wonderful--there's also some good songs on the background score, which isn't surprising, as the director was Cameron Crowe, whose last film was the wonderful Almost Famous. Too bad the writing, pacing, editing, and dialog didn't match the visuals and sound.

Normally when a film leaves me this cold, I'm first inclined to question if I simply didn't get it, and give some benefit to the filmmakers for trying something experimental, swinging for the bleachers, and missing. (George Lucas' THX-1138 falls into that category. Incredible looking film, with a dull plot and pacing. Dynamite car chase at the end however, which foreshadows the X-Wing and TIE Fighter shootout that climaxes Star Wars).

...And whose car chase apparently foreshadows Cruise's next movie project!

BLOGGER IS WORKING AGAIN. Sort of. For about three hours, I could post, but I couldn't get the pages to FTP to my Vario server. We're back. The stuff I wrote in the interim is posted below.

I AM A GOLDEN GOD!!! Err, not quite (sorry to steal Robert Plant's line). But I've just been mentioned by Glenn Reynolds, the man, the myth, the Instapundit. And Catholic Exchange recently updated my bio to reflect this site.

Orrin, Glenn and Mark, thank you all.

ARTHUR ANDERSEN, UP CPA CREEK WITHOUT A PADDLE. FindLaw Legal News is reporting that "Facing possible obstruction of justice charges for its role in the Enron Corp. debacle, accounting firm Andersen is now looking at a Thursday deadline to agree to a guilty plea, the Washington Post reported on Tuesday."

In related news, Nina Yablok, prominent Silicon Valley business attorney , and wife of the owner of the somewhat less prominent, but rapidly growing in popularity, eponymously named Web log EdDriscoll.com, sends this link to the UK Guardian, which says "Arthur Andersen is reportedly holding merger talks with rival Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu as the accountancy giant fights for survival after being tainted in the Enron scandal.

And it seems like everyone but the US is aware of these merger talks. Digital Israel has a similar story.

DEBUNKING DAVID MAMET. David Mamet made his name by writing edgy plays with crackling dialogue in the early 1980s, and then contributing that same ear for incredible dialogue to mainstream Hollywood films. Remember "That's the Chicago Way" from The Untouchables? Those wonderful riffs from "Wag the Dog"? Did you bother to watch "Ronin", a so-so action film, but with lines like "Have you ever killed anybody?" DeNiro:"I hurt somebody's feelings once." If so, that's Mamet.

Flak Magazine recently put up an article by Matt Fisher (who's email is roger_thornhill@hotmail.com. Paging Dr. Hitchcock...) which argues that Mamet has been on cruise control for quite sometime. Because he's in demand, he no long has to try:

He has become drama's answer to George Lucas; automatic acclaim has shrunk the scope and scale of his efforts, because no matter what he turns out, hey, it's a David Mamet movie. But unlike George Lucas, his hip cachet prevents everyone from bursting his balloon with a long-overdue reality check.

Fisher argues that Mamet's Hollywood hip cache comes largely from Glengarry Glen Ross, a film Fisher seems to really admire. But from the point of view of somebody who worked, effectively, in sales for many years, Glengarry was such a depressingly overblown series of clichés about salesmen that were cliches when Arthur Miller wrote Death of a Salesman in the late 1940s, it was astonishing to see it so overhyped, so endlessly rerun on TNT, and to see it be the cornerstone of someone's career speaks volumes about Hollywood's tenuous collective connection to reality.

Whoops, sorry for the rant there. It's just that I'm sure Hollywood believes that all people in sales are strictly in it for the commissions, or they're all 65 year old grizzled geezers who need that last sale before they go off to the great insurance agency in the sky. Or (especially in the case of Glengarry Glen Ross), they need outside help generating leads and referrals. Hell, at least Charlie Sheen in Oliver Stone's Wall Street had enough brains to prospect Gordon Gekko without being told to do so by his boss (The Pathmark Supermarket spokesman).

OK, that's my mini-take on Mamet (and as Fisher notes, The Untouchables, Wag the Dog and Ronin are all enjoyable films). Read Thornhill's, err, Fisher's article for a more thorough look.

...Everybody needs the Internet. That's why they call it the Internet!

THANKS BROS! The Brothers Judd, the hardest working book reviewers on the Internet, recently listed me as one of their “Most highly recommended” sites, and allowed me to put a minibanner ad on their site. I’m really, really honored guys. If you’re reading this, click over to their site early and often. And if you’ve just found this site via their mention of it, welcome onboard!

For the past several years, most of my writing has been “on dead tree” (where I seem to have corned the market on home electronics, but I do write about other stuff--honest!), but beginning in the summer of last year, I began to establish more of a Web presence. I contributed to the start-up phase of National Review Online’s Financial section, and then eventually realized that I was the official last reader of both Instapundit and NRO to not have his own blog, so, sensing a need that wasn’t met by the squillion other blogs out there, I naturally decided to hop on the bandwagon (if only to give potential editors a place to find me on the Web!).

If you missed my profile of the Bros, you can read the complete text of my original interview with Orrin, here. (Scroll down for text--it follows a reprint of my original article from Catholic Exchange.)

Putting together this Blog has been a helluva learning experience. I’m a great believer in DIY and creative experimentation. Years ago, Stanley Kubrick once told an interviewer:

The best education in film is to make one. I would advise any neophyte director to try to make a film by himself. A three-minute short will teach him a lot. I know that all the things I did at the beginning were, in microcosm, the things I'm doing now as a director and producer. There are a lot of noncreative aspects to filmmaking which have to be overcome, and you will experience them all when you make even the simplest film: business, organization, taxes, etc., etc. It is rare to be able to have an uncluttered, artistic environment when you make a film, and being able to accept this is essential.

Blogging is done on a much smaller, saner scale, but for someone like myself, who has little or no HTML knowledge, it can still be a tremendous learning experience. For example, putting together the minibanner for the Brothers Judd site, I spent a half an hour yesterday with Photoshop, and a friend who has a background in Web design, to quickly come up with an acceptable little banner. Working in that small scale, and making something that’s Web-friendly, was something I had never done before. As was putting together a site of this size. Fortunately, blogger is cheap and easy to use, and easy to manipulate.

The point is (it’s here somewhere, honest!) that anybody can put up a news and opinion blog, and almost everybody probably should—and the quirkier the slant, the better. Unlike the stodgy, stuck in mainstream liberalism traditional media, blogs allow for all sorts of interesting biases: since anybody can do one, then any group has a shot at finding a blogger who’ll represent them. Gay Republican Trekkies? Lesbian Libertarian Keynesian professional wrestling fans? There’s a probably a Web log that fits your interests, and if there isn’t, that’s probably reason alone to start one.

Like I recently did! Welcome onboard.

ANDREW SULLIVAN ON THE WTC MEMORIAL SPOTLIGHTS:

The towers reach to heaven, they dominate the sky-line, they are full of light. “Seeing those huge monoliths, as seemingly timeless as the pyramids, vanish taught us something about our buildings, our institutions, and ourselves,” one of the designers, Gustavo Bonevarti, writes in Slate. “We learned how ephemeral life really is. Light is ephemeral, but it is also universal—that's what we wanted this project to be.” Whatever replaces this should never substitute it entirely. I hope that every September 11 from now on, those lights are re-lit. Every September 11 – a ritual and memorial of light.

For the next month (the lights come down--at least for a while--on April 13), New Yorkers will have a memorial that's almost like a Rorschach test--ethereal, somber, bright, spectral--there are many, many meanings that can be read into the twin spotlights.

A friend who lives in a direct line with them (who thus had her view of the WTC ripped away from her on 9/11) was speculating how strange it's going to feel when these are turned off next month.

STAR WARS GEEK ALERT: While my money is still on Condi Rice as a front runner for the Presidency in the 2008 election, Senator Palpatine has recently entered the race as a dark horse candidate, as a member of the newly formed Imperial Party.

WHEN THE ECONOMY PICKS UP STEAM, WILL ANYONE BE LEFT TO REPORT ABOUT IT? Editorandpublisher.com, by way of Jim Romenesko's Media News says, "Permanent fixed-cost reductions" -- that's the catchphrase at newspapers these days. Pressured to improve their profit margins, a number of chains that slimmed down last year will continue to operate with fewer people -- even when the economy improves."

Twenty years ago, Tom Wolfe told an interviewer, "I don't know how much corruption there is at the local level, but there's never been a better time in the century for there to be corruption in local government, because the press isn't going to report it." With the exception of Internet reporters such as Matt Drudge, and a few others, and despite the proliferation of 24 hour news channels, most mainstream newspaper and TV reporting has never been shallower.

This sounds like a perfect opportunity for bloggers and enterprising freelancers to pick up the slack. It's possible that news agencies might use a combination of both to affordably diversify their reporting pool (see my article from last fall in CatholicExchange.com for some ideas on this subject), but who knows if that will happen. The fact that Drudge was absolutely loathed by most traditional reporters when he first appeared on the map doesn't bode well--but hopefully I'm just being cynical.

DOW UPDATE: Matt Drudge has a link to an article which reports that today's Dow close was the highest since June of 2001. "The entire focus of the market has shifted away from what can go wrong to now a better balance between what could go wrong and what could go right," said Rick Meckler, president of investment firm LibertyView. "The economic news has been incredibly good."

Like I said, couldn't happened on a better day.

CABLE MODEM SUBSCRIBERS UP, according to this Reuters story. "The number of subscribers to high-speed Internet service via cable rose almost 13 percent to 7.2 million in the fourth quarter of 2001, a trade group said on Monday, days before federal regulators begin shaping the framework for what rules apply to the service."

Consumers have not signed up for high-speed service via traditional telephone lines, known as digital subscriber line (DSL), as quickly. The biggest provider, Verizon Communications , has 1.2 million subscribers while the biggest cable company, AT&T Broadband has 1.5 million cable-modem subscribers.

At the same time, the Federal Communications Commission (news - web sites) is poised on Thursday to classify cable-modem service. Analysts have said they expect it will be deemed an information service, subjecting it to fewer regulations.

As anybody who's got it can tell you, the day they switched from dial-up to broadband is a day their lives transformed, especially if they're a telecommuter or self-employed. Can't wait to see how 802.11 wireless further transforms the Internet experience!

JAMES BOWMAN ON THE 9/11 DOCUMENTARY:

I almost fell off my chair at the words of Jules Naudet, who with his brother Gedeon made the film called 9/11 that ran on CBS on Sunday, when with his video camera in hand he saw people on fire in the lobby of the World Trade Center. Jules can be heard on the tape saying: “No one should see this.” And we didn’t! He shut the camera off! I confess that for half a moment I was disappointed. So great is the lust for “reality” on TV, even when we are scarcely aware of it, that our first reaction (or at least my first reaction) to being denied an image is like that of a child being denied a sweet. But I want it!

As Jules Naudet told a news conference last week, however, “This was an image that was quite horrible, and I thought immediately, ‘It's not something people should see.’

GOOD WAY FOR THEM TO END THE DAY:
The Dow Jones Industrial Average, the NYSE Composite, and the S&P 500 all ended the day up. Only the Nasdaq had a very small loss. I can't think of a better day for most of the markets to be up.

For the record:

DJIA 10611.24 +38.75
NASDAQ 1929.49 -0.18
NYSE 604.22 +2.12
S&P 500 1168.26 +3.95

UH, DOESN'T IT HAVE ANYTHING BETTER TO DO WITH ITS TIME? FindLaw Legal News is reporting that the "U.S. Justice Department will ask a federal judge to place tough new restrictions on the marketing, manufacture and sale of cigarettes, in the latest development in the government's 3-year law suit against the industry, The Wall Street Journal reported on Monday."

FORGET JOHNNIE COCHRAN, HIRE ORVILLE REDDENBACHER. The Columbus Dispatch has an article with a headline that reads "Judge sets bail for 2 accused of possessing stolen popcorn".

VIRGINIA POSTREL, SIX MONTHS AFTER 9/11:

This is an existential struggle. It can't be ended by appeasement or altered Mideast policies. There are no bargains to be struck and no single entity, in truth, to bargain with even if we wanted to try that unwise tack. Military action is required—significant and sustained, yet unlike normal wars against nation states.

For those of us with the privilege of civilian life, it is imperative to live normally and not give in to fear or (the pundit's curse) self-dramatization. If our civilization could survive the Cold War (or, as Freeman Dyson has said, the 1930s), we can survive anything. The struggle is a necessary evil. It is not a source of meaning or a reason to live. Those must come from the normal life which the struggle is fought to protect.

Postrel looked back on her Blog notes from 9/11 and described them as "banal or confused, although I can't say I'd take anything back." We were all confused that day, but Postrel did a helluva job cranking out news and opinions. When news sites were down, her Web site stayed up, and I clicked to it early and often. I know it's a cliche (another pundit's curse), but there's no doubt that the Blog Sphere really came of age on 9/11 and the days the followed.

WE COMPARE, YOU DECIDE: The New York Post (found via Instapundit, naturally) is reporting about the election Alec Baldwin lost, back in 1979. They said:

In 1979, when Alec still went by his birth name Alex, the eldest Baldwin brother lost his campaign to be George Washington University's student association president by one vote. After he demanded a recount which only confirmed Baldwin's loss, he dropped out of GW and transferred to New York University. . . .

The move made Baldwin the butt of jokes. In the March 8, 1979, edition of the GW Hatchet, National Law Center senator Dana Dembrow wrote: "Yes, it is possible for Alex Baldwin to not win a fair election. Alex Baldwin lost not because anyone cheated, but simply because his opponents were the choice of the voters."

When Mr. Burns lost an election on The Simpsons, he famously said:

"This anonymous clan of slack-jawed troglodytes has cost me the election, and yet if I were to have them killed, I would be the one to go to jail. That's democracy for you."

On December of 1998, during the House impeachment proceedings, Baldwin went on NBC’s Late Night with Conan O’Brien and let loose with:

"If we were in other countries, we would all right now, all of us together, [starts to shout] all of us together would go down to Washington and we would stone Henry Hyde to death!...We would stone Henry Hyde to death and we would go to their homes and we’d kill their wives and their children."

(Click here for a full transcript of Baldwin's rant, as well as a videoclip). Is there a secret Mr. Burns/Alec Baldwin connection? Perhaps they are both members of the top-secret Stonecutters organization. As I said, we compare, you decide.

MORE ON CBS'S 9/11 DOCUMENTARY: Matt Drudge is reporting "CBS won Sunday night with its 9-11 terror special pulling a 24.0 rating/34 share in the national overnights -- and a 51 share in New York City." Drudge says that "9-11 will easily become the most-watched program of the week, if the number holds in later NIELSEN runs." And National Review Online has a symposium about the show. Hopefully it will be rerun and/or released on DVD.

UPDATE: Drudge now links to washingtonpost.com article, which says 39 Million People Watched CBS' '9-11'.

I MISSED THE CBS DOCUMENTARY ON 9/11 THAT RAN SUNDAY NIGHT. I was out, and stupidly forgot to set UltimateTV to record it. If you missed the documentary as well, read Andrew Sullivan's comments on it:

It is simply a good thing that we remember that we are still at war; that the enemy launched it with a callousness that should banish any doubts about the morality of our cause; and that, when resolve falters, we remember the people and civilization we’re fighting for and the thousands of victims who have already paid the price. In an odd way, having seen it all again, I feel less afraid of what lies ahead, and more eager to get on with it.

That's just a snippet--read the whole thing.

TODAY IS THE SIXTH MONTH ANNIVERSARY OF SEPTEMBER 11. Glenn Reynolds has posted a link to what he wrote on his Instapundit.com site that awful day. "Note that things start off normally", he says, and then everything hits the fan. See also Virginia Postrel's Web log from that same day, which I remember reading many, many times as the day went on.

Speaking of which, for what it's worth, here's what my wife and I did that day, as well as my interview with Alvin Toffler soon after, and my article on what was going through the minds of the financial markets the following Monday.

UPDATE (Posted 9/11/02): While the above InstaPundit link is still active, within about 30 seconds of clicking on it, you'll be transported to Glenn Reynolds' new server. Here's the URL for that week's archives at his new Web address. Scroll down and look for the dotted line that marks the demarcation point at which point Glenn's posts reflect the fact that the world has just changed.

COSMO GETS DOWN AND DIRTY. Jonah Goldberg's famous dog (and NRO mascot) Cosmo "is about to embark on what could be its most controversial venture to date," according to this article in the Guardian, which goes on to say that Cosmo is "certain to shock all but the most committed of Cosmo girls," and "The campaign is almost certain to attract complaints when it begins appearing in magazines and on billboards later this month."

Oh wait, it's about the British version of Cosmopolitan magazine! Never mind...

HOW WILL WE KNOW WHEN IT'S OVER? James Lileks (by way of Instapundit) has a whole list, including "When the French are subject to terror-bombings it will certainly be over, at least for the French; they’ll surrender and move to the moon." More seriously, he adds:

When the Iranian mullahs take their thumbs off their nation’s jugular, allow themselves to be voted out, and sit silent while a new generation of Iranians hungry to rejoin the world begin to secularize their once-great nation, it might be over. Once the deposed mullahs waging war from their Afghanistan base are defeated, of course.

BROTHERS JUDD JUNKIES UNITE! And read the complete text of my original interview with Orrin, which he has posted on his Web site here. (Scroll down for text--it follows a reprint of my original article from Catholic Exchange.)

REPUBLICANS SHOULD BACK RECORDING ARTISTS, CONSUMERS says Glenn Reynolds in his latest Fox News column. Here’s an excerpt:

Imagine this scenario: the Department of Justice investigates the record and motion picture industries for fraud, where artists are concerned, and price-fixing, where charges to consumers are concerned. (There wouldn’t be anything bogus about doing so: I mentioned the vulnerability of the record industry to racketeering charges a few months ago at an entertainment-law panel discussion that I was moderating, in the hopes of stirring up a hot dispute between lawyers who represent artists and those who represent record companies. But, strikingly, everyone there agreed that the record companies were vulnerable on this ground.)

He’s discovered a major area where the Democrats are vulnerable, but will Republicans be smart enough to pick up the ball and run with it?

HOWARD KURTZ SAYS TROUBLED TIMES FOR NETWORK NEWS:

The audience is shrinking -- and graying -- because of changing lifestyles and more media choices. Older folks who came of age in the pre-cable era are accustomed to tuning in for news at 6:30. Most younger people never acquired that habit, are still working at that hour or are just plain less interested in news, surveys show. A growing number get their information online, essentially becoming their own editors.

You got it, Howard. We're sick of being talked down to, biased reporting, and/or simplification. In an era of a dozen different cable news, sports and financial channels, of hundreds of news and opinion Web sites, and Weblogs customized to a unlimited myriad of personal tastes, the big three networks' evening news (and PBS's as well) are done. As Ken Bode, a former NBC correspondent who teaches at Northwestern University's Medill School of Journalism says in Kurtz's article, "When Brokaw, Jennings and Rather retire, it is a perfect time for these corporations to decide their newscasts are no longer worth it." He adds, "Unless something dramatic happens, inevitably, the network newscasts are gone."

Wonder what Bernard Goldberg and Glenn Reynolds think of Kurtz's article.

SGT. STRYKER TAKES ON FRENCH CONSPIRACY THEORISTS:

I always get a kick out of dumbasses who make up conspiracies about stuff they know nothing about. Case in point: Someone whose only knowledge of aircraft is obviously limited to sitting in one as a passenger, displays his ignorance and complete lack of sense for all to see.

A friend of mine sent me the same link that the sarge refers to above. It's just an astonishing bit of paranoid horsesh*t. Read the comments on the sarge's site for further proof as to just how unbelievable this conspiracy stuff is.

BRENT BOZELL ON NIGHTLINE:

But the proposition that “Nightline” is less relevant is unquestionably true. When the show began in 1979, viewers in Idaho or Louisiana or Alaska relied on the Big Three broadcast networks for their world news. But today, in virtually every remote corner of the United States, Americans can get on the Internet and read the New York Times, or newspapers from around the world. They can read entire Congressional reports, or watch Pentagon press briefings. They can find out the latest headlines at any minute of the day or night on cable news.

Here's my theory, for what it's worth. Sell the "Nightline" package, including Kopel, to CNN or Fox News. Every political and news junky gets those channels, thus keeping "Nightline" on the air, but freeing up the airtime on ABC for David Letterman. Or just cancel the show. The world will survive. Besides, who has time for "Nightline" when there are blogs to read?

WHAT WAS NEW YORK LIKE ON SEPT 10th? READ TOM WOLFE'S ARTICLE in the (UK) Guardian, which provides the same snapshot in microcosm of Manhattan that his first chapter in Hooking Up, "What Life Was Like at the Turn of the Second Millennium", does for America as a whole.

ON A FRIDAY WHEN BOTH RICKY WILLIAMS AND TERRY GLENN GET TRADED, PRICELINE MAY SOON JOIN THEM...

Reuters says that Priceline is looking for a suitor.

Prior to September 11th, Priceline was getting its act together, as I wrote in my first article for National Review Online's Financial section back in August of 2001, which is astonishingly still online:

Similarly high stock prices can’t be reported for Priceline.com (PCLN), which ended Friday at $5.79 a share, but they may be headed towards recovery. After a tumultuous year of William Shatner’s ads, and trying to use its platform to allow consumers to “name your own price” for cheap gas and cheap groceries, the company has come to its senses and focused on its core business: cheap airfares. Additionally, [Scott Kessler, Internet industry analyst with Standard & Poor’s] says, “unlike companies like eBay and Amazon, which prioritized their customers as the most important constituency, you get the impression that Priceline definitely did not do that.”

Fortunately, Priceline also decided to refocus on customer service as a way to turn the company around. While this hasn’t yet made a large change in their stock price, several analysts believe that Priceline has made some very positive steps in the right direction. As corporate travel is down and airlines are relying on individuals to make up the slack, the current economic conditions may also be a benefit. Kessler has issued Priceline a “hold” recommendation.

September 11th and its obviously disastrous impact on air travel certainly helped to keep Priceline's stock in the dumper, which makes it a desirable takeover or merger target.

...But what will happen to Shatner?

WANT TO KNOW WHICH DOT.COMS ARE ABOUT TO KICK THE BUCKET? Take a look at F*ckedCompany.com.

Geez, I didn't know that Morpheus bit the dust, but the article that F-edCompany.com refers to says they have, but for very different reasons than Napster.

I AM ROWLF, PIANO PLAYER TO THE STARS...

	You are Rowlf! You don't draw attention to yourself much, preferring to keep your cool and stay in the background.
Take the What Muppet Are You? Quiz!

Which Muppet are you? Take the quiz yourself!

CALIF. VOTERS NIX NEW POLICE, FIRE BUILDING THAT VIOLATES TOWN'S FENG SHUI says this FoxNews.com article.

I don't have anything to add to this, except it's such a hilarious (and typical) California craziness sort of story. By the way, has anyone seen my mantra?

KMART TO CLOSE 284 STORES, AX 22,000 JOBS according to this Reuters article.

Discount chain Kmart Corp. (KM.N) said on Friday it will close 13 percent of its stores and cut nearly 9 percent of its work force as part of its reorganization under bankruptcy protection, resulting in a charge of $1.1 billion to $1.3 billion.

In late January, Instapundit.com had all sorts of good links and comments about Kmart. Check out this archive and start scrolling down to read just how groups of customers Kmart has managed to p.o. And then click over to Siloh Butcher's Web log (which Instapundit also mentions) for her brilliant rebuttle (including a great Tom Wolfe reference) to a Wal-Mart bashing San Francisco Chronical columnist. My favorite quote however, is this one, from from Eve Kayden's Blog:

"Amazon makes money as Kmart files for bankruptcy. Did I fall asleep and wake up in an alternate universe?"

JONAH ON STIMULUS PACKAGE, on National Review Online's "The Corner"

GREAT NEWS! [Jonah Goldberg] The House just passed the stimulus package – immediately after Greenspan says the recovery is "well underway"! Maybe we can declare war on al-Quaeda the day after we execute Bin Laden?

See this article for more information about what was actually passed, including "'a "Liberty Zone' in the lower Manhattan section of New York in which $5 billion in various tax breaks would be available over 10 years to help the city recover from September's attacks."

LARRY KUDLOW SAYS "BYE-BYE BABY RECESSION". More from
NRO Financial, where Kudlow says:

Rumor has it that when the judges at the National Bureau of Economic Research decided last fall that the U.S.'s tenth recession in the past fifty years started in March 2001, they used Arthur Andersen to audit the books. Just kidding, of course, although some Bush administration officials are now questioning whether the recession happened at all.

Hope he's right. Certainly the recent upticks in the Dow point to a recovery gathering steam in the next few months.

RUSSIA NOW HAS A FLAT TAX AND THEIR ECONOMY IS TAKING OFF. Read Deroy Murdock's take on Russia & flat tax in National Review Online's Financial section. Murdock writes:

Since January 1, 2001, Russians have enjoyed a 13 percent flat tax. That's right. The once-Communist superpower now stands to the right of publisher Steve Forbes on taxes. The former GOP presidential contender staunchly advocates a 17 percent flat tax.

"Sometimes philosophical seeds fall on interesting ground," Forbes says. "After Marxism, which was the philosophical equivalent of the IRS code, something understandable has obvious appeal."

Unlike their 20th century abortion known as communism, this is a Russian economic system that makes perfect sense. If their economy continues to grow at its current five percent, and their tax revenues grow, just as the Laffer curve says they should, expect other nations to follow.

Now if only the US would get the message...

Bob Cook of Flak Magazine has a humorous look at TCM's recent triple play of 1970s paranoia movies: Rollerball, Soylent Green, and Silent Running.

Having just recently dusted off my laser disc, letterboxed copy of THX-1138, I'd say Cook's commentary is dead-on. What a gloomy period the early '70s was for Hollywood, especially its science fiction films. Cook says "These movies were made when the hippie dream was just about dead, large conglomerates like ITT were all the business rage, and the environment was a wreck," but he leaves out the real reason why these films were made: after Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey every science fiction film that Hollywood cranked out had the same tone: heavy, ponderous, lugubrious, and dull. 2001 wasn't dull, but then there was only one Stanley Kubrick.

So until Star Wars came along, with its swashbuckling, Republic Serial tone, we were stuck watching films like those in the Flak article, and their equally paranoid cousins: Colossus: The Forbin Project, Logan's Run and the Planet of the Apes films.

Looking back at George Lucas's THX-1138, with its impressive Kubrickian/Orwellian production design (made for about $1.98), it's amazing how differently the world turned out since then: we don't all look like, dress alike, work in the same jobs, and worship the same God. I'll take a Tofflerian world over an Orwellian one any day. Fortunately, as one of the few directors to make a second science fiction film in the 1970s, Lucas was able to make a much more enjoyable sci-fi universe.

The Flak article ends on a note as scary as any of those films:

Even amid talk of remaking Westworld, The Omega Man, Logan's Run and the like, it's doubtful; as the Planet of the Apes and Rollerball remakes proved, today's pessimism doesn't come close to the misanthropy, dashed dreams and nuclear fears of the '70s.

Or maybe it was the cocaine.

JUST ADDED PAT TOOMAY'S excellent essay on Tom Landry to the links page. Toomay was drafted by the Cowboys in the early 1970s, and played with them on two Super Bowl teams. It's one of the most even-handed tributes to Landry, which respects the man, but also mentions his flaws. And Landry did have flaws, no matter how innovative a coach he was. Read Toomay's profile about what it was like to work for (as he was often called by his players), The Man.

JOHN FUND ON CALIFORNIA'S FAILED PROP 45, THE TERM-LIMIT END-AROUND:

Knowing that term limits remain overwhelmingly popular, California's pols decided they didn't dare ask voters to repeal the state's limits of six years in the Assembly or eight years in the Senate. So they polled and focus-grouped until they came up with Proposition 45, a clever end-run around the law that they thought would trick voters. Under the guise of protecting term limits, the initiative would have allowed any incumbent to stay in office four extra years by getting the signatures of one-fifth the number of people who voted in the last election. Incumbents would still have to appear on the ballot and be re-elected to their extra terms, but in hypergerrymandered California well over 95% of incumbents routinely win re-election.

Fund ends his article with:

In the end one of the best arguments for term limits is how much effort some of those incumbents affected by them struggle to escape them. This week in California voters sent a message that state legislators should consider expending less energy cooking up career-survival schemes and more time solving the state's problems: budget shortfalls, electricity and traffic congestion. Let's hope they pay attention.

They probably won't, but perhaps stronger messages can be sent in November.

MORE FROM ANDREWSULLIVAN.COM:

FINALLY, THE FRENCH DO SOMETHING USEFUL: “The ground war in Afghanistan hotted up yesterday when the Allies revealed plans to airdrop a platoon of crack French existentialist philosophers into the country to destroy the morale of Taleban zealots by proving the non-existence of God. Elements from the feared Jean-Paul Sartre Brigade, or 'Black Berets', will be parachuted into the combat zones to spread doubt, despondency and existential anomie among the enemy.” I don’t know who this guy is, but he sure made me laugh.

Andrew Sullivan writes:

George Will rightly eviscerates Bush’s cave-in to protectionism and industrial policy. Why Karl Rove is running economic policy is beyond me. Are they that scared of the upcoming elections? This is easily the dumbest, worst, and most cynical decision yet of this administration, and I hope principled conservatives give them hell for it.

I said to a friend earlier today that Bush's steel protectionism reminds me of (yet another reason) why I wouldn't want Pat Buchanan in the White House. The whole thing sounds like a bad flashback to the Keynesian economics liberal Republican days of Richard Nixon, and tarriffs, wage and price freezes, etc. And it's strange to see somebody run on the free market policies of Reagan (which, for the most part, Clinton carried over) and then do something like this.

ADDED A PARTIAL LIST OF "DEAD TREE" ARTICLES TO THE ARTICLES PAGE. (Which seemed to be a good place to them.) This was from a Word document I wrote around November of last year, so it needs updating for 2002 and late 2001, but it does give some idea of the stuff I've written in the last few years. Wish I could find those Atari 2600 videogame reviews I wrote for The Space Gamer around 83 or so when I was about 17, and the one or two little tidbits I wrote for Thrasher back then as well...

ARMY CAPT. ZAPS AL QAEDA GUIDES U.S. FIREPOWER AT JEERING ENEMY says the New York Daily News. This Captain has very, very big brass balls. And his enemy is very, very stupid...

(And obviously has never seen Monty Python's "how not to be seen" sketch.)

ESCARGOT PASSION--It must be official. I've seen everything that there is to see on the Web.

LET A HUNDRED BLOGS BLOOM ON CAMPUSES NATIONWIDE, says Stanley Kurtz on National Review's "The Corner" Blog.

Any college students out there in blogland? Here’s an idea. Two important scandals at Berkeley have just drawn national attention, at least in the conservative press--the male-sexuality course featuring live (possibly gay) sex and a party game with genital photographs, and the theft of a campus conservative paper (probably because of a story exposing reverse racism by a college Hispanic organization). I’ve written on both scandals here on The Corner, and thereby played some small roll in spreading the story, but it’s really Kevin Deenihan’s CalStuff blog that enabled the rest of us to spread the story. What if we had at least one good conservative blog at every college that now has a campus conservative newspaper? Right now, there are a tremendous number of PC outrages on campuses across the country that no one ever finds out about. It’s increasingly clear that one of the best things about the Internet is the end-run it allows us to make around the iron control of the liberal media.

Kurtz says that with conservative blogs on campuses across the country able to link to national blogs and to campus newspapers alike, "we could break through the barrier of politically correct campus censorship and rapidly expose any number of scandals. The general public would quickly start to act as a counterweight to the campus Left. Look at Berkeley. As a result of all the blogging, the campus conservative paper has collected thousands of dollars in contributions, reprinted its stolen press run, and spread knowledge of reverse racism on campus nationally."

Sounds good to me--I think we'll see more and more college bloggers, even if they have to go "undercover" and use a nom de blog to run any gauntlets of interference, such as St. Stryker, who uses his psuedonym to keep his identity secret from his Air Force superiors.

UPDATED THE LINKS PAGE TO INCLUDE "THE INTERNET'S GREATEST HITS". From time to time, certain article appear on the Web that stick with the brain. As Hunter S. Thompson might say, they have that certain extra "something"... These are a few of those articles (including Jonah Goldberg's classic "You, Me and the Sty", James Lileks at the Olive Garden, Rand Simberg on "Media Casualties", and more).

UPDATE ON SIMON OVER RIORDAN. Arnold Steinberg, a California political consultant has his take on how Simon did it here.

Patrick Ruffini's update to his Web log (previously linked below) also discusses Simon's win.

Of course, it don't mean a thing until the voting booths ring in November. But if anybody's vulnerable, it's ol' Grayout.

I JUST UPLOADED MY ARTICLE ON AMERICA'S OTHER ROCKET PROGRAM. This was written for Nuts & Volts, and there's a very thin chance that it may still run there. But it looks like the person who wrote the "how-to" piece that was to go along with it, never completed their article. So here's my take on a typical Saturday with the Reaction Research Society, who take their rocketry very seriously.

HEADLINE ON THE DRUDGE REPORT: BYE BYE, GARY. Matt's Web page links to an AP report on Yahoo!, that says "News - Condit Loses Primary to Former Aide"

Couldn't have happened to a nicer guy. Seeee ya!

And interestingly enough, Bill Simon beat Richard Riordan in the Republican primary to run against Grayout Davis in November. At least the voters will have some serious differences to chose from.

GREAT RIFF BY DAVID BRENNER ON AIRPORT SECURITY posted by Jeff Jarvis on his
WarLog site. Jarvis says " Comedian David Brenner just ranted on Fox News about airport security. They're just idiots, he says. The plan to pay them more will do nothing: 'Give an idiot $2 more and you have an idiot with $2.' He quoted the head of security at one airport as saying: 'All computers must be tooken out of their bags. Tooken!... Let 'em go back to asking, 'Do you want a lid on that, do you want fries?' "

Jarvis saves the best for last: now when Brenner gets pulled out of line, he pulls out a picture of the Most Wanted terrorists and says, "This is what you are looking for, not a Jew comic."

Not a bad idea actually. Now if only Norman Mineta would get the message.

(Yet another interesting tidbit unearthed by the ubiquitous Instapundit.)

THE DIGITAL BITS REVIEWS ALMOST FAMOUS in both its original DVD edition and in its new "Untitled: The Bootleg Cut" form.

Almost Famous, while it didn't become the blockbuster it was predicted to be, was loved by just about everybody who saw it. As somebody who grew up in the seventies and followed the real versions of the fictitious bands shown in the film, I would have loved to have been that kid, writing for Rolling Stone in his early teens.

What was quite amusing about Cameron Crowe's script, were the lines of dialogue aimed at 2000 audiences: "If you think that Mick Jagger will still be doing the whole rock star thing at age fifty, well, then, you are sorely, sorely mistaken.". Or, when the kid is in New York with an article due, the actor playing Ben Fong-Torres, one of the original Rolling Stone editor tells him to transmit to their San Francisco office via 'the Mo-Jo'. "It's a very high-tech machine that transmits pages over the telephone! It only takes eighteen minutes a page!"

I love it.

I wonder how many young reporters-in-training are reporting on groups via blogs? And are blogs the 2002 Mo-Jo?

DORIS KEARNS GOODWIN HAS BEEN BOOTED from the PBS NewsHour and Don Imus, according to the esteemed InstaPundit.Com

Reynolds said he didn't hear about Imus until he read a letter in MediaNews, which "also answers (partly) my question of why Doris Kearns Goodwin has created more outrage than Michael Bellesiles among the media crowd: "Goodwin's long chain of reputedly accidental borrowings, but they show her tendency to pickpocket her peers." Bellesiles, you see, was just pulling the wool over the eyes of Americans. He wasn't doing anything to his peers."

It's been interesting to watch a number of heretofore respected folks tarnish their reputations recently--Goodwin, Stephen Ambrose, Michael Bellesiles, and perhaps most signifigantly, Jesse Jackson.

Of course, some things never change. Dave Kopel on National Review's The Corner blog, says, "You might think that things are looking kind of grim for Michael Bellesiles, author of the hoax book Arming America. Even National Public Radio has caught onto him. .Despite the record of Bellesiles's mendacity--well-covered by Melissa Seckora on NRO, he has just been awarded a new $30,000 grant from the National Endowment of the Humanities, to write another book about guns. The NEH gave money to the Newberry Library in Chicago, which gave the money to Bellesiles, and which refuses to disclose how such a notable faker was awarded your money. Should the Newberry Library be renamed the Office of Strategic Deception?"

EARTHLINK LAUNCHES CABLE HOME NETWORKING SERVICE, according to this Reuters article. It sounds a little back-to-the-future to me, since it implies that that the networking will be off the existing home cable TV lines, ala the old days of 10-base-T networking on RG-6 cables. Of course, at 10 megabits a second, that will be plenty fast for most cable modems. And infinitely faster than "sneakernet", of course.

Of course, support of multiple computers on a home network makes sense for cable modem providers. I spent a hellish 48 hours or so trying to figure out how to get the multiple PCs in our home to talk to our cable modem after @Home hooked it up in early 1999. Fortunately, Sygate eventually did the trick, and still does, to this day.

THE MARCH ISSUE OF NUTS & VOLTS HAS MY NEW COLUMN. I started an every-other-month column for Nuts & Volts magazine called "Micro Memories". The first one is on Xerox PARC, and its revolutionary Alto and Star PCs. Just about every feature in your PC, from its basic architecture, to WSYWIG word processing, came (often directly) from PARC.

Sorry it's not online, but please run out and buy many copies of it today!

HD-DVD IS COMING, SAYS THE DIGITAL BITS. Which certainly makes sense, although it would have to be a huge improvement over DVD to get me to buy many of the same titles over again. It's amazing how many millions Hollywood has raked in by repacking the same titles. I think 2001 and Apocalypse Now, I've each bought on VHS (once), laser disc (twice), and DVD (twice). Of course, being a dedicated Kubrick obsessionist, I'm sure I'll buy most of his stuff again on HD-DVD.

"TIVO TO RAISE MONTHLY PRICES BY 30 PERCENT" According to this Reuters article. I wonder how this will impact their sales, as compared to Replay (who's service is free) and Microsoft's UltimateTV (which is customized for DirecTV).

Whichever service is chosen, the PVR is a helluva product. I own an UltimateTV box, and recently tested the Replay 4000 for Home Automation and Electronic House magazines, and they're both terrific. And it's great to spend an evening watching shows you want to watch, rather than clicking channels and trying to shift through so much of the flotsam and jetsam that's all over TV--especially with a satellite, which is often "500 channels and there's nothing on" (to paraphrase Bruce Springsteen).

Oops. Hey, Vario finally got my domain name active. That was fast wasn't it. They're good guys, aren't they?

MY DOMAIN NAME IS LIVE. www.eddriscoll.com THIS IS ONE GIANT LEAP FOR MANKIND. AND I SOUND EXACTLY LIKE EVERY OTHER PIECE OF SPAM I GET FOR SHOUTING ABOUT!!!!!

VIRGINIA POSTREL ON THE ECONOMIC BENEFITS OF WAL-MART:

http://www.nytimes.com/2002/02/28/business/28SCEN.html

BTW, Postrel, on her Dynamist.com Web log, says:

WAL-MEX: Wal-Mart de Mexico, a.k.a. Wal-Mex and already that country's largest retailer, has big expansion plans. It will add 67 stores over the next year and a half. Wal-Mart's growth is both a cause and an effect of Mexico's rising (by fits and starts) standard of living.

This is a test. My first actual Blog. God help us all.