Mystery Solved: House is Like Holmes

It took me two-and-a-half years, but I finally figured out that the Fox medical drama House has patterned the title character, an arrogant doctor who solves sadistic medical mysteries, after Sherlock Holmes.

Beyond the similarity of the names Holmes and House, both feature characters who are arrogant and addicted to drugs (Holmes abuses cocaine and morphine; House takes Vicodin for a leg ailment). They're both incredibly difficult to get along with and have only close friend and confidante -- Holmes has Dr. Watson, House has Dr. Wilson.

In an overt nod to Holmes on this week's episode, House was shopping for a cane when he put a curled Baskerville pipe in his mouth. (You'd think a guy whose patients regularly develop excruciating maladies from exposure to exotic toxins would have the sense not to do that.)

A House fan site runs down all of their similarities, which include another obvious clue that I missed: House's house has the address 221-B.

My favorite connection is that both characters love lowbrow culture. Holmes is a regular reader of "agony columns," melodramatic Dear Abby-style advice features for the lovelorn and desperate, and House is a regular viewer of General Hospital who once used the pseudonym Luke N. Laura.

Television · Books · 2007/05/02 · 1 COMMENT · Link

NBC Buys RSS-to-Email Service R-Mail

The largest email-based RSS service was sold to NBC Universal this week, an event that's curiously absent from the tech press. Randy Charles Morin's R-Mail was purchased by the entertainment network for an undisclosed amount.

The service has 50,000 users, 100,000 subscriptions and sends out more than 50,000 e-mails per day, according to DMW Daily, though I suspect a zero's missing from the last figure. When I wrote about R-Mail last August, it had 20,000 users.

R-Mail makes it possible to receive web site updates by email for any site that offers an RSS or Atom feed. I didn't realize that reading feeds by mail was so popular until I offered subscriptions to users of the Drudge Retort. Within a few weeks, more than 600 people were getting each news update from the site in e-mail.

Morin, a member of the RSS Advisory Board and a longtime advocate of RSS, began R-Mail as a personal project to suit his own needs. He turned it pro when the site grew by 15,000 users over a 90-day period in 2006.

Normally, you'd expect an RSS startup that attracted more than 45,000 new users in a year to get the attention of TechCrunch and the other sites that obsess over Web 2.0. But while Michael Arrington was wishing for somebody to launch a blog-to-email startup and covering the launch and fire sale of a small RSS-email service called Zookoda, he completely missed the one that grew into a successful business.

Rss · Business · 2007/04/27 · 7 COMMENTS · Link

Politics Is Not a Team Sport

The novelist Andrew Klavan has written a completely insufferable ode to himself for being conservative that's getting a lot of praise.

The thing I like best about being a conservative is that I don't have to lie. ... This is leftism's great strength: it's all white lies.

I wrote a response for Watching the Watchers that addresses the need of too many Americans to treat politics like a sport in which your team rox and the other team sux.

Politics · 2007/04/25 · 5 COMMENTS · Link

Doctor Has a Beef With Health Claims in Food Ads

Freedhoff began his career as a family physician, but switched gears and started the Bariatric Medical Institute in Ottawa, Canada, because he "quickly became frustrated prescribing medications for conditions that could be controlled with lifestyle changes. ... It's much more fun to stop drugs than to start them."

He recently spotted the Heart and Stroke Foundation of Canada recommending red meat as a healthy food:

I'm not aware of any study that has demonstrated any significant health benefits with red meat consumption.

On the contrary, I'm aware of many studies that have demonstrated the dangers of red meat consumption -- from breast cancer (in post-menopausal women, intake of just 60 grams per day increased their risk of breast cancer by 57 percent), to colon cancer (people who ate the most red meat were almost 40 percent more likely to develop colon cancer), and diabetes (for every increase in the number of daily servings of red meat there was a 26 percent increase in the risk of developing diabetes).

Health · 2007/04/23 · 2 COMMENTS · Link

I Take Abuse According to RFC 2142

I was told Friday that Buzzword.Com has been added to a blacklist at RFC Ignorant because the domain doesn't have an abuse email account. Somebody wanted to report a spam blog on my server, and when he couldn't send mail to an abuse account here, I was turned in for RFC reeducation.

RFC 2142 requires that web sites and other servers take mail at several standard mailboxes, including abuse@domain for complaints, postmaster@domain for issues regarding mail servers and webmaster@domain for web servers. According to RFC Ignorant, all domains that might be abused must have an abuse account that takes mail.

It is ... a widely-held misconception that <abuse@domain> only needs to work for Internet Service Providers. Instead, it should work for any "organization" for which e-mail (or other abusable Internet) service exists, whether that service is provided to one user or one million.

Because an abuse account is likely to get a bunch of spam, I was hoping to put an autoresponder there that tells people to use a web form to file complaints. But that violates the RFC:

... sites are welcome to suggest "better/optimized" methods of communication, but they must acknowledge that the complaint will be acted upon, as submitted to the main abuse@domain address.

RFC Ignorant's approach is obnoxious but the point's valid. You can't run a service like a free weblog host without being attentive to complaints.

After dealing with this and spending most of the day on spam problems on my weblog and e-mail servers, I decided that my plan to run 16 WordPress MU servers was completely insane. I've consolidated all of them down to a single host, Buzzword.Com.

Wordpressmu · Spam · 2007/04/21 · 9 COMMENTS · Link

Finding Good Blogs in a Sea of Spam

The 16 free WordPress hosts I began in February have been a gigantic maintenance hassle because of spammer abuse, but they have lauched two cool new sites: The Ad Whisperers, a blog about TV commercials, and Political Fretwork, a liberal blog that mines the press for political news.

Last night, Ad Whisperers linked to a phone commercial that has an unusual selling point -- our company will stick with you through all the changes in your life -- even sexual orientation:

You may have seen the new Fido cellular phone ad touting how flexible the company's plans are. You may also have done a double-take near the end when you realized that the man -- who had first been seen making out with a blonde and then with a brunette and a baby -- was now snuggling up with a guy on the couch.

Forget low roaming charges and free calls to my five. I want a phone service that'll support me on the down low.

Fretwork pulls together stories from various sources as they're breaking, like this contrast between Bush's saber-rattling to pass a war budget without a withdrawal timetable and Mogtada al-Sadr's saber-rattling to end the occupation, noting a disturbing observation from Middle East scholar Juan Cole:

Chillingly, some of the demonstrators appeared to be soldiers in the Iraqi army.

If I could get one killer blog a month on these servers, it would be worth the aggravation of checking the WordPress MU servers daily to delete spammers.

Wordpressmu · Tv · Politics · 2007/04/20 · 3 COMMENTS · Link

Cluetrain Derails in Blacksburg, Virginia

One of the best-known techbloggers was embarrassed Monday when he sent the following private e-mail and it was published by the recipient:

From what I gather so far (and info is incomplete), most of the cell phones in use by students at Virginia Tech, and the system they used as well (much more feature-rich than phones provided by big carriers, and user-programmable to boot) were provided by a company in New York run by my friend ... . I think what they're doing is critically important: helping the users help themselves and each other. And using this tragedy to create the phone systems we want, rather than what the carriers are willing to give us.

Though he backed away from this sentiment, for reasons that should be obvious, he can't deny thinking that the massacre might be a useful lever to get better phone services.

Not long ago, another prominent techblogger proclaimed that a new computer chip was more important than cancer, using a news story about an actual teen with cancer as his example:

... having cancer is important to that one person. Intel chips change the lives of hundreds of millions of people.

Yesterday, a third techblogger's first take on Cho Seung-Hui's release of a multimedia manifesto was to claim him as a vlogger, a person who publishes video updates of his life as a blog.

The Virginia Tech shooter sent a package of video and pictures to NBC.

In other words, vlogging comes to mass murder, in ways no one anticipated (or no one I know).

It makes perfect sense, in a perfectly senseless way.

I've been a techblogger for a long time, hyping stuff that excites me about web publishing, programming and affiliated forms of geekery. But there ought to be subjects that are larger than their ability to sell cutting-edge technology, and I'm pretty sure that mass murder and childhood cancer are two of them.

Blogging · Tech · 2007/04/19 · 8 COMMENTS · Link

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