Month: December 2002

First it was Ann Coulter wishing that Timothy McVeigh had done it– and
now David Horowitz is saying, “Perhaps al-Qaeda should have bombed the New York Times“.

Good grief.

A while back, I made reference
to the Bush II penchant for secrecy and restrictions on the free flow
of information as one the big strikes against it, and that it bodes ill
for our country.
Dwight Meredith
has given us a fuller tally of Bush held secrets– Texas Governor
Records, Presidential Records, Public Domain Energy Report, Thimerosal
Litigation Records, The Cheney Energy Task Force, Health Records, The
9/11 Commission, SEC Bush/Harken File, Removal Of Information on
Government Web Sites, FOIA Requests, Los Alamos Investigators Fired,
Homeland Security, California Energy Crisis, FBI Abuses, Being Too
Candid, and Secret Trials– and of course, there’s even more he doesn’t
touch on, like that shadow government of ours or the exterior of the
hotel Dick Cheney is staying in.
And these are things we know we don’t know about. What about things we don’t know about at all?

Next weekend, I’ll be speaking at Philcon. I’m surprised to find that I’m supposed to be speaking on a panel with Robert Picardo, best known as the Doctor on Star Trek: Voyager, about media tie-in books.

(Yes, he wrote one– a rather enjoyable romp called The Hologram’s Handbook.)

So if you have any questions I should try to ask, put them in the comments sections.

Tom Toles follows the same line of reasoning I did when I likened GWB to a wife beater… of course, he’s much funnier about it.

Bigfoot—
what a way to make an impression.
\\SEATTLE, Washington (AP) — The man who used 16-inch feet-shaped
carvings to create tracks that ignited the “Bigfoot” legend has died.
He was 84.
Ray L. Wallace’s family admitted his role in the creature myth after
his death November 26 from heart failure.
“The reality is, Bigfoot just died,” his son, Michael, said.\\

Over on the WWWAC list, there’s a bit
of discussion on Amazon ascendant, particularly now that they’ve taken
over CDNow.
You’ll forgive me for dissent, but they are not perfect. In fact,
there’s one section where they suck worms– electronic books. And this
is an area on I have no small amount of expertise, having been involved
in e-books longer than Amazon’s been in business.* I was doing a lot of
Christmas shopping on Amazon, picked up a few DVDs. As an impulse buy,
I decided to pick up an e-book as well, Seth Godin’s Bootstrapper’s Bible—
it looked good, and I wanted to read it right then and there.
But after I placed the order, I wasn’t allowed to download the book.
Nor was I allowed to for nearly twelve hours.
And when I was allowed access, I wasn’t given the option of actually
downloading the book to my hard drive– it opened up the Acrobat viewer
in my browser, and I had to save it from there.
Horrible. For a company that prides itself on customer experience and
not wasting the customer’s time, this was completely inexplicable. Next
time, I’ll check with FictionWise
first.
* By the way, I had actually considered starting up a book business
like Amazon, but I figured that was an interim step that would be blown
away by e-publishing. Seems to be a heck of a business in interim
steps, eh?

This is purely anecdotal, I haven’t tested these numbers– but doesn’t
it seem that there are a lot more robberies this holiday season? More,
doesn’t it seem that the perpetrators are a lot more desperate this
year, injuring and killing
people in the rush to get away?
This isn’t anecdotal: NYC has a record number of homeless this year,
with a shortage of 16,000 beds. And I think that’s going to get worse,
too.