Cartoonist's Turn For the Worse

Gael Cooper regularly mocks the comic strip For Better or For Worse on Pop Culture Junk Mail, a great blog she's been publishing since 1999. Reading her latest entry reminded me of something I discovered recently: The creator of the strip, Lynn Johnston, shut down a longtime fan site in 2001 by threatening legal action:

We have our own very active website and are responsible for everything that is connected to For Better or For Worse. I support the initiatives taken by my syndicate to prohibit you from continuing your site. I hope we will not have to pursue this matter further.

The fan site, published by schoolteacher Rebecca Stephenson, made extremely limited use of Johnston's work, as you can see in the Alexa archive -- some people probably have more of her strips on their fridge. Stephenson wrote in the site's FAQ she was respecting copyright:

There is a strip on each of the character's pages which showcase them, but the reason I haven't put up any others is, first, because it is possible to find them elsewhere on the web (check the main page or the other FBoFW sites page for links) and second, because of copyright laws, I feel that I should only put enough actual FBoFW strips on this page to communicate the idea of what FBoFW is and who the characters are, and no more.

The site promoted Johnston's book collections and merchandise, noted the strip's copyright and declared its unofficial status. For three years before an official site was launched, it provided a place where fans could find out about the cartoonist and the characters. Her thank you for running the site, which was comfortably within the boundaries of fair use: Legal threats from the syndicate and Johnston.

With the pull she has at her syndicate, Johnston could have permitted the site under license or recognized that it wasn't an infringement. Instead, she bullied it offline to reduce the competition for her own site.

2005/11/08 · 4 COMMENTS · Link

Mark Evanier attended an onstage Jerry Lewis interview Thursday night, learning an odd bit of trivia about the comedian's socks:

Asked about the white sweatsocks that he usually wears, sometimes even with formal garb, he said, "I wear them because I like them. They feel comfortable to me. I change socks about four times a day, always putting on a brand new, never-before-worn pair. Each year, I send hundreds of pairs of socks to --" and he gave the name of some charitable organization in Las Vegas. "There are people in Hollywood who spend just as much money each year on something else that's white but they put it up their noses."

Movies · Television · 2005/11/05 · 1 COMMENT · Link

My Name Server is Totally Lame

I started the day with a dead name server that knocked more than 100 sites offline, including Workbench, the Drudge Retort and all of the Buzzword.Com bloggers.

I've been using BIND for years and thought I had run out of interesting new ways to break it. Overnight, most name requests failed and my server log filled up with errors like this:

lame server resolving 'www.cadenhead.org' (in 'cadenhead.org'?): 67.19.3.218#53

A lame server is one that's not responding to a name request it is expected to handle. Requests began failing several days ago, growing in number as name servers around the Internet contacted my malfunctioning server when their cached data expired.

After using DNS Report to test my name server and poring over the configuration file /etc/named.conf and individual domain zone files, all of which appeared correct, I realized that something was missing from my server log each time I rebooted BIND. Lines like this:

named[30731]: zone cadenhead.org/IN: loaded serial 4418

This log entry shows that a name server has properly loaded a zone and can take its requests. When it's missing, the server has no idea it should handle that domain. I suspected that BIND had stopped looking at /etc/named.conf, so I checked the process status monitor:

ps auxw | grep named

This revealed that BIND was running out of a new directory: /var/named/chroot. Somehow, BIND had been moved inside a chroot jail, a popular security technique on Linux that limits a server to a directory and its subdirectories. If crackers break the server, they only can see the files inside the jail. The rest of the box is invisible to them.

I found the new location of named.conf in the jail, added all of my domain zones to the file and rebooted BIND. My server is no longer lame.

I've saved thousands of dollars over the years by running Internet servers on Linux instead of Windows, but there's a significant cost in work time, because something unusual goes fubar at least once a month. I can't tell whether this BIND change happened because of security patches I installed last week or an action taken by my hosting company without my knowledge.

In any case, it now works, so I won't be touching anything until something else breaks.

Security · Linux · Domains · 2005/11/04 · 13 COMMENTS · Link

Faith v. Constitution

Michael Thomson has written critically on the implications of a Catholic Supreme Court majority, focusing on issues where the church and court decisions might come into conflict:

... I am a proponent of diversity. I thought George Bush was as well. In his recent court appointee decisions, he has packed the court with adherents of a religion that controls and manipulates politicians, not just in the United States, but also all over the world.

This issue's being played mostly for laughs so far, and I do like the idea of letting a weeping statue of St. Thomas More settle close cases.

In time, I think the mass of Catholics on the court will become a problem, both for the justices whose views are anticipated to reflect church values and the fundamentalists who will be especially bitter when they don't. Evangelical Christians lost a chance to have one of their own on the Supreme Court with the withdrawal of Harriet Miers. If Samuel Alito is voted in and becomes a moderate like David Souter (Lord hear my prayer), I can't imagine they'll take that very well.

Another blogger, a practicing Catholic, wonders if the church might ever deny communion to justices:

If the Court were to decide a case in favor of birth control, homosexual civil rights, or abortion rights, will the justices be denied communion or even excommunicated? What about religious freedom? Separation of church and state? Prayer in the schools? In the face of such serious punishment, can a Catholic justice fairly and impartially decide the issues?

Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners now and at the hour of Scalito's confirmation.

Politics · 2005/11/03 · 2 COMMENTS · Link

President Bush Courts Catholics

Any legislator who is publicly supporting laws which favor abortion or euthanasia may not present himself or herself for Holy Communion. -- Raymond Burke, Catholic Archbishop of St. Louis

If Judge Samuel Alito is approved by the Senate, the Supreme Court will have five Catholic justices, a religious majority that is nearly without precedent in U.S. history. He would join Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Anthony Kennedy, Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas.

The only time this appears to have happened was 1792-1793, when four of the six justices belonged to the Episcopal church: Chief Justice John Jay and Justices James Iredell, Thomas Johnson and James Wilson.

The Constitution expressly forbids religious tests in consideration for public office, so there's a strong inclination against scrutiny of a nominee's religious beliefs, whether in support or opposition. With Catholics, this comes into conflict with a growing movement within the church to deny sacraments to lawmakers who oppose its views on subjects like abortion, stem cell research and euthanasia.

In 2002, the Vatican issued a doctrinal note stating that Catholic lawmakers must act in accordance with its teachings:

John Paul II, continuing the constant teaching of the Church, has reiterated many times that those who are directly involved in lawmaking bodies have a grave and clear obligation to oppose any law that attacks human life. For them, as for every Catholic, it is impossible to promote such laws or to vote for them.

The Catholic Church comes into conflict with different political factions over the Vatican's voluminously documented views. John Kerry, a practicing Catholic who regularly attends mass, was publicly denied the right to communion by Archbishop Burke during the 2004 presidential campaign, an action with the approval of Pope Benedict XVI while he served as cardinal. New Jersey Gov. James McGreevey was denied by another bishop for remarrying without getting an annulment.

Up to this point, American bishops have played the communion card solely against socially liberal Democrats. There has been no comparable effort to deny Justice Scalia for his support of capital punishment, nor a rejection of Catholic politicians who favor the Iraq war.

Though I'm undoubtedly going to be accused of anti-Catholic bigotry (in spite of being raised in the church), one of my concerns with Alito's selection is the historic majority that it establishes. When the church began actively politicizing the Eucharist, it called into question how life-tenured justices will reconcile conflicts between their Constitution and their faith.

Politics · 2005/10/31 · 52 COMMENTS · Link

Viva BBC America

I caught the first episode of Viva Blackpool last night on BBC America, a six-episode mini-series that features the most wonderfully vile lead character since The Sopranos.

The show's a funny drama about Ripley Holden, an Elvis-loving Brit trying to bring Vegas-style excess to Blackpool, England, in the form of the Yankee Dollar Casino. When a dead body turns up one morning, a Scottish detective shows up poking around Ripley's business (and his wife).

The comparisons to Tony Soprano are unmistakeable -- Ripley's a larger-than-life oaf ruling the lives of his wife, son and daughter, and he mixes bullying and charm in a way that makes me think the U.S. will steal actor David Morrissey the way we've absconded with Ricky Gervais.

The strangest and most amazing thing about the show was the occasional use of musical numbers a la Cop Rock. The first episode ends with a "These Boots are Made for Walkin'" dance between Holden and the detective, and though it sounds excruciatingly bad, it was so great I scrambled for the TiVo to record the show for my wife.

I try to avoid watching television aside from Law & Order and football, because it robs me of time I could be wasting on the web. But I'm in for the next five hours of Blackpool, which airs Mondays at 10 p.m. and has one last repeat airing of the first episode at 7 p.m. tonight.

Television · 2005/10/30 · 30 COMMENTS · Link

Harriet's Homework Helpers

A postscript on Harriet Miers, buried in a Washington Post story on the burial of her Supreme Court aspirations:

White House aides finished Miers's second response to the Senate questionnaire and delivered it at 11:40 p.m., more than three hours after she decided to abandon her nomination. The 59-page document makes it clear that the struggle to learn about her advice to Bush would have continued had she stayed in the fray. Asked for details about her work, she submitted 135 boilerplate, publicly available fact sheets on White House policies and 67 policy statements the administration has sent Congress on legislation.

Miers wasn't even working on her own questionnaire! I know that Supreme Court justices often lean heavily on their clerks in drafting opinions, but you'd think a person described as "detail-oriented" in four billion media stories might have given her homework a look-see before aides turned it in.

I'm beginning to wonder if she's even a good bowler.

Politics · 2005/10/28 · 6 COMMENTS · Link

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