By Cory Doctorow at 6:50 pm Sunday, Mar 7
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The ENC is sending threatening letters to TV stations that run MoveOn's anti-Bush ads, trying to freak them out with a nonsensical claim that that ads are illegal.
"As a broadcaster licensed by the Federal Communications Commission, you have a responsibility to the viewing public, and to your licensing agency, to refrain from complicity in any illegal activity," said the RNC's chief counsel, Jill Holtzman Vogel, in a letter sent to about 250 stations Friday.
"Now that you have been apprised of the law, to prevent further violations of federal law, we urge you to remove these advertisements from your station's broadcast rotation."
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Thanks, blaine!)
By Cory Doctorow at 5:31 pm Sunday, Mar 7
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Pico Iyer is a brilliant
travel writer (his
Video Nights in Kathmandu is a real standout) whose latest NYT editorial deals with the circadian violence wrought by jetlag and global communalism -- a theme near and dear to my
Eastern Standard Tribalist's heart, especially when articulated in such beautiful, compellingly drunken language.
The lure of modern travel, for many of us, is that we don't go from A to B so much as from A to Z, or from A to alpha; most often, we end up somewhere between the two, not quite one, and not quite the other -- in an airport, perhaps, that is and isn't the place we left and the place we think we're going to. Jet lag, in some ways, is the perfect metaphor for this, the neurological equivalent, I often feel, of some long, gray airport passageway that leads from one nowhere space to another. It speaks, you could say, for much in the accelerated world where we speed between continents and think we have conquered both space and time.
And, yet, of course -- this is its power -- it isn't just a metaphor. It is painfully real, as real as the words that are coming out slurred or as that piece of paper on which we have methodically added two plus two and come up with three. We have been placed at a tilt, and the person who emerges from us is someone suffering from something much deeper than the high-frequency hearing loss or the superdry sinuses that come from flying 500 miles an hour above the weather in a pressurized cabin.
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By Cory Doctorow at 5:22 pm Sunday, Mar 7
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Blogrolling.com, recently bought out by Tucows, has added OPML import and export -- that means that you can turn your RSS feed-list into your blogroll and vice-versa.
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Thanks, Elliot!)
By Cory Doctorow at 5:17 pm Sunday, Mar 7
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Visited my old building in Toronto tonight and stopped in to see my old neighbor Roger Wood, the
talented assemblage sculptor whose clocks I dearly adore. Roger had just come back from doing a crafts show in Philly and had a few unsold clocks in inventory, and this one, a "wall-mounted Jules-Verne style" took my breath away. I bought it on the spot to be shipped to my new flat in London.
94K JPEG Link
By Cory Doctorow at 7:35 am Sunday, Mar 7
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Travis sez, "I run a small business which rents instructional videos (like a NetFlix for geeks). The site could best be summed up as 'learn how to compete on JunkYard wars from the comfort of your own couch': information on welding, using a lathe, building a heat treating oven, etc."
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Thanks, Travis!)
By Cory Doctorow at 7:00 am Sunday, Mar 7
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When Frank Rich wrote a column criticizing Gibson's cynical marketing campaign for his little vanity project, The Passion, Gibson told the New Yorker, "I want to kill him... I want his intestines on a stick. ... I want to kill his dog." Now, Rich (who doesn't own a dog) has written another column, describing in detail the Jew-baiting manipulative tactics employed by Gibson in the effort to make his personal $25MM investment -- the most money sunk into a dead-language movie since
Quest for Fire -- pay off.
As for Gibson's own speech in this debate, it is often as dishonest as it is un-Christian. In the New Yorker article, he says that his father, Hutton Gibson, a prolific author on religious matters, "never denied the Holocaust"; the article's author, Peter J. Boyer, sanitizes the senior Gibson further by saying he called the Holocaust a "tragedy" in an interview he gave to the writer Christopher Noxon for a New York Times Magazine article published last March. Neither the word "tragedy" nor any synonym for it ever appeared in that Times article, and according to a full transcript of the interview that Noxon made available to me, Hutton Gibson said there was "no systematic extermination" of the Jews by Hitler, only "a deal where he was supposed to make it rough on them so they would all get out and migrate to Israel because they needed people there to fight the Arabs."
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via MeFi)
By Cory Doctorow at 5:58 am Sunday, Mar 7
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The Triplets of Belleville is an animated feature film that was up against Finding Nemo for Best Animated Feature at the Oscars this year. My mom has been talking about it nonstop since I got to Toronto, and I've just watch the trailer and poked around a little on the (sucktastic, Flash-based) website for the movie, and I'm pretty impressed -- enough so that I pre-ordered a copy of the May DVD.
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Thanks, Mom!)
By Cory Doctorow at 5:27 am Sunday, Mar 7
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Fark photoshopping contest theme: "what happens when kids start acting out their favorite video games."
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By Cory Doctorow at 5:14 am Sunday, Mar 7
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Ivan Appel, a Russian reader of mine, has begun translating
Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom into Russian, posting a chapter at a time as he goes. Sweet!
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By Cory Doctorow at 5:01 am Sunday, Mar 7
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SnapStream's "Beyond TV 3" is a software-based PVR that turns your PC into a TiVo-plus-plus, capable of streaming stored programs to your browser and auto-skipping commercials. Basically, it's as though they made a TiVo whose only considerations were what you, the customer, would likely want to see, and not what the Hollywood studios would prefer.
The software streams to Web browsers, so you don't have to buy another copy for remote viewing. It's fairly simple to enable security so strangers don't have access to your television signal or recordings.
Beyond TV handles all the personal video recorder basics well. Users can pause live TV, rewind and set up recordings — all without an advanced degree in VCR technology. And like TiVo's Home Media Option, recording can be scheduled over the Internet.
But SnapStream also added commercial break recognition, which vastly simplifies ad skipping. It also supports a variety of video formats and lets you easily convert to a more tightly compressed file.
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via /.)
By Cory Doctorow at 4:42 am Sunday, Mar 7
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A Japanese inventor has shipped an Aibo-like "guard-dragon" that costs as much as a car and has a bunch of anti-burglar sensors and behaviors.
With more than 50 built-in sensors, Banryu is capable of picking up changes in its surroundings and transmitting an alarm to its master's cellphone.
A camera on its back can swivel 360 degrees and send images of the room around it. It can also sense the smell of burning and detect temperatures above 50 degrees.
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Thanks, hary!)
By Cory Doctorow at 4:17 am Sunday, Mar 7
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Rusty "Kuro5hin" Foster has landed a sweet new gig with a web consulting shop for political campaigns:
Rusty Foster joined Armstrong Zúniga in February of 2004 as CTO. Rusty created the Scoop software platform in 1999 and founded Kuro5hin.org the same year. Kuro5hin is widely recognized as a pioneering project in collaborative media, and Rusty has written and spoken extensively about the potential of the internet as a medium for collaboration and grassroots organizing.
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By Cory Doctorow at 4:15 am Sunday, Mar 7
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Lovely collection of vintage (?) cowgirl pinup posters.
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via MeFi)
