Category: Media

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Bush’s Mystery Bulge

Much flying talk about a mysterious square bulge on Bush’s back, clearly visible beneath his suit during the first debate, leading to rumors that he may have been channeling Karl Rove through a tiny wireless earpiece. Salon has a pretty compelling analysis concluding that the likelihood is high. Mediachannel has another.

One videographer was asked by a Bush crew member what frequency his camera was on – speculation is that the question may have been a probe to prevent another episode like the one in France at the D-Day memorial event, when TV viewers were able to clearly hear a male voice speaking Bush’s words just before he spoke them. isbushwired.com explores the topic in some depth, and includes images. Networks had agreed not to shoot the debaters from behind, but did anyway.

An earpiece isn’t materially different from a teleprompter. But debaters don’t get to use teleprompters. Especially not presidential debaters. If this story blows open, the game changes.

Music: Lou Reed :: Endless Cycle
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VP Zoom

Overheard on campus: “If you watch the debates on Fox, you’ll see that they more often zoom in on the Republican candidates to make them look larger and more authoritative, and zoom out on the Democrats to make them look like weenies.”

Music: Palace Brothers :: You Will Miss Me When I Burn
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Consolidating the Message

No information on the source of this several-minute-long collage of the relentless fear-mongering drumbeat by your favorite politicos, but if you’re not drained by endless repeat of the past three years’ keywords, this ought to push you over the edge.

Hell, just watching the debates is starting to feel like a bludgeoning. Even within 90-second windows and all the facts and interpretations of the world at their disposal, candidates can’t help repeating themselves ad nauseum.

Thanks rinchen.

Music: James Chance & The Contortions :: King Heroin
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Best of the Berkeley Blogs

For UC Berkeley News, Bonnie Azab Powell commemorates the 40th anniversary of the free speech movement by rounding up what she sees as the Best of the Berkeley Blogs. Not sure birdhouse is even worthy of mention in the same breath as Brad DeLong but Powell says:

The Birdhouse, in summary, is the ideal dinner-party guest: witty yet understated, insightful without being shrill.

I’m flattered, though totally undeserving. Must be the first time I’ve ever been accused of being witty… Can’t believe I compared posting here to “doing push-ups…”

Music: Orlando “Puntilla” Rios :: Amanama
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Super Size Me

Another unanticipated consequence of living with Tivo: With an always-on list of good content, Amy and I had forgotten for the past few months that we actually like to watch movies as well. Rented Morgan Spurlock’s Super Size Me tonight and were awe-struck. Spurlock challenges himself to eat nothing but food from McDonald’s for an entire month, “three squares a day.” In that period, he gains 24.5 pounds, nearly destroys his liver, shocks his doctors, endures depression, mood swings, and generates 13 garbage bags full of packaging material. His vegan girlfriend even talks candidly about how his erections lose steam over the course of the month.

The film has a few sidebars on topics like the frightening state of modern school lunch programs and the power of the processed food industry’s lobbiests over government. Funny MOS interviews with people who have no idea what a calorie is. But it doesn’t touch the immense companion topic of factory farming, which seemed a bit strange. Focus here is really on personal health. Part of what makes the doc work is that there’s nothing pedantic about Spurlock – he’s a regular guy, unashamed to admit that McDonald’s food tastes great. He’s not preachy, just straight up and ready to turn himself into a guinea pig, even though it half kills him.

Music: Impossible Underpants :: Gordian Pie
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MT3, Template Mods

Now that MT-Blacklist is available for Movable Type 3.1, decided it was time finally to go for it. But upgrading the back-end and keeping the old templates locks you out of some of the coolest new features. And I’ve been wanting to move to the new date/slug-based URL format (rather than entry ID-based), so that URLs are not broken when databases are re-populated (e.g. when moving to a new host, or running an export/import).

Rather than mess around upgrading old templates, decided to start fresh with all-new templates. Which in this case look shockingly like the old templates. A few tweaks remaining, but good enough for jazz. Apologies to anyone who tried to leave comments today.

Cosmetic changes aside (comments on the new look welcome), this change lays the groundwork to enabling MT3’s PHP hooks, so I’ll soon be making permalink and category archives, monthly archives, and comments dynamic, which will mean near-zero delays when commenting, and reduced server load on publish.

Most glaring remaining bug: Old comments are in the database, but not showing up attached to existing entries. Hrmmmm…

Update: I’ve found the comment problem – I wasn’t missing all comments – just comments dating from June, when I first updated to the MT3, then went back to MT 2.6. From that point on, the comments_visible field in the mt_comments table was NULL rather than 1. No idea why, but I fixed this with a quick SQL statement, re-exported, and the missing comments since June 4 are now visible in the export. Now I need to do some surgery: remove all entries since then, trim the export file to just the affected entries, and re-import just those. Tomorrow…

Update 2: Comments from June 4 to the present have been restored.

Music: Julieta Venegas :: Casa Abandonada
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Comment Spam as Data Corruption

At OJR, a fairly exhaustive piece on the history and status of weblog comment spam, including this zinger from Irish blogger Antoin O Lachtnain, laying down the gauntlet (though I doubt it had any effect):

Relevant comments are very welcome, whether you agree or disagree with what I have to say. However, advertising of goods or services is not permitted on this forum without payment of a fee. The fee per advertisement is 500 Euros, which is payable immediately by bank draft. If you post an ad but do not pay the charge immediately you have corrupted data on this Web site without my permission. As such, you are guilty of criminal damage under the Criminal Damage Act, 1991 and subject to a prison sentence of up to 10 years and a fine of up to 12,700 Euros…Please note that posting on this forum will have no effect whatsoever on the PageRank of any links that you post.

Music: Minutemen :: One Reporter’s Opinion
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bconf, mtblogmail

Scripting my butt off. On request of a customer, just finished developing mtblogmail, a PHP utility that emails weblog summaries to a mailing list or the MT Notifications list at regular intervals, filling a mysterious void in the MT notifications feature (“Sure,” I said, “cake! A few SQL queries and…” turned out to be a full-blown utility). Released it as free software. Tested it here first, and migrated everyone who was on the birdhouse notifications list into subscribers. To get weekly email updates on recent birdhouse posts, enter your email in the box to the right.

Also just turned in final project for the shell programming class — a menu-driven script that creates / deletes users and groups, generates apache configurations, installs SpamAssassin preference files, configures webalizer or awstats, reports spam and virus traffic for the user and domain, etc. The instructor asked me to be a T.A. in the class next semester, but no have time.

Music: Burning Spear :: Dread River
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The Corporation

Just watched The Corporation with baald, feeling overwhelmed. Feel like fighting the machine. The movie is complex, huge in scope, tragic, and very entertaining. Hits like a ton of bricks. Dozens of interviews with CEOs, thinkers, economists, corporate spies. Case studies and analysis of the role of the corporation as entity that now fills a role larger than that of any church or government, and that is bound by law to hold the bottom line above all other considerations, and that is treated with the full rights of a person (but without accountability), thanks to a twist of the 14th Amendment.

So many vectors here. Amazed at the story of a city in Bolivia that was rescued from starvation by a corporation, in exchange for the right to privatize all public services, including water. Citizens ended up paying 1/4 of their wages for water, and were barred even from collecting rainwater. Amazed at the turns of events and court decisions that resulted in genes becoming patentable. Amazed at the lies of Monsanto and their pushing of Posilac to farmers (whose cows already produced more than enough milk) at great detriment to the cow and probable detriment to human health, and the legal war they started with the Fox Network, who planned to air an expose’ (two journalists ended up getting fired over it).

Revelatory, shocking, and brilliantly produced. But also depressing.

Music: David Bowie :: Memory of a Free Festival
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How and Why

HAW-chemistry Maybe it has something to do with having a kid, marveling at his process of discovery and thinking about his education, or maybe it just comes down to the tenacity of early memories, but a slight chill went up my spine browsing the covers of these How and Why books from the 60s and 70s. Seems like every elementary classroom, library, and doctor’s office had a collection of these books, and I would read in fascination about how the world worked, thirsty for information in the pre-internet era. I’d love to find some of these again. Would they seem ridiculous and dated if I saw them today? Were they well written? No idea. I mostly remember the style of illustration, and just the feeling of being turned on by life, the universe, and everything. Not all of these goose the nostalgia gland, but the ones that do ring such a happy bell.

Music: Joe McPhee :: Shakey Jake