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

I don’t have an iMac tho I do have iTunes, iLife, iPhoto, and iEtc on my Powerbook. Thus I have some useful Mac iInformation about what happens when you lose electric iPower:

1. Your Mac laptop makes a good emergency flashlight. Its spooky glow will keep you from falling downstairs while you search for your actual flashlight, which is not in the first three places you thought you left it.
2. Your Mac desktop doesn’t really mind power failures. When the power comes back, you have to log in again but it won’t need the kind of tender smoochies and coddling that my Windows PC used to insist on.
3. You still can’t post to your blog during power failures–but your Airport comes back on when the power does and you can go right back to posting informative blog entries–just like this one!

Must-read for Anglophiles: Suw Charman (Chocolate and Vodka) evokes the weight of history in Britain. Her essay* is lovely in itself and makes generous use of hyperlinks to information on various places she mentions.

It’s amazing how much hyperlinks add to the texture and usefulness of non-fiction.

Another place that really gets hyperlinks right: the Pepys Diary blog.

Footnotes? Bah, humbug (except for my footnote, below.) Long live the hyperlink!

* Suw’s article appears in the exciting new travel-history-culture-food-fusion blog from Tom Bridge and Robert Daeley—-Four Corners–I really recommend it.

My favorite color, when I was a little kid, was red–as in bright, bright, bright fire-engine red.

And all my life, if somebody asked me, “What is your favorite color?”, I’d say “Red.”

Then I discovered a scientific paper that said most people liked red the best when they were children. When they were children? Do you mean I get to make a different choice now that I’m grown up?

Yes, you do get to re-think your favorite color, whenever you want to. You get to re-decide how hard you want to party. You get to re-decide whether or not to have kids.

You get to re-decide whether you want to grab every opportunity to travel to some exotic spot on this planet. That’s one I’m right now re-thinking myself.

I love the person I was as a little kid. I love her boldness, her curiosity, the idealistic way she expected the best from every single person she happened to meet.

But she, who loved freedom more than almost anything else, would be the last person to want me enslaved to her choices.

One of the seductive, heartbreaking things about owning a pet is that they stay the same for so much longer than people. OK, so Marianne no longer looks like a ball of white fluff, punctuated by shiny black nose, pink tongue, white teeth (ouch!)

But when I look down to see who is dancing around my ankles every time I open the fridge, it is recognizably the same little dancing dog who has tried hard to trip me in many previous kitchens.

When Marianne arrived, my daughters were 7 and 14. Do you want to guess if they’ve changed in 15 years? Marianne stayed short–and her interest stayed focused on things I might drop on the floor.

A pet’s life is like a long, peaceful plateau where, for years and years, whatever else in your life changes, the pet stays the same. In fact, there are only 5 stages in a pet’s life:

1. Every morning, you are delighted: that cute little puppy is still there!
2. Every morning, you are delighted if that cute little puppy didn’t pee on something you care about.
3. Every morning, your dog is delighted, and treats you as if you had been away for 6 months and returned with an armload of dog biscuits and chew toys. [This is the stable state for owning a dog.]
4. Every morning, you are delighted if that dear old dog didn’t pee on something you care about.
5. Every morning, you are delighted: that dear old dog is still there.

Marianne, I regret to say, is now at stage 4.

* * * * *

Wow! Congratulations to Cory Doctorow! His novel Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom (which I absolutely loved) is on the short list for a Nebula Award.

I met
Cory at sxsw, and sat across
the aisle from him at the Bloggies, where Boing Boing won three awards
(out of the four they were nominated for.)

I have mixed feelings about this–Cory and BB are awesomely brilliant and funny. But–
if the gods decreed they would lose one Bloggie anyway–couldn’t they have lost that one to my pal AccordionGuy?

Once upon a time and long ago, my grandfather (and every other trustee of the University of New Hampshire) got an irate handwritten letter from Colebrook, NH. A high school student’s girlfriend had been turned down for admission. He wanted to let the trustees know–that was a big mistake!

That boy’s work, tracking down all those trustees, was much more impressive than the letter itself. My grandfather chuckled at his flowery prose–but made sure the boy himself got into college.

My point–and I do have one–is inspired by
something Scott Johnson blogged today about Fundrace:

Eek fricking Eek. I saw over on Slashdot a mention of Fundrace 2004, a new website which lets you see how your neighbors are donating funds to politicians. So I tried it. Eek….

Yes this may be publicly available information but by wrapping it into a web front end and essentially “democratizing it”, its scary. Yes I know I have no privacy but even so…

There goes yet another “reasonable expectation of privacy.”

Those of us who were around in the mid 1850s will recall that the secret ballot is there for a reason. Experience shows that employers can get pretty nasty if you don’t support their favorite candidate.

Now people who thought they were giving personal data to the US government wake up to discover it’s out there on the internet. And not just the name of the candidate they support–their home addresses, job titles, and employers. The potential for abuse seems huge to me.

I don’t like the feeling that things that for years have been private are now up for sale, or given away for free. It’s like waking up one morning and discovering that someone has given away my lawn chair and is digging up my tulips–“Hey, they weren’t nailed down.”

I’d like to see the presumption of right reversed. Instead of assuming that people have a right to broadcast the name of my candidate and the color of my bra–couldn’t we assume that I have some common law (or Fourth Amendment) right to privacy?

Is anything really private? Probably not. We can’t block the boy from Colebrook who cares enough to find the addresses of 10 college trustees. But we can put a stop to the presumption that after finding that information, he owns a right to publish it to the world.

My blog has a Creative Commons license–stuff I put out here is public. You can quote me and even create derivative works so long as you credit my work as a source. If you’re planning to sell my stuff–you have to ask me. But there’s a lot of stuff in my life that I don’t put out here, and I don’t want to see out there. I think that choice ought to remain with me.

…but every now and again I read something over at Halley’s Comment that makes me say, as if I were a believer:

Thank God for Halley!

There’s somebody beaming out human, baffled, but hopeful thought from the planet I live on…and that somebody is Halley.

According to Bruce Sterling, American internetters are slowly-boiled frogs.

We have grown used to deceptive spam and popunders–we dodge them daily without much conscious effort. (How many emails with 30 kb attachments did you delete yesterday?) Bruce says:

If you could get every scam artist, phisher, and 419 scammer and surround this building, we’d see them as a terrifying army, but they have carte
blanche to go anywhere in the world and terrorize people less
sophisticated than ourselves.

Thinking about it now, he’s totally right.

As we put more and more good stuff up on the web, and democratically encourage folks around the world to get out there and find it–maybe we should take some responsibility for the risks they’ll encounter.

How? I don’t know. But just realizing the problem exists (thanks, Bruce!) I know more than I did yesterday.

Thanks to Cory Doctorow for transcribing Bruce Sterling’s wonderful, rambling rant at sxsw. Damn, if I could have stayed just one day longer, I could have gone to his party.

BTW, I just finished reading Bruce Sterling’s novel Distraction–loved it–buy it, if you haven’t already read it!

you’re younger in spirit than so many i know… they’re too cautious just like your wuffwuff, as nally would call her.

GOP donors double dipping with Nader
Contributors deny that financial support is designed to hurt Kerry

10:29 PM CST on Friday, March 26, 2004 by WAYNE SLATER / The Dallas Morning News

AUSTIN – Independent presidential candidate Ralph Nader is getting a
little help from his friends – and from George W. Bush’s friends.

Nearly 10 percent of the Nader contributors who have given him at least
$250 each have a history of supporting the Republican president,
national GOP candidates or the party, according to computer-assisted
review of financial records by The Dallas Morning News.

Among the new crop of Nader donors: actor and former Nixon speechwriter
Ben Stein, Florida frozen-food magnate Jeno Paulucci and Pennsylvania
oil company executive Terrence Jacobs. All have strong ties to the GOP.

Democrats have warned that Mr. Nader’s entry in the race could help Mr.
Bush by drawing votes from John Kerry. Some analysts say Mr. Nader’s
third-party candidacy four years ago siphoned off Democratic voters and
cost Vice President Al Gore the White House.

“Republicans are well aware that Ralph Nader played a spoiler role in
the 2000 election. And there is no reason why they wouldn’t want to
encourage and help him do so again in 2004,” said Jano Cabrera, a
spokesman for the Democrat National Committee.

A spokesman for the Bush campaign declined to comment on Mr. Nader.

“We’re focused on our campaign. We’re focused on generating support for
Republican candidates,” said Danny Diaz, referring inquiries about Nader
fund raising to his donors.

Republicans who have given to Mr. Nader offered a variety of
explanations, including a desire to provide voters a choice in November
and to highlight the consumer advocate’s issues. Some donors said they
were miffed by efforts, primarily Democrats, to keep Mr. Nader off the
ballot.

None said their donations were designed to boost Mr. Bush’s chances in
the fall.

“Did I give $1,000 to Ralph Nader because I hope and believe he will be
president? No,” said California business executive Charles Ashman. “I
don’t believe that any more than Ralph Nader does. But I was offended to
see this campaign to squelch him from being a candidate.”

Mr. Ashman said he remains a staunch Republican. He contributed $2,000
to the Bush campaign, the maximum allowed for the general election,
according to records.

“I proudly made a contribution to the re-election of President Bush
because I support him 100 percent,” he said. “I hope and believe he will
be re-elected.”