Author: Glenn Hauman

If you’re coming here from this post, welcome to the fray. You don’t know this (and neither did Mark) but you’re about to help settle a point of contention.

Peter David was asking me whether there had been any traffic surge due to this article in the London Independent saying his blog was one of the quirkiest on the net, and I said I hadn’t seen any. Then I followed up with, “On the other hand, if Neil or Mark mentions you in his blog, traffic will spike.”

And now, lo and behold, Mark’s just given me a link.

So we’re going to take a day or two and see what it does to my traffic, and we’ll see if Mark Evanier has more blog juice than one of the larger newspapers in Great Britain. Watch this space.

As was pointed out to me, and upon further re-examination, George W. Bush did not flip the bird to a bunch of reporters, as shown on the Tonight Show.

We apologize for the error. I don’t know where we could ever have gotten the impression that GWB would do such a thing… oh wait, I remember where:

Q: What were Jerry Garcia’s last words?
A: Netscape opened at what?

What worries me is that I’m not sure what I have to explain to kids today, Jerry Garcia or Netscape.

…is the kindest, bravest, warmest, most wonderful human being I’ve ever known in my life.

Whoops, sorry. That’s Raymond Shaw.

A decade later, the 1996 Telecommuncations Act may be revamped [Politech]:

Sen. John Ensign, R-NV, has introduced a pretty wide-ranging (at 72 pages, it better be) bill to revamp the ’96 Telecom Act. It deals with topics such as:
– municipal broadband
– video from Verizon/SBC/etc. rather than cable co’s
– VoIP blocking by ISPs
– Web site blocking by ISPs
– Price regulation of communications services

I’ve placed the bill text here:
http://www.politechbot.com/docs/ensign.telecom.bill.072705.pdf

Summary is here:
http://news.com.com/2100-1036_3-5807278.html

-Declan

Here’s hoping we don’t have to sue to get his one overturned too.

Whenever you actually try to get some sleep early the way normal humans do, that’s the night everybody and their cousin calls you up because they figure “oh, Glenn’s up anyway…”

I’m going back to bed now. With any luck, I’ll have a decent night’s sleep. If not, you’ll probably see seven or eight blog posts between now and sunrise.

Americans didn’t flock to Canada after Bush win – Yahoo! News:

A: Because as bad as Bush’s domestic policy is, his foreign policy is worse.

A Remarkable Moment on Television:

I enjoy watching MSNBC’s Countdown with Keith Olbermann, which I think offers the smartest, most candid news coverage on TV. Lately, I’ve been disappointed at the number of days that Mr. Olbermann has been “on vacation.”

It turns out, Keith has been away having a tumor removed from the roof of his mouth. His show today is mainly about the late Peter Jennings and it’s really a remarkable, compassionate report on his deceased colleague. But the most startling moment — one of the most powerful things I’ve seen on TV in years — comes in the last seven minutes of the show. In it, Olbermann reveals what he’s been going through as a result of his own smoking, relates it to the death of Peter Jennings due (largely) to smoking…and tells viewers, basically, what idiots they are for continuing to smoke.

(Via news from me.)

Well, maybe if I say what a wise, witty, and self-effacing man Mark is, he’ll link to me anyway. Or what fun it was watching him moderate the Weblog panel at San Diego, though I’m disappointed he wasn’t blogging it in real time. That would have been worth major geek credentials.

…just as lots of other folks on the net are. While I have a long post brewing on this and related subjects, as a stopgap I refer you to Richard Dawkins’s Ignorance Is No Crime:

“It is absolutely safe to say that if you meet somebody who claims not to believe in evolution, that person is ignorant, stupid or insane (or wicked, but I’d rather not consider that).” I first wrote that in a book review in the New York Times in 1989, and it has been much quoted against me ever since, as evidence of my arrogance and intolerance. Of course it sounds arrogant, but undisguised clarity is easily mistaken for arrogance. Examine the statement carefully and it turns out to be moderate, almost self-evidently true.

By far the largest of the four categories is “ignorant,” and ignorance is no crime (nor is it bliss– I forget who it was said, “If ignorance is bliss, how come there’s so much misery about?”). Anybody who thinks Joe DiMaggio was a cricketer has to be ignorant, stupid, or insane (probably ignorant), and you wouldn’t think me arrogant for saying so. It is not intolerant to remark that flat-earthers are ignorant, stupid, or (probably) insane. It’s just true. The difference is that not many people think Joe DiMaggio was a cricketer, or that the Earth is flat, so it isn’t worth calling attention to their ignorance. But, if polls are to be believed, 100 million U.S. citizens believe that humans and dinosaurs were created within the same week as each other, less than ten thousand years ago. This is more serious. People like this have the vote, and we have George W. Bush (with a little help from his friends in the Supreme Court) to prove it. They dominate school boards in some states. Their views flatly contradict the great corpus of the sciences, not just biology but physics, geology, astronomy, and many others. It is, of course, entirely legitimate to question conventional wisdom in fields that you have bothered to mug up first. That is what Einstein did, and Galileo, and Darwin. But our hundred million are another matter. They are contradicting– influentially and powerfully– vast fields of learning in which their own knowledge and reading is indistinguishable from zero. My “arrogant and intolerant” statement turns out to be nothing but simple truth.

Unfortunately, I’m becoming more and more convinced something criminal’s going on here… more later.

Every so often, I ask myself in the wee small hours of the morning, “Why am I doing this?”

And then, I hear a deep voice echo back, “Because you’re on television, dummy.”

And I say, “Hey, no, sorry, not me, I haven’t been on TV in a while, you’ve got me confused with Howard Beale.”

And the voice says, “Whoops, sorry. Let me check my notes– because by doing all this, you’re going to be on television…?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Ummm… you want to be famous?”

“Eh. Not particularly, no.”

“Dang. You sure you don’t want fame? There’s an opening on CNN now.”

“No thanks.”

“Fox?”

“Yuck. Pass.”

“MSNBC?”

“How is that going to make me famous?”

“All right, all right. I think there was a screw-up at Central. Let me check in, and I’ll be back in a jif.”

“Take your time. I’m not going anywhere. Well, maybe the diner, but that’s just down the road, you can find me there.”

“Hey, diner. I could use a good cup of coffee.” And then it gets quiet again, and the cats look at me funny.

Maybe I’ll figure it out later.