I Shall Wear the Bottoms of my Trousers Rolled

Today is my 40th birthday. On this day at a medical clinic near Dallas four decades ago, my grandfather Bill hounded a senior nurse as she weighed and measured me, convinced I would be switched with another newborn through accident or malice. The only other kid in the nursery that morning was a girl, so I'm pretty sure my folks are the ones who produced me in a night of Champale-fueled abandon that probably involved a Chevy Malibu.

My parents married in late September 1966. I was born full-term. Twelve years later I finally did the math and began pestering my mother for an explanation during a car ride to my grandparents' house, fearing that I was a living breathing example of the breakdown of the American family. My aunt Pam halted the line of questioning and put my mind at ease by threatening to beat me.

With this birthday, I am officially entitled to a mid-life crisis.

Although I am a lapsed Catholic, I stuck with the church long enough to master guilt, so horndogging in the tradition of our nation's 42nd president has been ruled out. (Today's news that gonorrhea has developed drug resistance helps reaffirm that decision -- we're getting closer to Eddie Murphy's doomsday scenario where you poke your nether regions in the wrong place and they immediately explode.)

Because I refuse to clean my garage and live in a covenanted community that forbids curbside parking, a sportscar is also out of the question.

Normally in this circumstance, I would settle for some completely unnecessary home theater or computer purchase, NBA or baseball tickets, or perhaps Silver Age comic books in pristine mint condition. I live my life so close to the edge I get dizzy.

But this is one of life's moments that comes with spousal immunity from prosecution, so I'd hate to waste it. I think I'm going to use this opportunity to become one of those people who goes to the beach in a leopard-skin mankini.

· 2007/04/13 · 21 COMMENTS · Link

The Internet's Chorus of Calumny

Frank Paynter's getting his groove back after the Internet's long tail knocked him around like a stegosaurus. For all of the talk about how bad it is to be the focus of an angry mob, an angry Internet mob gums its prey rather than biting. Once you get used to the slobber it's not so bad.

Now that the horde's moved on to Tim O'Reilly and his stinking badges, Paynter's mocking the outrage brigade by quoting Karl Marx:

All this chorus of calumny, which the party of order never fail, in their orgies of blood, to raise against their victims, only proves that the bourgeois of our days considers himself the legitimate successor to the baron of old, who thought every weapon in his own hand fair against the plebeian, while in the hands of the plebeian a weapon of any kind constituted in itself a crime.

Katharine Newman, a college student in Virginia, works me over a little for defending Paynter, Jeneane Sessum and Chris Locke:

The reaction of some of the Big-Fishes who owned these group blogs became defensive, arguing that they were being unfairly indicted for hate speech, which they weren't particularly accused of authoring. And that was when the story really got under my skin. All these Big-Fishes standing in line to say they wouldn't apologize for what they hadn't said, to decry Sierra's story as a black mark on their careers? Backing these Big-Fish, folks like Nick Denton and Rogers Cadenhead? I really would have hoped not.

I defended them because the mob was 99 and 44/100ths percent wrong. Once people had a compelling story -- mean web publishers drive female blogger into hiding with misogynistic death threats -- they never let go of it, because the facts were more complicated and less entertaining.

Blogging · 2007/04/11 · 11 COMMENTS · Link

Exporting a Manila Site Using OPML

The RSS Advisory Board site now includes all of the articles, weblog entries, and comments from the group's old Manila site, dating back to the group's founding in 2004.

I never got a copy of the old site's root file from Harvard, so I collected the content using an obscure but cool feature of Manila: All site content is saved in the discussion board as individual messages, each of which can be downloaded as an OPML file. For example, open this weblog entry from Craig Burton's Manila blog in OPML format.

I wrote a Java application that used Apache HttpClient to download the files and XOM to process the OPML.

OPML sucks, but I got thousands of weblog files into a MySQL database so I can't complain. Manila stores message text in the text attribute of outline elements, some of which may be nested. Weblog entries are formatted using the most insane thing I've ever seen in an XML dialect:

<outline text="&lt;newsItem&gt;"/>
<outline text="&lt;title&gt;Hackers selling IDs for $14, Symantec says&lt;/title&gt;"/>
<outline text="&lt;url&gt;&lt;/url&gt;"/>
<outline text="&lt;/newsItem&gt;"/>

You need to be an XML dork to appreciate this, but it's XML elements stored as escaped markup inside XML attributes.

Java · Mysql · Opml · Manila · 2007/04/11 · 4 COMMENTS · Link

Councilman: Stop Apologizing to American Indians

I filed my first story today for Watching the Watchers -- a Republican city councilman in Texas thinks its time to stop apologizing to American Indians:

A Houston city council member said on his radio talk show that the U.S. should "stop the continuous apology for what was done to the American Indians" and drop federal programs and treaties that provide casino rights, educational support and welfare.

Michael Berry, a Republican councilman in his third term and mayor pro tempore who hosts a morning show on KPRC, said on the air March 27 that he opposes such benefits for the same reason he opposes paying slavery reparations. "If you're against apologizing for slavery, then you gotta be against giving welfare to the American Indians because of the fact that 200 years ago they were whipped in a war. ... We conquered them. That's history. Hello!"

I'm the new publisher of Watching the Watchers, which began in 2004 as a media watchdog and liberal news site. I'm looking for 700 to 1,000 word articles and opinion pieces, particular if they shed some light on a current story that's being botched by the national media.

That's not the case here. I got an email tip about Berry's remarks, which have been bouncing around American Indian sites but haven't attracted mainstream media attention yet, and thought they were newsworthy.

Journalism · Politics · 2007/04/02 · 23 COMMENTS · Link

Kathy Sierra and the Mean Kids Controversy

There's more than one side to the story about threats made against technologist Kathy Sierra, as an article by Dan Fost in today's San Francisco Chronicle does a good job of explaining.

I strongly sympathize with Sierra, because it sucks to be the target of somebody's rage on the Internet. I imagine it's considerably worse for women, for whom misogynistic threats from men are depressingly common, as my Java book coauthor Laura Lemay relates.

But Sierra's weblog post made the publishers of the now-defunct Mean Kids and Unclebobism blogs look like they endorsed or even authored the odious threats against her, which appears to be an unfair and inaccurate accusation to level against Chris Locke, Frank Paynter and Jeneane Sessum. Her partner Bert Bates continues to hold them responsible as this controversy rages around the web.

I've read several dozen Mean Kids posts by poking around the caches on Google and Bloglines. From what I've seen, the site began in early February as a harmless spleen-venting exercise, as Sierra acknowledged when she suggested herself as a target:

It's about f'n time. It's always Tara Tara Tara.

Like other exercises in misanthropy on the web, Mean Kids became less playful and more malicious over time, especially in terms of the audience it attracted and new authors it took on. When one of the site's writers posted a racist and hateful post about blogger Robert Scoble's pregnant wife Maryam on March 16, describing her as an "Iranian princess" and "brown sow," Paynter responded by shutting the site down and was rebuked by another contributor as a "control freak." Locke shut down the site he created in response, Unclebobism, for similar reasons.

You can fault them for beginning rant sites that ended badly, as if there's any other way those sites turn out, but it should be pointed out that Paynter and Locke closed both blogs in rejection of offensive content before Sierra's post. Sessum's involvement in Mean Kids was a single post that quoted a John Lennon song.

The Internet's newest incarnation of mean kids -- the torch-wielding mob going after people named by Sierra -- should focus their wrath on the people who made the actual threats and the reprehensible post about Scoble's wife.

Blogging · 2007/03/29 · 15 COMMENTS · Link

Lee Padgett, the Blogger to Be Named Later

I'm pretty thick-skinned when it comes to criticism, because in eight years of blogging I've made the occasional gigantic mistake that sends my credibility crashing through the guardrails into a ravine like Toonces the Driving Cat. But a recent cheap shot by Paul McNamara, editor and blogger for Network World, has stuck with me:

Cadenhead is a former newspaperman ... who appears to have forgotten a lot about the journalism business. (By the way, I worked for 20 years as a local newspaper editor before coming to Network World.)

The ellipses are part of the quote. McNamara uses them frequently in the middle of sentences for no reason.

I'm a childhood paper carrier and journalism school graduate who worked 10 years in the business and married a reporter. So I love journalism, both in the general and biblical sense. When somebody criticizes my journalism chops, it goes straight to the part of the brain that triggers inchoate rage.

I'm sensitive about the subject because I'm a failed journalist. I couldn't make a living at it, which is why I discovered web publishing early and become a technical author and blogger. A lot of the early web was built by people who failed in other mediums -- we had the free time to recognize its potential.

Given my rage, I'm enjoying the fact that McNamara's 20 years in journalism didn't stop him from making a rookie mistake: taking somebody else at his word without any evidence.

McNamara wrote that it was OK for the St. Augustine Record to engage in a public manhunt for a local blogger's identity, even though the blogger's been accused of no crime and was not being investigated in any manner for wrongdoing. To bolster his argument, he quoted an e-mail from the paper's editor, Peter Ellis, justifying the decision:

... an organized group launched a series of attacks against some elected officials. We wanted to find out what the group is (we now know). For the record, we are not friends -- nor are we foes -- of these candidates. We are, however, advocates for the public and think they want to know what organized groups are working behind the scenes to manipulate public opinion.

That was two weeks ago, and the Record has not run a story identifying the blogger or the alleged campaign to "manipulate public opinion." At this point, I think it's fair to conclude that the paper doesn't know who the blogger is, at least not to the degree it feels safe running the story.

So let's see if 20 years in journalism taught McNamara how to write a correction.

Jacksonville · Florida · Journalism · 2007/03/23 · 12 COMMENTS · Link

Rosie O'Donnell: WTC 7 Demolished on 9/11

Talk show host Rosie O'Donnell suggested that World Trade Center 7 was not destroyed by fire on 9/11 in a post on her personal weblog Thursday evening.

Writing in the poetry-like style she's adopted on her blog, O'Donnell took part of her post -- the list of reasons to suspect the building was demolished -- directly from a page on the conspiracy-minded site WhatReallyHappened.Com.

at 5 30 pm
9 11 2001

wtc7 collapsed

for the third time in history
fire brought down a steel building
reducing it to rubble

hold on folks
here we go

• The fires in WTC 7 were not evenly distributed, so a perfect collapse was impossible.
• Silverstein said to the fire department commander “the smartest thing to do is pull it.”
• Firefighters withdrawing from the area stated the building was going to “blow up”.
• The roof of WTC 7 visibly crumbled and the building collapsed perfectly into its footprint.
• Molten steel and partially evaporated steel members were found in the debris.

[WTC 7] contained offices of the FBI, Department of Defense, IRS (which contained prodigious amounts of corporate tax fraud, including Enron’s), US Secret Service, Securities & Exchange Commission (with more stock fraud records), and Citibank’s Salomon Smith Barney, the Mayor’s Office of Emergency Management and many other financial institutions. [Online Journal]

The SEC has not quantified the number of active cases in which substantial files were destroyed [by the collapse of WTC 7]. Reuters news service and the Los Angeles Times published reports estimating them at 3,000 to 4,000. They include the agency’s major inquiry into the manner in which investment banks divvied up hot shares of initial public offerings during the high-tech boom. …”Ongoing investigations at the New York SEC will be dramatically affected because so much of their work is paper-intensive,” said Max Berger of New York’s Bernstein Litowitz Berger & Grossmann. “This is a disaster for these cases.” [New York Lawyer]

Citigroup says some information that the committee is seeking [about WorldCom] was destroyed in the Sept. 11 terror attack on the World Trade Center. Salomon had offices in 7 World Trade Center, one of the buildings that collapsed in the aftermath of the attack. The bank says that back-up tapes of corporate emails from September 1998 through December 2000 were stored at the building and destroyed in the attack. [TheStreet]

Inside [WTC 7 was] the US Secret Service’s largest field office with more than 200 employees. …”All the evidence that we stored at 7 World Trade, in all our cases, went down with the building,” according to US Secret Service Special Agent David Curran. [TechTV]

lets start here
ok…go slow
remember 2 breathe
use google

Update: This position puts O'Donnell at odds with Penn and Teller.

911 · Terrorism · Television · 2007/03/19 · 341 COMMENTS · Link

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