Dead letter box
: Penthouse‘s parent company is in danger of folding.
Arafat’s Panic Room
: Question: What happens if Israel does kill Arafat? They say they’re not trying to, but they’re attacking his headquarters, as he cowers in one room. A stray bullet or missile or angry soldier could take him out. What then? War tonight?
: Dear Mrs. Arafat, says Tres Producers.
Sorry we blew your husband up. We were trying to “isolate” him from the rest of his terrorist leadership, and we ended up
Cool is dead
: Many will have pointed to the NY Times declaration today that the Web, like an old girlfriend, is just no fun anymore.
I welcome this.
The Web became too cool, too cute, too soon.
The Web became useless.
Yes, I do worry that has Internet companies go out of the business and real companies reduce their Internet investments, there will be less on the Internet to engage the audience and the audience could shrink.
But the truth is that people are spending less time on the Web today because they’re wasting less time.
They’re not surfing; we see that in every focus group we do. People know what they want; they get it; they get off.
This is not a problem isolated to the Web. Other media can get useless, too. When I was Sunday editor of the NY Daily News, I started a new section with only one mission: Every story in it had to be useful. No thumbsuckers about city hall. No days with bag ladies. No cries of injustice. Useful. For too many newspapers, I said, had started to become useless.
TV regularly becomes useless and then reforms itself when it discovers that that’s a way to lose money. Ditto movies and books.
The Web was cool when it was new and then cool wasn’t such a bad thing. I started a bunch of sites that were Cool Sites of the Day and I was proud of that… then.
But now the Web is about getting information, about buying things, about communicating (and weblogs do help with two of three of those things).
So I welcome the Web’s new dullness. Let’s hear it for dull!
Ha!
: A FoxNews anchor asks Binyamin Netanyahu whether he believes Arafat’s offer of a complete ceasefire. Netanyahu seems genuinely surprised at the question and replies: “Are you joking?”
He says Israel must do to Arafat what America did to the Taliban.
This is going to get even uglier.
: To the death…
: You’ve been waiting for the TV trend in reality shows and extreme game shows to go too far, haven’t you? Been wondering when we’d see the first serious injury or death, right? The start:
A contestant on the US version of Dog Eat Dog ended up in hospital after taking part in one of the show’s stunts.
The 26-year-old man had held his breath underwater for two minutes.
He was taken to hospital by paramedics as a precaution after an emergency call was made to the Los Angeles Fire Department.
US TV network NBC identified the man only as a Los Angeles personal trainer.
Scum spam
: Osama bin Laden allegedly sent email to an Arab paper in London.
Abdel Bari Atwan, editor of al-Quds al-Arabi, said last night that the message, headed “A Bin Laden Communique”, denounced Saudi Arabia’s Middle East peace initiative and praised Palestinian suicide attacks….
The message also praised Palestinian suicide attacks on Israelis and urged Muslims to launch jihad, or holy struggle, against the Jewish state.
“The Jews try in vain to flee, finding no refuge and becoming exposed to exploding bodies that make them taste death and chased by horror,” it said. It described suicide bombings in Israel and the September 11 attacks as “the great events” and “the blessed jihad”.
There has been no proven communication from Bin Laden since the height of the Afghan war. It was unclear last night whether the message was genuine, but if so it would be the first evidence that he has survived the bombing.
If anything will bring him out of hiding, it will be his ego.
Uncle Miltie
: Milton Berle died. Of course, I’m sorry to hear that. On his last appearance on Howard Stern’s show, he proved to be a wry and funny and up to any comic challenge.
I know I’ll be accused of being cruel and heartless and nasty for saying this, but I dread the nostalgia that will come from this. People will be wailing about how he represented the “golden age” of TV. But that’s bull. Early television was bad vaudeville; it was tinny, not golden: silly, slapstick, obvious, easy. The truth is that the golden age of TV is now; television today is filled with far greater talent and imagination and artistry. I don’t mean to detract from Miltie’s pioneering in a new medium; can’t take that away from him. But I just have to say that young people should ignore all the nostaglic claptrap they are about to hear; things weren’t always better in the old days; sometimes, things actually get better over time and TV is one of those things.
: Mac Thomason is crueler than I am.
Bastards
: Big suicide bombing in Israel, killing 19 people and injuring more than 100 (at latest count).
: And we should listen to Arafat… why?
: And we should give a shit about the Palestinians… why?
Sympathy is dying fast. Oops, it just died.
Victimology
: So now a class-action suit on behalf of all black Americans has been filed against three companies that allegedly profited from slavery well more than a century ago under the doctrine that if the Jews can do it (for genocide in their lifetime) then shy shouldn’t the next guy?
Where the hell does this end, this exploitation of victimhood?
By this logic…
: The Jews should certainly sue Egypt for their time in slavery under the Pharaohs. Let’s get it filed in time for Passover, eh?
: Native Americans should sue England, France, and Spain for taking their land.
: Native Canadians should sue the Hudson’s Bay Company for taking their land and furs (and then PETA should sue them, too).
: Muslims should Christians for the Crusades (hey, it sure would beat murdering us en masse).
Where the hell does it end, this idiocy?
When do people stop being victims? When do people stop being perpetrators? Where does guilt end? Where does entitlement end?
My ancestors were dirt-poor hillbillies in Appalachia who couldn’t afford shoes let alone slaves. Yet this suit would have me pay for the sins of others’ ancestors because, just for instance, I happen to be a customer of Fleet bank, one of the defendants in the suit. So what moral code says I should pay higher checking fees because somebody 200 years ago did something wrong? And what moral code says that the next generation should carry guilt for the sins of not just our fathers but our father’s father’s father’s father’s fathers?
Idiocy. Offensive idiocy.
If the courts do not throw this out immediately, the courts are a jackass.
The cure for blogstipation
: Some folks just disappear from blogdom for awhile (Thomas Nephew, phone home!). Some store up their posts and then eat a good, big bowl of prunes and out it comes. Nick Denton is of the latter variety and he’s posting like mad from PC Forum. Good stuff.
Denton is also assuring himself new nicknames as he tweaks the Sergeants (who just dubbed him a “prissy airheaded blonde”). The other day, another blogger — I apologize for not remembering which one — dubbed Denton a “schoolmarm” and that reputation will only be amplified with Denton’s posts yesterday on proper blog etiquette.
: Update. Daypop is wonderful. I find that Reid Stott created the schoolmarm moniker for Nick.
The dreaded Afghan spring II
: If you’re keeping score for the future, note that the NY Times joins the chorus warning of a rough spring (coming after the rough winter that wasn’t rough) in Afghanistan. The Guardian started the spring quagmire whining on March 21.
WYSIWYG blog editing … within the blog page
: Follow Me Here discovers a very cool-looking tool that allows you to edit your blog on the blog itself, in the plain old browser (just IE… take that, you Netscape liberals). The Blog “Adminimizer” is explained here. This is more than just a cool blog toy. This is about the wonders of XML: displaying and editing content in any form. We’ve had a drought of cool on the Internet lately. This is cool.
Wages of sin
: A topnotch Ken Layne column at FoxNews today on Saddam’s payments to suicide bombers‘ famlies.
Anthrax culprits
: It’s not every day that I say “amen” to a Wall Street Journal editorial, but I do today. They say that the administration’s domestic team is too quick to assume that the source of the anthrax murders is domestic. They point to the evidence I pointed to in recent days: an apparent anthrax lesion on one of the hijackers and the discovery of more biological warfare labs in Afghanistan.
…the FBI persists in asserting that the anthrax letter writer was probably a domestic nut with no ties to al Qaeda. Maybe so. But it’s also true that U.S. law-enforcement experts have been wrong about the sources of terror in the recent past, and are capable of becoming fixated on one theory of a case, which they then set out to prove. The first World Trade Center bombing, of course, turned out to be the culmination of a coordinated project carried out by a broad radical-Islamic network, not just a few disaffected crackpots living in the U.S.
The FBI, like the CIA and the other government intelligence-gathering agencies chasing terrorists, is a bureaucracy, and bureaucracies tend to operate under their own imperatives. In that context, it’s not reassuring that two senior law-enforcement officials involved in the anthrax investigation are quoted in yesterday’s Journal as saying that much of their work is aimed at ensuring that any evidence they bring forth will survive challenge in a courtroom. Well, we’d all like to arrest, convict and put away the individuals who dropped the anthrax letters in the mail, but the real national priority has to be forestalling more such attacks against the American people.
That means that we must be prepared to pursue the anthrax trail wherever it leads, even if it takes us to places, such as Iraq, that complicate choices about foreign policy for U.S. leadership.
Amen again. [via Instapundit]
Tragedy nuggets
: I get mail from James Archer reacting to my whining about the Oscars turning the Twin Towers into a politically incorrect image we shouldn’t see (below). He writes:
Why is it that every article, every news segment, every documentary, every essay, every song, every event, everything must mention “9-11!” every two minutes or be branded unamerican?
The events of that day have been transformed into a meme, a little postmodern nugget of political correctness that can be passed around like a pet rock, adored and petted and passed on to someone else. It’s no longer a historic event, it’s just an abstract concept. 9-11. Ground Zero. WTC. Firefighters. Flags. Giuliani. Images. Concepts.
Lit
: Will Warren at Unremitting Verse takes on Jonathan Franzen‘s hyper-hyped The Corrections.
Airport insecurity
: Frightening stats from USA Today on the still-miserable state of airport security. Read it and shiver:
In the months after Sept. 11, airport screeners confiscated record numbers of nail clippers and scissors. But nearly half the time, they failed to stop the guns, knives or simulated explosives carried past checkpoints by undercover investigators with the Transportation Department’s inspector general.
In fact, even as the Federal Aviation Administration evacuated terminals and pulled passengers from more than 600 planes because of security breaches, a confidential memo obtained by USA TODAY shows investigators noticed no discernable improvements by screeners in the period from November through early February, when the tests were conducted.
At screening checkpoints, the memo reads, “only the opaque object (such as a film bag) were routinely caught.” Guns passed through in 30% of tests, knives went unnoticed 70% of the time, and screeners failed to detect simulated explosives in 60% of tests.
Perhaps just as troubling, investigators “were successful in boarding 58 aircraft” at 17 of the 32 airports tested. “In 158 tests,” the memo says, “we got access to either the aircraft (58) or the tarmac (18) 48 percent of our tries.”…
“We still have the same people doing the same jobs they did before Sept. 11,” says Reynold Hoover, an expert on counterterrorism who conducts screening seminars.
Towers? What towers?
: I’ll tell you what pissed me off about the Academy Awards last night: The movie industry has suddenly decided that the World Trade Center towers are politically incorrect. They think we shouldn’t show the towers; we shouldn’t talk about them; it would be wrong.
They have Woody Allen come to show how Hollywood loves New York and give us clip after clip of New York from many great movies but what’s most noticable is what they do not show: The World Trade towers.
And we constantly hear Hollywood fret about whether they should edit movies to edit out the towers.
Stop. The Towers were part of the life of New York; they defined our skyline; they now define our history. We are not ashamed of the towers. We are not so tender that we want to act as if they were never there. We are proud of our towers as a symbol of New York’s greatness.
If they had shown the towers last night, I guarantee that the audience would have given them a bigger ovation than Woody got.
But Hollywood has no good sense. Hollywood has a tin heart.
A watched blog never boils
: First Will Vehrs threw in the blogwatch towel; he was doing a great job but he needed to pay attention to his real job. Then Tim Blair — who started this, didn’t he? — quietly abandoned blogwatching. Now Kathy Kinsley has run out of NoDoz and is claiming exhaustion (too bad on two counts: she was a great blogwatcher … and she was watching me). Blogwatching was a good idea but, like the Internet, it had one problem: there’s no money in it. I know somebody who may be working on a solution but I can’t talk about that now….
