Texan's Ad: 'You Will Never Silence Me'
While stopping in Liberty City, Texas, recently to eat at the binding arbitration Whataburger restaurant, I found an interesting display ad in the Longview News-Journal. The ad, which was almost a half-page in size, read as follows:
Amos Snow, III
Longview, TX 75605Apparently, I'm an enemy of the State.
I'm a Navy veteran, who for 7 years served my country in the forgotten conflicts of the '80s. I'm a small business owner who provides jobs within the community and provides finished goods to other manufacturers or end-users. I'm a Texan who has pride in our fiscally conservative state and local leadership. I'm an American who chooses to exercise the rights guaranteed in our most sacred documents, The Constitution of the United States and the Bill of Rights.
The office of the President of the United States and the Congressional leadership, has determined that if my views are contrary to their agenda, I'm to be "ratted out" by those who know me or hear of my opinion or views concerning their policy agenda.
I'm paraphrasing, but as John Hancock reportedly said when signing the Declaration of Independence: let me sign in a manner that the King can surely read without his spectacles:
My name is Amos Auston Snow, III and I do not agree with the irresponsible spending policies of the President or Congress. And as an American, I will oppose their attempt to bring fiscal ruin to our great nation.
Call me an "enemy" and rat me out if it suits you; but you will never silence me.
Snow's fear of being ratted out appears to be related to the White House request for people to forward chain emails containing false claims about health care insurance reform. Texas Sen. John Cronyn (R.) characterized the request as "asking American citizens to report their fellow citizens to the White House for pure political speech."
The White House Reality Check web site was launched to debunk some of the wild claims being made about the proposed legislation.
Assuming that Snow is a Republican, I'd be curious to find out if he bought any newspaper ads during the eight years in which President Bush's massive spending turned a $128 billion surplus into a $490 billion deficit.
Telemanjaro: The World's Largest HDTV
I attended Sunday's match between Chelsea FC and Club America at the new Cowboys Stadium, the $1.15 billion facility that opened a few weeks ago in Arlington. I expected the stadium to be huge, but Dallas Cowboys owner Jerry Jones has managed to construct a facility that is enormous even by the overcompensating standards of big-boot, tiny-johnson Texas excess.
Cowboys Stadium has the largest roof in the world that isn't supported by columns. Two arches twice as wide as the Gateway Arch in St. Louis support the roof, which is tall enough to hold the Statue of Liberty inside. The facility also has the world's largest retractable roof and the largest movable glass doors at each end zone. I don't know why these doors are needed, unless the facility is hoping to schedule meetings of the Transformers. From the outside, the stadium looks like a cross between the Legion of Doom headquarters and a Decepticon. I'm concerned that the first time the Dallas Cowboys lose a big game, the stadium will rise up in anger and reduce the Texas Rangers' ballpark next door to rubble.
During the match a massive thunderstorm raged outside, with lightning striking so close that fans gasped. Under the closed roof, you couldn't even tell the storm was bad. The stadium is larger than nature.
Inside, the view is great even from the upper deck cheap seats, which is where I sat, and the whole place is air conditioned. As the crowd of 57,000 filled out -- the stadium holds 82,000 -- blasts of cool air on my back kept the place comfortable. The carbon footprint can't be pretty. I'm guessing that every day this facility operates, the Earth's lifespan is shortened by a day. This is a fair trade.
The most amazing feature of the stadium is the world's largest HDTV, which hangs from the ceiling and faces both sidelines. Smaller side TVs hang off the sides.
The TV deserves its own name, so I've been calling it Telemanjaro.
Telemanjaro is 160 feet wide, 72 feet tall and lit by 300 million bulbs. The picture quality is flawless. From the upper deck, Telemanjaro occupies up so much of the view that you cannot see one-fourth of the fans in the stadium. It's tough to find a picture that conveys the enormity, but here's one by Erik Grande.
The field is fully visible, but it competes for your attention with Telemanjaro. The entire soccer match was broadcast on the TV as it happened. Occasionally, I glanced up to get a better view of play. Several minutes passed as I gazed in slack-jawed awe, forgetting to look back down at the field
Although this sounds like a knock against Telemanjaro, it's actually the best experience I've had watching a game from the uppermost deck of a large stadium. You don't miss anything from the nosebleeds. The gigantic screen sees all and knows all. Speaking of which, one of the Club America players desperately needs to exfoliate.
I attended the game with four other people, none of whom can afford Cowboys tickets in this economy. Making the impulsive decision to relocate from Florida to Dallas, I tried to commit us all to buying season tickets before we left the event and breaking the news to our respective spouses after we got home. (Private note to Chad, Eric, Greg and Mom: Your priorities are seriously out of whack.)
As a child of a generation raised on television, I cannot help but regard Telemanjaro as the pinnacle of human achievement. I felt a strong compulsion to worship Telemanjaro and to buy the products it advertised to stay in its favor.
Anyone who visits Dallas should make a pilgrimage to see Telemanjaro, no matter how many organs you must sell to afford Jerry's ticket prices. Fun fact: As much as two-thirds of your liver can grow back if removed.
The TV hangs above the players and weighs 660 tons, which initially made me fear that an accident might crush more than a dozen pampered millionaires to a fine paste.
But I realized quickly that Telemanjaro loves us and would not harm us, as long as we keep watching.
Daily Kos Shoots Down Anti-Gun Control Diary
I skim through 50-100 stories a day published on Daily Kos as I consider items for Watching the Watchers. To minimize bandwidth use, a Java application that I wrote saves a cached copy of each story on my server. Because of this cache, I end up seeing stories that were deleted from the site.
I'd heard for years that a lot of user-submitted stories are deleted from Daily Kos because of the viewpoints they espouse. So far, I'm not finding that to be the case. I've seen around 30 stories that were deleted. With one exception, they were all duplicates of another story, stories removed by the author, or test posts and other junk.
The only exception was a story that ran Saturday, titled Why Do You Want My Gun?. The story, which I've reprinted on Watching the Watchers, is a first-person account by a gun-control advocate who got robbed:
Back in 1993, I was 21 years old and worked as a clerk in a 7-11 convenience store. One evening, while working the swing shift, I was robbed at gunpoint. ...
If you've ever been unlucky enough to be held at gunpoint by a stranger, you'll understand the enormous amount of fear that you experience. I wasn't able to return to work because I was too scared they would come back. Up until that point, I had been a solid supporter of gun control. However, things changed overnight. I wasn't able to sleep for more than an hour or two at a time because I was having nightmares about it. I would wake up feeling completely panicked and scared. I have never felt that way in my life prior to this incident.
The story received 220 comments on Daily Kos before it was deleted with the following tags, which I think were assigned by site admins: "troll diary, donut depot, gay hating gun nut diarist, please distribute donuts evenly across all faceless comments, 3 donuts per comment only please." The comments can't be displayed, but you can see some of them on the user page for Faceless, the author of the piece. (Kos users call some comments donuts to signify they are worth zero in the site's recommendation system.)
Though I disagree with the conclusions drawn by the author of the story, I think it was a mistake for a site admin to remove it. There are a variety of viewpoints on gun laws and the Second Amendment within the Democratic Party. It's wrong to dismiss the author as a troll spreading anti-gun control propaganda simply because the person relates the kind of experience that turns some people into an opponent of gun control.
Credit: The photo of the handgun was taken by Robert Nelson and is available under a Creative Commons license.
Remembering the RSS Wars
I was clearing out old saved web pages when I found an amusing weblog post from the syndication wars. Here's Robert Sayre back in 2006:
I just left a response on Mihai Parparita's blog, hitting back at Mark Pilgrim, after he decided say that I am full of ---- about everything. Well, that's not very nice, but I've certainly said and written some not-very-nice things myself. It's refreshing to hear it out in the open, instead of backchannel conversations.
I'm so tired of all this crap, and I'm as guilty as anyone. Where do the problems come from? Are the people involved intrinsically bad? I don't think so, at least I hope I'm not intrinsically bad, and I don't think anyone else is either. In fact, most of the usual suspects are really productive people. Dare Obasanjo, Sam Ruby, Mark Pilgrim, Dave Winer, Tim Bray, Joe Gregorio, Rogers Cadenhead, etc, etc. These are all people that tend to, in other areas, get ---- done without much controversy, but can turn into the most obstinate jerks on a syndication mailling list. You wouldn't believe the ---- people say behind each other's back, either. It's much worse than what you encounter on the unpleasant mailing lists.
Why is it that they are drawn to this cesspool we're calling a conversation? I think it's a combination of two things: one is that the subject is mostly semantics. This allows for lots of conversation, and not much technical testing. In most open source projects, there are usually some reasonable metrics to test a proposed solution. The second problem is that software companies are guilty of first-order abuse of the term "community." There is no community.
Hacking on Wordpress last Thursday, I was surprised at how much fun I was having. I haven't had fun working on anything remotely related to syndication in a long time, other than working on Mozilla. You know, that's what I'm going to do from now on. Have fun.
When I rediscovered this post, I was excited to make Sayre's list of jerks, since I didn't figure I would rate a mention back then. All my efforts were not in vain.
Sayre went on to work for Mozilla and is still there today, so I guess it really was more fun than fighting over RSS like the Sharks and Jets. I think that after 10 years, the continuously burning RSS flamewar has finally burned itself out. These days, if you want to design a web format with people who are full of ---- about everything and could possibly be intrinsically bad, the place to be is HTML 5.
Auto-Tune the News: The Early Years
Eight years ago, Evan Gregory of the Gregory Brothers, the mad geniuses behind the Auto-Tune the News YouTube videos, gave the commencement speech at Swarthmore College for the class of 2001.
The speech, which ended up on NPR, is partially delivered in pirate.
Fixing 'Bad Request' Errors When Viewing YouTube Videos
I've been encountering a problem with YouTube lately in Mozilla Firefox that makes the site inaccessible and displays white space instead of embedded YouTube videos. When I visited the home page, Firefox reported the following "Bad Request" error: "Your browser sent a request that this server could not understand. Size of a request header field exceeds server limit." The error was triggered by the cookie header VISITOR_INFO1_LIVE.
I thought this was YouTube's problem, but when I investigated, I found out that the problem can occur when Firefox's cookies database has become corrupted.
To fix the problem, I opened the folder that contains my Firefox user data, closed the browser and deleted the file cookies.sqlite. When I restarted Firefox, it created a new database to hold them.
The cookies database usually can be found on Windows XP in the folder C:\Documents and Settings
Deleting the file cookies.sqlite wipes out your browser cookies and stored auto-login passwords.
Thailand Temple Lets Tourists Pet Tigers
Anna Wencl, a blogger visiting Thailand, writes about going to the Tiger Temple, a tourist attraction in Kanchanaburi that lets visitors get their picture taken with tigers:
We'd heard good things about it ... but those must have been dated. The temple was supposedly run by monks who took care of tigers, but now the tigers are taken care of by younger employees who seem think it's okay to kick them and drag them by their tails to get them to do what they like. Many people have speculated that the tigers are drugged ... and I have to say, they may be right on this one. They ran us around to 5 or 6 tigers to take pictures with them and although they pawed or rolled over a few time, they didn't really do much.
The writing's unclear on what taking pictures "with them" means, but a photo shows Wencl posing beside a tiger that's secured only by a chain around its neck.
I recently chaperoned a field trip to the St. Augustine Wild Preserve, a private refuge that had around a dozen full-grown tigers. They were secured in cages that included a smaller cage so a handler could enter safely to feed them. Every cage had two external locks.
During feeding time the reason for the security was evident. One tiger, agitated by the presence of a male handler near the food, rose up on his hind legs and rattled the links of the cage. The tigers needed to show males who's the boss when they had food to protect, while female handlers didn't elicit the same reaction. The speed, strength and size of these animals is impressive. Although I'm a liberal, I must acknowledge that the only thing keeping us atop the food chain is our right to keep and bear arms.
I don't know a lot about tigers, but the 40 middle school students I shepherded through the facility left with as many limbs as they brought on the trip.
The Tiger Temple's web site denies that the animals have been sedated, claiming that they "have been hand-reared with compassion by the monks and have had interaction since they were young cubs. So they have imprinted on humans and have accepted us part of their lives."
If you're being allowed as close to tigers as Wencl is in that photo, I don't see how that's possible unless the animals have been heavily and inhumanely drugged. It seems extremely reckless to allow tourists to interact with them like that. There are more than 7,000 photos on Flickr taken at the temple, many showing people interacting with the animals like it was a petting zoo.
A report by the animal welfare charity Care for the Wild International accuses the temple of illegal tiger trafficking, systematic physical abuse of the tigers and "high-risk interactions" between tigers and tourists.
The tigers are led on a short leash from their cages to the Canyon by Temple staff. There, they are chained on fixed 3m - 5m chains, and heavy concrete bowls are against or set close to the tiger's body to oblige the animal to adopt a good pose for the tourists and maintain it. Tigers are dragged into position by their tail and even punched or beaten to adopt particular postures that appeal to the tourists.
Temple staff stay close to the animals at all times to maintain control by use of tiger urine squirted from a bottle into the animal's face. In the wild, tigers use urine as a territorial or aggressive signal: sprayed at close quarters it would represent an extremely aggressive gesture from a dominant animal.
A photo published by the group shows a small child sitting on the stomach of a full-grown tiger.
Credit: The picture of Anna Wencl at Tiger Temple is made available under a Creative Commons license.
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