Betsy Devine: Funny ha-ha and/or funny peculiar

Here we see two French Victorian visions of “l’An 2000”–with both news and personal messages delivered by, er, somewhat earlier versions of the iPod.

Even more amazing, they got the year almost right!

David Weinberger

“Around the fire, after a day of grubbing for grubs or dancing between the legs of a woolly mammoth, our ancestors didn’t harangue cavemates about how their new improved spear thrower would jump-start their sex life. You can’t fool anyone around the fire, because you’ve all been doing the same thing all day, your frailties and strengths on display.”

I love Britt Blaser’s new metaphor for blogging–the relaxed, communal, and various late-night chitchat of multiple voices around a campfire.

Link via Scripting— thanks, Dave!

Focus of Plame CIA leak shifts to perjury and obstruction of justice.

Also in the news, Ex-agents rip Bush on CIA leak, and I quote:

”What has suffered irreversible damage is the credibility of our case officers when they try to convince an overseas contact that their safety is of primary importance to us,” said Jim Marcinkowski, a former CIA case officer.

He also criticized Republican efforts to minimize the damage caused by the leak.
”Each time the political machine made up of prime-time patriots and partisan ninnies display their ignorance by deriding Valerie Plame as a mere paper-pusher, or belittling the varying degrees of cover used to protect our officers, or continuing to play partisan politics with our national security, it’s a disservice to this country,” he added.

Would convictions for perjury meet the Bush criteria for firing Karl Rove?

Assuming that all ye who enter love old Mac games, like

• Mouse Stampede (like Centipede but with little tiny mice)
• Oregon Trail
• The Secret of Monkey Island

Bonus linkage:
Photos from the Harvard Bookstore’s Harry Potter party.

Thanks to Amity for today’s URLs, and may a good summertime keep being had by all!

When computers get their own drivers’s licenses–which OS would you like to see behind the wheel?

Team Banzai’s autonomous car uses 3 Mac Minis, fully loaded with OS X. Microsoft has fine slogans (“Where do you want to go today?”) but I hope I’m not sharing Route 95 anytime soon with a car whose “driver” could be zombie-jacked by a Windows spam-spewer in Russia.

Montgomery Scott aka Scotty (as in “Beam me up, Scotty!) was chief engineer of the original Star Trek. When Captain Kirk needed something impossible, it was Scotty who’d coax the Enterprise to deliver. Reluctantly, though, and with many words of caution:

• “Even if we were under full scale attack I couldn’t move any faster, not and maintain a safety factor.” — The Naked Time,” Episode 7
• “The warp drive is a hopeless pile of junk.” — “The Doomsday Machine,” Episode 35
• “I’ve giv’n her all she’s got captain, an’ I canna give her no more.”
• “She won’t take much more of this.”

Scotty didn’t need to prove his manhood with macho bravado–his concern was for his ship and for the big picture, not for polishing his own image. A suitable hero for a young nerd like me, and I always liked him.

How much of Scotty was in the writing and how much was in the performing? I was surprised to discover that actor James Doohan, who died this morning, was a Canadian who tried out multiple accents and nationalities before Scotty became a Scot. Wounded on D-Day–his cigarette case probably saved his life–Doohan gave Scotty the gritty no-nonsense attitude I so admired.

We will miss him,

Dave Winer laughed when I told him that yesterday, but it’s really true. In the looking-glass world of blogging and IRC, you can enjoy too-much social life without ever taking ten fingers off the keyboard.

Dave came to town and demoed his new OPML editor last night–
Lisa Williams and David Weinberger both live-blogged the event; you can replay the video made by Steve Garfield here.

But Dave and his demo will soon hit a city near you, most likely, and when they do, I urge you to get out and enjoy them.

As for me, I’m headed back to the backwoods!

The outing of Ambassador Joseph Wilson’s wife as an undercover CIA agent (if that is what she was) would be contemptuous — not to say felonious. As former President Bush said in 1999 of those who expose intelligence agents, they are “the most insidious of traitors.” We fully agree…even if the actors may not have appreciated the nature of their conduct.

 Robert F. Turner, associate director of the Center for National Security Law at the University of Virginia,…said the identity of Mrs. Plame in the Novak column appeared to be the reporter’s attempt to explain why Mr. Wilson was sent to Niger, not to reveal her role as an undercover CIA officer. “It does not strike me as going to the core what this law was intended to prevent,” he said.