BuzzMachine

Ovation
: I predict that when the Spiderman movie shows the World Trade Center towers, audiences everywhere will erupt in applause.

Tragedy
: We are not the only country to suffer the tragedy of school shootings.

Welcome home
: Mr. Hartung’s LakeFX is back.

Reply to sender
: Efrem (below) forwards the response he got from saudiembassy.net:

Thanks Efram. We think the United States of Israel is a great little country too. Maybe one day it will be our fourteenth province. Just kidding.

And Will Vehrs sends this to the Saudis:

Align yourselves with freedom and democracy, not with

violence and oppression. Support peace with Israel, not the Intifada. Urge the Palestinians to accept the boundries of a new state and help them build a nation based on a free people and free markets. Seek the US as your partner in peace and prosperity; stop the support of dark forces that attempt to undermine the only nation that can offer you military and economic security.

You stand at a historic crossroads. Follow the suicide bombers and radical Islamofascists into the dustbin of history, or embrace peace and freedom, teach it to your children, and achieve greatness.

Tell the Saudis what you think of them…
: Not that they listen but… Let’s have a little fun.

So the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia is threatening to threaten us with playing the oil card.

VodkaPundit says what the Prince can do with his threats.

Better yet, why don’t we all tell the Prince ourselves!

The Saudi embassy has its own email address: info@saudiembassy.net

So send them email directly — just in case they don’t read blogs.

While you’re at it, also CC this address I just created — saudisuck@mail.com so we can all share.

: And already, the mail bag starts filling up. This from Efrem Zionist Jr.:

Hi! How y’all doin’? Hey, I just wanted to let you guys know that I think–and I’m speaking as an American here–I think you’ve got a great little country. I don’t care what anybody says, it’s not just 865,000 square miles of crude oil, suicide pilots, and anti-Semitism. I think you’re going to make a fine 51st state. Don’t worry, the Pledge of Allegiance is easy to learn!

No, no, just kidding. I’m sure you’ll start off as a terrortory of the United States. I mean territory. But no! I’m just joking, really. You know how us Jew-lovers are, always cracking wise.

So, which hand should I chop off for sending this? Kidding!

A is for Andrew…
: Jim Treacher starts the blogictionary. One true entry:

Instalanche: A sudden influx of thousands of hits that threatens to crush your server, brought on by a link from Glenn Reynolds at Instapundit.com.

Appropriate for today, I suggest blogspotty: The reliability of Blogspot.

The Wall, cont.
: Eric Olsen weighs in on the wall.

: And a reader, Steven Postrel, counters on Olsen’s site.

We will soon build a wall between prowall and antiwall bloggers.

Maybe the French are right
: Well that headline gets your attention, eh?

Those protesting French are protesting not only their own insane election returns but also the corporate performance at Vivendi. Shareholders and employees “stormed” (that’s what the French always do: storm) the company’s annual meeting.

A wonderful idea.

What if we did the same at AOL Time Warner’s annual meeting? I said when the merger with AOL occurred that it was a big, fat mistake, that it was just Time Warner being frightened of its own future (and lack of strategy for it), that AOL was not worth anywhere near what was being calculated in the deal. Time Inc. had done things like this before; when I was there, they were afraid that Chris Whittle’s company (which put magazine’s in doctors’ waiting rooms) was going to eat its lunch and so they bought a big piece of his pie for too much money. They ended up writing all that off when Whittle croaked.

So now it turns out that the AOL Time Warner merger was a $54 billion boo-boo.

I still own too much of their stock, having worked there for a decade.

I’m depressed.

Maybe I should do some storming.

Oops
: I meant:

Blogger : Journalist :: Butterfly : Caterpillar.

It makes a big difference.

Blogging is to heroin as….
: Bo Weevil is soliciting SAT questions. I nominate: Blogger : Journalist :: Caterpillar : Butterfly.

The Wall
: Nick Denton joins the calls for building a wall between Arabs and Jews, between Israel and the West Bank and Gaza Strip, as the only sensible course left to bring peace.

I understand the desire: Enough of all you hate-motivated Middle Easterners, enough of your murders, enough of your hate leeching out of the region and killing others — us — all around the world, enough! Just stay away from each other, damnit. It’s like shouting at the kids in the back seat. Every parent in the world wants to build a wall between their kids sometimes. We want to build one between the Arabs and the Jews.

And Denton has a point: A wall may just buy the two generations the region needs to find peace.

But I doubt it.

A Wall was East Germany’s solution to a different problem — it was built to keep people in not out — and it didn’t work.

The first problem is Jerusalem. It, just like Berlin, wants to be an international city, a free zone, and that will complicate any plan to build a wall. No one will reasonably be able to keep Muslims from the Temple Mount and Jews from the Wailing Wall and Christians from their holy places. Jerusalem must be free. So if you make Jerusalem an international city, you build a big hole in the wall where bombers masquerading as pilgrims can pass through. You are soon forced to build a wall within the wall. You might as well not build a wall at all.

The second problem is image: The last thing Israel needs right now is to be seen as the wall-builders of our era.

The third problem, is that building a wall just avoids the problem, the real problem: the hate.

Fine, so a wall would make it yet harder for suicide-murderers to wander by a market or a hotel or a bus and trigger terror. But these merchants of hate, these people who will stop at nothing — even selling their own children into death and murder and hell — will find new ways to detonate hate. They invented the 737 bomb. They invented the woman bomb. They invented the child bomb. For all we know, they invented new, improved anthrax. A wall will not stop their weapons. A wall will not stop the retaliation. A wall will not stop the killing. A wall will not stop the hate.

I spent a lot of time in Berlin when the Wall was still up (I was working on a very bad novel about it that no one will ever read). When I first crossed over Checkpoint Charlie, I certainly was no fan of Communism, but I didn’t fully realize the damage it caused. By the time I came back across to the West, I saw the damage clearly. I saw it in a simple sign: I can’t tell you how happy I was to see the first Coke sign on our side; I celebrated all the choice we had.

The Berlin Wall only accentuated that contrast; it turned gray to black and white. And the media that flew over the Wall — in the extreme, our decadent Dallas and Dynasty at the end — only made the contrast more striking for people on the other side. The Wall turned out to be porous; it let images and ideas and jealousies and competition and dreams through from this side to that until such pressure built up on the other side and it simply had to blow. Media exploded that wall.

An Israeli wall would be just as pourous. The hate would still flow through.

And if this wall does prevent Palestinians from killing Israelis, the pressure will still build up; they and their alleged allies will aim their hatred elsewhere. They will attack Israeli’s friends. They will kill us.

I wish I had a solution, like Denton. I don’t. I know too little about the Middle East.

I wish a wall were a solution. I fear it is not.

The solution must come from self-interest, the need to begin cooperation or the need to end defeat. Mutual self-interest may well be impossible to find.

: Update: Don Wolff writes in email that I missed a successful wall: the DMZ in Korea. He says this keeps people of murderous intent from distrupting a democratic society.

Motive matters in how you judge success. If your aim is to cut off North Korea to the point that they’re starved, then perhaps that wall is successful. You could measure the wall of water around Cuba similarly. If the goal of the Israeli wall were to cut off Palestine and starve them of attention and economics, I’m afraid that wouldn’t work. The Palestinians have murderous allies.

Rub-off
: We can all tell from our traffic when we get an Instapundit link, as I was fortunate to get today for two posts (on Moussaoui and my hate mail from Bill Cosby, below).

I can also tell from my traffic when Blogspot is down, as it is right now; I get fewer links from all those Blogspot blogs and my traffic gets hit.

My luck that Blogspot goes down just as Instapundit.blogspot.com gives me a nod.

Nevermind
: Mediaminded throws in the towel.

But Letter From Gotham gets back in the ring.

Old way v. new way
: The accepted wisdom is that the Web is a rotten way to read newspapers. That’s what I always thought and said.

But this week, I’m south of the center of the universe (and I’m on a dial-up connection) and so I’m reading the Washington Post on paper, the first I’ve done that in ages.

Especially since Sept. 11, I’ve been reading the Post online — and I have to say, I prefer that. It’s a combination of factors: The Post’s web site it that good: well-organized, easy to browse, clean to read. And the Post on paper is oddly small; the size of the paper (the web, as we call it in the trade) is much narrower than the NY Times (to save money on paper) and it seems they try to cram more into that smaller space. I’m not alone. My wife found the Post hard to read.

Accepted wisdom is sometimes wrong.

Leave it to Moussaoui
: We’ll be watching Robert Blake on trial on TV when what we should be watching is Zacarias Moussaoui on the tube — not because it would be entertaining to see this bozo defending himself but because it would project the perfect — that is, perfectly accurate — image of Muslim fanatics as dangerous and demented and just plain stupid.

This is why we should have cameras in all courtrooms, to let us see the truth.