BuzzMachine

Revenge of the middle level
: I’m glued to the testimony of squeaky wheel FBI agent Coleen Rowley before the Senate. It’s not that I disagree with a thing she’s saying. It’s not that I don’t give her credit for having the guts to complain.

But….

With her Fargo drone and her schoolmarm glasses and her willingness to propound her personal recommendations on any topic — even the structure of the federal government itself — I have to believe that every single FBI boss over her — competent or incompenent — is gritting and grinding teeth right now, unable to say a thing, unable to shout: She’s just a midwestern midlevel cog.

You know what’s going to happen afterwards. She has been assured she won’t be subject to reprisals. She’ll have a job forever. I’ll just bet that they’ll move her to Washington. Now that Agent Muldar has left, they have a nice basement office nobody ever visits ready for Agent Rowley.

What, you’d rather have a Queen and her Twit Prince?
: I think I should invite Nick Denton to a good, rousing, all-American Fourth of July picnic and fireworks show.

Bravo
: So Bush is going to turn the Office of Homeland Security into a cabinet-level organization.

At frigging last!

We need an office that is accountable.

We need to end the bullshit fights over Ridge testifying to Congress.

We need to break up and clean up the FBI.

We need to get our act together.

Zero
: Went downtown for the first time in sometime to have lunch with a long-lost friend I used to work with at Chicago Today (the paper that had no tomorrow), a guy who’s as wry as a seeded loaf. He found me here.

He works a few blocks from the World Trade Center and so, of course, after we caught up on everything else, we compared notes of that day. And then I walked to the World Financial Center ferry to head to Jersey. I was no terror tourist. I had a destination.

But I walked by the Century 21 store, where I was standing that day when the second jet hit. And I walked past the boarded-up Millenium Hotel; behind the boards, I could still see the damned dust, thick even now, like ghost shit sticking and dripping over the word “Millenium.”

I had to walk a long way around the hole to get to the river, and along the way, as I stood by the busy highway with trucks rumbling, I looked down at the site and it suddenly struck me. The scene — the site, the sound, the smell — all reminded me of Berlin’s Postsdamer Platz after the Wall fall.

Potsdamer Platz was the very center of Berlin, packed with people and life until it was destroyed in the war and then surrounded by the Wall and turned into the no man’s land with landmines and barbed wire and concrete and death.

Then, after the Wall, it became the biggest construction project in the world. Berlin is still rebuilding it. You can see panoramas of the site from soon after the Wall fell until now at Cityscope.

Berlin did not try to recapture the old Potsdamer Platz. Instead, they tried to fill it with a new view of life, with Sony Center and other aggressively modern office complexes and apartment houses and theaters and malls and restaurants: life.

What I have always liked about Berlin is that its scars are still evident; they don’t try to hide their history or their pain. But once past that, they live.

In attitude, at least, Potsdamer Platz not only reminds me of Ground Zero today but it’s a model of what the World Trade Center can become tomorrow.

Fly naked
: The other day, I screamed about the president of American Airlines arguing that we should have less airport security. Now we have managers of 39 airports complaining to Norman Minetta about the luggage x-ray machines he promised to install but has not yet installed in our airports.

The letter says the bomb-detection devices the TSA has ordered installed by Dec. 31 will create crowds of people in terminals who could be targets for attacks; the machines would be installed near terminal entrances and thus create huge congestion there. The devices would quickly become outdated, the letter adds, yet require big construction costs.

I agree with Bill Quick: It’s about money, just money.

And won’t they all feel like greedy jackasses the next time a terrorist sneaks through their torn net.

Jersey boy
: Springsteen was inspired by 9/11 for his new album.

Coast roast
: I just happened upon ABC’s Hamptons show tonight. Quick, Californians, set your TiVos now and watch this. It’ll make you feel good. Back when I lived on the other coast, Marin and Mill Valley were America’s ludicrious laughingstocks. The Hamptons replaces them. What a bunch of time-wasting twits.

Nets! Nets! Nets!
: OK, Layne, we’re on. We’re engaging in the great media cliche: the geographic sports bet, Nets vs. Lakers, Jersey vs. L.A. (see below).

The only thing is, I may not drive to the shore. I don’t like beaches. The sand gets in your socks, you know.

So I’ll drive to another Jersey landmark: mall, refinery, or Turnpike rest station with a Laker’s flag flying … not.

The column-inch is mightier than the sword
: Not sure what I think about this: The Jerusalem Post is trying to get people to buy ads to support Israel.

Help Israel “breathe easier” by joining our “Founders Club”. $720 buys you maximum exposure to demonstrate your support for Israel. In addition to all the standard benefits, “Founders” receive a half page ad to be filled with your name in each of the two special Support Israel Now supplements to be distributed with all Jerusalem Post print products in time for Rosh Hashana, the Jewish New Year, two free gift subscriptions to the International Jerusalem Post or Jerusalem Report and 10 trees to be planted in your name by the Jewish National Fund.

OK. But (a) you’re preaching to the choir and (b) you’re really supporting the paper. Now if those same ads ran in al-Ahram and a few select Saudi papers, the sign me up.

Invention is a mother
: We’re one of those households that gets every imaginable catalog and I love to find amazing and ridiculous products. I found the king tonight: The Tingler. Gotta love the catalog copy:

Ten flexible copper tendrils glide through your hair, penetrating right through to your scalp. Smooth tips stimulate sensitive nerve endings, giving you a major-league case of goose bumps

The pause that oppresses
: So Arabs are boycotting Coke. Instead, they’re stuck drinking ZamZam Cola with their Yasir Arafat Chips.

Why don’t we just boycott something of theirs — say, oil?

Make that a MediumMac, please
: McDonald’s advertises in France not to eat too much of their food. Fewer customers = fewer chances for frigging frogs to attack Americanism, I guess.

Wrong head
: The Journal wants Robert Mueller’s head to roll. Wrong head. Ashcroft needs to go. He has not managed to catch the bad guys; he has run the FBI badly; he is endorsing a half-way fix now; he has not sense of priorities. Get rid of this ineffectual nut. Replace him with Rudy Guliani.

Winged dork
: The head of American Airlines must be an idiot. No other explanation. He’s saying we should cut back on airport security:

“It will be a hollow victory indeed if the system we end up with is so onerous and so difficult that air travel, while obviously more secure, becomes more trouble for the average person than it is worth,” Carty said in a speech here to the American Chamber of Commerce.

And it will be a hollow profit indeed if you make more money and more people get killed.

Frigging fool. Aren’t you reading the news? The FBI is still a bunch of Friggin’ Bungling Idiots. The Transportation Department has not managed to get promised security in place. Airports are constantly being closed because security guards are about as dumb as you.

I’m not flying. I got my eyes checked today and the sole topic of conversation with the nice doctor was how he hasn’t flown and still won’t fly. Howard Stern won’t fly. People are flying if they have to. If you reduce security, they will fly even less. Idiot.Nobody listen to him. His brain has been affected by bad air and radiation at high altitude.

Smart marketing/dumb marketing
: Now if Expedia had half a brain (and they should), they would read this customer service horror story and immediately email the guy and fix it. The poor consumer would then say that on his site and we’d all be impressed. That would be smart marketing. Not doing anything would be dumb marketing. Not knowing that the post is there would be criminally ignorant marketing. That is the worst

: If I had a brand to manage, I’d go to Daypop every day and enter it. Try Expedia, Expedia.

First, journalists, then J-school… first, weblogs, now W-school
: Richard Bennett points us to a course in Weblogs (where else: Berkeley).

Prerequisites: of course, none.

A little friendly advice
: Ken Layne’s advice to Pakistan and India:

Will you people quit this garbage? It’s 2002. You all need to work on your image, right? The United States and Russia are trashing two-thirds of their nuclear weapons. We just found oceans of ice on Mars. There are Internet cafes in Karachi.

Turns out it’s more fun to be alive than to be crisped by a crude nuke due to some jackalope’s big idea about national pride.

A new pub
: I just discovered Jewsweek [via the venerable HolyWeblog] and it’s a fine piece of work with good reporting and writing. This week, a story on the other battlerground over partition involving Muslims, the hot potato in India and Pakistan — and how Israel and India are allied:

The number of Indians and Pakistanis who died during the fighting, migrations, and expulsions during their countries’ birth-agonies is not less than half a million, and possible several times that

And the winner is St-t-t-t-t-t-uttering John!
: Just listened to The Flunkie v. The Junkie in the Brawl at the Trump Taj Mahal (while I was working very hard, of course) on Howard Stern. Brilliant frigging radio. Brilliant.

Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain
: Sarges comes out. Your turn, A.

Spam calling
: You think we have problems with spam. I get the Japan Internet Report newsletter by Tim Clark and he says spam on fabled Japanese mobile phones is torture:

Of the 900 million messages that go through DoCoMo’s servers each day, 880 million (98%) are spam, according to the company. The problem is that, regardless of the source of the message, subscriber phones ring (or vibrate) every time mail arrives. Nearly everyone who owns an Internet-enabled cellular telephone has been inconvenienced as a result….One colleague of mine was being woken up repeatedly during the night by the increasing number of unsolicited messages. After resorting to turning off his phone at night, he would find 20 or more spam messages on his handset in the morning.

Meanwhile, a test conducted by Net Village and Digital Street using an i-mode phone with an as-issued e-mail address (telephonenumber@docomo.ne.jp) found that the handset received 857 spam messages in August of last year, 2,898 in December last year, 2,945 in January this year, and 2,578 in February of this year.

Like the landline Internet everywhere else, the mobile Internet in Japan is now awash in junk mail. With e-mail transmissions accounting for 80% of Internet-enabled mobile phone activity, and 98% of that activity spam, we can calculate that more than three-quarters of all data-phone activity is basically garbage.

Harvard jihad
: Matthew Yglesias’ scoop on the Harvard jihad speech makes it into the Washington Post. Matthew beat them to it by nine days.

I’ll be your server…
: I don’t know what they’re up to with this (read: how they’ll make money) but Amazon has a beta of a very nice service displaying hundreds of restaurant menus for five cities: NY, SF, DC, Seattle, Chicago. Via Metafilter.