Nice move.

Citing the huge backlash from the early-adopter crowd over the sudden $200 price drop on iPhones, Apple announced today that they were giving all iPhone buyers a $100 Apple-store credit as a goodwill gesture.

You always know that, when you buy something electronic, the price will drop dramatically, and quickly. It’s the nature of the beast. Apple’s step here — which is worth, on paper, nearly $100M US, but will cost them far less — is a grand gesture sure to silence 99% of the grumbling horde. Good choice, Steve.

We think a couple of these are ours, actually

Missouri Loves Company provides some One-Liners Overhead While Hunting. Since Mr Missouri is actually a participant in this well-loved tale, we’ll provide a bit of context, just for fun:

“Madder than a captured Jap”
We were there for that one. One of the guides had taken a lone hunter to a field that ended up having no avian visitors. A city boy, said hunter was lost and essentially marooned until the guide came back to fetch him. Also, obviously the speaker is a war baby, since we can’t imagine anyone younger having this in their vernacular. Other than us.
“How do you put the magazine restrictor…”
That was us. Said game warden was a humorless fuckwit we’d already been warned about, but as we were manifestly complying with all available regulations (i.e., we had precious few birds), we felt comfortable jerking him around. He didn’t like it, but nobody liked him, so there you go.
“It’s not beer, it’s aiming fluid.”
We’re pretty sure Mr Missouri said that one, but the memory is necessarily hazy…
“If you miss the first two shots, the third one is just anger”
That was us, but we were quoting our dad. He was right. We used this line as partial justification for moving to an over and under a while back, too. Shut up.

Good thing we got Mrs Heathen a new iPod in July

If we’d waited, we would’ve be able to complain about Apple fucking us with fancy NEW Nanos.

Seriously, though, they’re mighty nice. Even nicer are the new iPod Classics, which now come in 80 and 160 gig. It might be getting close to time to finally upgrade the long-in-the-tooth 15 gig, so we get one that’s not all funky and sideways before they stop making the good ones.

(Oh, and if you paid $500 for an iPhone? Sucker. The 8-gig iPhone is now $399, or $200 less than than the intro price. The 4-gig iPhone is no longer available.)

Mmm, literary artifacts

Sutpen’s blog has a great notice up about the original manuscript for On The Road, which will be on display in New York from November til March. It is, as you may know, on a roll of teletype paper; Kerouac fed the roll of paper into his typewriter and didn’t stop until he’d created one of the most influential novels of his generation.

We think we need to road trip.

No pun intended.

Dept. of GAAAAAA

Via BoingBoing:

Jennifer Sutton, 23, recently visited her own heart at an exhibition in London. Sutton received a heart transplant and her original ticker is on display as part of the Wellcome Collection’s educational exhibition The Heart.

Ian Murdoch is High as a Kite

The Debian-founder-turned-Sun-employee seems to think OpenSolaris will challenge Linux.

Wow. And they say Jobs has a “reality distortion field;” McNealy’s must be amazing. Frankly, we remain baffled about Murdoch joining Sun in the first place. We hope he’s being paid in boatloads of cash, because any sort of equity compensation is a sucker’s bet. Sun continues to appear doomed, doomed, doomed. They made their bones on hardware that nobody wants anymore, and remain in the public light really only because of Java — which, amusingly, cannot be easily monetized. Spending cash and time on Solaris strikes us a just about the last thing they should be doing, and yet, here they are.

SabanWatch: Week 1

Nicky Lou surprised a few folks last year by leaving the pro coaching ranks and returning to NCAA, but when the deal was made public most saw why: the 8 year, $32 million offer made him the richest coach in college football, which is presumably sufficient motivation to take the hot seat that the top job in Tuscaloosa has become.

Well, here we are in football season once again, and it’s time to measure Saban’s performance. We figure a basic metric might be points per million, defined as “total number of winning points divided by 32” n.b. that we’re avoiding scientific notation by working with millions, not dollars. You’re welcome.

Yesterday Alabama played a creampuff from a lower division: Western Carolina. That the Tide routed them 52-6 shouldn’t surprise anyone, then. Frankly, we’re mildly disappointed that UA fell to this I-AA temptation; we’ve long complained about contender teams playing softies, and this year is no exception. Nobody in the top 25 ought to be able to stay there with one of these gimmee games on the schedule, but then again Alabama probably won’t be a contender this year — they are unranked, and it’s a new coach.

(Of course, some ranked squads played I-AA schools yesterday, and we think poorly of them for it — though at least (e.g.) Penn State and Auburn had the decency to actually win, unlike 5th-ranked Michigan who fell to I-AA Appalachian State.)

(No, LSU playing Mississippi State doesn’t count as a creampuff; it’s a conference game.)

Anyway, back to Saban. The margin of victory here was 52 – 6, or 46 points. Ergo, the Saban PointsPerMillion value currently stands at 46/32, or 1.4375. We’ll keep you updated as the season progresses.

Addendum 1: It will be difficult for the pollsters to insist Notre Dame is worth a damn this year after their 33-3 drubbing at the hands of unranked George Tech yesterday, which warms our hearts. However, expect JoePa’s squad to get an undeserved bump in the rankings after they meet and (probably) beat the Irish next week.

Addendum 2: In the “why can’t they both lose?” department, the only top-25 matchup to be played yesterday saw Cal beat Tennessee 45-31.

No surprise here, frankly

Via Wired’s Thread Level blog, we find this: FBI Spy Docs Show G-Men Don’t Understand Security. And they’re right. Click through.

Instead of personal userids, the FBI relies on log sheets. This may provide sufficient accountability if everyone follows the rules. It provides no protection against rule-breakers. It is worth noting that Robert Hanssen obtained much of the information he sold to the Soviets by exploiting weak permission mechanisms in the FBI’s Automated Case System.

We’re gonna start early this year

Yeah, yeah, yeah, Louisville notched 73 points against their first opponent last night, but catch this: said opponent is Murray State (home of the Racers), and they aren’t even in Division I-A. Lousiville and their ilk (Rutgers, anyone?) would get their asses handed to them if they played in a conference with real football schools, and didn’t clutter their schedule with creampuffs from lower divisions.

As is, they don’t play a ranked team until November 8, when they’ll likely fall to Rod’s West Virginia squad. They close out against similarly-overrated Rutgers on the 29th. Between now and then, they face such powerhouses as Middle Tennessee State, Syracuse, Cincy, UConn, and South Florida. How they’ve started the season as a top-ten team is simply beyond me. Put these birds in a stadium with a major conference team, and our bet is they’ll fold like a cheap suit.

Crime in the Future

Via Slashdot:

The FBI is investigating fifteen store robberies in eleven states, committed via phone and internet. The perpetrators hack the store’s security system so they can observe their victims. They then make customers take their clothes off and get the store to wire money.

Now that we’re older, we can become disappointed in the arc of a rock band in only 3 days

Over the weekend, we had occasion to visit with Chief Real Estate and UFO Analysis Correspondent BC at his satellite office in the wilds of Alagoddambama, where we engaged in more cigar smoking than should be legal, not to mention the barbecue.

Anyhow, ol’ BC has music tastes sometimes more adventurous than ours, and definitely hipper. Consequently, we were exposed for the first time to a band we’d heard of, but never listened to: Rainer Maria, an emo-esque trio from Wisconsin (and eventually Brooklyn) that formed in 1995.

(The first disappointment was that they’re already broken up, but this may not end up being so awful given what followed.)

BC had their second album “Look Now, Look Again” (1999) on his iPod, so it was that that we first pulled off eMusic when we got home. It was as good as we recalled — hey, even Pitchfork liked it — so we went back to the well, so to speak, to see what happened next.

That would be 2001’s “A Better Version of Me,” which was, if not as strong as LNLA, at least as good. We liked it enough that we immediately checked out 2003’s “Long Knives Drawn,” only to find that we’d gone A RECORD TOO FAR. It’s plodding, and not nearly as interesting as the earlier work. As it happens, the mavens at Pitchfork agree with us (like we care) that the tension provided by Kyle Fischer’s occasional backing vocal are a key part of the mix, and that relying exclusively on Caithlin DeMarrais’ voice is a mistake. Sadly, nobody seems to have told Rainer Maria about this, as the final record provides more of the same. We doubt we’ll even bother with it, actually.

So, there you have it: we discovered the band on Saturday, and by last night we’d already decided when they jumped the shark. Someday, perhaps we can manage to compress the entire process of fandom to an afternoon.

Gah.

Via JWZ we discover that someone in a position of authority, finally, has been found guilty of something in the wake of the Abu Grahib abuse scandal.

Lt. Col. Steven Jordan was acquitted on three counts:

cruelty and maltreatment for subjecting detainees to forced nudity and intimidation by dogs; dereliction of a duty to properly train and supervise soldiers in humane interrogation rules; and failing to obey a lawful general order by ordering dogs used for interrogations without higher approval.

So what was he guilty of?

The jury found him guilty of one: disobeying a general’s order not to talk to others about the investigation into the abuse.

Sweet God in Heaven, WHAT THE HELL?

Dept. of Temptation

College football is upon us, and the Alabama opener isn’t televised except on pay-per-view.

Quick, somebody talk us into, or out of, paying $109 for ESPN’s GamePlan package on DTV.

Slacktivist on Black Sites

It’s long, but go read it anyway; here’s the final graf:

What we do know is that any useful information collected at the Black Sites has come at an enormous cost. The fact that “90 percent of the information was unreliable” and the rest is suspect is a problem. But a far greater problem is that, as a consequence of embracing the KGB model [designed to produce confessions, not information], we have made ourselves suspect and unreliable. The CIA’s secret interrogation program, like the lawless detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, is a major obstacle to any meaningful victory in the “war on terror.”

Domestic Terror

The goal of terrorism is typically to disrupt and frighten the target society, subverting their calm state, so that more attention is paid to the terrorist’s cause. It almost never works at creating change the terrorist would like, but it frequently succeeds at least in damaging the society targetted, not in the least because political leaders in these societies often play directly into the terrorist’s hands by capitalizing on the fear for political gain, or to increase their own fiefdoms.

National Intelligence Director Mike McConnell is one such functionary; Bruce Schneier notes the following dialog from an oft-linked interview McConnell gave with the El Paso Times:

Q. So you’re saying that the reporting and the debate in Congress means that some Americans are going to die?

A. That’s what I mean. Because we have made it so public. We used to do these things very differently, but for whatever reason, you know, it’s a democratic process and sunshine’s a good thing. We need to have the debate.

Wow. “If we talk about security policy, people will die.” Um, bullshit. Democracy cannot thrive in an environment of secrecy. Certainly some intelligence should be secret, and some planning, but a hard line must be drawn between legitimate operational security and shadowy surveillance practices turned on regular citizens.

McConnell’s interview is interesting for a number of reasons, as pointed out at BoingBoing; perhaps most interesting is that he explicitly confirmed what the government has been refusing to comment on, even in court: that commercial telcos have been helping them spy on Americans. Also worthwhile are the links at the end of Schneier’s post, especially those to Salon.

Dept. of Silly Milestones

Over the last 2,458 days, we have provided you people with 4,917 posts. Today, the all-time posts-per-day average is above 2.000 (it’s actually 2.0004) for the first time. Despite the recent loquaciousness, the first few years of Heathen were based on a much less friendly system that made it a pain in the ass to post. Consequently we posted far fewer screeds; the site’s been consistently over two per day since 2004, but it took a long time to drag the life-of-Heathen average up.

We hope you people are happy. ;)

Other upcoming bloggy milestones: the 5,000th post should come in about 40 days, and the 7th anniversary is approaching in November. Mark your calendars, or whatever.

Holy CRAP this is the coolest thing EVER.

Forbidden Lego is a collection of Lego designs for models that will never see the light of day in official kits from Lego, Inc.

Forbidden Lego written by a pair of Lego master builders, who used to work in designing advanced Lego sets (e.g., Mindstorms). While they obviously got to work on lots of cool things while they were there, there were certain projects that just turned out not to be suitable to be made into kits released by the Lego company. They wrote the book to give some kind of a tantalizing hint at the kinds of things that go on behind the scenes at Lego, and the kinds of neat things that might get released in a world without product liability suits.

Models described include a catapult and an automatic pistol. Must. Have.

Dear Palm: Please Stop Sucking

People who know us know we’re gadget fiends. We used Newtons, for crying out loud, before Apple fucked ’em up by ignoring what Palm saw so clearly: small and connected and cheap will win, not big and unsyncable and expensive. The final Newts cost a grand, but wouldn’t sync with our desktop, and were nearly as big as the laptop we had at the time, all while Palms were $299, the size of a pack of smokes, and flawlessly syncable.

Anyway, so Palm ruled for a while. The original Treos were pretty fantastic, and showed what might ultimately happen in the whole PDA-phone convergence space. But for some reason, about 4 years ago, they stopped doing anything new or interesting; every product in their lineup now is a weak riff on the original 600, and that sucks. Heathen Central has even migrated off their venerable 650 to a — gasp — Windows Mobile device; it was only about a buck more than the Treo, but includes vastly greater capabilities (and, as noted at the time, outperforms the iPhone as well).

So, Palm, what the fuck? Fortunately, we’re not the only ones to notice this slackass behavior by Hawkins and company: Engadget lays it out for them quite nicely.

(N.B. the first suggestion under “Other Stuff.”)

The Onion’s in rare form again

No One In Women’s Shelter Able To Cook Decent Meal is profoundly wrong:

CLEVELAND–Despite having no other household responsibilities to occupy their time, none of the residents of the Cleveland YWCA Battered Women’s Shelter can prepare a decent hot meal by 6 p.m., sources at the shelter reported Tuesday.

“If it’s not burned or under-seasoned, it’s the same goddamn thing they made yesterday,” said group counselor Devon Martin, who doesn’t work all day long in the shelter’s therapy sessions to microwave his own leftovers. “Without mastering this important life skill, these women will never be able to leave the shelter. It’s not like they got anywhere else to go, anyway.”

Although records show the shelter houses more than 100 battered women, there is some speculation that this number may be exaggerated, as hardly any of the laundry bags left in the hallway get taken care of.

(Via Frank.)

This just in

We’ve just spoken with our Attorney, who had an amusing tale to tell of Apple technology.

The Attorney is one of the only other folks we know to have used and loved the Newton platform; he had two, since he had to replace the first after a tragic Camaro accident. It appears that this now venerable Newt has spent the last several years plugged in on a shelf in his office as the “deep storage” device for some addresses he rarely needed.

Well, said Attorney purchased the a new iPhone recently, and set about doing some long-needed address book consolidation. In a fit of what can only be described as unabashed optimism, he took note of the infrared eyes on both new and old Apple devices, and attempted to beam the last of his Newton-based addresses to the new iPhone.

It worked.

We should be so lucky

Rafe Colburn loves the Wire, but what gets us is this bit from the end of the post:

The last point I’d make about the show is that it is truly a love letter to the city of Baltimore as it really exists in the eyes of the writers. You can’t watch the show and not fall in love with Baltimore, ugly as it is. It makes me wish someone would write a really good show about Houston, my favorite deeply flawed city.

What, you mean Houston Knights wasn’t enough? (heh)

Dept. of Amusing Things Found on Wikipedia

heh In a pre-coffee stroll through Wikipedia this morning, we found ourselves browsing the entries for a variety of handgun rounds (already far afield of our original quest there, which was to determine the age of the .32-20 round mentioned in a Robert Johnson song; for the record, it’s from 1882, already venerable with Johnson mentioned it).

Anyway, on the entry for .500 S&W Magnum (a truly absurd round about the diameter of a AA battery), we found some interesting choices for “related” articles, preserved via screenshot at right.

Heh.

Here, have a sample

Agent Rob points out these guys. (Actually, it’s apparently one dude). The “Night Ripper” album includes an absurd array of samples, from 40+ years of popular music:

  • Boston
  • James Taylor
  • Paula Abdul
  • Verve
  • Arrested Development
  • Chicago (“25 or 6 to 4”)
  • Manfred Mann (“Blinded by the Light”)
  • Kansas
  • Steely Dan (“Black Cow”)
  • Paul McCartney and, separately, the Beatles
  • Smashing Pumpkins

Plus a million snippits that made us go “oh crap! What was that?” Here’s a sample track; there’s more at their MySpace.

Remember Jose Padilla?

He’s the American citizen arrested 6 years ago on charges he was working to build and detonate a “dirty bomb” on behalf of Al Qaeda. His case got interesting quickly, since the government maintained that he wasn’t entitled to any legal protections because he was held as an “enemy combatant”.

The courts eventually intervened, and the government was forced to try him in the regular courts, finally according him the same rights that ANY of us should have. Remember, this is a CITIZEN that the government simply declared to be beyond the reach of the rule of law. If that doesn’t make your blood run cold, we don’t know what will.

He may well have been a bad guy, but we’ll never really know, now, because our own government basically destroyed Padilla over the course of his 6-year incarceration (much of it in solitary confinement, and subject to CIA “interrogation techniques” designed to dismantle Padilla’s mental health) and only then tried him in public. He was found unfit to stand trial by a forensic psychiatrist, but they overuled her and tried him anyway. He was found guilty on all counts yesterday. From Lindsey Beyerstein:

Over Dr. Hagerty’s objections, Padilla was deemed fit to stand trial for conspiracy to murder people abroad and providing material support to terrorists operating in Bosnia, Chechnya and other foreign countries. A Florida court found Padilla guilty on all counts, Thursday.

By destroying Padilla, the government cheated us all out of justice. If Padilla had gotten the speedy trial that he was entitled to as an American citizen, he might have been legitimately convicted while he was still of sound mind. Instead, the government tortured an American citizen and thereby undercut the legitimacy their prosecution.

Glenn Greenwald has more:

For a substantial time, Padilla was denied all access to the outside world, including even access to a lawyer. In court, the Bush DOJ repeatedly argued that the President possesses the power to imprison even U.S. citizens indefinitely and with no charges simply by decreeing them to be an “enemy combatant,” with no review of any kind and no opportunity to contest the validity of the accusations.

The administration repeatedly contended that it was exercising this extraordinary and definitively tyrannical power — a power literally denied for centuries even to the British King — because it claimed that dangerous terrorists like Padilla could not be tried in a U.S. criminal court. Today’s verdict — along with scores of other terrorist convictions obtained with full due process rights both in the U.S. and other places, such as England — gives the lie to that claim.

All along, the Bush administration could have, should have, and was constitutionally obligated to charge Padilla with crimes if it wanted to imprison him. There is no more defining American liberty than the right to be free of arbitrary executive imprisonment, and like so many other basic liberties, the Bush administration violated and assaulted this right for no reason whatsoever.

[…]

Worse still, the notion that Padilla received a “fair trial” is dubious, to put it mildly, and will undoubtedly be vigorously contested on appeal. Last year, the New York Times obtained a copy of a video from Padilla’s imprisonment which showed techniques that can only be described as torture — systematic sensory depravation and gratuitous humiliations which clearly broke Padilla as a human being in every sense that matters, all before he had been charged, let alone convicted, of anything.

A word on the weather

It rained a little here yesterday. Everything’s fine. It always is.

Our dear relatives, we understand, are taken in by the national media’s narrative of “Houston” — a single, small place, apparently — being flooded by the remnants of a tropical storm (with a very pretty name).

Here’s the deal. (We said this once before, remember.) “Houston” is not like most places. It’s much, much bigger. Our city covers some 600 square miles. Some of that is on a flood plain, yes, but (as we have mentioned before), this is not where we live or work. Even Allison, in 2001, didn’t put water anywhere near our front door. Erin, God love her, was just a thunderstorm where we live.

“But people DIED,” we can almost hear you cry, “surely you’re understating!” Actually, we’re not (and don’t call us Shirley). Houston is also coastal plain, meaning that in any serious rainfall we will accumulate water in low-lying areas. Despite the near constant nature of this, every time it happens several folks decide to try to drive through it, and sometimes this is a fatal error for whatever reason. We also understand that a roof caved in somewhere down near Clear Lake, but, frankly, if it caved in under yesterday’s rain, we’d be thinking about “poor maintenance” rather than “storm” as a proximate cause.

So, yes, we’re fine. It rained a little. Everything’s fine. It always is.

And good riddance.

Another Republican has announced he won’t seek re-election in 2008; this time it’s our cousin Chip. Let’s hope his district hasn’t been gerrymandered into permanent Republicanism, and that the good people of it realize what voting for Bushites gets them.