intolerance 101

high school is not the place to learn. at least not about homosexuality.

A federal judge has blocked a county school system from instituting a new health curriculum that includes discussions of homosexuality and religion and a demonstration on how to use condoms.

the new pilot program was to begin on monday in six schools outside DC. but the judge issued a 10-day restraining order. and the superintendant announced that the program would not go into effect until at least next year, pending further study.

[judge] Williams agreed with two groups that filed a lawsuit claiming the curriculum's discussion of homosexuality amounted to preferential treatment for religions that preach tolerance of homosexuality over those that reject it.

For example, the curriculum juxtaposes faiths such as Quakers and Unitarians that support full rights for homosexuals with groups such as Baptists, who are painted as "intolerant and biblically misguided," the judge wrote in his opinion.

it's saddening to see a judge give legal credence to the "right to hate" argument, which goes "by preaching tolerance, you are being intolerant of my intolerance."

"I don't think it is right that we have 13-year-olds learning to think whether they are gay or straight," said Laura Quigley, who has three children in the school system. "We just need to let them be kids."

The new curriculum was to be used in eighth and 10th grades. The county planned to use it in all schools after testing it this spring.

Previously, health teachers could only discuss homosexuality in response to questions. Under the new program, they could bring up the issue on their own. The 10th-grade class would include a seven-minute video that discusses abstinence and includes a segment where a woman puts a condom on a cucumber to demonstrate its use.

god forbid (literally) that a 13-year-old, beginning if not well into the deep hormonal changes of puberty, should actually think about hisr sexuality. if that happened, they might actually realize that they're gay, saving them from years of self-doubt, denial, identity problems, socialization problems, and what have you.

13 is exactly when kids need to start thinking seriously about this stuff; in fact it's probably too late. puberty is an extremely tumultuous time, emotionally, physically, and socially. the earlier kids are able to start figuring themselves out, the better off they'll be.

there was already an exemption option for those who are members of the various denominations of discriminism. kids (or their parents) could opt out, with other options "that include abstinence-only programs" (which have been pretty much proven not to work, but never mind that). but that wasn't good enough: the haters don't want any kids to learn.

the USA is the new china

alert reader paul sends us this usa today column, which actually uses a lot of common sense while discussing music piracy. the thrust of the article is that "piracy" isn't really that bad; even in china where pirated cds are the norm (the chinese would never pay $15-$20 for a cd), artists still get paid, just not for cd sales: they make their money playing shows, selling merch, getting sponsors, and the like. and this is exactly how 99.9% of musicians in the US get their money, too. under the system established by the majors, artists never really make any money off record sales until they go gold (if not platinum). because the current western system makes artists recoup their expenses.

this was the passage i found most intriguing:

Music pirating is so rampant and so entrenched in China that it's unlikely to ever be eradicated. Chinese consumers have come to believe that music is worth, at most, a few cents a song, and that copying and sharing music are totally acceptable. In all probability, no company will ever be able to sell $15 CDs or 99 cents-a-song downloads in the world's most populous nation.

The International Federation of Phonographic Industry, which tracks music copyright issues worldwide, agrees. It figures 95% of music sales in China are of pirated copies. Instead of predicting that China will change as it engages with the global economy, the federation warns that China is, in fact, the leader. The federation's chairman, Jay Berman, has been quoted as saying, "The business model for the record industry worldwide is moving toward resembling what we see in China today."

In the USA, free downloads of copyrighted music are driving the recording industry to sue teenagers and holler about the morality of obtaining songs for free. But if China is the future, that's all in vain. The genie is out of the bottle. Eventually, recorded music will no longer make money.

emphasis mine, of course. that quote in particular struck me, and i wondered... who the hell are the intl federation of phonographic industry?

naturally, they're an international antipiracy group. their priorities are

• Fighting music piracy
  
• Promoting fair market access and adequate copyright laws
  
• Helping develop the legal conditions and the technologies for the recording industry to prosper in the digital era
  
• Promoting the value of music in the development of economies, as well as in social and cultural life

so i'm pretty curious to see the context of the quote maney uses in his usa today piece, because i have a feeling they're not as chipper about it as he is.

i'm about to leave so i don't have time right now to really browse through the site but i did find this story on the front page of their site:

World's biggest-ever haul of blank CD-Rs is seized in Mexico

Over 15 million blanks destined for pirate music trade are removed from circulation

Almost 16 million blank CD-Recordable discs � a worldwide record � have been seized in raids in Mexico. The bulk of the discs are believed to have been destined for the country�s piracy-ridden markets. The raids mark recent stepped-up enforcement efforts by the Mexican authorities to try and stem the overwhelming pirate music trade in the country.

Customs agents, with the support of federal investigation agents initially seized ten million blank CD-Rs in raids on two warehouse facilities in the municipalities of Morales and Tacubaya within metropolitan Mexico City. The raids followed eight months of intensive investigation. At the same time, customs authorities, assisted by federal fiscal agents, stopped and appropriated two shipments containing 5.8 million additional blank CD-Rs at the ports of Ciudad Juarez and Manzanillo. The shipments were apparently entering the country without proper documentation.

so antipiracy forces don't have anything better to do than to raid people who have blank cdrs? blank cdrs are perfectly legal to own. and while it could be argued that the sheer numbers are suspicious, i call bullshit. is the IFPI going to raid the warehouses of best buy or fry's or maxell or sony or tdk or memorex or any of the countless legitimate businesses that manufacture or sell blank cdrs?

if they raided and seized millions of pirated cds with the music already on them, or with pirated packaging, then they might have a case. but raiding and seizing blank cdrs is absurd, and going way way too far.

why does lizzy dole hate women?

not only does she apparently hate women, but she and 32 other senators (all male) are co-sponsoring a bill that says she is not a woman.

the bill is senate bill 51 (S51), and is called the "unborn child pain awareness act". it states that congress believes (yes, it says "congress has determined, not "science has determined") that fetuses feel pain, and that women who want abortions must have a statement read to them stating that they may choose anesthesia for the fetus. then she must explicitly choose to accept or decline said anesthesia. abortion providers would be required to keep an anesthesiologist around at all times in case someone opts for this.

now that's pretty weird in itself (i'm sure abortion providers do have someone on staff who can administer anesthesia to the woman, but how do you anesthetize a fetus? and how on earth can you do that without endangering the mother?), but the creepiest part can be found in the "definitions" section:

The term woman means a female human being who is capable of becoming pregnant, whether or not she has reached the age of majority.

pretty simple. if you can get knocked up, you're a woman. if you can't, you aren't.

so elizabeth dole, one of the bill's sponsors, who is clearly way too old to get pregnant no matter how much viagra bob eats, is not a woman under this definition. my 59-year-old mother is probably no longer a woman either (though she used to be at some point). any female of any age who has had her tubes tied, or worse yet, had a hysterectomy or similar procedure, is not a woman. but your neighbor's 13-year-old daughter... now that's a woman.

the bill doesn't say what these non-women females actually are; jeff at have coffee will travel suggests the term "unwoman" as coined by the handmaid's tale, but you could probably use any term you want, depending on just how dehumanized you want these ex-women to be: bitch, neuter, thing, dyke, it, skank, ho, fuck-toy, hey you get over here... of course i'm being intentionally offensive, but it's a valid question: since this bill would define these persons as less-than-woman, obviously we'll need to call them something.

are you now or have you ever been a member of the public broadcasting system?

digby has an explosive revelation regarding the new GOP effort to republicanize public broadcasting, which i posted about yesterday.

this story gets more outrageous the more you learn about it. i thought it was bad when i read the times article about tomlinson and how he plans to eliminate liberal bias by replacing it with conservative bias. when i read the mediamatters article pointing out that both of pbs's new ombudsmen were anything but the unbiased types you would want as ombudsmen, i realized it was even worse.

now we learn just how non-unbiased these ombudsmen are: one of them, william schulz, has ties to mccarthyism!

turns out that schulz, that paragon of objectivity, used to ghost-write a newspaper column for fulton lewis, jr, a mccarthy sympathizer/enabler/conspirator/apologist.

they appointed an ex-mccarthyite as a "designated neutral" who "strives for objectivity and impartiality." that's sure to clean that liberal bias right up!

hotel rwanda

i watched this movie on dvd last night.

this is a powerful, important film. if you're not aware, it's based on the true story of paul rusesabagina, a hotel manager in rwanda whose brave, selfless actions during the rwandan genocide of 1994 saved more than a thousand lives.

some seriously messed-up shit happens in this movie, made all the more disturbing by the fact that it all really happened. just when you think the worst is over and help will be there soon, something even worse happens, and this cycle repeats over and over again.

nearly a million people died in the conflict, and the united nations did nothing about it. sure, they had peacekeeper troops on the ground, but those troops were powerful, not allowed to even fire their weapons. then they scaled back their troops and evacuated all the foreigners, essentially abandoning the rwandans in their time of need.

one thing really drove home the sheer senselessness of it all: the fact that there isn't much difference at all between the hutu and tutsi, the two "peoples" in the conflict. in one early scene, a foreign journalist asks exactly what the difference is: the answer he's given is that the belgians (who took control of rwanda for a time after wwii) essentially invented the different clans. they picked the africans who were taller, lighter skinned, and had narrower noses, and decided "you are tutsi." the tutsi minority then helped the belgians run the country, angering the majority hutu. when you hear about genocide in places like bosnia or the darfur region of the sudan (or even nazi germany), you at least know that these are ethnically different tribes, with different religious beliefs. it's senseless and horrifying, but at least makes sense on that one level.

how to republicanize public broadcasting

republicans like to say that public broadcasting has a liberal bias. well... they say that about the media in general (which is demonstrably false), but they claim that pbs and npr are extra liberal. this isn't really true either (unless you define "liberal" as "educated art-lovers"), as there is just as much republican hackery in public broadcasting as there is liberalism (as the "buster" incident and others prove).

if the republicans had their way, they'd turn pbs into fox news II. the gop chairman of the corporation for public broadcasting is leading a crusade against what he calls "bias" in public broadcasting. and he wants to start his crusade by appointing a former chair of the republican national committee as cpb's new ceo and president.

...because the best way to eliminate bias in reporting is to put a former head of a political party in charge.

this nytimes article is crazy. just about everything tomlinson (the aforementioned republican cpb chair) says is directly contradicted by something else in the article. so let's go on an adventure in doublethink.

for example, this:

Mr. Tomlinson said that he was striving for balance and had no desire to impose a political point of view on programming, explaining that his efforts are intended to help public broadcasting distinguish itself in a 500-channel universe and gain financial and political support.

"My goal here is to see programming that satisfies a broad constituency," he said, adding, "I'm not after removing shows or tampering internally with shows."

directly contradicts this:

In December 2003, three months after he was elected chairman, Mr. Tomlinson sent Ms. Mitchell of PBS a letter outlining his concerns. " 'Now With Bill Moyers' does not contain anything approaching the balance the law requires for public broadcasting," he wrote.

this guy tampered with now as much as possible, even undertaking secret audits of the program's content.

and this paragraph seems to contradict itself:

Mr. Tomlinson said that it was his concerns about "objectivity and balance" that led to the creation of a new office of the ombudsman at the corporation to issue reports about public television and radio broadcasts. But the role of a White House official in setting up the office has raised questions among some public broadcasting executives about its independence. In March, after she had been hired by the corporation but was still at the White House as director of the Office of Global Communications, Mary Catherine Andrews helped draft the office's guiding principles, set up a Web page and prepare a news release about the appointment of the new ombudsmen, officials said.

how can a media outlet pretend to be "objective" while high-ranking white house officials working hand-in-hand with management, even being on both payrolls at the same time? that doesn't pass the laugh test, nor the armstrong williams test. it doesn't even pass the falling-over-as-my-brain-collapses-from-all-the-cognitive-dissonance test.

the end of the article really says it all:

Mr. Tomlinson said he understood the need to reassure liberals that the traditions of public broadcasting, including public affairs programs, were not changing, "that we're not trying to put a wet blanket on this type of programming."

But his efforts to sow goodwill have shown that what he says he tries to project is sometimes read in a different way. Last November, members of the Association of Public Television Stations met in Baltimore along with officials from the corporation and PBS. Mr. Tomlinson told them they should make sure their programming better reflected the Republican mandate.

Mr. Tomlinson said that his comment was in jest and that he couldn't imagine how remarks at "a fun occasion" were taken the wrong way. Others, though, were not amused.

"I was in that room," said Ms. Mitchell. "I was surprised by the comment. I thought it was inappropriate."

ah, the ann coulter defense. i was just kidding when i said i wanted terrorists to kill all the journalists! i don't really think we should become a bush administration mouthpiece! it's just a coincidence that i want to appoint a republican political operative as ceo!

there's a lot more. read the full article. (registration required: bugmenot is your friend)

and if that wasn't bad enough, now read all the stuff that the times left out:

In a May 2 article on efforts by Kenneth Y. Tomlinson, Republican chairman of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB), "to correct what he and other conservatives consider liberal bias" at CPB, New York Times reporters Stephen Labaton, Lorne Manley, and Elizabeth Jensen noted that CPB recently appointed two ombudsmen "to review the content of public radio and television broadcasts." But the article failed to note that one of the ombudsmen, William Schulz, is an avowed conservative with close ties to Tomlinson, while the other, Ken Bode, is a former journalist and a fellow at the conservative Hudson Institute who last year endorsed Indiana Republican gubernatorial candidate Mitch Daniels. In addition, the Times story made no mention that CPB's new chief operating officer and acting president is a former Bush administration official.

so both the ombudsmen--whose job is to be neutral and impartial--are hardline conservatives? that will surely fix any "bias" problems! and the "new chief operating officer" mentioned here is not the former rnc chair that tomlinson wants to appoint, but the current interim prez, who "played a significant role in the failed effort to loosen rules to make it easier for media companies to expand into new businesses and geographic areas."

more juicy details if you follow the link... and mediamatters continues pointing out flaws in the times article here, where they highlight all the prominent conservatives who have shows on pbs.

palast in the balance

greg palast is in trouble. maybe you haven't heard of him: he's a hard-hitting, muckraking journalist in the old-school style. he has broken some major stories, most notably the scandal involving how florida republicans illegitimately expunged thousands of blacks from florida's voter registration rolls.

because his investigative journalism routinely looks into controversial issues and upsets some powerful factions--he has investigted US election fraud, the bush administration, and the oil industry--he has effectively been exiled to england. nobody in the states (save harper's magazine) will hire him because he pisses off the wrong people. so for years he has worked at bbc, where his explosive stories continue to expose truths and win awards. he's also written a few books, and even put out a dvd movie about bush and a spoken-word cd.

but those powerful men and corporations are now suing him... in the UK, where there is no presumption of innocence and where libel cases are even trickier than in the states. money is needed to cover legal fees.

when i found out, i promptly went to his store and made a donation. for $40 or more, you get free signed palast books or merch with your donation. i donated $50 to get the bush family fortunes dvd. it should be good.

get jiggy to this mp3

the new mp3 of the week is called "jiggy in a war", is made of unintelligble metallica samples, and features an unrecognizable cameo by your girlfriend. check it out!

cincinnati

drbmd & i took half days on friday and met up at my house in the afternoon. we knew the show wouldn't start until after 9pm so we weren't in a hurry to leave. we watched kickboxer from hell, then packed up and headed to cincinnati.

we arrived at dj empirical's apt around 8pm local time. the three of us piled into my car and went to a nearby indian restaurant. apparently dje goes there a lot. it was pretty good but not outstanding. drbmd really enjoyed it, as it'd been some time since he'd had indian food. i don't remember what the place is called.

after that we stopped to get coffee at a place called sitwell's. it was supposed to be a brief stop but service was so slow that it probably took 10 minutes or more despite there not being any real line. then off again, winding through the confusingly knotlike cincinnati roads to the mockbee.

the mockbee is a really cool space, with that "italian restaurant" walls-falling-apart look and huge arched ceilings. there was art all over the place. i would have liked it without qualification if i had roadies. but the performance space was on the second floor and we had to park half a block away, so that wasn't too cool. it was in fact the worst load-in/load-out i've had in some time.

there was some antiwar meeting, then some guy who played a lute or something like that (then unfortunately switched to guitar later on). then it was time for the bad taste crew. the show had to end by midnight (i don't know why; it just did), so we only had 90 minutes or so for all of us (unszene, bobby vomit, me, dr. butcher m.d., and realicide), so everyone's sets were pretty short.

unszene played with his usual array of electronics, pedals, tape decks, and samplers. it was loud and hard. one of his tape decks wasn't cooperating so he threw it to the floor and it pieces of it flew off. smash smash.

bobby vomit played next. in addition to old modified turntables, he also used his numark ttx1 (high-end digital turntable), which was new to me. very short set; he wore an army helmet and when he finished his set he made a statement about dead soldiers and threw it to the ground. it made a clanking sound.

i played next. the PA was very loud, and i tried to turn my stuff down but it was still loud, so i just played. i had compiled a bunch of antiwar material, most of which was pretty harsh, and the whole set came out sounding very harsh and skittery. i struggled to find grooves or moments of clarity but it was difficult. later, while listening to drbmd's set, i realized that the PA was fairly distorted, which definitely impacted my performance. then i mixed in a recording of bush's press conference from the previous night, which was the only clean-sounding stuff in my whole set. (later, bobby vomit mentioned that he had also recorded the press conference.) i didn't think it was a particularly good performance, but apparently bobby got a recording, so maybe i'll have a different opinion when i hear that. it sounded very harsh, and it was hard to tell what i was doing, but maybe it wasn't as bad as i thought.

then drbmd played, and like i said, the PA was obviously distorted. but it was cool; spastic noise that gradually evolved into beats. those who weren't familiar with the material probably wouldn't have noticed that it was distorted. it still sounded good, just not how it was supposed to sound.

finally came robert inhuman, as realicide (i thought the group had other members; i don't know where they were). his set involves several microphones, an old speaker, screaming, and tons of feedback. it was very loud and abrasive, as you might expect. at one point he somehow mic'ed the speaker and was getting quite a broad palette of sound out of it. later he even crawled up inside the speaker, to the great excitement of the crowd.

then it was over; we loaded out and drove back to indy. the dr crashed in the guest room at my house. unszene and bobby vomit drove back separately: see bobby vomit's post for another perspective.

the next day, drbmd discovered that he had no other obligations, which is somewhat rare for a weekend. i suggested we could go to the movies, and soon enough we had decided to go to the key and see in the realms of the unreal, and to eat at the mexican restaurant nearby.

the restaurant, mi pueblito, was pretty good. we were the only customers in there, and i suspect there was only one guy working, who both served us and cooked our food. but it was pretty good: everything was fresh and tasty down to the tortillas and salsa. i'd be happy to go back some time.

in the realms of the unreal is a documentary about outsider artist henry darger. darger was a quiet man who worked as a janitor at various hospitals, not really talking to anyone aside from his coworkers or immediate neighbors. not until he was on his death bed did anyone discover the work: countless paintings, some immense, and thousands of pages of writing, including possibly the world's longest novel at 15,000+ pages. he left behind only three photos of himself, and was known by precious few, so the bulk of the movie is told through his work: narrators reading from his autobiography and the novel, while the paintings come to life on the screen. it was pretty interesting, and very different.

finally, we briefly stopped at the thrift store there by the key. i grabbed a couple records (they appear to be books from the bible on vinyl, two discs out of a box set; the rest of the set was not to be found) and a framed cardboard picture of billy ray cyrus. it was $1.21 and i figured it would be easy enough to alter artistically. the woman at the register seemed concerned: "you don't look like a billy ray cyrus fan." apparently the thing had been back there for a long time. then we were off back home and soon drbmd was on his way back to anderson.

the sun also sets

the dst bill has passed 51-46, in a late-night session. the governor will sign it and then petition USDOT to hold hearings on which time zone indiana should be in.

those hearings will be very contentious and a lot of people will be pissed off by the final ruling, whatever it is. i think the argument that businesses will start flocking here if only we changed our clocks is a delusion; it won't happen. but mitch will have that extra hour on the golf course in the summers, so that'll be nice at least.

what else can you expect from an administration that considers dst and a new dome more important than funding education or social programs? companies don't want to move into a state full of uneducated poor people... or do they?

star power

the last time i ran into ryan from thursday club, he told me that he'd taken a copy of maura's milk chocolate bath from the take-one-leave-one at recycled rainbow and given it wcsb, the cleveland radio station where he works (probably the biggest college station in cleveland, and home to the subgenius hour of slack). so hey, that was cool, but i didn't think a whole lot of it. there are a few stations out there who have a cd or two of mine, not to mention djs who have stuff or burn their own cds to spin.

fast forward a couple months and ryan posts to exbe that i'm #7 on wcsb's top 10 for the week. i guess i'm actually getting some regular airplay.

well i found wcsb's top 30 list online and i'm still on it at #12. better than dinosaur jr and yo la tengo. however, the list is a week out of date (currently dated 4/16), so my chart position could have slid since then.

who's at the top of the charts? watching too much kids in the hall has conditioned me to believe the answer should be "bel biv devoe", but maybe the answer should really be stAllio!

i've gotten airplay before (awia has gotten lots of plays on wcbn, for example), but this is the first i've ever charted. it's kinda weird.

i guess i should state for the record that radio djs are more than welcome to contact me directly about promo packages. i've sent them out before and have no problem doing so again.

the sun also stands still

the indiana house voted on DST... and nothing happened.

Daylight-saving time legislation failed to pass the House this morning, when a 49-48 vote against the measure stopped it in its tracks.

The bill could be taken up again later, but it's an open question whether supporters will succeed in changing enough minds. Two key supporters of the measure are out sick.

House Speaker Brian Bosma, R-Indianapolis, opened the voting machine at 11:33 a.m. and held the machine open in hope of getting the 51 yes votes needed.

As Rep. Terri Austin, D-Anderson, voted no, however, opponents cheered. By then, the machine had been held open for several minutes, even though such votes usually take less than 30 seconds.

More lights went from green to red as the packed House gallery stood and lawmakers milled about the chamber. Rep. Scott Pelath, D-Michigan City, called for Bosma to tally the vote, but he refused.

Twelve minutes into the vote, House Republican leaders fanned out in an unsuccessful effort to persuade lawmakers to change their votes. Three minutes later, at 11:45, they came back shaking their heads and Bosma closed the machine, which tallied 48-49.

wthr makes sure to point out that "there were not enough votes to approve or defeat the measure"... they could bring this up for another vote before the session ends, and possibly get a different result. but the session ends friday, after which time we'd have to wait until next session, and the whole damn process would have to be repeated.

so it's possible it will still pass. but time is running out. way to go, mitch. you touted this as one of the pillars of your platform, but in part due to your own arrogant comments, chances that it'll pass don't look so good.

more on why dems were pissed about daniels' comments:

"When asked about the united Democratic opposition to the budget, I said that the requirement to devise a package that every Republican (House member) would vote for prevented us from achieving even greater deficit reduction," Daniels wrote. "That was a true and non-judgmental statement of fact. I honestly do not know how these remarks could be misinterpreted, but I sincerely regret if anyone did so and took offense."

why was it a "requirement" that every republican vote for the package? bills get passed due to majority vote: if a package that democrats (even just a few democrats) could agree to had been proposed, then even if a few GOPers had been against it, it still could have passed. and it could have resulted in "greater deficit reduction". but daniels prefers to blame democrats. democrats who had no say in the budget bill whatsoever:

Democrats are just as mystified as to why Daniels doesn't understand their anger.

Democrats were excluded from the conference committee meetings crafting the budget, and all the amendments that Senate Democrats offered were rejected. The House and Senate are both controlled by Republicans.

"I don't know if the governor realized our conferees had been excluded," Bauer said. "He said he really didn't know."

today, light savings

today is a good day to vote: yesterday the indiana sentate approved DST 28-22, and the indiana house is scheduled to vote at 11:15 this morning (a little less than an hour and a half from now).

but it's possible that governor "my main bitch" daniels has already screwed this one up for himself:

The debate in the House had already begun when Democrats, angry at comments Gov. Mitch Daniels had made earlier about their role in the state budget, asked to meet privately.

Republicans, who thought they had locked up the 51 votes needed to pass the controversial issue and send it to Daniels to be signed into law, were suddenly scrambling.

They were losing Democratic votes they needed to pass the time change, and some Republican opponents were being pigeonholed in a last-ditch attempt to pick up more votes.

so what did bitch say that angered them so?

"The Democratic Party's entitled to take a position of opposition or even obstruction. I guess it wasn't a surprise. I will say if there had been any element of bipartisan interest on their part, a stronger budget might have been possible."

Daniels said there was "zero interest and zero votes available from the Democratic side."

Democrats said Republicans had shut them out of negotiations.

"I hope the governor is listening," Robertson said. "I wish he would choose his words more wisely. One of these days he might just have to eat them."

of course... if your opponent doesn't come running at the opportunity to hop on your jock, then clearly they're not being bipartisan.

more later once the vote has happened. for now check out flava flav here:

animation show 2005

last night (before watching "justice sunday" on my tivo) drbmd & i went to see the animation show 2005. this is the second year of the animation show festival; they set the bar really high the first year, but i think they met it again, even with the distinct disadvantage of only having one don hertzfeldt cartoon this year (last year's theatrical version had five!)

i'm pretty busy today but want to make a few comments before i forget it all. format = cartoonist/director - toon title - my comments

jen drummond - the FEDS - this was an interesting short about people whose job is giving out free samples at supermarkets. jen drummond also worked on richard linklater's waking life (which is highly recommended). fun in a clerks sort of way, but i enjoyed waking life a lot more (i know it's not fair to compare a short to a feature-length film, but i couldn't help but compare while i was watching, because i don't think i've ever seen that animation style anywhere else).

david russo - pan with us - OH MY GOD... this has some of the most jaw-dropping awe-inspiring animated sequences i have ever seen. it starts off with etched glass that comes to life and moves through various absurdly-complicated (yet breathtaking) shots, like a scroll that unfurls down the road (seemingly for miles). you can see the stop-motion animation as it happens: focus is drawn to the "animated" parts, which are flawless and smooth, but in the periphery you can see the animators' hands or whole bodies skitter about as they manipulate what's happening. this is really something else: i can't effectively describe how this looks because i've never seen anything quite like it before. astonishing.

jonathan nix - hello - a very cute short about a boy with a boombox head, who can only communicate by playing tapes (in his boombox head, of course). he's in love with a girl who has a radio for a head... but whenever he's around her, he gets so nervous that he can't cue up his tapes in time. poor guy.

peter cornwell - ward 13 - a man wakes up in a hospital. his face is wrapped in bandages. he begins to explore... and quickly discovers that the hospital staff is not looking out for his best interest. thus begins the most exciting, action-packed 15 minutes of claymation i've ever seen. thoroughly cool.

tomek baginski - fallen art - tomek baginski directed the cathedral, a dark and beautiful piece of 3d animation that was featured in last year's show. fallen art is a complete 180: while still somewhat dark, this is very playful and funny, where the cathedral was brooding. i don't want to spoil the big surprise, so i'll just copy the tagline from animationshow.com: "In an old forgotten military base far from civilization, a group of deranged military officers nurture their insanity."

georges schwizgebel - l'homme sans ombre ("the man with no shadow") - georges schwizgebel also directed la course à l'abîme from last year's show. stylistically they're very similar: they both look like an impressionist painting come to life. pretty cool. i like this one better than la course à l'abîme because it has more of a narrative structure and linear progression (la course à l'abîme was more like a music video for hector berlioz). it's about a man who is swindled out of his shadow, and desperately tries to get it back or adapt to his new shadowless life.

don hertzfeldt - the meaning of life - this was a significant change of direction after the 4-5 hertzfeldt shorts that were included in last year's show. those were hilarious; this has moments of humor but is overall much more serious. it's an epic look at the world as creatures crawl out of the primordial ooze, gradually evolve into humans, form "civilization", and then go extinct, evolving into hordes of fantastic creatures. very good.

i could keep going and keep reviewing the other shorts, but i have run out of time! needless to say, every selection is at least pretty good, if not fantastic. the ones mentioned above were among my favorites, but everything was worth seeing.

ha ha! (in best sen. nelson voice)

i went back looking for more screengrabs. like i mentioned before, they had corrected the scroll by the time frist came on, so there wasn't much more to get (other than go in looking for dobson in awkward poses or making funny faces). but i did get a couple more. here's the empty stage immediately after dobson walked off.


(click for bigger view)

this was actually very tricky to time correctly because there were at most a couple frames before they cut to the audience (nice standing ovation, yes?):


(click for bigger view)

senator nelson?!?

i tivo'd that "justice sunday" program today... drbmd and i were just watching it and noticed something peculiar (well, especially peculiar).

at the bottom of the screen is a scroll listing senators who the crazies think are "soft" on judicial nominees. the format is state - senator - phone #. viewers are urged to deluge their senators with calls begging for an up-or-down vote on bush's wingnut judge appointments.

but being a native-born hoosier, i wasn't aware that indiana had a senator named "nelson"


(click pic for larger view)

update:i guess they noticed their mistake, because they had corrected the scroll to say "lugar" by the time they played bill frist's videotaped statement.

second update: in case you don't recognize him, i guess i should mention that the guy in the screenshot is anti-spongebob crusader dr. james dobson, founder/chairman of focus on the family.

2,4,6,8, who do we discriminate?

bigots, have no fear: it's okay to discriminate against gays in indiana. the city-county council rejected by 18-11 a measure that would've extended discrimination protection to include sexual preference and gender identity.

In the end, it was not Republicans who killed the measure -- though all but one, Scott Keller, voted against it -- but five Democrats, who broke with the majority of their caucus to oppose the proposal.

i don't agree with this reasoning; it's the same reasoning that suggested that florida "won" the election for bush in 2000. but elections don't really work that way: all votes are created equal. florida might've been given to bush, but if any number of states had gone for gore, bush wouldn't have won. similarly, those democratic pro-bigotry votes hurt, but if more republicans had voted against, it wouldn't have mattered.

this is not to say, however, that those 5 democrats don't deserve a heapin' helpin' of scorn for caving in to the hate lobby. steve talley, council president, is a black man who should know about discrimination firsthand... but he voted against the measure, claiming there was "no evidence" that gays are being discriminated against? wha-huh? isn't that exactly the kind of argument that was used against jim crow laws back in the day?

same goes for patrice abdullah and sherron franklin, both black democrats who should've known better. (not to let ron gibson or mary moriarty adams off the hook either: their whiteness does not excuse them.)

Some council members later said that religion spoke louder than politics Monday.

"I don't think that I should be forced to compromise my integrity and my beliefs as to what God put here for us to obey and to accept," said Patrice Abduallah, a Democrat who voted against the measure, Proposal No. 68.

In Indiana, similar anti-discrimination ordinances have been approved in Bloomington and Lafayette. Nationwide, more than 100 communities and at least 16 states and Washington, D.C., also have some form of anti-discrimination statute in place for private employment, according to a national gay-rights group.

In Indianapolis, though, some said a campaign by the opposition eroded support.

"The onslaught of misinformation has been almost numbing," said Council Democrat Jackie Nytes, the proposal's sponsor. "I am surprised that people feel as swayed as they do by the clear misinformation."

For example, supporters said, some council members were being told the measure would affect churches.

"religion spoke louder than politics"? which commandment is "thou shalt hate gays" again?

fortunately (for me, at least), my councillor, jackie nytes, was actually the sponsor of the bill, so i can vote for her with pride next time 'round.

mp3 de la semana

this week's mp3 of the week is my remix of "schwindel" by einstürzende neubauten. it's really glitchy and probably takes a lot of liberties. read more about it and download it now!

also, because of the server hiccup last weekend (not this past weekend), i will be leaving up the mp3 from two weeks ago (critical stop) for an extra week.

001 java.net.UnknownHostException

periodically when i try to post a blog entry it will fail and i'll get this error message (001 java.net.UnknownHostException). i never really knew whether this was caused by blogger or my host (i suspected it was some of each, and technically i was right, but the mast majority of the time it was blogger).

well, it turns out that this error generally means that one of blogger's DNS servers is down. DNS servers resolve human-readable names (such as "animals within animals dot com") to actual IP addresses. so if blogger's DNS server is down, blogger won't be able to find your server, and your entry won't get posted, no matter how well your server might be performing.

(i say "generally" because if your server is, in fact, down, you will probably also receive this same error.)

anyway, the fix is to find your server's IP address and plug that into your blogger settings rather than the server's domain. there are lots of ways to determine that IP address, but the easiest is to go to a site like this one.

i was having this problem this morning, and assumed that srn was down for maintenance (that new new server is due pretty soon), but miraculously after several tries my ghost in the shell post went through... but then my DST post wouldn't. and i could log in, but still couldn't post. obviously the problem was not with srn. a little googling and here's the answer.

so if you use blogger and get a lot of failed posts, there's your answer.

daylight shaving

indiana's dst bill keeps inching toward... well, nobody really knows what it's inching toward, other than a vote tomorrow. nobody really knows whether it'll pass, and legislators seemingly keep voting it on to the next stage simply to get it out of their hair. indeed, masson points out that even the editorial-writers don't have any better arguments anymore than "let's just vote and get it over with." (i highly recommend masson's blog for coverage of indiana dst and other legislative issues: it's very comprehensive).

although polls allege that a majority of hoosiers support going to dst, the lafayette journal-courier righly points out that a major drawback to this bill is that it does not settle the matter of which time zone indiana would be in. the goldsmith plan is to just pass the damn dst bill, and then figure out the time zone later. this is a bad idea: i suspect that a very large number of hoosiers would be happy to observe dst if we went to a specific time zone, but not if we went to the other.

the problem is that indiana is in a sort of geographical dead zone: if the time zone border were a straight line, it would cut right through the middle of the state. if we switch to EDT, then during the brunt of summer it won't get dark until near 10pm (an absolute nightmare [pun intended] for those of us who actually enjoy nighttime). if we switch to central, then during the winter it'll start getting dark around 3pm. so it's a shitty situation for indiana regardless. in fact this is the entire reason why indiana opted out of dst in the first place: there is no non-shitty solution. either we get shoved into a time zone where we don't really fit, or we're stuck in a land of confusion in between them. the only question is which scenario is the least shitty, and opinions on that are vastly different depending on your priorities.

the myth that our lack of dst somehow causes hoosier brain drain and prevents corporations from doing business here is clearly false. arizona and japan, for example, don't have any brain drain problems. adopting dst in indiana won't be some panacea that will reverse our economic problems. and i for one don't buy the "energy conservation" argument either: perhaps, if we went to EDT, hoosiers would use slightly less energy on keeping the lights on during the day. but they would also spend more energy on air conditioning, because the hours when the sun is out are the hours when it's warmest. and we all know that a/c uses more power than lights do. not to mention how much gasoline people will use: it's been said that dst encourages recreational driving. and with the high price of gas these days, that's an expense you can't afford to forget.

anyway, the full indiana senate votes on this tomorrow. if it passes, it moves on the house. if it fails in the senate, i think that means the bill is officially dead. at least until next year when they try to ram it down our throats yet again.

more things that rock

ghost in the shell: stand alone complex

the year is 2030. cybernetic technology has advanced to the point where virtually the only difference left between "humans" and robots/AI/software is the existence of a soul, or "ghost". many people now have cyberbrains, which allow their minds to wirelessly connect to computer networks, if not various other physical or intellectual enhancements. but that simple cyberbrain accessibility means that if you're not careful, unscrupulous hackers can actually hack directly into your brain. in these dangerous times, superhacker law enforcement is needed, and that's where section 9 comes in.

i've been in love with this show for many months now. the animation isn't quite as outstanding as in the movies, but it's really good. the character work is great. and the plotlines! o, they're deliciously intricate and sophisticated. this is probably the deepest, most intelligent anime series i've seen (and one of my favorites, along with fullmetal alchemist, which is on adult swim immediately before GitS... what a double-team!)

this is a series that shifts seamlessly between high-tech action, spy stuff and intrigue, and deep metaphysical and philosophical questions. i now fantasize about cyberized. i pretty much did before, since cyberpunk and bionics have been standard concepts for years now, but i never had such an elaborate framework for my cyberization fantasies.

at any rate, i've decided that this show is just too damn cool to only watch when it comes on adult swim. and it's way too late now to record all the episodes to tivo and dump them to vhs tape (conceivably i could do this someday, when they start airing it everyday, but it would still be a big project involving many hours and many tapes). so i've decided to buy the series on dvd. it won't be cheap: around $20 for 4 episodes, for the non-special editions (though maybe i'll get v3 special edition in order to get the t-shirt). but i think it'll be worth it.

the hard part will be not rushing out to the store immediately to start buying the dvds. i have a habit of doing that: as soon as i decide i want something, i want it now and purchase it as soon as possible. i should be able to wait at least a couple days before i start buying these dvds. but maybe i won't make it. that remains to be seen.

the fall

while many of us had hoped that the GOP's constant scandalous behavior could catch up with them before last year's election, allowing the people to sweep them out of office en masse, their long-awaited comeuppance has been slow to materialize. but thanks in part to the corporate media's pack mentality--where the more coverage a story gets, the more coverage it will continue to get until you can hear about nothing else--scandal is all over the place and increasingly hard to ignore.

the rumors surrounding ethical breaches by house majority leader tom delay have been circling for years, but getting consistently louder in past weeks. even prominent republicans have been starting to say that it's time for him to go. but delay is not ready to go, claiming that he hasn't done anything that everyone else doesn't do (not the best of moral or ethical arguments), and that he's never done anything that was actually illegal or in breach of house ethical rules.

now we know the truth. delay won't be able to talk his way out of this story.

The airfare to London and Scotland in 2000 for then-House Majority Whip Tom DeLay (R-Tex.) was charged to an American Express card issued to Jack Abramoff, a Washington lobbyist at the center of a federal criminal and tax probe, according to two sources who know Abramoff's credit card account number and to a copy of a travel invoice displaying that number.

DeLay's expenses during the same trip for food, phone calls and other items at a golf course hotel in Scotland were billed to a different credit card also used on the trip by a second registered Washington lobbyist, Edwin A. Buckham, according to receipts documenting that portion of the trip.

House ethics rules bar lawmakers from accepting travel and related expenses from registered lobbyists. DeLay, who is now House majority leader, has said that his expenses on this trip were paid by a nonprofit organization and that the financial arrangements for it were proper. He has also said he had no way of knowing that any lobbyist might have financially supported the trip, either directly or through reimbursements to the nonprofit organization.

there's no mistaking: that's a clear violation of the house rules. cut and dry. copy and paste, click submit, and the verdict is in. or it would be if the house ethics committee hadn't effectively disbanded after delay had the rules changed in order to keep him out of trouble. but he's damaged goods now, and the longer it takes him to resign, the more damage he does to his party and his allies.

meanwhile, john bolton is a loyal bush crony who once famously remarked that there is no such thing as the united nations. naturally, bush nominated him for UN ambassador. and until the other day it seemed to be fate that his nomination would be shoved through committee and be sent to the senate floor... where it would possibly ignite the "nuclear option" (more on that in a minute). this was expected to happen despite the fact that bolton has been described in senate hearings as "a kiss-up, kick-down kind of guy" who is routinely abusive to co-workers and underlings, trying to get them fired or chasing them down hotel hallways while throwing stuff at them.

but surprisingly, the other day a republican senator (sen voinovich of ohio) stepped forward and said he wasn't comfortable voting just yet. this bold action actually set off the daily show's first-ever "bipatisanship alert" and stalled the nomination, pending further investigation, until next month. (in contrast, my own senator, dick lugar, was the one rearing to force the vote through until voinovich had a break.)

at the rate that stories damaging to bolton keep coming out, there's no way his nomination will succeed next month:

Colin Powell plainly didn't like what he was hearing. At a meeting in London in November 2003, his counterpart, British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw, was complaining to Powell about John Bolton, according to a former Bush administration official who was there. Straw told the then Secretary of State that Bolton, Powell's under secretary for arms control, was making it impossible to reach allied agreement on Iran's nuclear program. Powell turned to an aide and said, "Get a different view on [the Iranian problem]. Bolton is being too tough."

Unbeknownst to Bolton, the aide then interviewed experts in Bolton's own Nonproliferation Bureau. The issue was resolved, the former official told NEWSWEEK, only after Powell adopted softer language recommended by these experts on how and when Iran might be referred to the U.N. Security Council. But the terrified State experts were "adamant that we not let Bolton know we had talked to them," the official said.

[...]

But the London story is further evidence that Bolton and the White House have their work cut out for them. On several occasions, America's closest ally in the war on terror, Britain, was irked by what U.S. and British sources say were efforts by Bolton to undermine promising diplomatic openings. Perhaps the most dramatic instance took place early in the U.S.-British talks in 2003 to force Libya to surrender its nuclear program, NEWSWEEK has learned. The Libya deal succeeded only after British officials "at the highest level" persuaded the White House to keep Bolton off the negotiating team. A crucial issue, according to sources involved in the affair, was Muammar Kaddafi's demand that if Libya abandoned its WMD program, the U.S. in turn would drop its goal of regime change. But Bolton was unwilling to support this compromise. The White House agreed to keep Bolton "out of the loop," as one source puts it. A deal was struck only after Kaddafi was reassured that Bush would settle for "policy change"—surrendering his WMD. One Bush official called the accounts of both incidents "flatly untrue."

so bolton is no incredibly hard to work with that the only way to get things done is to go over his head. exactly the kind of guy we want as our top diplomat.

so we have scandals involving the house majority leader and one of bush's top nominees... but what's going on in the senate? how about a scandal involving the senate majority leader, too?

majority leader bill frist will appear (via video) at a gathering today at a louisville megachurch denouncing "judicial activism" and promoting the "nuclear option" (the concept of eliminating filibusters during nominations, an idea so outrageous that democrats have promised to shut down the senate if it occurs). the gist of today's event, called "justice sunday", is that the judiciary is "against people of faith". the message being that if you aren't in the radical right, you have no faith, something which, surprisingly, millions of people find insulting.

the event will be netcast as well as on satellite tv (i already have my tivo set to record it when it comes on WHT tuesday night; there could be lots of sample-able crazies on there). and by appearing on the program, even if only by videotape, frist is aligning himself with the farthest of the far-right wing and tacitly endorsing their definition of faith. either you are with him or you are a heathen.

lots of people are fuming about this all over the net... like here and here and hell... here.

something rotten is afoot in between the states of virginia and maryland.

do you have any rolls?

new blogroll in the right column... it will probably expand over time, at least the politiblog section. and hell, if you're a regular reader & have a blog, drop me a line (or even a lime). i'm also looking for more good hoosier blogs (though indiana blogs has quite a few listed).

i made a couple other minor updates; probably the only one you'll notice is that the date headers have changed color. i think they stand out a little more, while still not being too bright or distracting.

i also wasted some time trying to strip out the tables in the awia bio section... i managed to update and rework this page using css (eventually i'll go in and add links from each member to hisr bio, though currently a few members don't have bios yet), but the individual bio pages are simply impossible to redo in css without mangling the presentation (or coding every little box with exact pixel heights, which is more of a hassle than it's worth). so those particular tables are here to stay.

vsnares hungarian translations

upgraded from the comments. syntax did the bulk of the translating and i merely went back and filled in the gaps, tweaked some wording in a couple places.

i knew that someone else had to have posted this somewhere, and eventually i did find this thread on the planet-mu phorum, but as far as i know, the phorum is probably not google-able. that doesn't do any good: this info should be on google so that people can actually find it! so here goes!

Venetian Snares
Rossz Csillag Alatt Született = born under a bad star

1. Sikertelenség = failure
   
2. Szerencsétlen = catastrophic, miserable (also hapless, luckless, misadventurous, sad, star-crossed, unfortunate, unhappy, unlucky, untoward, woeful, wretched)
   
3. Öngyilkos Vasárnap = suicidal on sunday ("gloomy sunday")
   
4. Felbomlasztott Mentökocsi = disintegrated ambulance
   
5. Hajnal = dawn, daybreak
   
6. Galamb Egyedúl = lone pigeon
   
7. Második Galamb = second pigeon
   
8. Szamár Madár = asinine bird
   
9. Hiszékeny = gullible
   
10. Kétsarkú Mozgalom = bipolar movement
    
11. Senki Dala = nobody's song
    

the new shiz

since i bothered to post a list of the new cds and records i bought last week, i might as well tell you what i think about them. these are in the same order i posted them last week.

beck gameboy variations -- this is a fun record with songs made out of gameboy sounds. apparently it is only available in two formats: 12" vinyl and itunes download. i like it, but i would've liked it more if it were instrumental. as it is, this is basically four gameboy remixes of tracks from guero.

mf doom/madlib madvillain -- excellent. the beats are tight, and of course mf doom is one hell of an mc. instead of "skits", this record has tracks that are more like sample cutups, talking about what kinds of supervillains mf doom and madlib are, or how music sounds better when you're "on weed" as jon stewart's character would say in half baked.

handsome boy modeling school white people -- wow, i liked their previous record (so how's your girl?) a lot better. there are some tracks on here that are undeniably catchy and i'm not sorry i bought the record, but several other cuts are mediocre at best, and at least one (the one with vocals by some nu-metal guy) is virtually unlistenable: i couldn't get all the way to end of the track last time i listened.

prefuse 73 surrounded by silence -- i've only listened to this twice, maybe three times, because when i'm listening to records i tend to grab the madvillain first. but this is a good record. it has MCs and other vocalists on it (including beans, members of wu-tang, and more), a significant change from the past few prefuse 73 records. i was a little worried that he might succumb to "cex syndrome" (wherein the production grows less interesting when hip-hop vocals are added, presumably so as not to detract too much from the vox... though i admit i haven't heard cex's maryland mansions so maybe he's overcome that), but i think this record stands up pretty well on its own. and the MCs are pretty good.

drop the lime this means forever -- maybe dropthelime has been spending too much time around hearts of darknesses, because this is another one of those electronic records where the producer suddenly feels obligated to sing. that seems to be a trend these days: electronic musicians start singing, perhaps in order to sound more like "real" musicians. i don't know; i tend to be of the opinion that not only are vocals generally not necessary with electronic music, but that more often than not they actually harm the music: i can't tell you how many "industrial" bands i've heard where i liked the song for the first 8-16 bars, until the vox kicked in and were simply awful. but anyway, even with all the sudden singing (maybe i just didn't know dtl's material as well as i thought and he's always been predisposed to crooning?), this is not a bad record. but it's not a great record either. i really like some of the instrumental breakcore material (some of which was plucked from earlier vinyl releases), and the stuff with vocals is at least okay: sounding somewhere between the industrial "elektro" sound (not to be confused with electro) and hearts of darknesses on less drugs.

doormouse stanley yershonowski presents xylophone jism as the ridiculator -- i believe this was originally going to be released on planet-mu, but then doormouse had a falling out with mike p, so it ended up on donna summer's cock rock disco label. it's good. it sounds like contemporary doormouse: a little jazzy, lots of hard breaks, with some hip-hop and lots of silly samples.

end percussions -- i remember when connie, syntax, and i went to bent crayon in october, there was a really cool cd playing that had that jazzy/loungy/'60s-playboy sound with hyper-cutup beats. one track on the cd i recognized, knowing that i had it on some comp, yet unable to put my finger squarely on its identity. well, i do believe this was the cd. the track i recognized is the first track on the cd. and i think the comp in question was the advanced d&d with donna summer premium cd i got when i donated to wfmu.

beck guero -- i'm not half the beck fan that i was, say, a decade ago, but this is a nice little record. it's kind of a return to the style of mellow gold and odelay.

general patton vs the x-ecutioners -- mike patton and turntablists. it's a good combination. scratching, hip-hop beats, and patton singin' and makin' mouth noise. not as abstract as i might've liked, but good.

venetian snares winnipeg is a frozen shithole -- this is being promoted as the hardest vsnares record in a long time, and that's true: lots of gabber and hard breakcore sounds. it is brutal and punishing in a way that only aaron funk can be. of course it's good; that goes without saying. but it doesn't necessarily hold together as an "album" (which could be because the cd version has 9 tracks and 3 of them are remixes).

venetian snares rossz csillag alatt született -- this record is apparently about pigeons. sonically, it's all about the strings (i'm sure they're really synths, but they sound like beautiful strings)... though those vsnares beats are still there. this is possibly the best vsnares album ever. the arrangements are catchy if not moving, and the beats are wonderfully placed to hype up the emotion in when needed and then cut out for the somber moments. top notch. there's one song on here that makes me feel like flying... i would tell you which one but the track titles all look like nonsense or some odd eastern language.

popus dei

remember last fall, when certain people in the catholic church suggested that john kerry and other pro-choice politicians should be denied communion?

yeah, cardinal ratzinger, our new pope, wrote this:

Regarding the grave sin of abortion or euthanasia, when a person's formal cooperation becomes manifest (understood, in the case of a Catholic politician, as his consistently campaigning and voting for permissive abortion and euthanasia laws), his Pastor should meet with him, instructing him about the Church’s teaching, informing him that he is not to present himself for Holy Communion until he brings to an end the objective situation of sin, and warning him that he will otherwise be denied the Eucharist.

no body of christ for you!

microsoft turns its back on gays

after years of supporting gay rights and gay-friendly policies, apparently microsoft has changed its mind. just read the americablog post on the subject.

popesquatting

this guy is one of my authors. i've edited at least 2-3 of his books.

Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger of Germany is not the only person to value the papal moniker Benedict XVI.

A St. Augustine, Fla., man, Rogers Cadenhead, registered the address BenedictXVI.com on April 1, hoping that would be the name of John Paul II's successor. To cover his bases, Cadenhead, 38, also registered ClementXV.com, InnocentXIV.com, LeoXIV.com, PaulVII.com and PiusXIII.com.

Benedict XVI was the name picked by the new pope, Joseph Ratzinger.

Cadenhead, an author of 20 technology how-to books with titles such as "Movable Type 3 Bible Desktop Edition" and "Teach Yourself Java in 21 Days," said he registered the names for $12 each from Internet address seller BulkRegister LLC.

"I couldn't resist the chance to have some skin in the game. Someone else already has JohnPaulIII.com and JohnXXIV.com, but otherwise I put a chip down on every name of the past three centuries," Cadenhead wrote on his Web log at www.cadenhead.org.
For nearly as long as Internet addresses have been sold, speculators -- sometimes called cyber-squatters -- have bought attractive addresses with the hopes of either selling them to the highest bidder or using them to snag visits from unsuspecting Internet users.

BenedictXVI.com links to Cadenhead's blog. Reached on his cell phone, he said visits to the site started rolling in at a rate of about 100 per minute after the pope's new name was announced.

Cadenhead describes himself as a "lapsed Catholic" and "domain name geek" who bought up the domains after doing a little online research into papal naming conventions. "I really thought that especially if Cardinal Ratzinger was chosen, that he'd be very likely to go back to the papal playbook and choose one of these traditional names," Cadenhead said.

i'm not a big fan of cybersquatting, but as long as cadenhead isn't trying to extort money out of this, it's probably innocent enough. or maybe it's Pope Innocent enough. at any rate, i don't think i have a problem with registering these kinds of domains, as long as you're not doing it to bilk others out of money. that is unethical.

A 1999 U.S. law made it illegal to register an Internet domain name with the intention of extorting money out of a trademark owner. But that does not prevent someone like Cadenhead from owning an Internet address associated with a famous person's name, said Wendy Seltzer, an attorney at the San Francisco-based Electronic Frontier Foundation.

She said owning such domains is permissible "if you share that name . . . if you're creating a noncommercial message or fan site around that name or . . . if you're using it for an unrelated purpose [where] the name also makes sense, but not to gouge money out of the celebrity."

...

BenedictXVI.com is not Cadenhead's first celebrity domain purchase. In 1998, he bought Drudge.com in response to the rising popularity of the Drudge Report (www.drudgereport.com), an Internet gossip and news site. He still runs the "Drudge Retort" site as a liberal response to its enormously popular namesake.

Cadenhead said he hasn't decided what he will do with the Benedict domain, but he vowed he will not pawn it off to the highest bidder.

"Whatever decision I make will be guided by the desire not to make 1.5 billion people mad at me . . . including my grandmother," he said.

haha... i hadn't been to the drudge retort before...

censor-me elmo

yesterday congress passed the family entertainment and copyright act, which hollywood both loves and hates. hollywood likes parts of the bill for it's "antipiracy" provisions. though there seems to be some confusion about that portion:

The less controversial aspects of the bill, which makes it a federal crime to use video cameras to record films in movie theaters, did not command as much debate. The Act sets tough penalties of up to 10 years in prison for anyone caught distributing a movie or song prior to its commercial release. Moviegoers caught using video cameras in theaters would face up to three years in prison for a first offense and up to six years for later arrests.

10 years for leaking a song or movie? 3-6 years for videotaping a movie? those are some harsh penalties... but what does the previously linked sf chronicle say about this?

The bill also makes it a federal offense to use a video camera to record movies in a theater, punishable by up to 10 years in prison. It also allows the record industry to seek damages against a person who releases a music CD before its official release.

someone is confused... so which offense is punishable by up to 10 years?

but let's move on. 3-10 years is ridiculously, insanely harsh for leaking a song on the net, but sneaking a video camera into a movie theater is not a very defensible act. though 3-10 years is still mind-bogglingly harsh, even for that.

anyway, hollywood was dead-set against another provision of the bill: one that allows censorship technology inside dvd players. now, if you choose, it is totally legal to buy a dvd player that turns any dvd you want into the equivalent of pallies, edited for television... funk you, you mother-father!

[T]he bill is designed to nullify a lawsuit filed by eight movie studios and a directors' association against ClearPlay Inc., a small Utah technology startup that wants to sell home DVD players that can automatically filter objectionable material from prerecorded DVD movies.

Entrepreneurs were heartened by the bill's passage.

"It shouldn't be possible that big companies with big pockets can kill industries they don't like," said Bill Aho, ClearPlay's chief executive officer.

i'm a bit torn here. on one hand, it's almost impossible not to see this kind of thing as a blow against art. movies that are "edited for content" are truly the bane of film lovers everywhere, whether it's edited for television or whether the studios force the director to cut out content so it can earn a specific rating. you're not watching the real movie, but some limp, spayed version of it. so the practice, even the concept, of a self-censoring dvd player somewhat disgusts me. if you don't want to watch explicit content, it's easy: don't watch explicit content!

at the same time, legally i don't think there's any reason why such an item shouldn't be available. i totally agree with the bill aho quote above. the MPAA and pals are big bullies who try to smash anything they don't like. emasculating movies in this fashion might be somewhat offensive... it might be the utter desecration of the filmmaker's vision... but those aren't good legal reasons to hold back the tech. so hollywood resorts to the old "copyright violation" argument... using such a device creates a "derivative work" and only the author has the right to create derivative works. this is of course total bullshit, but it is also the way copyright law is defined these days. congress apparently didn't buy the bullshit this time. and they definitely didn't buy this bullshit, which is my nomination for "specious argument of the year":

"These days, I don't think anyone would even consider buying a DVD player that doesn't come with a remote control," said Rep. Lamar Smith, R-Texas, who authored the provision.

"Yet there are some who would deny parents the right to use the equivalent electronic device that would protect their children from sex, violence and profanity in movies watched at home."

a censorship-enabled dvd player is "equivalent" to a remote control?!? congressman, dvd players already have a feature that is equivalent to a remote control. it's called a remote control.

pope benedict xvi

the next pope has been chosen.

Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger of Germany, a hard-line guardian of conservative doctrine, was elected the new pope Tuesday evening in the first conclave of the new millennium. He chose the name Pope Benedict XVI and called himself "a simple, humble worker."

those of us who were that a new pope might have more rational views on important sexual and reproductive issues (condoms, for example) will have to wait for the next pope, it seems:

Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, whose strong defence of Catholic orthodoxy has earned him a variety of sobriquets — including “the enforcer”, “the panzer cardinal” and “God’s rottweiler” — is expected to poll around 40 votes in the first ballot as conservatives rally behind him.

he has a bit of a checkered past, as well:

In 1937 Ratzinger’s father retired and the family moved to Traunstein, a staunchly Catholic town in Bavaria close to the Führer’s mountain retreat in Berchtesgaden. He joined the Hitler Youth aged 14, shortly after membership was made compulsory in 1941.

He quickly won a dispensation on account of his training at a seminary. “Ratzinger was only briefly a member of the Hitler Youth and not an enthusiastic one,” concluded John Allen, his biographer.

Two years later Ratzinger was enrolled in an anti-aircraft unit that protected a BMW factory making aircraft engines. The workforce included slaves from Dachau concentration camp.

Ratzinger has insisted he never took part in combat or fired a shot — adding that his gun was not even loaded — because of a badly infected finger. He was sent to Hungary, where he set up tank traps and saw Jews being herded to death camps. He deserted in April 1944 and spent a few weeks in a prisoner of war camp.

He has since said that although he was opposed to the Nazi regime, any open resistance would have been futile — comments echoed this weekend by his elder brother Georg, a retired priest ordained along with the cardinal in 1951.

sure, like it says, membership in the hitler youth was compulsory... it's not like he enlisted or anything. and if he later deserted, then obviously he wasn't an enthusiastic one, as his biographer says. but still, instead of open resistance to the nazi regime, he chose silent complicity.

he's also a member of opus dei, a secretive, arch-conservative organization that some people say is downright cult-like.

so catholics, no condoms for you.

stand up for your mp3. right?

this week's mp3 of the week is called "stAllio! vs ludacris" and it's a remix of the track "stand up" by ludacris. it's all glitched out and stuff. i like it.

recovery

all data from animalswithinanimals.com that was lost in the server crash is now back up... with the exception of any pictures that were posted to the bobby vomit blawg in the past week or so. i don't have those images; hopefully mr vomit still has them on his hard drive and can repost them. (i think that only one pic was lost: the photo of the guitar-turntables that he's working on. but my memory could be faulty.)

the important lesson here is always keep a copy of your website. i have pretty much this whole site (except for the blogger parts) on my hard drive, so recovering the lost content wasn't too difficult. (blogger stores all blog posts on its own servers, separate from where you publish the blog, as i suspect most blogging services do, so recovering the blogs is also easy.)

the new mp3 of the week will be announced within the next couple hours (the mp3 is already online, but i haven't done my writeup for it yet).

hiccup

big server belch this weekend... the site was down for awhile and when it came back, it was at least a week out of date.

the new server is dead. long live the old server.

we were told that the new server had a defective part. so we're back on the old server again until the new one is replaced. luckily, thanks to blogger etc, i have backups of my lost data. not everyone was quite so lucky. if you're reading this, the blog has been recovered. but the mp3 of the week is now out of date... it's reverted to the week before last.

tonight, i'll put up the new mp3 for this week. and last week's will go back up. but i can't fix that until i go home tonight.

deadnecks

syntax points us to dontshootthecat.com, a blog set up to cover the wisconsin cat-shooting issue. lots of links there. for example, more about the wisc conservation congress:

[...]the Wisconsin Conservation Congress was established in 1934 as an avenue for public input and exchange concerning conservation issues. In 1972, the congress was authorized by State Statute (15.348) to be an official advisory body on matters that come before the Natural Resources Board.

The Conservation Congress is an independent organization of Wisconsin citizens elected by county to serve on the congress. County delegates serve on committees and work through an established process to decide which advisory questions introduced at the county level should advance to become statewide proposals the next year.

the governor of wisconsin states unequivocably that this thing isn't going to pass:

"I don't think Wisconsin should become known as a state where we shoot cats," said [Gov. Jim] Doyle, a Democrat who neither hunts nor owns a cat. "What it does is sort of hold us up as a state that everybody is kind of laughing at right now."
...
Doyle said he respects the Conservation Congress but "on this one I think everybody recognizes it's not going anywhere."

that's it exactly: the issue makes wisconsin into a laughing stock. for example, here's the definition of "deadnecks":

Readers from all over the nation were burning up chat rooms and message boards, flabbergasted that the idea even came to light. At the Journal, we received dozens of e-mails.

"I believe it's about time that we have an open season on 'Deadnecks,' one reader wrote. "For those not familiar with these dangerous creatures they are a carnivorous animal that feeds on anything it can shoot, hook, stab, hit and run over with a pick-up, or otherwise kill for sport and/or food. They are indigenous to northern states of the North American continent.

"Deadnecks get their name due to the lack of brain activity that goes on between their ears (i.e. dead from the neck up). They don't seem to be able to put together any thoughts that make any sense to any other civilized human being. It is said that the next intelligent thought a Deadneck has will be his/her first."

so it looks like there won't be any legalized cat-shooting in wisconsin anytime soon. but i still have to wonder about wisconsin and south dakota... what are their standards for what is a "feral" cat? i know i'll be sure to find out before i ever take my cat into either state.

they shoot cats, don't they?

wisconsin wants to pass a new law that would allow people to kill cats. when i first heard about it, i assumed that obviously they must be talking about mountain lions or pumas or some sort of huge cats that they consider dangerous: similar to how people out west freak out about coyotes and wild bears. of course, my answer to that would be you morons, you move into the animals' land and take it over, and you get upset because the animals didn't magically disappear? but i would be wrong there, because the proposed law isn't about killing big cats: it's about killing small, domesticated cats: housecats. fortunately, even if it passes, it isn't going into effect right away:

There will not be an open season on feral cats, no matter the results of Monday's vote at Wisconsin Conservation Congress meetings around the state.

Department of Natural Resources Secretary Scott Hassett said there are too many unanswered questions and problems associated with killing stray cats.

Statewide results were tallied Tuesday. Overall, Wisconsin residents supported a controversial plan that would allow hunters to take out wild felines that kill birds and other small mammals. Residents voted 6,830 to 5,201 for the plan. DNR officials said the plan passed in 51 counties, failed in 20, and tied in one.

The question asked residents in all 72 counties whether the state should classify free-roaming cats as an unprotected species. That would allow hunters to kill them at will.

i'm a bit confused what the dnr is actually saying here... simply that the plan hasn't passed yet? or that even if they try to pass the plan, dnr won't let them? i'm confused, especially by the wording of this paragraph:

If enough Wisconsin counties had voted yes on the advisory proposal, the issue could have been brought back next spring as an "action item." If passed then, it could have given the DNR permission to enact it. At least two upper Midwestern states, South Dakota and Minnesota, have allowed wild cats to be shot for decades, just like skunks or gophers.

all that "if they would have" wording suggests that the vote did not pass (though the numbers suggest it did).

speaking of "the numbers", the way this article talks about how "residents" voted, you would think wisonsin had a statewide election on cat-killing, and that only 12,000 people came to the polls. you must check local6's past coverage for a clear explanation that people had to go to their local county meeting of some organization called the "wisconsin conservation congress" in order to actually vote on the issue.

now, you couldn't just shoot any cat: you can't go into someone's house and execute their calico. the plan would only allow people to shoot strays, or "feral" cats. so what determines whether a cat is feral?

[Mark] Smith [a La Cross firefighter who proposed the plan] proposed that the state should classify wild cats as an unprotected species. The proposal defined such cats as those not under the owner's direct control or wandering by themselves without a collar.

clearly mr smith doesn't know much about cats if he thinks "having no collar" indicates that a cat is a stray. i know a lot of cat owners (and a lot of cats), and most of those cats don't wear collars. why not? because cats don't like collars and they tend to be agile and flexible enough to squirm out of their collars should anyone try to make them wear one. keeping a cat under your "direct control" is not exactly easy, either.

so yeah, non-feral cats without collars get outside all the time. my cat doesn't wear a collar; we try to keep him inside, but sometimes he manages to slip by someone, or even to open the back door by himself. and once he's out, he disappears for a few hours. i know he can take care of himself, so i try not to get too worried when this happens, but i can't help it. after all, he's a sick kitty (FeLV+), and if he gets outside and scraps with other cats, he can get even sicker.

if i lived somewhere like south dakota or minnesota, i would also have to worry about some asshole with a hunting rifle shooting him, too. while i'm normally very nonviolent, if someone fucking shot my cat, i would be tempted to get a gun of my own and return the favor.

have bribe, will travel

remember last year when kerry would criticize bush for "outsourcing the hunt for bin laden"? turns out he was right, and that "outsourcing" is responsible for bin laden still being on the loose today.

The head of the German intelligence agency, in an interview published here Tuesday, said Osama bin Laden had been able to elude capture after the American invasion of Afghanistan by paying bribes to the Afghan militias delegated the task of finding him.

"The principal mistake was made already in 2001, when one wanted bin Laden to be apprehended by the Afghan militias in Tora Bora," the intelligence official, August Hanning, said in an interview with the German business newspaper Handelsblatt.

"There, bin Laden could buy himself free with a lot of money," Mr. Hanning said.

A spokeswoman for Mr. Hanning confirmed the accuracy of the newspaper's account. She said Afghan forces had told Mr. bin Laden they knew his whereabouts and he would be arrested, but they allowed him safe passage in exchange for a bribe.

In the past, other officials - including Gen. Tommy R. Franks, the former American commander in Afghanistan - have acknowledged that Afghan militias who fought on the side of the invasion coalition had allowed leaders of Al Qaeda and the Taliban to get away. But Mr. Hanning is the top intelligence official to say Mr. bin Laden was among them.

can't we all just get along?

cameras are a protester's friend. at least, when the protesters have the cameras. when the cops have the cameras, they aren't always so beneficial.

Dennis Kyne put up such a fight at a political protest last summer, the arresting officer recalled, it took four police officers to haul him down the steps of the New York Public Library and across Fifth Avenue.

"We picked him up and we carried him while he squirmed and screamed," the officer, Matthew Wohl, testified in December. "I had one of his legs because he was kicking and refusing to walk on his own."

Accused of inciting a riot and resisting arrest, Mr. Kyne was the first of the 1,806 people arrested in New York last summer during the Republican National Convention to take his case to a jury. But one day after Officer Wohl testified, and before the defense called a single witness, the prosecutor abruptly dropped all charges.

During a recess, the defense had brought new information to the prosecutor. A videotape shot by a documentary filmmaker showed Mr. Kyne agitated but plainly walking under his own power down the library steps, contradicting the vivid account of Officer Wohl, who was nowhere to be seen in the pictures. Nor was the officer seen taking part in the arrests of four other people at the library against whom he signed complaints.

it's hardly a complaint that standard operating procedure for police at protests is to aggressively confront the protesters, herd them into tiny areas, arrest them by the hundreds for no particular reason, and beat the shit out of them if they resist too much. and it's nice to see that many of these rnc protesters are being exonerated. but i still must wonder how many millions of dollars have been wasted on these unnecessary trials... not just all that govt money, but the money the protesters must spend on their defense against their wrongful arrests.

Seven months after the convention at Madison Square Garden, criminal charges have fallen against all but a handful of people arrested that week. Of the 1,670 cases that have run their full course, 91 percent ended with the charges dismissed or with a verdict of not guilty after trial. Many were dropped without any finding of wrongdoing, but also without any serious inquiry into the circumstances of the arrests, with the Manhattan district attorney's office agreeing that the cases should be "adjourned in contemplation of dismissal."

So far, 162 defendants have either pleaded guilty or were convicted after trial, and videotapes that bolstered the prosecution's case played a role in at least some of those cases, although prosecutors could not provide details.

emphasis mine. now that digital video technology is getting affordable, more people are buying it... they're taking their cams into the street during protests, and documenting police harrassment. i'm a bit skeptical of the next paragraph, though:

Besides offering little support or actually undercutting the prosecution of most of the people arrested, the videotapes also highlight another substantial piece of the historical record: the Police Department's tactics in controlling the demonstrations, parades and rallies of hundreds of thousands of people were largely free of explicit violence.

now, the times does not offer any actual evidence that the tactics "were largely free of explicit violence", only statements from city and police officials. and of course, a police spokesman isn't going to say "yeah, we beat the fuck out of a bunch of those people."

and even assuming that it was "largely" free of "explicit" violence (meaning there was still some amount of explicit violence, and god knows how much non-explicit violence), i would have to say that if only 9% of the people you arrest actually get convicted of something, then clearly the police are abusing their powers and are wrongfully arresting tons of people. whether those arrestees are getting bruised or not is almost irrelevant: their rights are still being abridged, they're still stuck wallowing in jail, and they still have to pay bail, court fees, and so on. and we know that the police have edited at least one video, though the claim it was a mistake:

Video is a useful source of evidence, but not an easy one to manage, because of the difficulties in finding a fleeting image in hundreds of hours of tape. Moreover, many of the tapes lack index and time markings, so cuts in the tape are not immediately apparent.

That was a problem in the case of Mr. Dunlop, who learned that his tape had been altered only after Ms. Clancy found another version of the same tape. Mr. Dunlop had been accused of pushing his bicycle into a line of police officers on the Lower East Side and of resisting arrest, but the deleted parts of the tape show him calmly approaching the police line, and later submitting to arrest without apparent incident.

A spokeswoman for the district attorney, Barbara Thompson, said the material had been cut by a technician in the prosecutor's office. "It was our mistake," she said. "The assistant district attorney wanted to include that portion" because she initially believed that it supported the charges against Mr. Dunlop. Later, however, the arresting officer, who does not appear on the video, was no longer sure of the specifics in the complaint against Mr. Dunlop.

and i also have to wonder how many more cameras were out there that were confiscated by police.

stop here for critical mp3

the new mp3 of the week is called "critical stop". it's a little mini-databent track i made during the "true data" sessions. it's not even 2 minutes long, but they're two good minutes. check it out.

new purchases

i realized recently that i hadn't been inside a record store in months (perhaps since october!), and it had possibly been even longer since i'd been inside one in my own home town. so today i decided to slurge and make a trip to indy cd and vinyl, my favorite local shop.

here's what i picked up (obviously i haven't gotten to listen to much of this yet)

vinyl
beck gameboy variations
mf doom/madlib madvillain
handsome boy modeling school white people
prefuse 73 surrounded by silence

cd
drop the lime this means forever
doormouse stanley yershonowski presents xylophone jism as the ridiculator
end percussions
beck guero
general patton vs the x-ecutioners
venetian snares winnipeg is a frozen shithole
venetian snares rossz csillag alatt született

then i went to target to get a vcr head cleaner (my vcr could really use it), and i ended up buying a few dvds... saved!, ren & stimpy first and second seasons uncut, and ghost in the shell ii: innocence. i also bought some boxers and a belt.