I just love this.

NBC is whining about its Emmy losses to cable, in particular vis a vis Sheen and West Wing losing to Chiklis and The Shield, which “nobody in America has ever seen.” NBC Entertainment president Jeffrey Zucker also wants you to know they they’re just as groundbreaking as HBO, darn it. Really.

Good God, that doesn’t even pass the giggle test. I want some of what he’s smoking.

We’re not that Chet.

The WSJ is reporting another email worm making the rounds, this one with a 9/11 theme and named “Chet.”:

‘Chet’ Computer Worm Carries Sept. 11 Theme A WALL STREET JOURNAL ONLINE NEWS ROUNDUP Computer antivirus experts said Wednesday that a Sept. 11th-themed computer worm has emerged which spreads via Microsoft Corp.’s e-mail programs. Network Associates Inc., the big U.S. antivirus company, rates the “Chet” worm a low-profile threat. The worm was discovered Tuesday and was apparently written in Russia. The worm resides in an e-mail attachment file called “11september.exe,” which when opened, attempts to send itself to each e-mail address listed in the Windows address book. The e-mail has “All people!!” in the subject line and appears to come from a sender at “mail@world.com.” The e-mail contains the message: “Dear ladies and gentlemen! The given letter does not contain viruses, and is not Spam.” It describes a conspiracy theory about the terror strikes on Washington, D.C., and New York, and urges readers to open the photos and documents attached. Japanese software company Trend Micro Inc. and Finnish computer-security company F-Secure Corp. issued warnings Wednesday about Chet. F-Secure said the worm isn’t a big threat to computer systems since it “contains serious bugs.” Mikko Hypponen, manager of antivirus research at F-Secure, said in a press release: “This seems to be a poor attempt from a wannabe virus writer to exploit the commemoration of September 11,” “However, as the worm seems to crash regularly, it won’t go far.” The most successful viruses use e-mail to propagate, often sending out copies of themselves to addresses saved in users’ Microsoft Outlook programs. Some notable recent virus outbreaks include Klez, Code Red and Nimda. Updated September 11, 2002 12:33 p.m. EDT

Rest assured if I wrote a virus, I wouldn’t rely on Outlook, okay?

What’s worse than a greatest-hits tour?

The inevitable barrage of cheap slag pieces complaining about said tour, that’s what. This time it’s the Rolling Stones, of course. Yes, they’re pushing sixty. Yes, they’re touring again. Yes, they’ll make millions doing it. And yes, again, somehow this just pisses some people off.

Case in point: I just read this piece from the New York Times. With essentially no exceptions, it is more or less exactly the same piece that’s run somewhere every time the Stones have toured since about 1975. Columns like this are as tired and boring as they say the Stones are, if not moreso. It’s a knee-jerk response calculated to resonate with the inevitable hipper-than-thou types who find the Stones repugnant because they’re not the cutting edge of cool anymore. I read the same bit in 1989, and again in 1994 — and went on to enjoy the Stones tours both years, as did thousands of other people.

The only shocking thing about this particular piece is the author. Neal Pollack is a regular contributor to Dave Eggers’ McSweeneys.Net online literary magazine, and typically his pieces are interesting and well-considered. This is a flaccid retread of something a hundred men and women have written before, and it takes us nowhere new. So he’s got his panties in a wad that Jagger, et. al., will pocket millions by playing this tour, and he feels it Important to insist that they “have nothing to do with Rock and Roll.” Whatever, man. I hope the NYT check was big. What are you now, the Comic Book Guy? |*|

This Just In:

The folks at Soul Train are assholes.

Actually, there’s more to it than that. A fifteen-year-old California high school student took issue with their choice for their annual lady-of-soul award, viewing Ashanti as a less worthy candidate than his favorite contender, India.Arie. So, like any teen with time on his hands, he started a petition at PetitionOnline.com and circulated it to his friends, figuring at most he’d get 100 or so signatures.

Well, it got more interesting than that. He got more than ten thousand. Soul Train was unaccountably threatened by this act, and their webmaster sent the kid an abusive email for daring to question their judgement. Furthermore, they posted said mail on their site (you’ll have to go to the kid’s site to see screenshots of it), though eventually they removed it in favor of the two diatribes currently on their front page — which include references to “white-owned BET,” apparently their windmill du jour, as well as commentary about how anyone has time to organize petitions in a post-9/11 world (presumably, though, finding time to honor artists in the first place is Just Fine for any Red-Blooded, Soul-Train-Loyal American). Additionally, they cast aspersions on this kid based on his “foreign-sounding” name, and seem to view his opinions as meritless since he’s not black. What the Fuck?

Wow. Way to go, Soul Train! For these actions — i.e., having a very silly and very public fit because a FIFTEEN YEAR OLD disagreed with you — we present you with the first annual NoGators Award for Shockingly Stupid Corporate Behavior! Don Cornelius, come (get?) on down!

This just in: All Men Not Created Equal After All

The courts have ruled that the detainees in Cuba have no rights, at least in terms of any recourse through the US courts for being detained indefinitely without charges or access to counsel or even the formal POW label. This is freakish and bizarre. Bush, et. al., would be screaming bloody murder if some other country held our citizens this way, but it’s suddenly just fine if we do it. So much for rule of law.

If you’re not pissed off, you’re not paying attention.

Go here to read the NYT editorial that begins:

The Justice Department all but told a federal judge this week to take his legitimate concerns about civil liberties and stuff them in the garbage pail. The Bush administration seems to believe, on no good legal authority, that if it calls citizens combatants in the war on terrorism, it can imprison them indefinitely and deprive them of lawyers. It took this misguided position to a ludicrous extreme on Tuesday, insisting that the federal courts could not review its determinations. This defiance of the courts repudiates two centuries of constitutional law and undermines the very freedoms that President Bush says he is defending in the struggle against terrorism. The courts must firmly reject the White House’s assertion of unchecked powers.

It appears that whole “checks and balances” thing we learned about back in junior high may not apply after all, at least if the Bush Justice Department has its way.

I suppose bringing Unsolved Mysteries back was out of the question.

Salon reported today that the Operation TIPS hotline — you know, so you can report suspicious activity by your shifty neighbors after they complain about your stereo? — is actually ringing at America’s Most Wanted. The ACLU has a great press release as well.

Think carefully about this. Fox is involved in domestic, citizen-based spying? I mean, the whole citizen-spying thing was creepy enough, but just exactly what sort of message are we sending by having ratings-whore John Walsh’s televised detective magazine involved?

Where are we going, and why are we in this handbasket?

Dept. of People Unclear on the Concept

Don’t Link To Us! is a compendium of brain-dead sites who seem to think we need their permission to link to their sites. Just to be clear, linking happens by including the address of the site you’d like to link to in an HTML link tag, like this:

|*|< a href="http://www.nogators.com/" >NoGators< /a >|*|

which gets rendered on the page like this: NoGators

Links are the essense of the web; free linking is how it got to be the place it is. Promulgating the notion that we need permission to commit this basic act is willfully stupid; these firms deserve our ridicule.

How Bush Got Rich

We keep hearing about the Harken deal and what may or may not have been insider trading. Nothing will come of it, of course, and perhaps rightly so. But Christopher Caldwell in the New York Press has something to say about the pattern of opportunities Shrub enjoyed, and how that is potentially much more troubling than his fortunately-timed stock sale:

What kills the President is that every time Harken comes up, Democrats get to retell the story of how he made his money. And this, basically, is the story of the spectacular unfairness with which moneymaking opportunities are lavished on the politically connected. It is the story of a man who has been rewarded for repeated failures by having money shot at him through a fire hose. It is the story of a man who talks with a straight face about having “earned” a fortune of tens of millions of dollars, without having ever done an honest dayâs work in his life.

(Link)

Change is Good.

So I rebuilt most of the site, including the Heathen templates, mostly to divest myself (finally) of some awful cut-and-paste code I started using before I had a clue about stylesheets. The HTML under all this should actually make sense now. Feedback encouraged.

Dept. of People Who Suck

First, this: I had a great weekend. My brother got married. I was best man. It was a fantastic, wonderful, incredible experience, and I couldn’t possibly be happier about it. My new sister-in-law just rocks, and she makes my brother happier than I’ve ever seen him. It’s great.

BUT: Last night, at their fabulous enormous beautiful reception at the Country Club of Jackson, Mississippi, their band did not show up. No calls. No messages. Nada.

So, if you happen to be in the market for a Motown/R&B act in the Mississippi/Alabama area, there are a number of fine options. However, you should avoid at all costs a group called 24-7, whom Aubrey’s father reserved through Frasco Entertainment in Jackson.

Did I mention that my little brother and most of his friends are attorneys?

Anyway, we all still had a good time, but good GOD, to not even SHOW UP to a wedding gig. . . wow.

Wow.

This article from Business 2.0 has been passed around a bunch lately, but it’s really worth reading. The Columbian cartels have apparantly gotten tech-savvy, and have IT infrastructures that would make most Fortune 500 firms jealous. And of course: they’re in an intensely competitive business with high regulatory pressure and absurdly complex supply chains; their business domain is an IT consultant’s dream because they’ve also got a license to print money.

Stop for a moment and think about how much taxpayer money is being used to fight these guys, and how futile that is. Not because the Columbians are rich, but because the market wants their product despite decades of this “War on [Some] Drugs.”