Yearly Archives: 2007

Radley on Cory

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The Agitator has much to say as we near the 6th anniversary of Cory Maye‘s “crime,” which amounts to defending himself and his child against unknown assailants breaking down the door to enter his home in the dead of night. On the day after Christmas, 2001, Maye was asleep in his home when a drug task force broke into his home with a no-knock warrant. First through the door was Ron Jones, who did not identify himself as a policeman.

Maye shot him dead before the cops managed to make clear who they were, and was quickly railroaded to Mississippi’s Death Row before his sentence was reduced last year on appeal. If nothing changes, Maye will spend the rest of his life in prison for defending his family against a home invader he had no way of knowing wasn’t his drug-addled neighbor.

Our government at work

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The copyright cartel has managed to get a bill introduced that would create a whole new Federal copyright protection department as well as provide for drastically higher fines and — get this — civil forfiture of computer equipment involved in infringement even if the owner is not convicted. This is a scary mirror of a questionable practice from the ill-considered drug war; under no circumstances should assets be seizable without a finding of guilt.

Dept. of Very, Very Geeky Puns

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So I added RAM to my laptop last week by removing one of the 1-gigabyte DIMMs and replacing it with a 2-gig DIMM, producing a total of 3. This is sort of unusual, because heretofore most RAM has been set up with homogenous slots — all 1-gig, or all 2-gig, or whatever.

I have taken to referring to my mixed setup as “The Welk Configuration,” since it consists of a one and a two.

I am nowhere nearly as sorry about that as I probably ought to be.

Tim Tebow is made entirely of Win

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The Florida QB just became the first underclassman ever to win the Heisman, number 3 for the Florida Gators — Spurrier and mid-90s standout Danny Wuerffel are the other two. Oddly, all three are the sons of clergymen.

Even better: since Tebow’s only a soph, we get to watch him play for the Gators next year, too. Now, if you’ll excuse us, we’re going to watch the Texans.

We have innocent people at Gitmo, and the government knows this, and doesn’t care

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So much for the Shining City on the Hill, human rights, respect for law, or any of the other qualities we insist make the US different: Evidence of Innocence Rejected at Guantanamo:

U.S. District Judge Joyce Hens Green, who was privy to the classified record of the tribunal’s decision-making about [German citizen] Kurnaz in 2004, concluded in January 2005 that his treatment provided powerful evidence of bias against prisoners, and she deemed the proceedings illegal under U.S. and international law. But her ruling, which depicted the allegations against Kurnaz as unsubstantiated and as an inappropriate basis for keeping him locked up, was mostly classified at the time.

In newly released passages, however, Green’s ruling reveals that the tribunal members relied heavily on a memo written by a U.S. brigadier general who noted that Kurnaz had prayed while the U.S. national anthem was sung in the prison and that he expressed an unusual interest in detainee transfers and the guard schedule. Other documents make clear that U.S. intelligence officials had earlier concluded that Kurnaz, who went to Pakistan shortly after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, to visit religious sites, had simply chosen a bad time to travel.

The process is “fundamentally corrupted,” said Baher Azmy, a professor at Seton Hall Law School who represents Kurnaz. “All of this just reveals that they had the wrong person and they knew it.”

Kurnaz was eventually released, in August of 2006, but only after German Chancellor Angela Merkel made him a priority. There is no reason to believe his five-year plight was unique, and newly declassified documents surrounding his case make it clear that innocents at Gitmo will have a hard time indeed getting released, since the process to “try” them is so heavily biased against them. Detainees are still unable to see all the evidence against them, and in some cases are denied the right to even now who said they were terrorists. It’s Kafkaesque, and is representative of the worst impulses of a power-mad administration.

Puppet Redemption

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Ever wonder whatever happened to the puppets used in Rankin-Bass‘s Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer? Wonder no more.

Two years ago, the figures were acquired by current owner Kevin Kriess. Santa’s face was stained, there was mold under his beard and half his mustache was gone. Rudolph was missing the red light bulb from his nose, said Kriess, a longtime fan of the special whose Harmony, Pennslyvania-based business TimeandSpaceToys.com sells action figures and other collectibles based on movies and TV shows.

Kriess, 44, said he bought his two treasures from a person whose family had received them years ago from a relative who worked for Rankin/Bass. For many years, the delicate wood, wire and fabric puppets had been treated casually: first as toys and later as holiday decorations.

“They had Rudolph in a candy dish with candy all around him, just on a coffee table, and people would just reach in around Rudolph’s body and pull out a candy cane or something,” Kriess said. In the family’s holiday photos, you could spot Santa slumped under a tree in a corner, he said.

Arthur Rankin Jr., who with producing partner Jules Bass created the “Rudolph” special for original sponsor General Electric, said the figures were just going to be thrown out, so his secretary took them home and gave them to family. No effort was made to preserve them, because no one imagined the show would become a hallowed classic.

“You make a film and you don’t know whether it’s going to work or not, whether it will have an audience,” said Rankin, 83, reached by phone in Bermuda, where he is now retired. “In the case of ‘Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer,’ it went beyond any expectations.”

Another bit of fun

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We’ve been enjoying The Big Bang Theory for two main reasons: one, it features a Houstonian and alum of our favorite local (and sadly defunct) theater company; and two, it’s doing a fine job with actual geek humor and personality types.

What we didn’t realize is that the names of the main characters — Sheldon and Leonard — are a tribute to a film and television producer, director, writer, and actor who, among other things, played Nick the bartender in It’s A Wonderful Life.

Today’s ray of bright, bright sunshine

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Jonathan Coulton is a musical god. For example: “Code Monkey think maybe manager want to write god damned login page himself.”

In finding Code Monkey, we also encountered “Skullcrusher Mountain,” which includes this lyrical brilliance:

I made this half-pony half-monkey monster to please you
But I get the feeling that you don’t like it
What’s with all the screaming?
You like monkeys, you like ponies
Maybe you don’t like monsters so much
Maybe I used too many monkeys
Isn’t it enough to know that I ruined a pony making a gift for you?

Yes.

How to Compete, by Dell

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Dell’s released a special edition World of Warcraft gaming laptop for a cool $4450.

Now’s probably a good time to point out that I’ve been having a great time in Azeroth since it launched 3 years ago on bone-stock Apple laptops that go for half that: first a then-aged Titanium G4 Powerbook, then, starting 2 years ago, an Aluminum G4, and since August on a Macbook Pro. Sure, a hot-shit laptop is often a lovely thing if you’re playing brand-new very high-end games — but World of Warcraft was released in November of 2004. Machines costing $1,000 will play it fine.

Still, I’m sure Dell is giving you something very, very special for that extra two large. Or something. But the fancy extra hardware will really get you no better WoW experience; buying one of these machines more or less brands the user as clueless dork.

Good luck with that.

Creeping No-Fun Police-State-ism

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Radney’s on the case, again, but here’s the fun part: Michigan thinks it can force anyone under the age of 21 to submit to a breathalyzer at any time, i.e. when they’re not driving. And they’re aggressive about it. The ACLU is suing.

A second plaintiff, Ashley Berden was 18 years old when she attended a party at a friend’s house to celebrate her graduation from Swan Valley High School. After she left the party, Thomas Township police officers arrived and found her purse which she had forgotten. They then came to Berden’s house at 4:00 a.m., woke up her family and demanded that she take a breath test. The police did not have a warrant but they informed her that would be violating the law if she refused the test. The test registered a .00% blood-alcohol level, indicating that Berden had not been drinking.

So Proud

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Texas joins Kansas, et. al., as another state hostile to science; Christine Castillo Comer was forced to resign as the Texas Education Agency’s director of science for failing to be neutral on the issue of evolution.

It goes like this:

Ms. Comer, 56, of Austin, is out of a job, after forwarding an e-mail message on a talk about evolution and creationism — “a subject on which the agency must remain neutral,” according to a dismissal letter last month that accused her of various instances of “misconduct and insubordination” and of siding against creationism and the doctrine that life is the product of “intelligent design.”

…

Debbie Ratcliffe, a spokeswoman for the state’s education agency in Austin, said Ms. Comer “resigned. She wasn’t fired.”

“Our job,” Ms. Ratcliffe added, “is to enact laws and regulations that are passed by the Legislature or the State Board of Education and not to inject personal opinions and beliefs.”

Ms. Comer disputed that characterization in a series of interviews, her first extensive comments. She acknowledged forwarding to a local online community an e-mail message from the National Center for Science Education, a pro-evolution group, about a talk in Austin on Nov. 2 by Barbara Forrest, a professor of philosophy at Southeastern Louisiana University, a co-author of “Inside Creationism’s Trojan Horse” and an expert witness in the landmark 2005 case that ruled against the teaching of intelligent design in the Dover, Pa., schools.

“I don’t see how I took a position by F.Y.I.-ing on a lecture like I F.Y.I. on global warming or stem-cell research,” Ms. Comer said. “I send around all kinds of stuff, and I’m not accused of endorsing it.” But she said that as a career science educator, “I’m for good science,” and that when it came to teaching evolution, “I don’t think it’s any stretch of the imagination where I stand.”

Ms. Comer said state education officials seemed uneasy lately over the required evolution curriculum. It had always been part of her job to answer letter-writers inquiring about evolution instruction, she said, and she always replied that the State Board of Education supported the teaching of evolution in Texas schools.

But several months ago, in response to an inquiry letter, Ms. Comer said she was instructed to strike her usual statement about the board’s support for teaching evolution and to quote instead the exact language of the high school biology standards as formulated for the Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills test.

…

Ms. Comer said that barely an hour after forwarding the e-mail message about Dr. Forrest’s talk, she was called in and informed that Lizzette Reynolds, deputy commissioner for statewide policy and programs, had seen a copy and complained, calling it “an offense that calls for termination.” Ms. Comer said she had no idea how Ms. Reynolds, a former federal education official who served as an adviser to George W. Bush when he was governor of Texas, had seen the message so quickly, and remembered thinking, “What is this, the thought police or what?”

If we do not act as a nation and keep these nutbird fundies out of educational policy now and forever, then we are well and truly fucked. To a first approximation, anyone insisting that dogma has a place in the schoolhouse is more interested in indoctrination than education. It is paramount that people grow up with actual critical thinking skills, but if we let the relgious types run education, that’ll be the first thing out the window.

More: Arkansas, is, of course much worse off, and surging GOP candidate Mike Huckabee is right there with them, defending creationism and the dumbing-down of American science education.

U.S.A.: Nation of Kidnappers

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Our government is busily asserting in British court that they have the right to kidnap British citizens in the U.K. if they are suspected of crimes in the U.S. Extradition is unnecessary.

Presumably, the British authorities will take a dim view of this, and remind the Americans that kidnapping is crime in Britain.

I continue to be shocked at the absurd statements this Administration seems wholly willing to promulgate. We as a nation would obviously not accept this line from someone else; it’s utterly contrary to the rule of law, and our support of such might-makes-right positions make it harder for us to “spread democracy” elsewhere. There’s just no way this is a good idea.

Here come those coonasses again

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At the end of a weekend crazy enough to cap the craziest season in recent memory, we find a total reordering of the BCS. Here we go.

The first big shock was huge: Big East power West Virginia somehow managed to choke and choke hard, falling to unranked Pitt and thereby becoming the 6th second-ranked team this year to fall, and the 5th to an unranked team. Ouch. Say buh-bye to the title hunt, boys. On the other hand, they did give Pitt its first road win in 14 months. Pitt, for their part, improve to 5 and 7.

Unshocking in the extreme was overrated Mizzou finding itself unable to match Oklahoma. OU dominated the Missouri Tigers even more convincingly than in their regular season matchup back in October; the final score was 38 to 17, and OU claimed its second Big XII title in a row (amusingly, they’ll face the former #2 in the Fiesta Bowl).

With both #1 and #2 off the list, then, where does the BCS go? Well, wonder no more, little buddies, for the answer is known: the title game will feature LSU vs. Ohio State.

How’d we get here? LSU comes in the back door, by claiming the SEC title in their win over Tennessee on Saturday. Ohio State — in their capacity as the the old #3 — is an obvious choice to promote to the big game; they’re 11-1, and the 1 was a shocker against Illinois. LSU, though, requires some explanation. The prior rankings went Mizzou, West Virginia, OSU, Georgia, Kansas, Virginia Tech, LSU. The #1 and #2 losses outlined above clearly disqualify those teams, and OSU is in the show already, which brings us to the matter of Georgia. The 10-2 Bulldogs were for some reason ranked higher than LSU or Tennessee, but they’re manifestly not the SEC champs (they lost to Tennessee, who then lost the SEC title game to LSU), so they get kicked to the curb. (We agree that you can’t expect to play for the brass ring if you don’t win your division.) Kansas is, well, Kansas; they played candyasses all year, and the BCS voters know it. VaTech may be the ACC champs after beating BC on Saturday, but they’ve got just as many losses as LSU, and one of those was a cajun-style 48 to 7 ass-whippin’ from LSU back in September. Which brings us right back to Baton Rouge. (The fact that it took 6 OTs for LSU to lose twice didn’t hurt them.)

What a mess. It would’ve made more sense if the rankings past #2 last week made any sense; the calculus required above makes it clear that Nos. 3 through whatever were pretty much random, because when it came time to pick a new top pair, the BCS realized that their old #4, #5, and #6 needed to be skipped for the top game to make sense, and that means the whole list is a clusterfuck. Frankly, we hope there are many, many more years like this so that everyone sees that the only fair thing is for the NCAA to have a Division I tournament for football just like they do for the lower divisions and just like they do for basketball. There are plenty of plans out there they could adopt, and — quite frankly, and pardon my french — fuck the bowl sponsors. This whole this-bowl and that-bowl proliferation is absurd, and needs to be exposed for the fraud it is.

Finally, there’s one more lovely thing afoot. Very late last night, Colt Brennan and his Hawai’i Warriors managed to rally from 21 points back to win against Washington, 35 to 28, thereby staying perfect and making it impossible for any just system to keep them out of a BCS bowl. (Brennan was 42 of 50, including 6 for 6 in his final 76-yard drive; Hawai’i’s final 28 points were unanswered by the Huskies, who did not score in the second half.) They got their wish: they’ll meet Georgia in the Sugar Bowl. We don’t expect Georgia to have much trouble with the Warriors, but we’ll be rooting against our conference anyway. Hawai’i has tried to play big teams for a while now, to show folks they’re for real, and they’ve been frustrated because quite frankly nobody wants any part of their offense. USC flat out refused to schedule them. They deserve a shot at a good team and a good bowl, and I’m looking forward to watching it. Where can I get a Hawai’i jersey?

Mmmmm, delicious RAM

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We’ve updated the Heathen Macbook Pro to 3 gigabytes of RAM, which means that we never, ever go to swaptown anymore, even with a gigabyte instance of VMWare running.

Yummy. Highly recommended.

Dept. of Full Circle

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Techdirt points out the most interesting thing about Viacom’s decision to offer South Park online for free: What many have by now forgotten is that South Park began life as a viral video passed around on the Internet.

Here is our copy, preserved from back when its size actually was a problem (50MB Quicktime), around 1997. We first saw it a bit earlier, on videotape, via a friend of ours who was working at LucasArts at the time; we put this around New Year’s ’95-96 or ’96-97 (no earlier; the short was created for Christmas 1995).

Seven Years of Bad Luck

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Lookie here what the archive page says today:

At 4:37pm on 29 November 2000, I decided to take the plunge and convert a longstanding mailing list then called ‘Some Arrant Knaves I Know’ into the blogolicious splendor you see before you today. Now, seven years and 5,225 posts later, I’m still here, scarred but smarter, as they say. Seven years is a decidedly biblical length of time, and reaching the milestone puts me in a reflective mood. (Of course, the original home of Heathen, NoGators.com, is slightly older, and was itself a migration of a site originally hosted at Houston ISP Neosoft since 1995.)

Bizarre differences, then and now

In 2000:

  • The boom was booming, and I was going to be rich forever.
  • Britney was still hiding her white trash truth from us.
  • Terrorists were, by and large, something my roommate killed in Counterstrike, and I could carry my Swiss Army Knife on airplanes. Not to mention as much hair gel as I wanted.
  • My wife was still someone I’d met in college, but lost touch with.
  • Jackson Correspondent Triple-F was a lowly, drunken and aggressively single law student entering his final year instead of the married father he is today.
  • There was no participatory web to link to back then. HotOrNot existed, but things like Wikipedia and social-networking sites like MySpace and Facebook were still a ways off. (Well, Wikipedia launched in 1/01, but it didn’t get useful for a while.) Blogs were also pretty unusual, though that also changed quickly.
  • As you may recall, there were no comments for two years. I turned them on due to the Heights Attorney’s complaints in 12/2002. The initial Heathen platform, Blogger (then only a year old!), didn’t support them, and I didn’t bother turning them on for some reason when I migrated to Greymatter in July of 2001. (You can’t tell this by looking at the archives, since everything from 7/01 on appears to have a comment link thanks to the import job I did when I switched to Blosxom in 2003.)
  • There were also no categories until 2003, either.
  • I posted a lot less. 2002 had only 234 total posts. 2007 will likely top 1,100 (1,046 as of last night). The dramatic uptick coincides with my adoption of Blosxom as a platform, which makes things much easier (thanks, Mike).
  • The layout’s changed a few times, but sadly there are no historical shots of anything but the very first Blogger template (preserved in the oldest archive pages).
  • REALLY longtime Heathen know that MH lived first at NoGators.com in a subdirectory, not on its own domain; I didn’t buy the mischeathen/miscellaneousheathen domains until 2003.
  • Heathen and NoGators originally lived at Laughing Squid, a great and independent host in San Francisco. We moved from there to a leased server at some point, and then off that server following a hacking incident a couple years ago. We’re now hosted as part of a work-for-hosting deal with Spacetaker.
  • Traffic’s gotten slightly better, but is still low enough that I’ve never seen a dime off the ads. The five year post says Heathen was at 5K+ uniques a month and 80K hits a month; for October ’07, we did 7600 uniques and about 80K hits. (Oddly, November shows nearly 13K uniques for some reason.)

Bizarre constants, then and now

  • By the time the first post happened, I’d already moved into Heathen Central. This makes the HQ my most constant domicile ever, not counting the house I was born into (1970 – 1979).
  • I still drink with most of the same people, with only a couple new faces. Ear O’Corn married the subject of the second-ever post about a year ago, but she was already around back then. We’re just older now. Even Lindsey.
  • We had the same creeps in the White House, which seems particularly bizarre.
  • My earliest and most constant sources are only a bit older than Heathen: Metafilter dates from 1999. BoingBoing started in January of 2000 as a weblog (though it was a site and a zine first). The mostly-dormant Memepool started 1998. Heathen’s frequently served as sort of a second-order aggregator of cool stuff online, based on the assumption that most of its readers don’t also read the hardcore geek sites like these.

Things we noticed perusing the first couple months

  • Holy Jesus, what was I thinking with that godawful orange?
  • I’ve gotten longer-winded. Part of this is Blosxom, which makes it much less trouble to post, and harder to lose a post-in-progress to the fickle foilbles of browser code. I just write an entry in any editor, save it to the right directory locally, and run a sync job when I get around to it. Blogger and Greymatter (and pretty much every other platform) required I use a web interface to post, which just gets in the way. This ease of use is the major reason why I’m still not using a database-backed tool.
  • For the first year or so, it was slightly less political, and slightly more goofy, and completely devoid of football.
  • Did I really not realize that the jazz critic who lambasted Ken Burns’ multi-night affair in 2001 was THE Harvey Pekar? Apparently.
  • First mention of Utilikilts: August, 2001.
  • The old pages got a lot of comment spam before I locked down the files. Oops. Better commenting is one feature I’d get if I’d move to a fancier platform, and it’s tempting.

I’m still having fun with this peculiar public hobby. You’re apparently still reading. I reckon there’s no reason to stop now. Happy birthday to Heathen, and Happy Holidays.

Shocking on lots of levels

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This long Wired profile of Universal head Doug Morris makes two enormous points:

  • The record labels really have been just as stupid, if not stupider, as we thought; Morris’ worldview and business plan seems wed to the notion that taking a bottom-line hit today to be better positioned later is a bad idea, though most businessmen I know call that “investment.”
  • iTunes is much, much more dominant than we realized. Apparently, in 2007, 22% of all music solid in the US will be through Apple’s iTunes Music Store.

Wal-Mart became the go-to retailer in nonurban America a long time ago via sheer ubiquity combined with loss-leader prices, but Apple’s done one better: they win with the trifecta of (a) lower prices than Wal-Mart; (b) near instant delivery without leaving the house; and (c) being literally only a click away on most computers. (Plus, Apple’s not run by or beholden to puritan fundies who blanch at racy lyrics.)

Morris and his cronies still don’t get it, though. They’ve branched out to Amazon, sure, but they’re hoping to roll out the Total Music store soon, with some sort of DRM plus all-you-can-eat subscription model. Rick Rubin at Columbia wants to do the same thing, but it, too, will require some kind of lock-up to work like they want it. That’s not what consumers want, clearly.

Total Music is designed to unify Apple’s competitors in what amounts to a coordinated attack on the iPod. The details are far from finalized, but in Morris’ conception a Total Music subscription would come pre-installed on devices like the Zune, the Sony PlayStation, or a mobile phone. Universal is well aware of the difficulty of convincing consumers to pay for music subscriptions, so Morris wants the devicemakers to pony up the cash themselves, either by shelling out for a six-month introductory offer or by assuming the cost forever. This would be money well spent, Morris argues, because it would help the Microsofts of the world eat into the iPod’s market share. He has already hammered out preliminary agreements with Warner and Sony BMG and has met with executives at Microsoft and several wireless carriers. If Morris is able to make Total Music a reality, he will once again have succeeded in bending the industry to his will — in this case, by using the combined catalogs of the major labels to help establish a true competitor to the iPod. After all, why buy an iPod if a Zune will give you songs for free?

Unfortunately, Total Music will almost certainly require some form of DRM, which in the end will perpetuate the interoperability problem. Morris likely doesn’t care. He is more committed to Total Music — or any other plan that allows protection — than he is to a future where music can truly be played across any platform, at any time. “Our strategy is to have the people who create great music be paid properly,” he says. “We need to protect the music. I know that.”

The music’s fine, Morris. Bands are already breaking on their own, without major label help, by looking to the net for distribution and booking. It’s middleman companies like Universal that need protection, and we’re betting consumers aren’t dumb enough to play along.

Additional commentary at BoingBoing and TechDirt, the latter of which has a bit of fun with one of Morris’ analogies:

Morris is so clueless that he chooses the worst possible analogy to explain his position. Lots of entertainment industry execs have thrown up their hands and ignorantly stated that “you can’t make money from free.” That’s wrong, of course, but Morris takes it one step further up the ridiculous scale, with the following example: “If you had Coca-Cola coming through the faucet in your kitchen, how much would you be willing to pay for Coca-Cola? There you go. That’s what happened to the record business.” Hmm… and what is coming out of your faucet in your kitchen? That’s right… water. And how much are people willing to pay for water? That’s right, billions. In fact, it’s a larger market than (oops) recorded music. Can someone please explain how Morris keeps his job?

Click through just for #9

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Cracked’s list of the 9 most badass Bible verses includes Exodus 2:11-12, with commentary:

One day after Moses had grown up, he went out to where his own people were and watched them at their hard labor. He saw an Egyptian beating a Hebrew, one of his own people. Glancing this way and that, and seeing no one, he killed the Egyptian and hid him in the sand.

Sure, Moses was a great leader, an emancipator of his people and a prophet. Most people don’t know that he also was the Biblical equivalent of Splinter Cell’s Sam Fisher–a well-honed killing machine, able to slay from the shadows without pity or remorse. Martin Luther King may have had a dream, but Moses had a body count.

You can almost picture the scene: An Egyptian soldier is wailing on a hapless Hebrew when Moses, clothed in head-to- toe black, drops down from the ceiling. Moving with cat-like grace, he sneaks up behind the soldier and, taking his head in his hands, snaps the man’s neck with one savage twist. As the lifeless body slumps to the ground, Moses lights up a cigar. “Well,” he quips, “looks like someone bit off more than he could Jew.”