Day: June 8, 2002

From the Dept. of Just Plain Neat

Check out Bookwatch . It’s a fellow who has set up a routine to scan through weblogs (using weblogs.com for his source list) and track when various books are mentioned. So you can look at Snow Crash, for example, and see that TTLB mentioned it (which is how I found the site — I got a referral from them).

Paul Bausch, the fellow who runs it, also has a blog with a few very nice photos of Yosemite that are making me jealous.

Patrick Nielsen Hayden is to Coleen Rowly’s defense from meanies Jeff Jarvis and Matthew Yglesias :

“From here it looks like the problem is that the people in charge of our security think pretty much exactly like Jeff Jarvis and Matthew Yglesias–which is to say, like a well-connected East Coast media maven and a smart Harvard undergrad. For people like them, or like Robert Mueller and George Tenet, someone like Coleen Rowley is and always will be the sort of person you ignore…Jarvis and Yglesias are good guys, but (wittingly or unwittingly, I can’t quite tell) they’re offering a window into exactly why we’re where we are. “

Well said. I listened to a bit (only a bit) of her testimony and I was frankly charmed. She seemed like a very practical, down-to-earth professional who knew her job and was patiently trying to explain it to folks who didn’t. And the Fargo accent works for me, unlike for Mr. Jarvis.

I haven’t examined her full testimony, but the parts I did hear were pretty straightforward: notably, the section where she testified that the FBI’s search engine only works on single words, so you can search on “aviation” but not on “aviation schools”. I think there’s quite a legitimate question to ask why it has taken this long for somebody to testify to Congress about that basic a failing, but you can’t fault Ms. Rowley for that, and she seemed to do a fine job of it to me…

has an interesting referral to a Village Voice piece with statistics on Israeli and Palestinian casualties over the past few years. It says volumes about those doing the killing on each side; funny how actual facts can do that sometimes.