Mena Trott 1, Ben Metcalfe 0

Last December, Six Apart founder Mena Trott gave an infamous speech about online civility where she called out one of her critics in the event's IRC backchannel, an audience member using the pseudonym dotBen:

Who is dotBen? All day yesterday you've been an ------- to the people who've been in this town and I want to know why don't you, why, what the ----?

DotBen turned out to be Ben Metcalfe, at the time a technologist at the BBC, who stood up and said that candor is more important than civility.

Yesterday on his blog, Metcalfe got an anonymous comment in response to one of his posts:

Yes google can shove it. And you can go ---- yourself.

Metcalfe called out his anonymous critic for incivility:

Dude, you're not quite as anonymous as you think. And if you want to chat ---- like that without even putting a name to the remark, then I don't feel to bad about giving our your IP address: 71.39.78.68

Hmmm a quick google (it was google, this time!) and I notice you once tried to add XeniSucks.com to the Wikipedia Entry for Xeni Jardin and have been trolling the Phoenix Arizona entry (which I notice is where you are from).

Sure, you could be on a dynamic IP but seeing as the only instances of this IP address that I can find is more trolling (like your comment here) it looks like this is you ...

Movable Type · Civility · 2006/10/27 · 4 COMMENTS · Link

Republicans, Campaign Ads and Stem-Cell Research

I caught a little of Rush Limbaugh's show this afternoon as he attempted to gnaw his own leg off to escape the trap he stepped into by taking on television's Michael J. Fox.

As medical experts continue to weigh in on the authenticity of Fox's symptoms, Limbaugh could only defend himself by creating an alternate universe in which he provided a dispassionate factual rebuttal to Fox's claims two days ago, not obscenely pantomimed mockery of a 45-year-old man stricken with a severe nervous system disorder.

One poll found a five-percent jump in support for the research after Fox's ad aired during the World Series.

The progressive 547 group Majority Action demonstrates the difference between Fox's personal, emotionally resonant plea and a crass attack ad on the same subject.

A lot can be said about Republicans during this election season, but I wasn't aware that Rep. Don Sherwood (R-Pa.) and other incumbents would visit paralysis, early-onset Alzheimer's and juvenile diabetes on suburban swing voters. Maybe if they cut back on their compulsion to inflict disease, there wouldn't be a growing need for universal health care.

Politics · Radio · Television · 2006/10/26 · 21 COMMENTS · Link

Mentes Criminales: Pegas Como un Niña Pequeña

One of the benefits of American monolinguilism: Hearing people speak in languages you don't understand is funny.

This Spanish-dubbed scene from Criminal Minds gives the dour FBI profilers a little smoldering Latin heat.

Television · 2006/10/26 · 2 COMMENTS · Link

Rush Limbaugh Mimicked Michael J. Fox's Parkinson's Disease

As Rush Limbaugh accused Michael J. Fox of exaggerating the effects of Parkinson's disease, he impersonated Fox, jerking his head and arms wildly back and forth.

I try not to criticize human caricatures like Limbaugh, because their shtick depends on regularly offending people. Every time a liberal blasts Ann Coulter, a cash register ka-ching goes off in her vestigial brain. But the sight of Limbaugh mocking the symptoms of a Parkinson's sufferer hits a new low.

From 700,000 to 1 million Americans have Parkinson's disease, according to the New England Journal of Medicine. Add their loved ones and anywhere from 5 to 10 million people are personally affected by the disease, intimately familiar with the symptoms that Limbaugh ridiculed.

As the video makes the rounds of the Internet and cable TV today, I hope that Limbaugh hears from every one of them.

Politics · Television · 2006/10/26 · 67 COMMENTS · Link

Detecting Weblog Spam with Comment Flak

Because I don't want to add captchas to Workbench, this weblog has been drowning in comment spam. Since I began accepting comments in September 2002, I've received 13,000 legitimate comments and 172,000 spam.

I'm trying a new technique this week that makes spam easy to detect by putting a bunch of bogus text areas on a weblog form, hiding them with Cascading Style Sheets, and checking them for input when the comment is submitted. I call these fields comment flak.

Spammers typically put their junk comment in every text area on a form. When text shows up in any of these flak fields, my blogging software treats it as spam.

I've written a new Comment-Flak library for PHP that makes it easy to use this technique on any weblog published with PHP.

So far, 100 percent of the spam submitted to this weblog has been caught by this technique. This will drop if the technique becomes popular, but I'm hoping people will offer tips on how to make it harder to beat. The code has been released as open source under the GPL.

Programming · Php · Open Source · 2006/10/25 · 9 COMMENTS · Link

Rob Lowe, Snow White and the Academy Awards

The infamous opening number to the 1989 Academy Awards, which featured Snow White and Rob Lowe and killed the career of show producer Allen Carr, turned up on YouTube:

Seeing this for the first time, I thought the opening was campy, hokey and overdone, but that seemed like the point. You don't line up a dozen dancing tables with lampshade heads and a chorus line of male ushers belting out "whenever you're down in the dumps, try putting on Judy's red pumps" without knowing you're completely over the top.

The only unknowingly bad thing in the number is Lowe's singing.

After the show, Julie Andrews, Paul Newman, Gregory Peck, Billy Wilder, Sidney Lumet and 12 other "luminaries" wrote a public letter complaining about the show. I couldn't find the letter, but this April 29, 1989, New York Times item shows how seriously they took the matter:

The producers of the Academy Awards said today they had appointed a committee to review last month's Oscar show after such Hollywood stars as Julie Andrews and Paul Newman called it an embarrassment.

The show, produced by Allan Carr, was also assailed by critics but received the highest Oscar television ratings in five years.

Roger Kahn, president of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, said the committee would determine why the show had attracted such stinging criticism and see "what we should do in the future."

In a letter to the Academy signed by 17 Hollywood luminaries, including Miss Andrews, Mr. Newman, Gregory Peck, Billy Wilder and Sidney Lumet, the 61st Oscar show was called "an embarrassment to both the Academy and the entire motion picture industry."

"It is neither fitting nor acceptable that the best work in motion pictures be acknowledged in such a demeaning fashion," the letter, made public Thursday, said.

Television · Music · Movies · 2006/10/24 · 8 COMMENTS · Link

Art Bell Threatens Lawsuit Over Weblog Comments

Talk radio host Art Bell is threatening to sue me over comments posted by readers on Workbench.

At first I thought it was a hoax, but the emails check out. Writing from the Philippines with an email address at KNYE, the radio station he founded while living in Pahrump, Nev., Bell suggested several times he'd pursue a lawsuit in an email exchange that began Wednesday (full transcript):

I am the real Art Bell and your column and the responses to it have just been called to my attention.

I am contacting my Atty to determine what Legal action can be taken against those that have made actionable statements. ...

I would begin by taking the site down right away. I am a reasonable person but I can assure you as I tried in my email that what is contained in that thread goes way beyond the bar in even the case of a PUBLIC PERSON. I am shocked that as a media person you would not be well aware of this. Accusations of Child Molestation and Murder are actionable. Please review what you have allowed to be posted. What at the very least I expect is a written apology as well as the entire disgusting mess to be taken down right away. ...

If you are unable to eliminate the obvious Libel, it can be done at a far greater cost to us both. I am not talking about your article, I am talking about the comment's made and carried by your page. Please review it. I will not contact you again, my Lawyer will.

I've written about Bell three times in the last year, drawing more than 2,300 reader comments:

• Art Bell's Wife Dies Unexpectedly, Jan. 07, 2006
• Art Bell Remarries, Will Leave U.S., April 16, 2006
• All Art Bell, All Romance, All the Time, April 19, 2006

When Bell shared details about his wife's death and subsequent remarriage with his radio audience, which numbers in the millions, a bunch of his listeners found this blog in Google searches and commented on the subject. Some of the speculation was pretty savage, and no one familiar with his show would be surprised at the number of conspiracy theories offered in explanation. I've never engaged in any of that speculation.

Though I give readers wide latitude in the comments they post, I remove libelous comments when they're called to my attention, as I told him in our email exchange. But I'm under no legal obligation to do so, thanks to Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act:

No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider.

I'd prefer not to get sued, but if he wants to test Section 230 in court, I think it's a principle worth fighting for. The blogging medium thrives on its receptivity to reader feedback. I've taken 13,000 comments on Workbench and more than 300,000 on my other sites. If a blogger was treated as the author of every statement made by a reader, there would be no way to accept comments without reviewing each one prior to publication, turning a medium for boisterous public discussion into something as controversy-averse and excessively careful as a newspaper's letters to the editor section.

Radio · Politics · 2006/10/23 · 147 COMMENTS · Link

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