Day: July 9, 2002

Neat! Mickey’s a blogroll.
Since he’s also got permalinks now — sort of, you can use the daily links all the way down at the bottom of his page — I think we can now declare Microsoft Blog ready to ship as R1.0 — it now has almost as many features as its free competitors, even if the feature implementations are more annoying and less functional. Soon, we’ll all be MSBlogging^TM and wondering how we ever survived using a blog tool that didn’t have the neat little paper-clip help icon that pops up every now and then to cheerfully inform us that we misspelled “idiotarian”, and that wouldn’t “cluefully challenged’ be a more sensitive phrase to use anyway? Sure, MSBlog will be DRM-hardwired to prevent deep-linking (to limit legal liability), but everything interesting is always on the front page anyway, right?
I still think we need a campaign to Free Mickey’s Prose … maybe I should offer to contribute $1 of every purchase from the TTLB Premium Store to a fund to buy his contract back from Bill….
Update: Lair gets it.

Damn. And here I thought the Western U.S. was the place prone to bursting into flames. Seems Quebec has some flamable properties too — check out this satellite photo of the several-hundred-mile wide smoke plume that’s drifted down to the Eastern U.S. from Canada.
Click for the full scoop from NASA and for a full-sized version of the image. According to NASA:
The enormous smoke plume is almost 200 miles wide where it enters the United States over the New York and Vermont state lines. The thick pall is affecting air quality in places well to the south, including New York, Baltimore, and Washington, D.C. The image shows the smoke drifting out over the Atlantic Ocean, and then curling back in over North Carolina (bottom right).

NPR’s the Media did a sort-of abbreviated show last week, but had two pieces of interest I’d recommend.
The first was a bit on a new ad campaign by the Ad Council (of McGruff the Crime Dog and Smokey the Bear fame) which consists of a series of television spots devoted to convincing Americans that freedom is an important idea.
No, really.
I haven’t seen the spots, but they are described (with audio clips) in the OTM RealMedia audio here. And they sounded, well, downright creepy.
The tack of the ads seems to be to posit an alternate America where freedom does not exist; showing the viewer some normal American doing things we take for granted suddenly finding himself in trouble with The Authorities. One example has a young man coming to the library with a list of books, where he is sternly and ominious informed by the librarian that the books “are no longer available.” Soon enough, he’s being approached by mysterious men who wish him to come with them and answer a few questions.
The idea, I guess, is to creep people out enough that they’ll fight for freedom. Or something like that. (The multiple self-referential layers of doublespeak goodthink here are making my head spin).
The problem, particularly about the library book spot, is, well, reality. (Brooke Gladstone, the interviewer, raised this exact point I’m about to demonstrate, so she gets the thought-credit; I just did some legwork to dig up the right sources).
When it comes to libraries, my understanding is that law enforcement has pretty comprehensive powers to obtain (with some court approval involved) records of books that individual patrons check out. Check out the American Library Association’s page on the PATRIOT Act, if you want to attempt to decode the legislation yourself. So the “spooky” scenario that the Ad Council is trying to warn us we must be vigilant to prevent…. has already happened.
Similarly, the Electronic Frontier Foundation says you’d better watch what you search on Google. (And by the way, that means you to the few folks who hit the site by searching on “Christian Porn”. What would Jesus think?). According to EFF:
Be careful what you put in that Google search. The government may now spy on web surfing of innocent Americans, including terms entered into search engines, by merely telling a judge anywhere in the U.S. that the spying could lead to information that is “relevant” to an ongoing criminal investigation. The person spied on does not have to be the target of the investigation. This application must be granted and the government is not obligated to report to the court or tell the person spied up what it has done.
Hmph. Watch what you say, indeed.
The second OTM story, on a lighter note, was about a gentleman who decided to rate the national flags for the world based on a consistent set of asthetic guidelines, and assign each a letter grade.
Japan, for example, gets an A (“A classic. Simple, to the point.” ), while the Stars and Stripes coasts by with a C+, getting docked for too many stars (“If one is good, fifty must be just right.”).
Fun stuff, and perfect to start your morning before you’re ready to think about more weighty matters. Go direct to the web site, or the OTM RealMedia is here

Keep an eye on Iran over the next few days: Tuesday is the anniversary of the student protests / street riots three years ago. The government banned any demonstrations… which of course, increases the possibility that something truly dramatic might occur.
Update 10:30 PDT: As expected, the ban was violated, leading to small-scale skirmishes between protesters and riot police.