Michelle’s got a movie you should watch

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From my friend (and Mobile native) Michelle Richmond’s blog, in a post about a documentary film making the rounds called The Order of Myths, about (the original) Mardis Gras in Mobile:

In The Moviegoer, Walker Percy’s classic novel about searching and longing in Louisiana, Binx Bolling, himself a less-than-enthusiastic participant in the better-known Mardi Gras of New Orleans, says that to see one’s own city on the big screen is, in a way, to have one’s own place and time validated, made real. I’m a long way from Alabama. It’s fair to say that, for a long time, I have not considered it home. In one of the stories in my first book, The Girl in the Fall-Away Dress, the narrator, Gracie, who has also left Mobile, remarks on how ill-at-ease she feels every time she returns there: “Some Mobilians don’t know that the party has long-since ended, clinging hard-heartedly to the notion that the Confederates won the war.” I was 25 years old when I wrote that, close enough to home to despise it, too young to understand the subtler nuances that Brown captures in The Order of Myths. This is a film for Southerners who’ve left home, and for those who have stayed, and for anyone who wants to reach a deeper understanding of a place and a culture that has been by turns mocked and mythologized for decades.

There’s a trailer.

No surprise here

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A year after taking their ball(s) and going home, NBC Universal programming is once again available in iTunes. Turns out they need Apple more than Apple needs them. No surprise there; making it hard for your customers to see your programs they way they want to see them is never a good plan; NBC’s bullheadedness here certainly sent Heathen to the Torrents to catch up on Battlestar last year, after they foolishly pulled the show from iTunes without having DVDs in the channel.

Yuck.

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Jesus Fuck, Nicky, what the hell was that? You beat the everliving tar out of #9 Clemson, and then look like a goddamn AA squad against a non-conference private school like Tulane that’s presumably hampered by actual admissions requirements? You go three entire quarters against their D without an offensive TD? Sure, the punt return team bagged two in the first half, but special teams points shouldn’t be the backbone of your offense, dude. ESPN used words like “listless” to describe the Tide on Saturday, and that’s being KIND. 172 total yards (to Tulane’s 318), four allowed sacks, and two — TWO! — missed field goals will NOT make the faithful happy about your gold-plated contract, Nicky.

Good Christ. A win is a win, but the Alabama-Tulane game was a fucking embarrassment in every other way that mattered. I’m frankly shocked the Tide didn’t drop in the rankings this week, instead of rising (2 spots, to 11 — HA! — in AP; only one notch in USAT, to 16). Good thing Saban’s got another non-con next Saturday before the big Georgia game. Some folks need some ass whippin’ at practice these two weeks.

Speaking of which: Georgia’s still only number 2, behind perennially-fellated USC despite the fact that the Trojans were OFF this week while Georgia played. At least the pollsters are split; Georgia got 23 first place votes to USC’s 33 in the AP poll. Ohio State drifts south this week on the “strength” of their weak win over Ohio, and in the final shakeup it turns out the AP and USAT agree on the top ten: USC, UGa, Oklahoma, UF, OSU, Missouri (ha!), LSU, Texas, Auburn, and Wisconsin.

Oh, and the fucking Irish won their opener. Ick.

Our Hero This Week

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Carl Malamud. Who is he? He’s the guy who is, essentially, daring states to try to assert copyright over their laws.

Yeah, read that again. Some states are actually claiming that their laws are copyrighted, and that reproducing them without permission — and without paying the state! — is a violation of copyright law. Obviously, this is a terrible idea — the states should instead be making it as easy as possible for citizens to read the laws that govern them. So Mr Malamud is publishing them online via scanned copies for any and all to read, download, print, etc., for free.

And he’s hoping very much that his home state sues.

The Party of Hate

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Check out what Doug Rushkoff has to say about the RNC’s week-long Two Minutes Hate, and about Giuliani’s speech in particular.

Last night, the Republican Convention made it clear they prefer war. They see the world as a dangerous and terrible place. Like the fascist leaders satirized in Starship Troopers, they say they believe it is better to be on the offensive, taking the war to the people who might wish us harm than playing defense. It is better to be an international aggressor – a bulldog with lipstick – than led by the misguided notion that attacking people itself makes the world a more dangerous place.

And more:

Republican party representatives are proud today that their convention has finally produced the “same level of energy and enthusiasm” as the DNC’s last week. And while it may have produced the same level of excitement, the excitement was of a very different character. It’s much easier to get people riled up but inviting them to hate a man – particularly one who they haven’t been allowed to hate for traditional reasons. Giuliani’s job – much like his job as mayor of NYC – was to give the Republicans in attendance permission to hate Obama and the potentially intelligent society he represents. It’s not about city vs. country or educated vs. military. It’s about thought vs. violence.

Where the DNC’s show talked about policy, and about what we can accomplish together — which is what “government” is supposed to be in a Democracy — the GOP took another path.

Dept. of Bollocks

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We reckon the pollsters are just tired of the ongoing SEC dominance, and as a consequence voted their wishes instead of their consciences this week: After a pair of blowout wins, somehow USC is magically ranked at 1, ahead of Georgia. In the preseason poll, the perennially-overrated Trojans were stuck at #3 (AP, behind Georgia and Ohio State, who also has no business that high) or #2 (ESPN, just behind UGa).

Actually, we’re being a little sarcastic; both Georgia and Ohio State played creampuff non-BCS teams, while USC played a BCS creampuff (ACC’s Virginia, who we suppose does have a football team — but a 52-7 win, how “quality” can they be?). So we guess there’s at least some logic. What DEFIES logic is that some of the pollsters are still voting for Ohio State as number one. WTF, people? Anyway, Georgia will likely move up as their “real” schedule picks up and they play more quality opponents (including a 4-week run of Spurrier’s Gamecocks followed by 3 ranked teams starting on 9/13). Their slate is as tough as anybody’s, given that they have to play in the SEC.

In other news, Alabama jumps mightily on the strength of the Clemson win: USAToday has them at 17 and the AP at 13. Clemson drops off the AP, and clings to 22 on the USAT. (Clemson and Illinois are the only 0-1 squads on the rankings.)

Look for NickyLou to bag the next two easily, hopefully: he meets Tulane and Western Kentucky in the next two weeks before opening the conference schedule against Arkansas a week after that. With a little look and more SabanSauce, the Tide could be 4-0 going into the Georgia game on the 27th. Kentucky and Mississippi follow with what ought to be gimmes before Tennessee (usually anybody’s game, but the Tide is waxing while Fulmer’s Vols wane), another should-be-easy with Arkansas State, and then the big LSU game on 11/8, more than 2 months away.

Bruce Nails TSA — AGAIN

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In an LA Times op-ed, security expert Bruce Schneier rips the TSA a new one over the ID rules:

[T]he photo ID requirement is a joke. Anyone on the no-fly list can easily fly whenever he wants. Even worse, the whole concept of matching passenger names against a list of bad guys has negligible security value.

How to fly, even if you are on the no-fly list: Buy a ticket in some innocent person’s name. At home, before your flight, check in online and print out your boarding pass. Then, save that web page as a PDF and use Adobe Acrobat to change the name on the boarding pass to your own. Print it again. At the airport, use the fake boarding pass and your valid ID to get through security. At the gate, use the real boarding pass in the fake name to board your flight.

[…]

This vulnerability isn’t new. It isn’t even subtle. I first wrote about it in 2006. I asked Kip Hawley, who runs the TSA, about it in 2007. Today, any terrorist smart enough to Google “print your own boarding pass” can bypass the no-fly list.

This gaping security hole would bother me more if the very idea of a no-fly list weren’t so ineffective. The system is based on the faulty notion that the feds have this master list of terrorists, and all we have to do is keep the people on the list off the planes.

That’s just not true. The no-fly list — a list of people so dangerous they are not allowed to fly yet so innocent we can’t arrest them — and the less dangerous “watch list” contain a combined 1 million names representing the identities and aliases of an estimated 400,000 people. There aren’t that many terrorists out there; if there were, we would be feeling their effects.

Almost all of the people stopped by the no-fly list are false positives.

[…]

In the end, the photo ID requirement is based on the myth that we can somehow correlate identity with intent. We can’t. And instead of wasting money trying, we would be far safer as a nation if we invested in intelligence, investigation and emergency response — security measures that aren’t based on a guess about a terrorist target or tactic.

That’s the TSA: Not doing the right things. Not even doing right the things it does.

Needless to say, the TSA has no intelligent answer to any of this. Their usual angle is “trust us; we know what we’re doing.” Frankly, we’ve never seen any evidence that’s true.

Twitter Treasure

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A triptych of beauty from Merlin Mann:

Howlin’ Wolf sounds like everything that scared America in the 50s, except Russians, jews, and vaginas.

I’d enjoy a cable series where fictionalized Howlin’ Wolf, Capt. Beefheart, and Tom Waits live in a van and solve crimes. Maybe w/a monkey.

Oh, also? They’d have a band. And at the end of each episode, they’d sing a really weird song about morals and staying in school. Obviously.

Police State in Minneapolis

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They’re rounding up suspected protesters in advance of the Republican convention. Near as we can recall, this isn’t actually illegal.

Protesters here in Minneapolis have been targeted by a series of highly intimidating, sweeping police raids across the city, involving teams of 25-30 officers in riot gear, with semi-automatic weapons drawn, entering homes of those suspected of planning protests, handcuffing and forcing them to lay on the floor, while law enforcement officers searched the homes, seizing computers, journals, and political pamphlets. Last night, members of the St. Paul police department and the Ramsey County sheriff’s department handcuffed, photographed and detained dozens of people meeting at a public venue to plan a demonstration, charging them with no crime other than “fire code violations,” and early this morning, the Sheriff’s department sent teams of officers into at least four Minneapolis area homes where suspected protesters were staying.

This is obscene. Some heads need to roll over this.

Clemson Who?

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The Tide put a full-sized SEC hurtin’ on #9 Clemson tonight, to the tune of 34 to 10, and it wasn’t even that close; the Tide held the ball for over 41 minutes, and outproduced the Tigers 419 to 188 yards (all in the air; Clemson had 1 rushing yard). The Tide blew two early scoring opps, settling for field goals when John Parker Wilson couldn’t connect even without meaningful Clemson resistance in his first two possessions. Quoth Bowden the Younger, “they outplayed us on both sides of the ball.” Clemson was completely unprepared for SEC speed and toughness.

To be fair, though, Clemson is just Clemson. They lost to Maryland and BC last year, for crying out loud. This #9-ranking is preseason bullshit, even if knocking them off it does fuel Tide passions. The Alabama faithful should remember that Clemson hasn’t beaten UA in 12 straight meetings, even if the last one was a 56-0 shellacking back when Bear ran the show (1975). Alabama gets a couple easy weeks before the next “real” game — next are unranked Tulane and Western Kentucky, followed by freshly Nuttless Arkansas on 9/20 before a big show in Athens against currently #1 Georgia. Let’s hope Nicky Lou can keep it together, and keep this win from going to his young team’s head.

More to come. Inshallah.

Buchanan on Obama

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This is really amazing. Buchanan — somewhere to the right of Mussolini, typically — is over the friggin MOON about Obama’s speech; quoth Keith Olberman: “We had to stop PB gushing over Obama’s speech for the sake of time. Perhaps that will tell you the story better than anything else we can say.” Word.

Direct link.

Again with Barack

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We sort of wondered if this clearly very gifted speaker could top his race speech, or his stage-setting winner from the 2004 convention. That was misplaced worry; even Pat Buchanan seems to think Obama’s was the best convention speech ever, and GOP street-fighter Alex Castellanos’ reaction ends with “whoever didn’t get picked for Republican VP today may be a lucky Republican.”

Your lips to God’s ears, Alex.

True.

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Online acquaintance JeffreyP has this to say about airline fees:

If it’s really the case that airlines can’t make money in the current environment without resorting to these pricing practices, how come Southwest, one of the most consistently profitable airlines in the country, doesn’t charge anything to check a second bag? And how is it that Continental can possibly get away with serving free meals on its flights?

Also: Fifty bucks to check a second bag, Delta? Seriously? Seven bucks for a fruit plate, Northwest? You guys are douches.

Tacking on all these little charges is cheesy. It’s yet another thing (in addition to abusive airport security and interminable delays) that makes me not want to fly at all. Anytime you can’t express the price of something in a sentence or less, there’s nearly always something predatory and possibly crooked going on. Anytime you can’t express the price of something in a sentence or less, there’s nearly always something predatory and possibly crooked going on.

Totally brutal. And probably also true.

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This bit from the WaPo almost certainly sums up The Clone Wars better than anything else:

Lucas fulfills his lifelong dream of completely dehumanizing his space opera, replacing it with a digitally animated style that is somewhere between cartoons, Christmas specials and panoramic paintings on the side of a van. One thing is definitely intact from the most recent prequel episodes: From the first frame, all but the learned geeks in the audience won’t know what the heck is going on. Obi-Wan Kenobi and Anakin Skywalker (celebrity voices impersonated) are in the midst of the legendary and pointless Clone Wars, the battles of which seem to transpire on either Planet Marriott Airport or Planet Phallic Symbol.

Zap! Pow! What’s? Boom! Happening? But wait: Now Yoda has ordered our heroes (accompanied by their inappropriately dressed teenage Jedi summer intern, Ahsoka Tano) to help rescue the kidnapped toddler of Jabba the Hutt. That’s right: There’s a Baby the Hutt. I’d go on explaining “Star Wars: The Clone Wars,” but you’d think I was high.

Omnibus Picture Post

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So, lots of Flickrism; in rough chron order:

Obviously, I’m still finding my feet with the 50, but it’s still awful cool to be able to shoot indoors with no flash.

Posted in Pix

Dead Man Walking

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Palm has released its new Treo Pro, which turns out to be just another Treo-running-Windows (not Palm OS), with few if any new features, and a marginally slicker case.

However, the real fun comes with this tidbit: It’s being released without a carrier partner and is therefore unsubsidized; it costs $549, or hundreds more than virtually any competitor from Blackberry or Microsoft or Apple (remember, the 3G iPhone is $199). Sure, it’s unlocked as a consequence of this, but this means precisely squat to 95% of the cell-buying public.

Not quite as dumb as the famously-aborted Foleo, but awful close. Somebody put a bullet in these guys; they’re done.

Once again, Microsoft sets new standards in user-hostility

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The primary Heathen machine developed a hardware fault, so I’m working on a backup and was, until about an hour ago, happy using webmail for both personal and work stuff. Our work tool is Exchange, which means the webmail is Outlook Web Access (OWA). OWA is, generally, not awful, but I just ran into some pretty annoying shit.

One of our products uses an Access database to store some data. A client’s having a problem today, so they sent me their DB so I can try to track down the issue. No worries, right? You’d think that, but…

It turns out OWA blocks Access files as “potentially unsafe.” There appears to be no way to convince OWA to allow those files through. “Oh well,” I thought, “I’ll just set up an IMAP account.” IMAP is easy and simple and means my mail won’t get out of sync despite using multiple computers. For the sake of variety and education, I decided I’d try Entourage, Microsoft’s Mac-side Outlook-like thingy.

Setup was easy, but it took about 2 minutes before I wanted to strangle someone.

It turns out Entourage won’t let me have the database files, either. The help file says:

An attachment to a message was blocked.

Cause: For security reasons, Entourage blocks attachments that could potentially harm your computer.

  • Solution: If you do not trust that the attachment is safe, delete it from your computer.
  • Solution: If you trust the message sender and want to receive the attachment, ask the sender to compress the file and then send it to you again.

Whisky. Tango. Foxtrot. MS is now fixing their absurdly broken OS’s security problems by crippling their mail programs. Delightful.

More

I did a bit more digging. It turns out that, if you Google long enough there is a way to disable this nanny feature, but it involves changing a .plist file inside the Entourage bundle in /Applications. It’s totally absurd to put editable settings in /Applications, but never mind that. (Also, this little “feature” is yet another example of how Microsoft is actually not interested in selling software that appeals to users; it’s interested in selling software that appeals to administrators, but what ever.) What’s even more fun is that the list of verboten filetypes is dominated with extensions that are meaningless in the Macintosh context. I can click all day on an EXE file, but it’s not going to run on OSX, so there’s little point in keeping me from downloading it. On the other hand, Office files can and do carry destructive payloads, but .DOC isn’t on the list. Yay Redmond!

Things that aren’t clever

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The Olympics video site is built such that it will only work on Intel Macs, not PowerPC Macs.

Based on my understanding of building Mac software, doing this means they made a choice to deliberately exclude the PPC machines (and there are still millions out there; Macs have long useful lives — Mrs Heathen’s laptop, for example, is one) when compiling the software. Apple’s build tools create so-called Universal binaries by default that work on both architectures. Someone at NBC or the Olympics is basically just being an asshole.

That much, at least, is clear

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Blockbuster CEO Jim Keyes: “I’ve been frankly confused by this fascination that everybody has with Netflix.”

Even better is Keyes on library size: “I don’t care how many movies are available to me. As my personal taste as a customer, I want to watch the new stuff so whether we have 10,000 movies or 200 movies doesn’t matter if I don’t want to see any of the movies that we have . . . our assortment is heavily weighted toward newer releases and mainstream staple titles.”

It Begins: SabanWatch 2008

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We had big fun with the PointsPerMillion jabs last year, but we’re putting it aside this time around in favor of sheer unadulterated partisanship; after all, they’re not spending any of OUR money — Chief Heathen attended UA on a scholarship surplus, and we’ve never bothered to give them one thin dime in the interim. We’d just like to see ’em win, given that they’re paving NickyLou’s driveway with gold anyway.

The Tide are ranked low (#24 AP, unranked USA) in the preseason, which isn’t at all unfair given the 2007 record (7-6, 4-4 conf). So here it is:

  • 8/30 Clemson (#9) in Atlanta (ABC)
  • 9/6 Tulane
  • 9/13 Western Kentucky
  • 9/20 @ Arkansas
  • 9/27 @ Georgia (#1)
  • 10/4 Kentucky
  • 10/18 Ole MIss
  • 10/25 Tennessee (#18)
  • 11/01 Arkansas State
  • 11/8 @ LSU (#6 USA, #7 AP)
  • 11/15 Mississippi State
  • 11/29 Auburn (#11 USA, #10 AP)

We can’t help but notice that Saban’s boys must play three traditionally tough — and ranked — rivals on the road. We hear good things about the recruiting class; here’s hoping they come through. We find out with what might be a real game, even, against a top-ten squad. Roll Tide anyway; we’ll check back in on Sunday as per usual; until then, we’re not going to try to handicap the schedule.

Good News for Maher Arar?

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Arar is the innocent Canadian we kidnapped at JFK and sent to Syria for torture under the “extraordinary rendition” program. He sued, but his suit got quashed by the district court on state secrets grounds, and that dismissal was upheld by a subset of the 2nd Circuit.

Now the 2nd Circuit has decided, on its own, to rehear the case en banc.

Now here comes the unexpected part: the 2nd circuit has announced that it will reconsider the case en banc, which means all the judges on the appeals court will hear it and vote on it. What makes this truly surprising is that Arar’s attorney didn’t ask for it; the court granted the rehearing sua sponte, on its own. That is extraordinarily rare. It suggests that there were a number of judges on the circuit who agitated for the rehearing because they believe it was wrongly decided.

Sure would be nice if some folks actually met consequences for what they’ve done to Arar, and what they’ve done to our nation.

Update: Frank chimes in with a link to the actual order.