'Red Eye' Flight: Aisle Seat, Window Seat or Terrorist?

The 2005 thriller Red Eye, starring Rachel McAdams and Cillian Murphy, has a narrow premise: The guy sitting next to a hotel manager on an overnight flight turns out to be a terrorist who blackmails her into helping facilitate a politician's assassination.

I enjoy films that are set up in a way that makes you wonder how they can possibly tell a story. Most of the film takes place between two characters in one aisle of a plane, and it isn't easy for Murphy to menace the poor woman in between drink orders and the arrival of his complimentary peanuts.

I've never seen these actors before, but McAdams is really good as the plucky manager putting her degree in hotel and motel management to the test. By the end she's become something rare in movies: a heroine who doesn't need anybody to save her. In fact, during a climactic physical confrontation with Murphy, she's so badass you start to worry about his safety instead of hers.

Without giving away too much of the ending, I didn't know that a high-heeled shoe could do that.

Movies · 2006/10/31 · 8 COMMENTS · Link

Liberal Site Raw Story Frames News Articles from Other Sites

The liberal news site Raw Story makes a regular practice of framing articles from other media sites, displaying the pages at a Raw Story web address with additional advertising. This technique was the subject of a widely publicized copyright and trademark infringement lawsuit in the late '90s between a small news site and several media giants.

Some examples from Raw Story's current front page:

• British to evacuate consulate in Basra after mortar attacks, The Telegraph
• Zoo celebrating rare dove birth, BBC News
• Shreddin' With Dick, Wonkette
• Zawahiri Was Target in U.S. Attack on Religious School in Pakistan, ABC News

In February 1997, the Washington Post, Time, CNN and five other plaintiffs outlets sued the web site TotalNews for framing stories from their sites, calling the practice "parasitic" and an infringement of their trademarks and copyrights.

Simply put, Defendants are engaged in the Internet equivalent of pirating copyrighted material from a variety of famous newspapers, magazines, or television news programs; packaging those stories to advertisers as part of a competitive publication or program produced by Defendants; and pocketing the advertising revenue generated by their unauthorized use of that material.

News coverage of the case, which was settled when TotalNews agreed to stop framing the plaintiffs' sites, helped discourage the practice. Raw Story, one of the largest liberal sites with 3.2 million hits a week, displays its own banner ads and navigation menu atop each framed article.

Disclosure: I publish the Drudge Retort, which was in 2005 a member of the Liberal Blog Advertising Network with Raw Story and around 75 other sites. After both sites were kicked out of the network, I briefly discussed the formation of an ad network with Raw Story founder John Byrne.

Publishing · Politics · 2006/10/30 · 8 COMMENTS · Link

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

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