Greg: Debunking Gore critics over the Internet

I’ve heard the tired saw that Al Gore claimed he invented the Internet too many times, and heard it debunked almost as often. Greg points to (and quotes some lengthy excerpts from) an article at the Daily Howler providing a definitive debunking.

(Oh, and Greg, I think I’ve been reading too many warbloggers. After following the reaction to Doc’s statements yesterday, including Doc’s own follow-up, I had a dream last night that I got a righteous fisking for saying I wouldn’t stay silent about the war. I’m not even sure I know what a fisking is. Except that it has nothing to do with Ian. (Small inside joke.))

To Hell With Good Intentions

McLusky
McLusky Do Dallas
Beggars Banquet/Too Pure, 2002

My love is bigger than your love
We take more drugs than a touring funk band (Sing it)
My love is bigger than your love (Sing it)
My love is bigger than your love (Sing it)

My band is better than your band
We’ve got more songs than a song convention (Sing it)
My love is bigger than your love (Sing it)
My love is bigger than your love (Sing it)

And we’re all going straight to hell

My dad is bigger than your dad
He’s got eight cars and a house in Ireland (Sing it)
My love is bigger than your love (Sing it)
My love is bigger than your love (Sing it)

When we gonna torch the restaurant? (Sing it)
When we gonna pay the guide dog? (Sing it)
My love is bigger than your love (Sing it)
My love is bigger than your love (Sing it)

And we’re all going straight to hell

When we gonna torch the restaurant? (Sing it)
When we gonna get excited? (Sing it)
My love is bigger than your love (Sing it)
My love is bigger than your love (Sing it)
And we’re all going straight to hell

Your next TV courtesy Microsoft .NET alerts?

I’ve been thinking about getting a new TV. I’m really a movie guy and watching letterboxed content on my 27″ screen is a little painful. But my options for getting a bigger TV were:

  1. A larger conventional or rear projection TV, which are a good value but won’t fit in our built in entertainment center;
  2. A front projection unit (like a computer projector), which is also a relatively good value (80″ screen, anyone?) but which requires a totally dark room for best fidelity;
  3. A plasma TV, which has the right form factor but which is way too costly for me right now

Then I noticed on Microsoft.com’s home page a link that said something about a plasma television set (the link is down now). Curious, I followed the link to find a sweepstakes: “Sign up for alerts and win cool prizes.” Including, coincidentally, the 42″ Panasonic plasma TV I was looking at. Unfortunately I’m, for various reasons, not eligible to play…

Music in the time of war

As I drove in this morning listening to KEXP, I was thinking how it was interesting that you could interpret just about any song as war commentary. Example to follow: McClusky’s “To Hell With Good Intentions.” Then John (In The Morning) put on War on War and I realized that I wasn’t the only one hearing it that way. Heck of a playlist today, starting at 6 am. In fact, I’m half tempted to submit it to Art of the Mix and see how it gets voted.

Playlist so far:

  • Billy Bragg, “Rumours of War”, Don’t Try This At Home
  • Coldplay, “A Rush Of Blood To The Head”, A Rush Of Blood To The Head
  • Echo & the Bunnymen, “The Killing Moon”, Songs To Learn & Sing
  • Massive Attack, “What Your Soul Sings”, 100th Window
  • Moby, “The Sky is Broken”, Play
  • The Fading Collection, “Grief”, Interactive Family Radio
  • Jakatta, “American Dream”, Indian Summer
  • Stars, “Death To Death”, Heart
  • Smog, “Morality”, Supper
  • The Cure, “Killing an Arab”, Boys Don’t Cry
  • The Postal Service, “Brand New Colony”, Give Up
  • Belle & Sebastian, “I Fought in a War”, Fold Your Hands Child, You Walk Like A Peasant
  • New Order, “Love Vigilantes”, (the best of new order)
  • Butterglory, “The Sklls of the Star Pilot”, Crumble
  • Cat Power, “He War”, You Are Free
  • Longwave, “Wake Me When Its Over”, The Strangest Things
  • The Godfathers, “This Is War”, Unreal World
  • Ted Leo & The Pharmacists, “Dead Voices”, Hearts Of Oak
  • Beatles, “Revolution 1”, The White Album
  • Junior Ross & The Spear, “Rough Way Ahead”, Babylon Fall
  • Jurassic Five, “Freedom”, Power in Numbers
  • Marlena Shaw, “I Wish I Knew (how it would feel to be free)”, Black & Proud Vol. 2
  • Public Enemy, “Louder Than a Bomb”, It Takes a Nation of Millions To Hold Us Back
  • Gus Gus, “Gun”, Polydistortion
  • The Future Sound Of London, “We Have Explosive”, Dead Cities
  • Sigur Ros, “Viorar Vel Til Loftarasa (good weather for airstrikes)”, Agaetis Byrjun
  • Clinic, “For the Wars”, Walking With Thee
  • Wimbledon, “That’s What I Like to Call Collateral Damage”, Cumershl
  • Grand Mal, “1st Round K.O.”, Bad Timing
  • Mclusky, “To Hell With Good Intentions”, Mclusky Do Dallas
  • Sleater-Kinney, “Combat Rock”, One Beat
  • Wilco, “War On War”, Yankee Hotel Foxtrot
  • Willie Nelson, “Darkness on the Face of the Earth”, Crazy: The Demo Sessions
  • Bob Dylan, “Paths of Victory”, The Bootleg Series Vol 1
  • Ben Harper, “With My Two Hands”, Diamonds On The Inside
  • Johnny Clarke, “Love Your Brothers and Sisters”, Dubwise & Otherwise 2
  • Gomez, “Army Dub”, In Our Gun
  • The Notwist, “Consequence”, Neon Golden
  • Joseph Arthur, “Ashes Everywhere”, Come To Where I’m From

Doc isn’t reading the right sites

Doc Searls: “Liberalism may not be absent from the blogging world, but it’s certainly impotent.” He’s talking about peaceblogging, not liberal blogs in general. I wonder how he missed Tom Tomorrow? It’s not as though he’s low profile.

I could recommend a few other key liberal blogs, and so could my friend Greg, who should certainly resent the blanket description of his blog as “impotent.” Go get ’em, Greg.

Bill of Rights found; Ashcroft surrenders

In unrelated news, a historic copy of the Bill of Rights, which was one of 14 commissioned by George Washington when he was president and which was subsequently stolen from the North Carolina State House by a Union soldier during the Civil War, has been recovered, according to CNN. No word on whether Ashcroft has been notified, or whether he’s aware that we have a Bill of Rights.

The war has begun

CNN: Twenty-four cruise missiles were fired and 2000-lb. “bunker buster” bombs were dropped at “selected targets of military importance.” Speculation is that the target was a meeting of Saddam and his military advisors.

Hmm. Apparently itís operation Iraqi Freedom. As operation names go, itís no “Desert Storm.”

Three years and five days ago today: a beginning

I just realized I missed an anniversary. My very first page on a website called Jarrett House North was published March 14, 2000. The page was a direct port of the front page of my first personal web site, which I had built in Frontier (back when it was free) on my Power Mac 7200/90 and which I was serving (illegally) over our DSL connection from that Mac using Mac OS 8’s Personal Web Sharing. (The page is still visible at the Internet Archive. Note the damning lack of an actual domain name; I had essentially hijacked the IP address, since Bell Atlantic’s DSL solution wasn’t compatible with Mac OS 8.)

When Dave announced that he was providing free Manila hosting at Editthispage.com for those who wanted to try Manila, I registered my site under the same name I was using for my homebrew site, Jarrett House North. I transferred some of the old content into the Manila site using cut and paste, and then forgot about the site (with a few exceptions) until the summer after my first year of business school.

So when someone asks what my blogaversary is, I tell them my blog was born June 11, 2001, but that it was conceived March 14, 2000 and had a really long gestation period. 🙂

Special bonus: the site map for my old web site is still at the Internet Archive. Compare to the current site map, which only points to my static pages, not to most of my blog content (and hence hasn’t been linked into my main navigation yet). Most of the structure was already set in place in 1999.

A year ago today: OPML scripting

A year ago today I was working on understanding OPML and writing scripting solutions around it. I never did get OmniOutliner2OPML working correctly, and Omni released a new version of OmniOutliner that supported OPML directly.

As an AppleScript, though, OmniOutliner2OPML was interesting enough to form the basis of an article over at Studio Log by Jesse Shanks called “OmniOutliner as a Script Analysis and Management Tool” so it wasn’t totally wasted effort.

The script, like any programming that handles outlines, binary trees, and other branching data sets, contains recursive logic that has to process each level of the tree repeatedly. I used to obsess over this sort of stuff for hours in my old day job, writing selective disclosure tree controls for browsing document relationships in workflow applications and trying to make them as lightweight as possible. Because the reality is that tree structures are both easy and gnarly to program—easy, because they are highly repetitive in their structure (does this node have children? if so, ask each of them if they have children, and so forth), and hard because it’s hard to predict how deep the tree will go and how many levels you’ll have to process, and how long it will take.

Distant echoes of war in the NW

Heard on our NPR station’s local news update this morning: with the USS Carl Vinson carrier group deployed, many businesses in Bremerton, WA are shortening their hours and laying off employees. Another news story estimated there are as many as 19,000 military dependents in the Northwest.

Domesticity

It’s amazing how little it takes to make me feel domestic. I came home in the late afternoon daylight and helped Lisa weed the bed beside the driveway.

(The beds are all a complete disaster, incidentally. We have paths around all the garden beds, from the garden to the back patio, and from the garden to the garage door, and all the way down to the street covered in bark. Thinly covered, now, and with weeds creeping through—actually, covering—the bark. I foresee paving brick, landscaping cloth, lots more bark, and raised beds in the future.

(Also, have I mentioned how good it is to have daylight again?))

Anyway, I only got as far as the end of the fence while the light was still good, then we did some quick shopping and made dinner from leftovers and did laundry and set a pot of stock that I started making last night back on the burner to cook down. What is it about dryer sheets? the smell? Something, anyway, that makes me want to be even more domestic. Or else just makes me sound like Mickey Rooney on a bad day.

Emails from Rachel

From a different front: The Guardian has reprinted a series of emails from Rachel Corrie, the American who was crushed to death by an Israeli bulldozer as she tried to keep Palestinian houses in the Gaza Strip from being destroyed:

I spent a lot of time writing about the disappointment of discovering, somewhat first-hand, the degree of evil of which we are still capable. I should at least mention that I am also discovering a degree of strength and of basic ability for humans to remain human in the direst of circumstances – which I also haven’t seen before. I think the word is dignity. I wish you could meet these people. Maybe, hopefully, someday you will.