BoingBoing seems to have silently removed all posts and podcasts mentioning Violet Blue. Others say it’s not a new phenomenon.
As this blogger notes, a blog is not a public utility, and thus can censor as much as it likes. It’s not a government entity subject to the First Amendment.
Still, BoingBoing, for a very long time now, has tested out as the most popular blog on the Internet, and as such, it choosing to disappear Violet Blue from its archives is a proposition highly unpleasant to consider. “We’ve always been at war with Eastasia,” after all.
As Zota points out in the digg coverage:
Last year, boingboing wrote about the Society of American Archivists decision to delete their old listserv archives. They generated enough attention that the decision was reversed and the archives were preserved. If they’re erasing parts of their own archive for any reason, it’s an act of shocking hypocrisy. If they’re deliberately scrubbing specific people from their archives, it’s a disgusting reversal of all their publicly stated principles.
As many point out, it’s possible there’s an innocent cause to the deletions. However, given that they also are deleting comments asking them what’s going on, it’s not promising.
Of course, some are figuring out ways to place tongue in cheek quite firmly …
“The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it.”
— John Gilmore, TIME, 12/06/93
Last Sunday, I was on my way home, having gone downtown to meet Mom for some dinner and a walk around Millennium; she had been in town visiting with her best friend.
On the way home, we had a brief rainstorm followed by the sun coming out in full regalia quite quickly. Hopeful, I looked around, and sure enough:
![[Rainbow!]](http://www.windycitymike.com/images/2008-06-22-rainbow.jpg)
Not only was it fantastic to see a rainbow, but what also was pretty amazing was how everyone around me was just getting a kick out of seeing a rainbow. I kind of understand why it’s the Biblical expression for hope and a new beginning — everyone on the street was walking more chipperly.
Pretty cool.
Heh. McSweeney’s does “Lit 101 Class in Three Lines or Less” (via Kottke).
The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe
C.S. LEWIS: Finally, a utopia ruled by children and populated by talking animals.
THE WITCH: Hi, I’m a sexually mature woman of power and confidence.
C.S. LEWIS: Ah! Kill it, lion Jesus!
The Dallas and Denver coordinators ran off with the profits:
While I no longer have any authority to speak on behalf of the worldwide Can’t Stop the Serenity effort, and can comment only from the combined perspectives of being the event’s founder, part of this fandom, and an observer, I post the following message because no one else seemed willing to do so until after this year’s events had passed.
[...]
Equality Now has indicated that they never received the money raised in 2007 by the Can’t Stop the Serenity events held in either Denver or Dallas/North Texas.
In the case of Denver, the person ultimately responsible for the estimated $1,900 raised — the co-organizer there who was serving as the event’s accountant — apparently has since disappeared and reportedly become completely incommunicado. That money, as near as anyone can tell, simply is gone forever, although no one knows why. Equality Now reports having no record of those funds.
In the case of Dallas/North Texas, the roughly $5,600 raised wound up in the account of the lead organizer there and got “lost”. He currently is under a signed agreement to make monthly payments over the next two years to Equality Now.
[...]
The event-going public has the right to know what happened. There is no ethically-defensible way in which to withhold the fact that someone’s money did not go where it was supposed to, while asking them to give more money again this year.
[...]
My sense of ethics isn’t up for a public vote, despite some on the CSTS organizers’ forums trying to make it that way. And, to be honest, it’s absurd (to put it very tamely) that apparently I have to drag people kicking and screaming into exhibiting ethical behavior.
The resistance to exhibiting ethical behavior by making these unfortunate facts known to the fandom at large in a timely manner, delaying doing so for so long that it’s now mere days before this year’s events, became so rabid that one organizer accused me of simply wanting attention for myself.
As the founder of Can’t Stop the Serenity, why in a million years would I ever desire going out of my way to write a gut-wrenching statement such as this one?
All anyone had to do to prevent this coming from me was for Denver, Dallas, or this year’s global coordinator to have the ethical will to treat the fandom with respect and explain in a timely manner — in other words, at any time since this past February — what was done in its name.
No one was willing to do the right thing. Which I guess tells me something I wish I didn’t have to learn.
BBC:
Scientists claim they have cured advanced skin cancer for the first time using the patient’s own cells cloned outside the body.
The 52-year-old man involved was free of melanoma two years after treatment.
US researchers, reports the New England Journal of Medicine, took cancer-fighting immune cells, made five billion copies, then put them all back.
If you use Google Calendar, you may or may not have noticed that you can generate a PDF of your calendar by hitting the Print button, and then clicking on the “Save As” button that comes up in the little pop-up window.
I wanted to know if there was a web address that could take me directly to that PDF. There is.
The way you can find your own is by using Firefox and downloading the Live HTTP Headers extension. Once it is installed, open up the Live HTTP Headers window (it should be on your Tools menu), and go to Google Calendar, hit Print, select the options the way you’d like them, and essentially go all the way to where Firefox is asking you where to save the PDF.
Then, go over to the Live HTTP Headers window, and hit the “Save As” button there. It will save the “log” to a text file. The last web address it tried to get will be your PDF’s web address.
It tends to take the format of something like this:
https://www.google.com/calendar/printable?
ctz=[your time zone, in the format of "America%2FChicago"]&
hl=[two-letter language code, i.e. "en" for English]&
pgsz=[the size of your paper — letter, legal, A4]&
mode=[what format you're printing — I use agenda]&
wkst=[not sure what this stands for — I imagine it's what day the week starts, Sunday or Monday]&
src=[this is a long code here, and there is one of these for each of the iCalendars being represented in whatever you are printing out]&
prr=[how many days you are printing out: TODAY, THREE_DAYS, etc.]&
psd=[print descriptions, true or false]&
pset=[print end times, true or false]&
psa=[print attendees, true or false]&
psr=[print your response, true or false]&
pfs=[font size — SMALLEST, SMALLER, NORMAL, etc.]&
po=[orientation — PORTRAIT, AUTO, or LANDSCAPE]&
psdec=[show events you have declined, true or false]&
pbw=[print in black and white, true or false]&
pjs=[I'm not sure what this one is, but it's a true-false value]&
pda=[I'm not sure what this one is, but it's a true-false value]&
dates=[start date YYYYMMDD]%2F[end date YYYYMMDD]
Obviously, this is not really something you can construct altogether on your own, at the very least because of the “src” codes being used for each individual iCalendar, which, as far as I can tell, don’t appear anywhere else (not even in your Private Calendar URLs).
The URL that comes from Google Calendar also has a “rand” value, which I assume is a random number. However, removing the variable altogether from the mix doesn’t seem to do anything any harm.
San Francisco theater owners are scheduling Serenity showings for the same day as the Can’t Stop the Serenity events (which are benefits for Equality Now), under the premise that people will assume they too are charity showings, and instead are pocketing the cash.
Months ago, I called the Clay to ask why they chose the third weekend in June to show Serenity (which is the weekend we’ve done CSTS the past two years) and the manager said “We know a lot of people will come and we can make a lot of money”. When I asked about possibly working with Equality Now, the manager just laughed. I just hope people don’t go to this thinking they are supporting Equality Now. Like I’ve said before, having other screenings of Serenity is not a bad thing. I just don’t appreciate theaters being sneaky about it. There are 11 other months they can show Serenity but all of a sudden there are 6 bay area screenings in the last two weeks of June? What’s up with that?
(via Whedonesque)
Mazel tov, George!
Actor George Takei, 71, and Brad Altman, 54, were the first couple to ever receive their marriage license in the City of West Hollywood. Takei and Altman will have a wedding ceremony in September in the Democracy Room of the Japanese American National Museum in Los Angeles.
The couple have been together for 21 years and were invited to be part of the ribbon-cutting ceremony inviting the couples into West Hollywood Park to receive their license. Many couples even went on to have wedding services performed in the park under wedding gazebos, surrounded by music, flowers and passed decorated cupcakes.
I’m glad to see there be so much concatenated joy on one day … bless them.
The blog io9 compares Ron D. Moore’s Star Trek: Deep Space Nine with Battlestar Galactica and finds them extremely similar: long sweeping arcs, “good” terrorists (Maj. Kira v. Col. Tigh), the enemy among us (Changelings v. Cylons), divided loyalties (Odo, Worf v. Athena, Helo, Final Four), mismatched couples (Odo/Kira v. Saul/Ellen, Galen/Cally, Sam/Kara), and gods and prophecies (Prophets v. Lords of Kobol).
In Oceanside, California, El Camino High School students were told by highway patrol officers that 26 specific students had been killed in car wrecks over that weekend.
Teenagers broke down weeping.
A few hours later, school officials revealed it to be a “scared-straight” exercise.
How was the reveal performed? By bringing them into the school’s stadium and showing the “dead” students, streaked in blood, being pulled out of the wrecked cars by local police and firefighters.
“[W]e wanted them to be traumatized. That’s how they get the message,” said the guidance counselor and program creator, Lori Mengele Tauber.
I’d love to see some enterprising California lawyer enlist all those students in a mass tort action against the fuckheads who run that school. This is a perfect example of people letting zealous, fanatical belief in the rightness of a cause convince them to engage in utterly inhumane behavior with no regard for the individual, basic humanity of a teenager.
I recently found an interesting world map via the Strange Maps website — this was how one man, Maurice Gombard, felt that the world should be divvied up after World War II. A quote from the explanatory text:
The main building blocks of his New World Order were to be:
- The United States of America (USA): the US, Canada, all Central American and Carribean states, most Atlantic islands (including Greenland and Iceland), most Pacific islands, Taiwan, Hainan, the Philippines and several now Indonesian islands, including Sulawesi. This was to be the dominant power in the world, military and otherwise.
- The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR): the Soviets were to be rewarded with Persia (Iran), Mongolia, Manchuria, Finland, and all of Eastern Europe, which subsequently would form part of the Eastern Bloc (excluding Albania, but including the real-life maverick state of Yugoslavia, socialist but anti-Soviet). All of theses states were simply to become member-states of the USSR. Austria and most of Germany, although ‘quarantained’ are shown within the Soviet sphere.
- The United States of South America (USSA): including all South American states, with the three Guianas as a single constituent state and the Falkland Islands part of the USSA.
- The Union of African Republics (UAR): All of Africa as a federation of republics.
- The Arabian Federated Republics (AFR): covering Saudi and all other states now occupying the Arabian Peninsula, plus present-day Iraq and Syria.
- The Federated Republics of India (FRI): Present-day Afghanistan, Pakistan, India, Nepal, Bhutan, Bangladesh and Birma (Myanmar).
- The United Republics of China (URC): A federation including all parts of present-day China, Korea, the erstwhile French colony of Indochina (now Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia), Thailand and Malaya.
- The United States of Scandinavia (USS): Norway, Sweden, Denmark.
- The United States of Europe (USE): the Benelux countries, the German Rhineland, France, Switzerland, Spain, Portugal and Italy.
- And finally the British Commonwealth of Nations (BCN), including Great Britain, Australia, New Zealand, Sri Lanka, Madagascar and most of Indonesia.
Smaller entities include Eire (the whole of Ireland), Greece (including Albania), Turkey (excluding European Turkey), Hebrewland (the Holy Land plus Jordan) and Japan. The three axis states (Germany, Italy and Japan) were to be ‘quarantained’ until they could be readmitted in the family of nations.
Roger Ebert recently wrote an entry in his Sun-Times blog about the word “fuck” and those who use the term, an entry which I found rather surprising. Rather than try to summarize it here, I’ll just point you towards the entry, which is a short read.
Here’s my response, posted as a comment to the entry (at this particular moment, awaiting approval):
Mr. Ebert, I must admit to being a bit surprised at this latest blog entry of yours, as I’ve usually found myself sharing most of your opinions in the past.
I suppose what I am surprised at is that I just have no idea where some of the suggestions you are making come from, in terms of a cognitive supporting structure. Admittedly, opinion does not need to always have a supporting structure constructed, but they stand stronger when they do, and as these suggestions seem a bit odd (at least to my sensibilities), knowing the supporting structure of this commentary would assist.
In all honesty, I’m not sure how, cognitively, there’s a link between the word “fuck” and rape. The word “fuck” is a crude word, but its commonly understood primary definition is the act of sexual intercourse. I’ve never heard any context in which the word alone has the additional connotation of the brutal nonconsensual act that rape is, nor even having a connotation of any element which could reasonably be then connected to rape.
It is, I think, not vocabulary that represents public civility, but intent. Postulate a guy greeting another guy on the street with this: “Harry, how the fuck are you!”, followed by a big bear hug. I don’t feel public civility was violated there, and in fact, I feel somewhat warmly at the display of affection. I certainly don’t feel that “something sad” was represented by that guy’s use of “fuck” as a sign of great emotional emphasis in his term.
I also feel it’s of beneficial use to society as a whole as a release of anger. At least in my experience, using the word “fuck” helps dissipate, not aggravate, anger. If someone can, instead of bringing a shotgun to work the next day, walk away with a steady stream of profanity mumbled under his or her breath, society is all the better from it.
And its use in terms of sexual emphasis — again, I think it relies upon the underlying emotional intent. If a man or woman uses that term to lustily suggest sexual intercourse, the moral weight of that word instead rests upon the relationship between the two. If it is stranger-to-stranger, the term is quite offensive. If it is lover-to-lover, it may be a sign of deep sexual attraction, in which case such love-lust is, I feel, a positive emotion.
My own (respectful) suggestion is that this is a result of a natural progression that all humanity experiences. I’m somewhat resigned to the fact that thanks to that downward progression, there will be things going on in several decades which will most likely offend my moral sensibilities, since my moral sense is a natural product of my upbringing in the ’70s, ’80s, and ’90s. I think that mankind’s consensus as to public morality has always been on a steady progression from the more restrictive to the more permissible. (One thinks of the “Idiocracy” satire as taking that progression even further, if somewhat dytopically.)
But I think morality has to be relativism-based, because I think most of the problems of modern-day mankind are based on people who base their morality on inflexible absolutes. That results in religious fundamentalism, and their inflexibility has caused much of the world great pain. (I am not comparing you to a fundamentalist! Just saying that mankind must not be held to moral absolutes that disregard the chronological advance of time.)
When I was a kid, Transformers were my bag. I loved ‘em. So for a little bit of nostalgia, I rented Transformers: the Movie from Netflix. And it had two absolutely hilarious moments.
First — there was profanity in it! In a kids’ movie! At one point, Spike (the kid on the original series, now an adult) realizes that a large buttload of explosives didn’t even ding the big planet-sized Transformer baddie. And he goes: “It isn’t even dented? Oh shit, what are we going to do now?” And, yes, he says “shit” — it’s not vague enough to be a matter of interpretation.
The second is even more bizarre. In one of the most bizarre moments of the movie, the Autobots are on a junk planet and have reached out to some wreck-based transformers (voiced by Monty Python’s Eric Idle, of all people) with the “universal greeting.” They then proceed to dance to “Weird Al” Yankovic’s “Dare to be Stupid.”
Oh, you think I kid.
No, I not kid.
The scene pulls out on them boogying down to such lyrics as:
“You got to squeeze all the Charmin you can
when Mr. Whipple’s not around … “
Yes, Mr. Whipple is mentioned in Transformers: the Movie.
By the way, I need to take the opportunity to say that aside from the utter non sequitur awesomeness that is a “Weird Al” song plopped down in the middle of the movie, the soundtrack utterly, utterly, utterly sucked. I mean, even accommodating for the possibility of ’80s awfulness, the soundtrack utterly, utterly, utterly sucked. It was hair metal. Throughout the whole. Fucking. Movie. And what’s worse, it was hair metal with vocals, meaning that while you were listening to movie dialogue, you were hearing bad generic lyrics.
And another non sequitur — the song that’s in this movie — Stan Bush’s “The Touch” — might sound a little familiar. Why? Well, it’s “Boogie Nights.” Dirk Diggler (Mark Wahlberg) shows exactly what an awful voice he has by singing the song (YouTubery).
Interesting exchange in Ebert’s Answer Man column this week:
Q. I am 14 years old, and I personally love great movies, but I can’t get friends that are my age to sit down and enjoy these classics with me. They claim they are boring. They didn’t even like “The Godfather,” stating, and I quote, “There was, like, no action.” I was wondering, is there a certain age where people are suddenly awakened and realize they enjoy great movies — and if so, why is it that younger people tend not to like the classics?
Randy Rosdahl, Gastonia, N.C.
A. I think it has something to do with how interested you are in other people in general. Many of the truly great movies involve a close look at human life and behavior. To appreciate them, you have to be able to step outside yourself and empathize with someone else. That’s the opposite of instant gratification. Some of your friends may not have reached that level of maturity. Some never will.
Fun little note from yesterday’s Daily Kos diaries. First, from a news report:
Bob Kelleher is a man who has lost a lot of elections - but he’s still running, this year as a Republican for U.S. Senate.
Since 1964, Kelleher, an 85-year-old Butte attorney, has run for public office 15 times, losing all but once. His single victory came in 1971, when he was elected as a delegate to the 1972 convention that rewrote Montana’s state constitution.
Kelleher’s lone rallying whoop then - as now - probably has something to do with his extended losing streak: Kelleher wants to do away with America’s unique system of representative democracy and replace it with a parliament.
And then the diarist steps in with the news:
Kelleher beat out five Republicans in yesterday’s primary. And he didn’t just eek out a victory. He crushed them by 13 points. And as for the GOP’s hopes of at least saving face in this race? Well, I think it’s safe to say that train has left the station.
Hee. Hee. Hee. Hee. Hee. It’s a glorious time to be a progressive.
On a conference call with other New York lawmakers, Clinton, a New York senator, said she was willing to become Obama’s vice presidential nominee if it would help Democrats win the White House, according to several participants in the call.
BITE ME, Hillary. You’ve been doing every corrupt manuever you and your handlers could possibly think of to win. You not only don’t fit into the Obama Administration, you don’t fit into the new Democratic politics anymore. Go slink off into the mud you so enthusiastically threw throughout the campaign.
