Boo

The program I wanted to write for my phone was simple: I wanted to be able to select which side of the street my car was parked on, and have it add alarms to the calendar reminding me to move my car for street cleaning on the appropriate days of the coming week.

It was easy! And it runs perfectly in the Nokia emulator, but when I tried running it on my actual phone...SecurityException!

And basically I'm screwed, as it seems T-Mobile locks everything down...no "third party" access to user data (such as the calendar) at all.

Of course, I'm not even a "third party," I'm the second party, the owner of the phone. How annoying.

Needless to say, my next telephone will run Lunix.

And my code I hereby release into the public domain:

package street;


import java.util.*;
import javax.microedition.midlet.*;
import javax.microedition.lcdui.*;
import javax.microedition.pim.*;


/**
 * @author Travis
 */
public class StreetCleaning extends MIDlet implements ItemStateListener {
    public void startApp() {
        Form form = new Form("Street Cleaning");


        options = new ChoiceGroup(null, Choice.EXCLUSIVE);
        options.append("North (Mon/Thu)", null);
        options.append("South (Tue/Fri)", null);
        options.append("None", null);


        form.append(options);
        form.setItemStateListener(this);


        Display.getDisplay(this).setCurrent(form);
    }


    ChoiceGroup options;
    static final String summary = "Move car";


    public void itemStateChanged(Item item) {
        PIM pim = PIM.getInstance();
        String reminders = pim.listPIMLists(PIM.EVENT_LIST)[4];


        Calendar today = Calendar.getInstance();


        try {
            EventList events = (EventList)pim.openPIMList(PIM.EVENT_LIST, PIM.READ_WRITE, reminders);


            // get rid of existing notices
            for (Enumeration items = events.items(); items.hasMoreElements(); ) {
                Event event = (Event)items.nextElement();
                if (event.getString(Event.SUMMARY, PIMItem.ATTR_NONE).equals(summary))
                    events.removeEvent(event);
            }


            // select days of week based on side of street
            int[] days;
            int side = options.getSelectedIndex();
            if (side == 0) {
                days = new int[2];
                days[0] = Calendar.MONDAY;
                days[1] = Calendar.THURSDAY;
            }
            else if (side == 1) {
                days = new int[2];
                days[0] = Calendar.TUESDAY;
                days[1] = Calendar.FRIDAY;
            }
            else
                days = new int[0];


            for (int i = 0; i < days.length; i++) {
                // set alarms for next coming weekday
                int apart = days[i] - today.get(Calendar.DAY_OF_WEEK);
                if (apart < 0 ||
                        apart == 0 && today.get(Calendar.HOUR_OF_DAY) > 10)
                    apart += 7;


                // first event
                Calendar day = Calendar.getInstance();
                day.setTime(new Date(day.getTime().getTime() + apart * 24 * 3600 * 1000));
                day.set(Calendar.HOUR_OF_DAY, 8);
                day.set(Calendar.MINUTE, 20);
                day.set(Calendar.SECOND, 0);
                day.set(Calendar.MILLISECOND, 0);


                Event event = events.createEvent();
                event.addDate(Event.START, PIMItem.ATTR_NONE, day.getTime().getTime());
                event.addInt(Event.ALARM, PIMItem.ATTR_NONE, 1);
                event.addString(Event.SUMMARY, PIMItem.ATTR_NONE, summary);


                events.importEvent(event).commit();


                // second event
                day.set(Calendar.HOUR_OF_DAY, 9);
                day.set(Calendar.MINUTE, 50);


                event = events.createEvent();
                event.addDate(Event.START, PIMItem.ATTR_NONE, day.getTime().getTime());
                event.addInt(Event.ALARM, PIMItem.ATTR_NONE, 1);
                event.addString(Event.SUMMARY, PIMItem.ATTR_NONE, summary);


                events.importEvent(event).commit();
            }
        }
        catch (PIMException ex) {
            Display.getDisplay(this).setCurrent(new Alert(ex.getMessage()));
        }


        destroyApp(false);
        notifyDestroyed();
    }


    public void pauseApp() {
    }


    public void destroyApp(boolean unconditional) {
    }
}

New Level of Nerddom

Somehow both Andrew and Dmitry were under the impression that, back when Andrew and Jay and I all had Palms III, I had actually written software for it to track my expenses. I did have a program like that, but I sure didn't write it.

I can't remember if I ever actually tried setting up a Palm development environment; at the time my only computers were a beige Mac and a couple PC's running Slackware, so it's quite possible there wasn't anything available, or available for free. I am pretty sure I had a Palm simulator for the Mac, but I think I only used it to play Parking Lot.

In any case, I just downloaded NetBeans and the Nokia S40 platform SDK. :( I want to write a program that sets my alarm clock for street cleaning. :((((((((((((((

Gaming System

Two single-button controllers and a 4-color, 3x1 display. Looks pretty fun!

Herack Oboover

I have not yet gotten to the Obama-as-Hoover article in the current Harper's (I am weirdly fastidious about reading each issue completely, and in strict order, though on occasion I do read "Findings" without having finished the crossword), but this sounds very accurate to me:

Obama’s failure would be unthinkable. And yet the best indications now are that he will fail, because he will be unable—indeed he will refuse—to seize the radical moment at hand.

Nerdiest Thing Ever?

3D slideshow of a concert of music from Battlestar Galactica.

Homemade Cargo Bike

Saw this just now walking the dog:

It's a slightly modified shopping cart strapped to the front fork with hose clamps. The two front wheels are each attached to forks as well, also connected to the basket with hose clamps. I didn't think to inspect the headset, but I guess there must be a stem in there to hold it together, but with no bars other than the handle of the shopping cart.

So not only useful, but also welding-free and completely reversible.

All Side Effect

Pretty sure this fails to conform to the intended use of properties:

        int _alarmEventCount = 0;
        public int alarm { set { _alarmEventCount += 1; } }

Not my code, but by a coworker who is good, so I'm sure there's a logical reason how it came about.

Hair Clipping Issues

This is stupid. There is an ultimate fighting video game coming out that cut a character because they couldn't figure out how to render his hair. Which, fine, maybe if you didn't take something like hair physics into account early in the project, then you get to the character models and can't figure out a way to make it look non-stupid.

But then they tried to get the actual guy to cut his hair, so they could give the character model short hair. Why not just give the character model a haircut? People would understand.

And up until that point I'm giving the game studio the benefit of the doubt, because I can understand how that could be a kind of unforeseen wrench in the works for which there's not an obviously ideal solution. But it turns out their game also can't show people fighting in a left-handed stance...so they show everyone as right-handed! Seriously that is like making a baseball game and realizing your engine can't handle bats so they just render everyone with golf clubs.

It's Wiffin' Season!

Played some solid w-ball on Sundy, in honor of our fallen soldiers.

We played this version under which, instead of keeping track of imaginary baserunners, you have to actually run on a hit and then get an increasing number of points for each base you get to safely; fielders throw the runner out by getting the ball back to the mound with the runner off-base.

It makes playing with more than two people easier because each person has their own score, and you don't have to worry about teams or anything. And the get-the-ball-to-the-mound dynamic introduces some of the interesting parts of baseball that are left out from the wiffle rules I've played under before: for example, if the pitcher runs to field a grounder, one of the other players on defense needs to cover the mound to get the out; and it actually becomes advantageous to throw pitches that will be hit for grounders that will be fielded for an out, whereas under the official rules it's often better to go for a fly out.

We also played using the softball ("king") size wiffle ball, which was not as weird as I had anticipated. It actually seemed to curve better than the baseball size, though maybe it was just that the larger size made the motion more visible. It's definitely easier to jam a finger in one of the holes (nullus) to throw a changeup, though. In any case, I had some success with the changeup/changeup combo, and with throwing a curve for a groundout, though my slider was as hittable as ever.

Kind of Disappointing

So no Democrat Socialist Party for us. Too bad, this stuff tickles me to no end.

The Book of Neuteronomy

So we are supposed to get Prancis's balls chopped off soon, and our neighbors told us about the ASPCA's mobile spay/neuter truck. It so happens that it's going to be near us on Saturday, and we can save a couple hundred dollars by getting him neutered there instead of at the vet's.

I am a little hesitant because the program is intended to provide services to low income communities and they perform only a limited number of operations (25 animals a day) on a first come/first served basis. There is a nominal fee for people without proof of public assistance, but even with that we could be preventing someone from getting their pet fixed for whom going to the vet would not be an option. If we want to minimize our impact as gentrifiers in our neighborhood, isn't this exactly the kind of thing we should be avoiding? On the other hand, it would save us $300, which is a significant amount of money...but maybe that makes it that much more unethical?

I don't know, I'm not sure what we'll decide. We've also discussed the possibility that 25 people might not even show up by seven on what is going to be a drizzly Saturday morning on a holiday weekend, but that feels like a rationalization.

Balk Like an Egyptian

So Mike Pelfrey balked thrice against the Giants last night? Weird. I am fuzzy on what even constitutes a balk...the first one is obvious, I can see the second one, but the third one is just a mystery to me.

Andy Griffith Show Values

I love this classic non-apology apology: Kim Hendren is sorry he referred to Chuck Schumer as "that Jew"...because it "took away from what [Hendren] was trying to say"...which is how Chuck Jew-mer was trying to Jew up our Andy Griffith Show values with his Jewy wiles.

Perfect example about how when the right wing rhapsodizes about the good old days and 1950's values, it's not a case of forgetting about segregation, exclusive neighborhoods, and the reign of the closet. Rather, those things are exactly what they want to bring back.

Priorities

Atrios links to this LA news story about California "ghost" towns of foreclosed houses. There are all these people still living in half-empty neighborhoods with legitimate complaints about trashed abandoned houses that get used for gang hangouts, drug sales, and so forth.

But then all of a sudden attention turns to a house that's being squatted by...a family! Who can't be evicted because...they pay their utility bills? Uh, so what's the problem again?

Oh, I see, they don't maintain their lawn and neighbors would prefer a "nice family." Maybe leaving the place empty would be a better option? Hilariously, one person even complains about the squatters' impact on property value, as if that's still a thing.

Nice to see a dying community unite around the poor bankers, who just want their justly deserved "fees," and against the evil homesteaders squatters who might actually have a shot at saving the neighborhood.

Dollhouse / In the Middle of the Street

I watched the season (and, in all likelihood, series) finale of Dollhouse earlier this week. My initial reading stands, I think, though it now appears to me as though the primary allegorical (and the premise and characters are more complex than mere allegory warrants, so this isn't intended as a comprehensive reading in any sense) import of "the Dollhouse" is as a representation of patriarchy, and the enforcement of rigid gender roles in particular.

That is, the feminist critique of capitalism is present (for example, in the commentary on the entertainment industry, and TV in particular), but it's more focused on the specific problems posed by patriarchal gender roles. The following musings contain many spoilers for the entire season.

The first indication of this is the name of the Dollhouse itself: the term "dollhouse" is certainly evocative, and does reflect the status of the Actives as mindless playthings, but it doesn't exactly make sense as a description of what the Dollhouse organization does in the fictional world. The organization bills itself as fulfilling clients' fantasies, whatever they may be. In contrast, an actual toy dollhouse is generally not seen as this kind of blank slate for a child's imagination to fill in freely; rather, it's a highly gendered toy, used almost exclusively by girls to act out (and rehearse) traditional gender roles.

Put another way, a dollhouse's immediate purpose is to allow a child to act out fantasies, but only of a very limited sort, while its larger purpose (not necessarily what it was intended for, but what it actually functions to do in the real world) is to enforce societal gender norms. Likewise, each Dollhouse branch is in the immediate business of allowing clients to act out certain of their fantasies, while there have been many allusions throughout the series to some greater project that the whole sprawling entity is working on.

The Actives under this framework are those whose true personalities have been supplanted by whatever pre-programmed identities are forced upon them. This is directly analogous to people who quash their own true desires in order to take on externally mandated (and often conflicting) gender roles defined by the patriarchy. Some remnants of their true selves (Alpha's sadism, Echo's suspiciousness, Victor's crush on Sierra) might leak through, but by and large they are completely displaced by the personalities they adopt to satisfy the needs of those around them.

This dynamic is nominally voluntary: as DeWitt constantly reminds everyone, the Actives work for the Dollhouse under legal contract. But the narrative reveals that for many of them, their choice to join the Dollhouse was not much of a choice at all. Thus is one of the standard apologies for problematic gender normative behavior—people are free to do what they want, and if that means wearing miniskirts then so be it—explicated within the framework of Dollhouse.

It is appropriate then that while the Dollhouse employs both male and female Actives, the majority of them are women. This reflects the disproportionate negative impact of enforced gender norms on women while acknowledging that men suffer under patriarchy as well. (Perhaps also of interest here is how Alpha and Echo react differently when they come to be inhabited by all of their programmed personalities simultaneously: Alpha experiences this as a liberating rebirth into godhood and destroys his original self, while Echo has no interest in these false personae, desiring only to pay her dues in the Dollhouse to win back her real identity.)

Characters aside from the Actives demonstrate other ways of interacting with the system of patriarchal gender norms. The two major "good guys," Boyd Langton and Paul Ballard, disagree with the Dollhouse's purpose and methods, but neither offers much promise of being able to do anything to stop it. Langton tries his best to keep an eye out for Echo, but his complicity in the Dollhouse project limits his impact. While Ballard initially appears devoted to taking down the Dollhouse, he comes to adopt the mentality of a "white knight," occupied more with rescuing Caroline in particular than in undermining the larger operation (tellingly, it takes Mellie, herself trapped within the clutches of the Dollhouse, to recognize this self-delusion for what it is). It is no accident that these two sympathetic male characters also comport themselves according to the norms of typical masculinity, guided by self-righteousness and doing their talking largely with their fists.

Topher, in contrast, does not conform to traditional masculine norms, but his misanthropic egotism and contempt for the Actives mean that he helps uphold patriarchy nonetheless. He's an example of someone who would actually benefit from a world without patriarchy, but goes along with it because feeling superior to its victims is easier than challenging the status quo. An example of someone escaping the stringent rules of patriarchy is given in the character of Whiskey, whose mutilation liberates her from gender expectations (note she becomes a doctor) because she cannot be easily sexually objectified under patriarchal standards of beauty (this option for freedom is, again, no option at all; disfigurement should not be a prerequisite for membership in humanity).

The remaining two characters, Dominic and DeWitt, don't really seem to function at the same allegorical level as the Actives and the rest of the supporting cast. Dominic is abstracted to the point of being an out and out symbol: he's the government that recognizes the power of patriarchy as a potential means to some future end, and keeps an eye on its activities as a result. DeWitt doesn't seem to be much more than a somewhat hackneyed archetype, the ball-breaking ice queen. That's clearly a role fraught with all kinds of more or less interesting gender dynamics, but it doesn't seem to be much informed by the Dollhouse-as-patriarchy framework.

So that's my reading of the show's motivating conceit. If the series does continue then I would expect its themes to evolve with it, the way Buffy's "battling the demons of adolescence" premise gave way to more complex themes. But it would also be nice to see how the story that's been told so far would work out, as I would also expect it to be consistent with this allegorical framework.

Home Office

Working from home in my urban hellhole.

"Empathize right on your behind!"

Bam, Michael Steele nails it. You be da man! My new voter registration as a Republican will be in the mail this afternoon.

Current Object of Bike Lust

Saw one of these things this morning (at the farmers' market, natch). It looked like the couple it belonged to had two kids they'd brought in the cargo box.

Not sure where I'd park one, but 150 pounds is plenty for carrying a dog around...we'd looked at specs for some of the Danish-built ones that some companies used to import, and they maxed out at 100 pounds of cargo IIRC, which Prancis is not likely to exceed, but who knows.

So anyway that's tempting enough, but the Joe Bike prototype is seriously badass.

Mets!

It's hard not to feel optimistic coming off the two wins in the mini series against Philly.

My ignorance of the sport of baseball means I'm not really aware of the psychological impact something like, say, pulling a pitcher out of the rotation, can have on the whole team, but it sure seems to have had a good effect so far. It's not so much the string of recent wins, but that they seem to be more like whole team affairs, rather than Johann carrying them or just getting lucky when an opposing pitcher blows it.

Looking forward to seeing how Jon Niese does tonight. I don't think I remember him from last season.

The Caine Dootiny

Via Sadly, No!, wow, Michael Caine is a jackass. It's not like he pulled himself up by his own bootstraps in the midst of the Thatcherite capitalist paradise...he made his career in the 1960's, under the confiscatory tax structure decried by other working class lads made good.

Clearly, while some people are none too happy about their tax brackets once they've met with great success, the threat of high taxes was not enough to put them off their ambitions in the first place, so it's hard to take Iain Martin's scaremongering in the Telegraph column seriously. He seems to half recognize this, as he is very right to worry about "[a]ccess to the best schools...increasingly limited to the affluent." It's just his proposed remedy—slash taxes for the ultra wealthy—that's nonsense.

Good Take on Supreme Court Vacancy

I like Ezra Klein's framing of the issue: the centrality of women's (and gay and racial minority) issues to what the SCOTUS does is exactly why non-(straight white male) candidates are so important.

And it is actually seriously incredible to me that an opinion columnist in a national paper can do a piece that boils down to "race and gender don't matter anymore so Obama should appoint a white man" and not get called out by an editor for the basic error in reasoning.

She's a Superfund (She's Superfundy)

I'm glad it sounds like the Gowanus Superfund status is going to go through. The arguments against it all basically amounted to "it's going to be really hard to get people to live in housing built on a Superfund site," which, yeah. Is that supposed to persuade anyone?

May Day Cartoon

Asher Roth Officially Sucks

Of the three predictions written for Gawker of how well Asher Roth's album would do, Byron Crawford's was almost exactly right. It was especially nice to see Touré's prediction fail, his overestimate hinging as it did on myths about how "the majority of hip hop fans" are "suburban," "[think] hip hop is theirs," and "enjoy listening to and looking at someone who reminds them of themselves." This is pretty much wrong in every particular as well as mistaken overall.

I don't care one way or the other about Tom Breihan's being wrong, but it's interesting that he got caught up in the idea that Roth would succeed entirely due to successful marketing. If anyone should recognize the speciousness of that kind of thinking, you'd think it would be Lil Wayne's biggest mainstream stan...dard bearer. If it were as simple as marketing, every label would have a Soulja Boy or a T-Pain. One thing every label does have plenty of, however, is Asher Roths...not gimmicky white rappers with "suburban" schticks, but artists they've pumped zillions of promotional dollars into creating buzz around who subsequently put up lackluster album sales.

Mistranslation?

People are probably aware of the Israeli minister who thinks "swine flu" is offensive to Jews and Muslims because it refers to a food they can't eat. I don't get it...I could see the objection if they named a deadly disease after something that Israelis do eat (falafel pox?), but it's hard for me to understand this one. I'm assuming he was mistranslated.

Good Idea

Using pronunciation audio clips from online dictionaries as ringtones.

Exercising myself upon a dumb Bell

For some reason I find the quotes from this week's World Wide Words weird word, dumbbell, very hilarious. Apparently the original "dumb Bell" was just a fake bell that "affords the exercise called RINGING, by means of a rope, which comes thro’ the floor or floors down to a study or chamber, and was practised by an eminent physician who was very fat." Of course.

Selling Livable Streets to Conservatives

Streetsblog links to an essay on why social conservatives should support public transportation and walkable communities. It's a good thought, though I personally tend to be fairly skeptical of the notion that the vast majority of conservatives are truly interested in things like "family values" or "free markets" beyond their rhetorical utility.

And even if you give them the benefit of the doubt on that score, they still have to weigh those benefits against the "piss off a hippie" potential of continuing to support car culture.

Honestly, a better tack might be to play up the value of walkable communities when Obama establishes the New World Order, Jesus returns, global race war erupts, and you're forced to use your arsenal of stockpiled firearms to defend your family from roving satanist cannibals. Under such conditions, riding a recumbent or hopping on the bus will be much easier than scavenging for gas.

We Like This Crime Rate Just Fine

MY previews a book that makes the claim "that if we use smarter law enforcement, and hand out smarter punishments, we can decrease the crime rate while also becoming considerably less brutal and punitive in how we treat offenders."

The obvious rejoinder: who says "we" want to decrease the crime rate (let alone become less brutal or punitive)? This is not new territory, and the ability to reform the criminal justice system has existed for long enough that at this point the assumption that there is a general good-faith desire for reform can only be considered naïve.

Biden His Time

Hey guys, what ever happened to Vice President Joe Biden? What's he up to?

Professor Emeritus Griff

Whoa, I had no idea Professor Griff still performed with Public Enemy. I think Bol is onto something in the sense that after letting Flav use PE shows to promote his reality TV career, Chuck D doesn't really have any grounds for denying Griff a platform.

And all that said, at least considering, or not dismissing out of hand, some of the left-field theories about Obama or 9/11 and so forth, if only for the sake of argument or as a jumping-off point for serious discussion, would have at one point been well within the Public Enemy mode.

Burn Hollywood Burn and One Million Bottle Bags, for example, both come to mind as songs that posit what most people would consider some fairly incredible wide-ranging conspiracies aimed at repressing African-Americans, and then develop themes around how the machinery of capitalism makes actual deliberate conspiracy redundant. Not to say those are the best examples, just that they immediately occurred to me as demonstrating Chuck D's approach to cultural analysis.

And also it is nice to see that sort of mentality now once again becoming part of PE's approach after (again, agreeing with Bol) Chuck's understandable but disappointing Obama cheerleading during the election.

Representation and Accountability

Matt E. Glesias bases his case for direct mayoral control of NYC schools on the argument that a larger number of democratically elected offices, most of them representing very small local regions, leads to less accountability, because the average voter doesn't have the time or means to stay up to date on the actions of all of their elected representatives.

This seems obviously mistaken to me. Having fewer races on the ballot doesn't magically make voters more informed on the issues, and it reduces the ability of those who are informed to, say, endorse current zoning policy while voting to change course on the city's approach to reducing street crime.

It's nothing more than the fetishization of turnout, and it's undemocratic.

More Opera Nonsense

Ezra Klein links to a Freakonomics blog post that links to Terry Teachout's Wall Street Journal piece wondering why more musical performances aren't booed.

The occasion prompting the article was the Met's premiere of La Sonnambula, which was booed, and though Teachout actually writes that the Met is one of the few places where booing is not unheard of and contrasts it with Broadway shows that always get standing ovations regardless of the quality of the performance, the comment thread in Klein's post somehow twists it all into a case of Met audiences standingly ovating everything.

And wouldn't you know it, the consensus seems to be that opera goers are a bunch of phonies who don't know the first thing about good music and sneakily cover it up by acting as though all opera performances are amazing even when they aren't. (Everyone knows that the best way to conceal one's insecurity and lack of discernment is via indiscriminate enthusiasm rather than with, say, baseless reflexive skepticism.)

Anyway, not much to add really. People are silly, and not least silly among them the Met audience who booed the La Sonnambula production, which could barely be called experimental by any standard rooted in the last half century, let alone "avant-garde"; I'm really reminded of the jerky guy in Farewell My Concubine who was outraged that one of the protagonists took the wrong number of steps between one specific set of lines or something.

Putting the "Erm..." in Sabermetrics

Particularly absurd post on Mets Geek charting each team's bullpen's average fastball speed against strikeouts. Don't even try to wrap your mind around what it might even mean to average the pitch speeds of an entire bullpen together, the results are random noise, not "a slight trend."

At Least He Has a Kickstand

Accident waiting to happen. Come on, put the grill on the ground before you light it. Jeez.

Interesting Church

I've walked by one of these little storefront churches that are so plentiful in my neighborhood that intrigued me with the slogan on their sign: "Where People are Equipped for Management and Productivity."

Today I looked up their website, where you can tithe online, email them a prayer request, or buy instructional CD's on topics such as Laziness and (on sale) My Lover Is My Friend ("Re-learn the magic of touching...Is there anything too hard for God?"¹).

Anyway, sort of crazy. It reminds me of those "prosperity" oriented megachurches, but even Amwayer.

¹ That's what He said.

Two-Way Bike Lane on Prospect Park West

A road diet and bike lane there is a great idea. CB6 knows what's up.

Aaaaand we're done here

Aforementioned C4SS blogger Thomas Knapp's credulity towards the "Tea Party movement" is the final straw.

"Little indication" it was an astroturf job? That's the whole point of the astroturfery, no? That it looks like the roots of real grass? Fortunately we don't have to rely on "indications," as the involvement of right-wing and business interests has been well documented.

Not likely to take on an "explicitly anarchist ideology"? I think you might be on to something there...the transformation of authoritarian right-wing populism into anarchism would be odd indeed.

So I'm done with them. It really gets me, as carrying water for proto-fascists who don't want to pay for public schools is exactly the kind of short-sighted tactical blunder for which Kevin Carson has so frequently excoriated libertarians. I had high hopes for C4SS but at this point they might as well be Reason.

FeedBurner Considered Dangerous

Robert's RFC for short URL auto-discovery reminded me the other day that FeedBurner could be responsible for the same potential mass link-rot problems as URL shorteners, depending on how aggregators interpret their feeds.

It doesn't seem like RSS has a concept of how to present an item's "real" (I guess canonical) URL, versus the URL of the item within the feed itself. Or if it does then FeedBurner doesn't use it.

For example, the link element in an item from Eschaton's feed contains "http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/blogspot/bRuz/~3/WwfzaA_LDo8/thursday-is-new-jobless-day_16.html" rather than "http://www.eschatonblog.com/2009/04/thursday-is-new-jobless-day_16.html", and (at least in Bloglines and Google Reader, the two aggregators I've used) that first one is the URL that you get when you try to copy the item's address to link to it in a post of your own.

The real URL is there, but it's in the origLink element in the FeedBurner namespace, which apparently not even Google Reader knows to look at. If you're not anal retentive enough to actually follow the proxy URL and resolve the redirect then you'll most likely end up linking to the FeedBurner link that's subject to all the same risks as a shortened URL. FeedBurner, being owned by Google, admittedly looks like a pretty reliable bet at this point, but who knows what the future holds.

The Cats Know What's Up

There's a vacant apartment upstairs, and every time the landlords come in the building to show it Lucy starts growling and both cats scurry away to hide in the bedroom. I am chalking it up to class consciousness.

Citizen Kane 3D

Awesome. Not sure if he used successive frames from a dolly shot or cut out different elements and did it "by hand," but the results look really good.

Clowning the Discourse

Myglesias takes issue with Brendan Nyhan's approving link to Bob Somerby's criticism of Rachel Maddow. He has some worthwhile points, but there's a fundamental disconnect at play here in how these different media critics are coming at the show.

I think Nyhan is somewhat of an idealist who believes in and tries to work towards a more elevated public political discourse. Spinsanity really used to drive me nuts (during the 2004 election cycle, I guess it would have been) with how painfully even-handed it could be in the face of all sorts of right-wing vileness. Matt Yglesias is basically himself a pundit, and of course he's going to be pretty cynical about the political media; from that perspective, the existence of Democratic talking points on cable news beats is preferable to its non-existence, end of story.

Somerby is sort of a hybrid, eminently jaded about the state of the discourse, but committed to improving it because he's a true believer who is certain that liberalism will carry the day if things are hashed out in good faith on an even playing field.

Personally, I enjoy Somerby's vitriol but am probably closer to Yglesias on the cynicism scale. Not that the triumph of either of their brands of moderate liberalism is worth propagandizing or discoursing for in the first place.

Who Is This Fellow?

I subscribed to the Center for a Stateless Society feed when they picked up Kevin Carson...I had already wished he'd post more to his personal blog, and didn't want to miss anything. But now they seem to have a new blogger, Thomas Knapp, whose ideology seems much more in line with the vulgar libertarianism Carson has dedicated so much effort railing against.

For example, take this recent litany of standard libertarian canards...Mussolini never made the trains run on time, public schools suck, USPS sucks, &c. It gets my dander up, though I'll refrain from offering a classic point-by-point rebuttal; if I wanted to spend my time rebutting libertarian cant then there are any number of intertubes I could read, but I don't so I don't.

In any case, Kevin Carson seems to be pretty consistent in linking to his C4SS posts from his personal blog, so maybe I'll just stay subscribed to that.

Ah Neat

I noticed this wall on the way to pick up pet food in Cobble Hill the other day. I had actually been wondering how long they took on it and whether it was approved by the property owner or construction crew.

Where'd I Put That Pitchfork Oil?

Digby posts, then follows up with the video, on a CNN segment that comes to the (counterintuitive!) conclusion that toiling away in poverty is actually a pretty good deal when the economy is collapsing, since your life can't possibly get much shittier than it's always been.

The Physics of Balls

I got a sort of demi-spam from some science organization who put on an event that Sarah and I attended last year. I would have ignored it, but it was Mets-related, so I clicked through to view a weird video about the physics of baseball. Science professors and professional athletes are pretty comparable in terms of awkward comedic timing.

The Cost of Efficiency

Kevin Carson has a good post at C4SS laying out how the supposed efficiencies of industrial capitalism actually end up costing consumers. It reminds me of a point Paul Roberts makes in The End of Food, where he cites a study suggesting that, even if you value your own labor at a pretty high wage rate, it's impossible to figure a cost for home canning vegetables that comes anywhere close to what you pay in a grocery store. The markup to cover packaging, advertising, distribution and all the other overhead is something like 400%.

Frustrations With Consumer Capitalism

It always annoys me when I can conceive of a product that I would gladly pay for, but I can't seem to find anyone who makes it.

For example, when my old cell phone died, I wanted to replace it with a similar "bar" (as opposed to flip) model, but with a few more up-to-date features like Bluetooth and support for mp3 ringtones (i.e., only two years out of date instead of six). But such a device did not appear to exist, at least not among the couple dozen of phone models offered by my provider.

Similarly, after I left my favorite winter hat at the opera, I embarked on a months-long, and ongoing, quest to find a replacement in a similar vein. This out-of-stock item is the closest I've found, though the one I lost was this completely non-stretchy wool felt that I really liked.

I've temporarily suspended my search for a basket and metal chainguard that will work on my blue bike.

The latest of these frustrations derives from the idea that I should get a table-top radio so I can listen to Mets games this summer. I had some idea in mind about the kind of radio I'd want, and what I read about this model sounded good at first. Some more investigation left me disappointed, though: the reception is apparently no good, the components are cheap and poorly assembled, and the advertised impressive sound quality is evidently reliant on the kinds of trickery used to make Bose products sound deceptively good.

The Tivoli Model One definitely seems like it's supposed to appeal to people who like the idea of a simple, elegant device that does a limited number of things well. But then instead of actually being such a product, it instead conveys those values through its visual aesthetic, and then relies on cognitive dissonance to convince consumers that they're satisfied with it.

Anyway, I've probably spent too much time on this topic (though not nearly as much time as I've wasted looking for felt caps on the internet), but I do think it's an interesting way that capitalism fails consumers on a pretty regular basis. The markets for many types of products are flooded with virtually indistinguishable offerings that change capriciously in response to fads and trends without ever responding to the needs and desires of sizable minorities of consumers. The result being that large numbers of people are constantly underwhelmed by many of the products in their lives for reasons that should have been easily corrected.

Why Oh Why Can't We Have a Better Press Corps?

Heard this on the radio yesterday morning. The Takeaway's correspondent, Todd Zwillich, who reports for an organization called Capitol News Connection, is completely clueless on what card check even is...he's clearly heard the phrase "secret ballot" connected to the debate, so he tosses that out and then bullshits from there.

He seriously sounds like a student who got called on when he hadn't done the reading ("card check...it's all about who checks your card"), ending up getting the Republican and Democratic positions on the issue completely reversed. Hilarious. And nobody corrects him or explains what the debate actually is. Do they even know?

No transcript, but listen to the audio at the link and fast forward to around 7:20.

Puckish NY Times Headline Writer

Talking about Rush Limbaugh flapping over his rolls seems more like the Post's style.

Pssst

Hey guys. I have a super-secret technique that will guarantee you can pay ABSOLUTELY ZERO income taxes, whether at the federal or state level, 100% LEGALLY. There is no fraud or deception involved, all the paperwork is GUARANTEED LEGIT, and you will pay EXACTLY ZERO DOLLARS in income tax if you follow my instructions. I accept paypal, email me for details today.

Who Let the Dolls Out

I started catching my ass up on Dollhouse, because I'm a dork like that. I am not really up on the reviews, but the ones I've read have been fairly negative, non-committal at best. My impression is that reviewers were expecting a little more of a specific condemnation of the prostitution-like aspects of the Dollhouse business model. Not perceiving it, they conclude that the show condones prostitution, or exploits it for the audience's titillation.

The criticism is partially correct in that, at least so far, Dollhouse has refrained from a portrayal of the sexual exploitation of the "Actives" as uniquely immoral. Which is not to say that their situation is shown as anything other than horrific. But the horror stems from denying them their personalities and memories, with sexual exploitation being merely a facet of their dehumanization: brainwashing someone into a willing assassin is as violent an act as brainwashing her into a prostitute. Viewers and reviewers who want the sexual abuse identified as especially heinous violations are missing the point.

This is a theme that Joss had begun exploring in the final televised season of Buffy, where the expectations of the duties of the Slayer, imposed from without upon a young woman without her consent, echo the expectations society has for all women from the day they are born. Dollhouse extends the (uncontroversial) theme of women's ownership of their own bodies along the lines of feminism's broader critique of capitalism, with the idea that all humans should have a right to their own minds as well.

Flashbacks have hinted that Echo, at least, began working for Dollhouse willingly, though doubtless with the understanding that she had no other viable options given her circumstances (still unknown). The horror of her employment's reality makes clear that such a selling of one's soul is illegitimate in its essence, and does violence to the subject's humanity.

Others participating in Echo's dehumanization are tainted and dehumanized as well, as demonstrated by the head of security's obvious contempt for the Actives. Even a sympathetic character, like Echo's Watcherhandler Langton, is faced with the impossible choice of either abandoning his charge to a potentially less caring successor or staying to lend legitimacy to the enterprise. In this way capitalism sorts everyone into those who are irrelevant and those who are complicit, the only other option being (going out on a limb here in a prediction for where the narrative's headed) to bring down the system itself.

Anyway, I expect that reviewers who find themselves turned off by the value system implied by Dollhouse are picking up on two quite real themes: an absence of any specific objection to sexual prostitution in the context of more general and horrifying violence, and tension resulting from trying to square feminist-humanist values with the inhuman excesses of capitalism. A reviewer operating from a worldview in which sexual violence is uniquely vile, not because of its denial of humanity, but because of its power to sully and impart shame on its victims; and in which capitalism is a force of individual freedom rather than its enemy; is going to be understandably disconcerted by a narrative that does not share or opposes those values.

Defending the USPS

Amanda has a good post in defense of the Post Office, in response to some typically banal lukewarm libertarian cant spewed up by Myglesias. Nothing gets my goat like USPS-bashing, which so often amounts to "nobody goes to the post office anymore, it's too crowded."

I'd only add that not only does the USPS make urban areas more walkable, it makes rural areas practical places to live at all: without the postal service as competition, it's doubtful private carriers would pick up from or deliver to remote parts of the country at any kind of affordable rate.

Meet the Mutts

Long before having a dog I would talk about how I would get him or her Mets gear. Specifically, I wanted them to have both home and away jerseys, though I was undecided on which player to get. But now I've discovered that the only dog jersey they sell is the black "alternate" design, and it comes only as number 00 with no player name. Boo.

Good to Know

I had noticed several months ago that the Bicycle Station storefront on Vanderbilt had "For Lease" signs up in the windows, and then it closed and was replaced by what looks like a higher end bike retail outfit (I haven't actually been inside to check it out). But according to the internet they have relocated to Park and Adelphi, up by the Navy Yard. Not very convenient to me, but I'm glad they're still around...their business always seemed to be booming, so I hadn't figured they'd have gone out of business and they must have just gotten priced out of the neighborhood.

Pinball Construction Kit

Gamasutra has a good post remembering Pinball Construction Kit for the Apple deuce, which was totally fun. I remember Nate built a table called "Mr Green Jeans," but I don't remember any of mine. I doubt any of them turned out any better than my abortive Democratic Presidents of the 20th Century table I was working on for Visual Pinball a couple years ago when I forgot to eat all day and passed out the next morning and busted my head.

Baby's First Poop "Al Fresco"

We didn't even have to put paper down for him. We're so proud!

Art and Life Imitate One Another in Lockstep

Gabe tires of the vampire fad. Which prompts me to notice that, spoiler alert, the last few issues of Buffy Season Eight have involved a growing vampire trend that is making the slayers' jobs difficult. I wonder if Joss just lucked into that or if he was paying attention enough to see the vampire thing coming. Probably the latter but it seemed like a crazy coincidence to me.

Hilarious

I can't really believe that John Ashcroft insisted on being called "general." Too perfect. Wikipedia confirms that, the "general" in "attorney general" being an adjective, this makes no sense. Maybe he was confused by the surgeon general's being a vice admiral.

Defense

A Revealer post linking to a review of Prayers for Bobby draws a parallel between that film's portrayal of homosexuality and Revolutionary Road's portrayal of women (spoilers alert):

In the film, women are...conniving but not too bright, sex for them is a form of vengeance or control, and they often talk too much. Star Kate Winslet does have sex -- once to control Leonardo DiCaprio, once to take vengeance on him, and then never again. And, of course, she dies tragically, the wages of sin -- the result of aborting a baby Leo wanted.

Everyone is entitled to their own interpretation of course, but this one strikes me as fairly eccentric. Both main characters in Revolutionary Road are extremely flawed, and neither can be held free from blame for the events in the narrative, but the most obvious reading places the moral responsibility for April Wheeler's death squarely on Frank's shoulders: it is his haranguing and emotional manipulation—indeed, his "talk[ing] too much"—that pressures April into delaying the abortion until after it would have been (relatively) safe. If anything, Frank's culpability is so clear-cut that the story threatens to deny April's agency in her own demise, but to gloss this as April's earning "the wages of sin" seems badly wrong to me.

Also not sure about the implied slight to Underworld: Rise of the Lycans. I mean, it is plainly the case that Lycans is no "feminist parable," and it doesn't come close to satisfying the Bechdel test (there is barely more than one speaking female role), but it's hardly a notably egregious offender along those lines, and the antagonist's autocratic enforcement of patriarchy is portrayed as nearly as serious a flaw as his devotion to racial purity (which is saying quite a lot for a film that is a slavery parable).

I Would Trust Them Over the Editorial Board of The New Republic

Via Narco News, a plea for President Obama to rescind the Cuba embargo by Cigar Aficionado. Sort of hard to take their recommendation as that of a dispassionate and rational observer interested only in the pursuit of justice.

(But who knows. I don't read Cigar Aficionado, and for all I know they were the sole cigar-focused periodical to speak out against the Bush regime in the months before the war in Iraq. If that's the case, then I stand happily corrected.)

But whether you suspect an ulterior motive or not, they're clearly on the right side of this issue. And given the what I imagine is considerable overlap of their subscriber base with the people who actually fill the smoke-filled rooms in which important foreign policy decisions are made at the highest levels of government with smoke, they might actually have a shot of being listened to.

Nowhere to play it, right?

So frustrating.

Update: Wrong! Could have hooked it on to make (OKE)H.

Weather 2.0?

Is there a clean, fast web site for checking weather forecasts?

It occurred to me a week or two ago that it's 2008, and there should be no reason to subject myself to the cluttered interface and animated banner ads of weather.com. I don't know of anything better, so I've switched to the government. It's actually not bad, functionality-wise, though it is still pretty unattractive. But at least they don't assault you with ads or distract you with golf conditions or whatnot.

Pro-Corporate Regulation

Ezra Klein has a good post on the USDA's official standards for the labeling of "naturally raised" chicken, and how the regulatory apparatus colludes with agribusiness in misleading consumers. He doesn't mention, though perhaps it is implied, the way that something like this hurts the smaller-scale operations raising chickens in a manner that does correlate strongly with a reasonable person's common-sense understanding of "natural."

Whoa

The indy media logo,

,

is rendered as "((( i )))" in the web page title when you go to the site.

I believe (i) was the emoticon we came up with as the counterpart to the ever-useful 8==D. Use it in a text message today!

:-P (i)

VidProp

Via tiltfactor, an interesting article in the Jerusalem Post about war propaganda video games. I think it's interesting that the medium of video games is still young enough that this kind of propagandizing doesn't necessarily seem out of place. I think a lot of US-made World War II games, for example, present a perspective so simplistic and blindly patriotic as would seem crass (if not flatly offensive) were it in a movie.

President Obama: Failure

The Dow Jones Industrial average was down 4% today. Nice job, Obama! We're screwed. Bring back that last guy!

Mix Tape Idea

The Beatles, "Lovely Rita"
Van Halen, "Hot for Teacher"
Lil Wayne, "Mrs. Officer"

I can't think of any others, but that's the gist.

As a side note, I did once have a smokin' lady mailman, though I rarely got to see her unless there was a blizzard or something keeping me home from work. Maybe I'll write a song about it.

Scrabolex

The good old scrabolous game has come back to life in the form of "Lexulous (renamed)" (sic). Andrew and I picked up one of our old games where we had left off, and we've been discussing some of the changes they had to make to comply with Hasbro's absurd intellectual property claims. The differences include:

• a different board layout (it was even more different, including quad word scores, but they changed it to something closer to the original);
• fewer tiles, some of which score higher; and
• eight-tile racks, with a 40-point medium bonus for playing seven tiles and the regular 50-point bingo bonus for playing all eight.

So far, the bigger racks (what? Why are you looking at me like that?) seem to have had the most noticeable impact. As Andrew pointed out, the opportunities for hitting a double-triple are vastly increased because you have enough tiles on your own to reach from one TWS to another without building around an existing tile. But in general just having that extra letter to play with means you are going to be able play seven tiles a lot more often, for almost as many points as a full bingo.

I was looking around the internets to see if anyone had taken a crack at adapting computer programs to play the lexolous rules (Quackle allows different boards at runtime, but the tile sets and rack sizes are hardcoded), and I found the site of this crackpot whose stuff I've looked at before. He invented Octo Scrabble (scrabble with eight-tile racks, including a scaled bingo scoring system) a year ago, and swears by it.

(The reason I call him a "crackpot," though he is possibly more accurately merely an especially creative curmudgeon, is because he also has suggestions for how to reform basketball, the justice system, piano notation, units of measure, parade viewing, and ice water consumption. Among many, many other things. Also, it seems that 55 years ago one could buy leg padding not two blocks from my house.)

Back to the topic at hand, the other differences in the game don't seem as major as the rack enlengthening...you can sort of see some of Andrew's and my plays sticking to the new lines of multiplier squares in our first game the way they stick to their counterparts in regular corporate scrabble, but that stands to reason, and since the layout is pretty similar in qualitative (better multipliers as you get further from the center) and almost identical in quantitative terms (the official game has one more TLS per quadrant and they otherwise match), it doesn't seem to affect how the game plays very much.

What I'd really like to do is to run an AI against itself (nullus) for a couple tens of thousands of games under each rule set, and see how the size and variability of scores compare. Until then I did take the time to chart the differences in tile scores and frequencies:

Really, they seem to have mostly just scaled back the number of tiles (resulting in more games played, which translates to more "x started a new game of Lexulous" messages on Facebook), upping the tile values to keep scores up (Lexulous has 11 fewer tiles, but they average 2.3 points to Scrabble's 1.9).

So that's all I've got on that score. Realistically, I am unlikely to try to hack Quackle myself to get an idea about how the lexolous rules change the familiar game (it builds on Windows, but with MinGW, which I don't have installed, and Qt, which just kill me now).

Oh Man

So last night I went to the library to pick up a book I had placed on hold, one that Henry at Crooked Timber had described as "a brooding, post-Mievillian fantasy set in a decaying city of uncertain extent and boundaries, with a keen ear for politics, character and language." Sounds like just my type of thing, and since it was Crooked Timber (by way of Andrew) that introduced me to China Miéville in the first place, I took the recommendation to heart.

The point of his post was musing on how the "cover...suggest[ed] a generic quest fantasy of the more or less inept and badly plotted variety" and didn't do the book justice, but that in no way prepared me for what said cover would actually look like.

Bear in mind that I had to retrieve this from the hold shelf and then take it up and hand it to a real-life librarian to check it out. There were little kids there. I'm lucky they didn't call the police:

Robot Composer

Robert linked to this Microsoft program that generates chord changes to accompany vocal recordings. It's, on the one hand, extremely hokey and ridiculous (there are two sliders, "Happiness" and "Jazziness," that the user can adjust to change the mood; hopefully the Pro version will provide controls for "Boogieosity" and "Pizazz"). But on the other hand, it's sort of like the music version of MS Chat, which gave us Jerk City.

Basically, it's stupid, but the stupidness means that someone could do something with it that is stupid but also pretty awesome, I rest my case.

I am way behind on my blog reading

So this is a couple days old, but this idea for creating economic stimulus by raising Social Security benefits and cutting payroll taxes is too elegant not to link.

For Chrissake

I don't even know what to say about this FBI snitch who outed himself after testifying against activists protesting the RNC. The idea that he might not have been acting as a provocateur is absolutely risible. If anything, the disillusioned civilian who believes his moral code compelled him to betray his compatriots is even more likely to provoke extreme tactics than is a salaried government agent working undercover: the agent is just doing a job, but the traitor has already sold his soul and now must assure himself it was for a good price. God knows under what statute "attempted tossing of Molotov cocktails" is supposed to be prosecuted, but it's a load of shit however they try it.

Me and My Best Friend

Thanks to BSNYC.

lolnazi

I have had it with Far Side style captioned lolcats making it to the front page of ICHC. This one is almost as bad. Another contender. The earliest one before that was almost a moth ago, which I fear means they're becoming more frequent.

Do not want, kthx.

401(ghey)

Atrios quotes someone on the problems with expecting untrained individuals to manage their own retirement investments. I totally agree. I recently encountered a related annoying pattern when it comes to trying to find general financial advice, which is that the assumption made by people who are trained in finance is always that more control over your investments is better.

This came up because since my employer was just sold, at some point I'm going to have to do something with my old 401(k). One option is I think to sort of transfer it to my new one, basically cashing out of everything and then using the money to buy funds in the new plan. But everyone advises that it's much better to roll it over into a Roth IRA, because then I can invest in whatever individual stocks or funds you want, rather than have to pick from the dozen or so I can choose from under the new plan. But I don't really want to invest in individual stocks because I find finance confusing and tedious...I would much prefer to be able to treat my retirement investments as a black box that somebody who is actually qualified manages for me.

Of course, it's all moot at this point. With the failure of global capitalism it's become clear that nobody is qualified to manage any sort of investment, and every dollar I put in my 401(k) is surely never to be seen again.

Finally

For some reason, my library eschews the standard login/password method of authentication when you access your account online. Since that's I guess what my web browser expects to deal with when it saves passwords and stuff, my browser won't remember any of the form data, and thus logging in has always meant I have to dig out my library card and copy down the like 10-digit barcode just to renew a book.

I finally took the time to mess around and figure out how to make a bookmark that would fill in my info for me. Here it is:

javascript: filldata = function() { document.getElementsByName("name")[0].value = "..."; document.getElementsByName("code")[0].value = "..."; document.getElementsByName("pin")[0].value = "..."; }; filldata()

It's actually pretty damn simple, and now I'm upset at all the years (years!) I've wasted typing in my barcode over and over.

In The Future We Will Play Hoverpinball

GameSetWatch has an interesting interview with pinball designer Pat Lawlor. I didn't know, or I had forgotten, that he now designs for Stern, though he seems pretty unenthused by what they're doing there ("so CSI is going to have a skull?" "Uh, yeah, it has lots of things. Including a skull").

The part I found surprising was his defense of the Pinball 2000 platform. I mean, I see what he's saying about how pinball would need to adapt to a younger arcade-going audience to be viable, but Pinball 2000 strikes me as having been such an obviously flawed attempt in that direction. It sacrificed the most viscerally satisfying part of pinball (especially in Pat Lawlor's tables), the physicality of the balls interacting with the different features, in order to make it more video game-y in the most superficial way (add a video screen!). It's like if your hot dog stand were losing business to the new sushi place across the street and you tried to compete by not cooking your hot dogs.

In conclusion, someone please give Pat Lawlor the resources to make more games like No Good Gofers, but do not under any circumstances let him run your business.

Proportional Response

I don't disagree that it's monstrous, but I'm surprised Digby's surprised by the defense of disproportionate response. Disproportionate response to aggression has always been the foundational doctrine of Israel's foreign policy, and her partisans in the US have been similarly vocal about it. The rationale behind this strategy actually relies on the disproportion being widely recognized and expected, the idea being that if you know that any hostility towards Israel will be met with overwhelming violence, then you have only yourself to blame for the results when you go ahead and launch rockets anyway. It doesn't make much sense, but it's certainly not a big secret.

Advertising Against Your Own Product

Via Myglesias, the Times has this story on how colleges contract with credit card issuers, who pay for access to the student body. This passage amused me:

Jennifer Holsman, executive director of the alumni association at Arizona State, said the association tried to teach students about responsible uses of credit. "We work closely with Bank of America to provide educational seminars to students in terms of being able to get information about how to pay off credit cards, how not to keep balances," she said.

I don't know what you're supposed to think when you see some corporate entity like this that is by all appearances engaging in behavior that is antithetical to its own interests. If Bank of America really is trying to persuade its cardholders not to carry balances then they are being played for suckers, since they can only make money from their credit card business when their customers carry balances.

It reminds me of Philip Morris's anti-tobacco TV spots in the years following the tobacco settlement. It was sort of an interesting problem, wanting for PR purposes to run ads nominally discouraging use of their product, but that didn't actually have any negative impact on sales. Fortunately for them, they had a perfect model to follow in the government's anti-drug advertising of the 80's, which had been convincingly demonstrated ineffective. I imagine Bank of America drew from the same well in designing a campaign to discourage students from taking on credit card debt.

Mr. Fish Continues to Kill It

I would also have included a scrotum, with hair. But this is pretty good.

Your Grandfather's Pez Dispenser

I had an idea a while ago that it would be cool to make an all-metal Pez dispenser, maybe with a nice oiled leather grip around the outside. Some dork made one with a metal body, but the "action" is still plastic, and I bet it still makes that cheap plastic-y spring sound when you reload. I envision a precision steel mechanism with ball bearings that would require occasional lubrication to stay in peak performance. It would also not be Boba Fett. Maybe FDR.

Look Ma

The big LCD traffic advisory signs over the Long Island Expressway have lately been advertising the DOT's "511" service for accessing travel information from your cell phone. The display alternates between advising you to "DIAL 511 FOR TRAVEL INFO" and reminding you to "USE HANDS-FREE CELL PHONE WHILE DRIVING" (those might not be exactly the wording they use, but that's the gist).

That second message is the end result of 2001 legislation that prohibits cell phone use on the road in New York unless you use a hands-free device. It is now common knowledge that talking on a hands-free phone while driving is just as dangerous as talking on a handset. Even the DOT website acknowledges as much, and yet there's the LCD sign up there, telling you how to comply with the letter of the law while continuing to place yourself and your fellow road users at unnecessary risk.

The legislation in question was originally drafted as a ban on all non-emergency cell phone usage while driving, which makes sense: you can't force drivers to pay attention to the road, but you can remove some of the most obvious distractions. But the cell phone service industry lobbied hard against it, since they "sell" a lot of "minutes"¹ to drivers who are (quite openly) trying to distract themselves from a monotonous commute.²

The resulting "compromise" is that you can still talk on your phone in the car, but you have to use a "hands-free microphone" accessory. It's a double victory for the phone companies, since they keep their bored commuter market and also sell more licensed hands-free accessories.

It sucks that this kind of lobbying can be successful. You can see that even though most people (even if they consider themselves an exception) can understand that talking on any kind of phone distracts people from driving, there's no way that that kind of broadly-held awareness can coalesce into any kind of organized lobbying interest that can compete with the phone industry. But I guess you'd hope that enough legislators would take their jobs as representatives of the people seriously enough that they would take up the public's side and recognize that yeah, even though cell providers make money off of it and would hate to lose that lost revenue, really everyone else would be better off if we got phones out of drivers' hands, so too bad, suck it up.

And maybe the compromise law is better than nothing, because now that it's on the books it can be amended to ban all cell use, or maybe challenged in court as not fulfilling its stated purpose (is that a thing?). Who knows. But it sure seems as though, with the DOT is basically running publicly funded ads encouraging drivers to use their (hands-free!) phones, the legislation as passed is worse than none at all.

¹ How this can even sound like a plausible basis for an industry in the first place is a mystery in itself.

² Note also that this whole situation arises as people attempt to lessen the burden of tedious automobile commuting. A much better response would be to figure out how to alter our world so that so many people don't need to drive so far to work every day.