Category: Personal

Another controversial anti-Islam novel: Plateforme

Brendan Berhnard, writing in LA Weekly, examines a new novel about Sex Tours and Terrorism, which in an odd burst of synchronicity was reviewed in the NY Times on 9/11. Plateforme (a French title) was written by Michel Houellebecq and tells the story of a simple man, worn out by the bureacratic life in France, who travels to Thailand to take advantage of the cheap sex trade who ends up surviving an Islamic terrorist bombing there which kills his new girlfriend. The English translation is not going to be published until next year.

The protagonist goes on to develop a deep and abiding hatred for Islam and Muslims. Houellebecq, in an interview with French magazine Lire, called Islam “a dangerous religion” that, “fortunately,” is doomed to be undermined by capitalism. The author, considered perhaps the most controversial in Europe today, has been criticized heavily by the French Muslim community for being rascist and has received enough death threats to have the Paris police keep him hidden and protected in a safe house. Sounds quite interesting and I will surely be looking for the English version.

Life size Monopoly comes to San Jose

Friends of San Jose Beautiful is bringing a lifesize version of the Parker Brothers game to Guadalupe River Park in San Jose. Monopoly in the Park will be available for parties and other group use, with properties sponsored by different corporations (IBM purchased New York Avenue, Waste Management bought Community Chest) and organizations (City of San José Police Department, Police Officers Association purchased “Go to Jail”). There are even jailbird costumes for players to wear while imprisoned. Wired also has a story on the project. Given the current push of California companies and the state Attorney General against Microsoft in the antitrust case, I find this particularly amusing!

Calculate your layoff probability

The nice folks have developed the Dismal Scientist Layoff Calculator as a public service. Simply plug in your zip code, industry, occupation, last job review grade, and, if applicable, employer’s stock symbol and out will pop a percentage. For example, if you live in Pacifica, work as a programmer for Sun Microsystems, and received a middle third rating, your probability is 8.8%. Not bad. I think this is one of those unintentionally funny things in life.

Will Wheaton: Truly not lame

In a classic Slashdot interview,Wil Wheaton Responds to your Questions and shows that age 29 (yeah, I know it’s hard to believe) he’s actually learned a few lessons from being a teenage TV star. And for the three of you who don’t know, Wil played Wesley Crusher on Star Trek: The Next Generation for the first several seasons until he went off to learn about life on a higher plane with the Traveller. Wheaton has a decent website and in this interview he responds with humor and candor to reader-supplied questions about being hated on the internet and rubbing Shatner’s belly.

An amusingly high portion of the thread posts in response say, essentially, “Hey, Wheaton is way cooler than I ever thought. And he didn’t blow his life away with typical child star crap. He even knows what a karma whore is.” But I knew Wheaton was cool, even back in the day.

Chicago terror: was this a close call? Definitely a problem

No one doubts that there will be additional terrorist incidents, the only surprise to me is that we haven’t seen more already. Perhaps the government is doing a good job? Well, I wonder if the arrest of Subash Gurung was going to be another airplane attack. Gurung was arrested Saturday before he could board a United Airlines flight from Chicago to Omaha with several long blade knives and a stun gun in his carry-on. Let’s see, he’s a Muslim from Nepal, young but not too young (27), and in America on an expired student visa holding a fake immigration employment card.

But that’s not the whole story. Gurung made it past the security checkpoint at O’Hare, but airline employees at the gate area searched his bag in a routine check and found the weapons. Argenbright Security, the largest US airport security contractor, has been cited repeatedly fo similar breeches. One wonders how members of the House of Representatives who voted against federalizing airport security are reacting to these continuing problems.

It is about Islam: A call for Reformation

Farrukh Dhondy, writing in City Journal, discusses Our Islamic Fifth Column, how British (and to a lesser extent, American) policies have allowed groups of what is now clearly the enemy to develop and thrive in our midst. The article is a little lengthy but discusses Muslim migration to Britain and subsequent alienation and stagnation of that group, the Rushdie fatwa, a little-reported attempt by a group of mostly British Muslims to bomb British targets in Yemen, the Summer 2001 ‘asian’ riots in several English cities (as Dhondy writes, “The riots had no targets, symbolic or strategic.”), and that communties response to 9/11.

All these point to a fundamental disconnect in the lives of Muslims living in Western countries, that there is a major conflict between the values of the nations in which they live and those preached by the radical Islamists. Dhondy ends by tying these threads all together into a call for an Islamic Reformation, one which allows Muslims to continue their beliefs in Allah and the Koran but also permits them to live in peace with non-believers. Otherwise, the current attacks by Al Quaeda, supported by believers in many places, will escalate into a war in which the radical Islamists attempt to impose their religious beliefs on the entire world through violence.

Via garret.

Liverpool FC: Rockin’ Anfield

With a fairly simple 3-1 victory over Manchester United, the Liverpool Reds moved into second place in the Premiership, one point behind Leeds with one game in hand, and showed that all the championships won in the last year are just the beginning of a new era. Earlier this week, the Reds shut out Borussia Dortmund to finish the first phase of the Champions League in first place in their group and draw two teams they beat in last year’s UEFA Cup, Barcelona and Roma, in the round of 16 second phase. Even with manager Gerard Houllier in the hospital and off the grounds for another two months, mad scorer Michael Owens is leading the boys for more silver.

Today’s movie: Monsters, Inc.

We scare because we care. And how true and sweet that saying really is coming from the mouths of John Goodman and Bill Crystal. You can read plenty of reviews of Monsters, Inc., so I won’t go into it here except to say that this movie is the first must see film in months. I read Friday that one of the reasons Pixar movies are so consistently good is because the actual production is so demanding and lengthy that the script has to be great to justify the effort. As an extra treat, Pixar has posted several short films to the site, definitely worth watching.

Update: Lots of people agreed with my assessment as this film took in $63.5 million in its opening weekend, setting a new record for animated films (blowing past Toy Story 2’s 1999 $57M bow) and reaching #6 for all films. Toy Story 2 ended up with a $485 million box office total and Disney execs are rubbing themselves silly with such an unexpected result. Jet Li’s The One took second with $20M and I am going to disregard some friend’s less-than-stellar reviews and see it anyway.

Tonight’s movie: Enemy at the Gates

One of the most important and painful battles in World War II was the Nazi assault on Stalingrad. The Nazis had won essentially every land battle up to that point but ran into the monster Russian winter and the ability of the Soviets to throw almost unlimited number of solder/cannon fodder at them. In Enemy at the Gates, we see a small part of that story as good comrade Jude Law matches his farm-bred sniper skills against Nazi master marksman Ed Harris. Throw in a love triangle with Law up against Communist Party political office Joespeh Fiennes for Rachel Weisz that ties in to the main plot. The end is predictable if you remember your history, but since we are so focused on the characters, well written and directed by Jean-Jacques Annaud, that their individual fates keep us involved right up until the hokey epilog.

Rushdie: The politics of terror are religious

Salman Rushdie, the outspoken Muslim author, writes in the NY Times that Yes, This Is About Islam. The “this” referred to, of course, is the current battle between Al Quaeda and it’s allies and the rest of the world. Rushdie’s honest appraisal follows hard on the heals of related writings by Thomas Friedman and Seymour Hersh. The picture of the political Islamists that is emerging is unpleasant, unfriendly, and in need of a massive change if we are to see the end of terror in any reasonable amount of time.

Tasty but disgusting

Glish points us to a reference on the innocuous-looking Maraschino Cherry. The mysterious people behind the Cocktail book admit that the truth is unpleasant. I wonder if I will ever eat another one of these nasty little things.

And I am your host, Bungo Burrows of Tuckborough, according to Chris Wetherell’s amusing webtoy Hobbit Name Generator. Some other Hobbit names:

George Bush – Squinty of Simpleton

Bruce Springsteen – Togo Loamsdown of Deephallow

Andy Pettite – Podo Bumbleroot

Julia Roberts – Polo Moss of Lake-By-Downs

Hillary Clinton – Minto Knotwise of Michel Delving

Hey, the movie is only weeks away, are you ready?

Letter to the Editor: Eliminating the USPO

Following up on the poorly thought-out column mentioned here previously, I wrote a letter to the editor of the SJ Mercury News Personal Technology section in response to David Plotnikoff’s column:

To the Editor,

In in this week’s Personal Technology section David Plotnikoff ponders whether, given current circumstances and his own highly-connected lifestyle, the federal government ought to jump on the technology bandwagon and eliminate the US Post Office. I’ve been reading the Mercury News for about five years now and am sad to see the decline in writing that this column evinces. Plotnikoff completely fails to consider the larger issues involved in such a transition, economic, social, and political, which ought to be part of any serious discussion.

First, not everyone can afford a PC and an internet connection or perhaps feels there are better uses for those dollars (and since your paper consistently comes down on the side of personal freedom of choice, one would think this is a valid objection). Second, not everyone is willing to turn their life interactions over to technology; just because Plotnikoff no longer writes letters doesn’t mean everyone has to give up that pleasure. A sub-argument here is that some of us actually still receive magazines and other publications through the mail and I am not yet ready to read them on a computer screen. Third, there are 900,000 people directly working for the USPO and I daresay that no one has the political capital to eliminate all these jobs, especially in today’s poor job climate.

Plotnikoff, after suggesting we can eliminate paper mail and replace it with online banking, then goes on to diminish his own argument by complaining about the poor implementation of his bank’s software. David, maybe you need to change banks because the one I use for 90+% of my payments does not suffer from quite so many usability problems.

Bill

Disco kills!!!

This is something that right-thinking individuals have know for years but now scientists have proved that disco kills. Sadly, a few mice had to be sacrificed in the experiments and of course the methamphetamine they fed the little tikes didn’t help either.

Microsoft: a useful new remedy

Curt Wuollet, writing on OPOpinion, asks the important question: Government Contracts – Why Does Microsoft Still Have Them?. After the feds and many states have been pursuing Gates & Co. for so many years, you have to wonder why the federal government is Microsoft’s biggest customer. As Curt points out, this is a no-brainer, low hanging fruit, and would open up some big opportunities for Microsoft competitors–not to mention providing a powerful incentive to Microsoft to clean up their act.

For all his ranting, how come Dan Gillmor hasn’t brought this one up by now? Or the high paid lawyers at ProComp and the other anti-MS groups?

Book Reviews page now online

I know you’ve searched through the site, salivating over every new critical appraisal, novel or non-fiction. Okay, now they’ll all be indexed in one easy to find place: the Book Review Index. Save the applause, send cash.

Save the Post Office!

John Robb, President and COO of Userland, writes today in his Weblog that the time has come to shutter the USPO and get the 300,000 people who work there into jobs more in tune with the future. I humbly disagree.

Probably the most critical use of regular mail is bill paying. Even for the computer-abled of us, though, not every transaction can be handled electronically, at least not yet. Two examples from my highly connected life: I want to send a one-off check to a charity, do I need to go through the hassle and wait of setting them up as a payee in my bank’s bill-pay system? I need to pay Uncle Sam some income tax, I don’t think at the moment that would be approved as a payee in the system. Also, I like reading some things on paper but how do I get my Analog and Wired magazines? The tech isn’t here yet to replace them.

The biggest question, of course: What do the sizable number of people who don’t own a computer or do but don’t have an Internet connection do to pay bills? Tell them to go to the public library once a week? And how about all those people who don’t even have bank accounts, much less credit cards? They need to receive their bills by regular mail.

No, we need the post office for the time being.

Update: John posted a reponse (same link) and says we should spend the money to overcome the technology issues, which is swell except that it will take time to develop the technology and we need to safeguard the system immediately. And I think there are social issues that John is underestimating–a lot of people like getting catalogs and magazine in the mail, throwing them in a pile and reading at their leisure, there is the entire direct mail industry to consider, and what about the simple, old-fashioned appeal of writing a letter to a loved one?

Update 2:David Plotnikoff, writing in the SJ Mercury News (so I sure hope this link lasts more than seven days!), spouts the same line as Robb. He says that as “for the delivery of physical goods, United Parcel Service and Fed Ex do a nearly flawless job.” But Plotnikoff completely ignores my objections above and focuses on the fact that his bank has a really poor implementation of online banking. Come on David, you’re writing for a major newspaper, so please look a little deeper!

Amazon, NBC make a smart deal

The top etailer and the top TV network are hooking up in a deal that will post books, music, and other products recently shown on NBC, CNBC, and MSNBC on a special Amazon page. The page will be promoted with short commercials on the NBC channels.

I think this is a really smart idea. I hope over time they will expand the project to include previous posted goods–“Oh yeah, did you see that book about germs they mentioned on Dateline a couple of days ago?”–that you could look up by date or show. This seems like such low hanging fruit that I’m really surprised no one has done it before. This deal is a good example of what John Sviokla, writing in CIO Magazine, calls being a 24-hour, 3-D marketer.

The closest to this that I’ve read about is still mostly vaporware, a system that allows viewers to press a button on their TV remote control and order a product being shown at that time. Developed by Wink Communications, this system requires a cable or satellite vendor to integrate Wink technology into their settop boxes, remotes, and office systems. After five+ years, Wink hasn’t made much headway.

Teaching intolerance

Thomas Friedman, writing in the NY Times, continues the lesson on the Saudi royal family. The short and sweet:

– their textbooks do not teach tolerance for non-Muslims: Muslims must “consider the infidels their enemy.”

– they don’t want America to know the truth about their country. The one time we sent a Arab-speaking ambassador, he was forced out after six months.

Friedman, as always, is an important read. What I’d like to know is when will a reporter get someone from the Bush administration on the record on this topic.