random thoughts
Random Thoughts - Young Scoble is back to posting. When he resumed, he said that he was avoiding hyperlinking, so that people wouldn’t read their referrer logs and know that he was back to posting. But hyperlinks don’t result in referrer log entries unless someone clicks on them, and people don’t click on hyperlinks unless they are reading the page, at which point they would already know that he has resumed posting. Anyway, I am glad he is back, and so I clicked on all of his hyperlinks a bunch of times. Actually, thinking about Scoble’s scenario reminded me of the old saying:
If a tree falls in the woods, and nobody is around to hear it, does it make a sound?
Asserting that falling noises (and poems) are seen, and not heard, Joyce Kilmer once replied:
I think that I shall never see
a poem as lovely as a tree
Ogden Nash pointed out that Joyce’s comment could be taken either way, by penning:
I think that I shall never see
A billboard as lovely as a tree.
Perhaps
unless the billboards fall,
I’ll never see a tree at all.
Of course, all of this talk of “never see” reminds us of the silly Gellet Burgess play on the old English “How Now, Brown Cow” elocution exercise, which goes:
I never saw a purple cow,
I never hope to see one.
But I can tell you, anyhow,
I’d rather see than BE one!!
Again, Ogden Nash feels compelled to share his expertise on the subject:
The cow is of the bovine ilk;
One end is moo, the other, milk.
Gellet’s response is more fitting a usenet denzien than a poet or blogger:
Ah, Yes! I Wrote the “Purple Cow”
I’m Sorry, now, I Wrote it!
But I can Tell you Anyhow,
I’ll Kill you if you Quote it!
The thing I find most amazing about the string of poems above is that they are completely inane and useless, but most native English speakers know them mostly by heart without even knowing where they learned them. How do things like that slip into our collective conscience, lying dormant and waiting to cascade forth, triggered by a Scoble post?
Changing subjects, I think this Spinney guy is completely right about the future of war. The war on terror is proving that high technology in the hands of an army is no match for even low technology in the hands of determined individuals. This idea that the puppetmasters at home will ever be able to see a unified, coherent, “perfect intelligence” view of the battlefield seems like wishful thinking to me. When a western army says “would you die for your country?” they are really asking, “would you kill for your country, and work hard to ensure your own individual survival, while also assuming a heightened risk of death, on behalf of your country?” This is very different from the guy who straps on explosives and walks into a coffee shop in Jerusalem and really dies for his country. Putting 802.11 in every soldier’s jeep is a long way from being an effective response to an asymmetric threat like this.
More of my personal opinions: I really think that Rap Brown is innocent. The guy did some questionable things in the sixties, for sure, but he seems to have been a changed man for the last 30 years. He embraced Islam, rejecting the racist “Nation of Islam” and instead has acted on behalf of Muslims of all races, even speaking out on behalf of persecuted white Muslims. And the facts just seem too strange — there were three guys there who all looked almost identical (”Three bald black guys with gowns and beards”), and one of the guys initially confessed (and had scores of guns in his car). And Rap isn’t acting like a political prisoner. I listened to an interview, and all he talked about was Islam, Allah, etc. and not himself. I think Mumia’s guilt is obvious from the facts of his case, and is especially betrayed by the fact that he “doth protest too much”. On the other hand, I don’t get the impression that Rap Brown is too interested in being a poster boy for “rage against the machine”, although there will certainly be people who hold him up as a political prisoner. The “conspiracy” defense seemed a bit stupid to me, though. It sure seems like an unjust conviction, but more out of haste to get a conviction than anything else. There were three people who might have been involved, and before the first guy retracted his confession it was an open-and-shut case. After the first guy retracted, it was just a matter of saying “Let’s figure out who had motives that are easiest to prove and can be portrayed as menacing to jurors. And Rap Brown is a troublemaker anyway…”.
Normally I disagree with John Conyers from Detroit, but I have to agree with his comments today about the INS: “I am astonished that while the INS is fixated on detaining and rounding up countless Arab-Americans without any justification, it has failed to take basic steps to ensure that visas are not issued to known terrorists”. More proof that Spinney is right; INS has incredible technology, I have seen some of their stuff up close. Who thinks that giving them even more budget and computers is going to fix such fundamental screwups?
And finally, I cannot believe this stuff about Daryl Strawberry. It is like some cheesy movie, “Baller Interrupted” where a MLB player is time-warped back to his youth and grounded for smoking Marijuana. Apparently, Daryl has been in a detention facility for ten months because he used pot and hired a hooker (Huh? Who gets ten months in detention for that?? How did Hugh Grant get away with it?) Now, he is getting kicked out of the detention center and put in jail, because “Strawberry also was cited for kissing a female resident, not taking
medications properly and being caught smoking behind the dormitories”. He went ten months, deprived of his freedom, and without any drinking or drugging (which I would think is pretty much a world record for the kind of people in his social circle). After that utterly heroic period of self-denial, he gets sent to jail for acting like any thirteen year-old high-school kid? Smoking tobacco, kissing women? I know this stuff really offended the Taliban, but I thought Florida was part of America?