December 2003 Archives

It’s Christmas!!! I am spending the holiday with my family in Dallas this year. My dad and his wife and two kids came down and are staying with my sister. So far it’s been a good time. We’ve had a big pan-family Christmas Eve dinner and bash, opened a few presents early (due to scheduling conflicts) and shopped at the utter last minute. We’re a normally disfunctional American family, and everyone I’ve spoken to wants to be just like us.

I hope you all have a very happy Christmas and New Year’s!! Don’t party too hard or eat too much, and remember to tell your family you love them. (Oh and I think you shoudl all go have a hamburger, I hear it’s not been a very merry season for the beef industry in the US. First Oprah and now mad cows.)

A federal appeals court has ruled that President Bush cannot hold Jose Padilla as an enemy combatant. The court said that the president is not authorized to seize US citizens and declare them enemy combatants because Congress never authorized that. The court was the 2nd Court of Appeals.

The AP reports.

For more on the Jose Padilla case read: “Bush’s Vanished Prisoner”, The Village Voice Jose Padilla and posse comitatus

Researchers from Center for Astrobiology in Madrid, Spain are studying a weather phenomenon that produces something called “megacryometeors”. These things are basically huge ice formations that fall out of the sky. And evidentl;y we’re not talking just your normal, everyday hail here people. We’re talking huge on the scale of half a sedan.

But they say not to worry, it most likely won’t fall on you. Although, I wonder if that’s what they told the people at the car dealership in Lawrenceville, Georgia.

The Seattle Post-Intelligencer reports.

Members of Congress from both sides of the aisle are pushing legislation that would dramatically increase the size of the military. Advocates of the bill claim that forces are spread too thin due to deployments abroad in places like Afghanastan, Iraq, Europe, etc. But, Pentagon has repeatedly said that the armed forces are not efficiently using the personnel they have no so adding additional bodies would not be an effective solution to those concerns.

The proposed bill in the House of Representatives would:

• add 40,000 troops to the Army, bringing active duty rolls to 522,400
• increase the size of the Air Force by 28,700 to 388,000 troops
• grow the Marine Corp form 175,000 to 190,000 troops

There does not seem to be any report with an estimated cost for the additonal troops, but USA Today did say that adding 2,400 troops to the Army last year cost $68 million.

USA Today reports.

Two articles published today by WIRED News report that boards of election across the US are selling their voter rolls. Political organizations and candidates can purchase the names, addresses, phone numbers, and other personally identifiable information for almost any use at all. Worse yet in many states this information is also going out to marketers and advertisers who will use it to more “effectively target services and direct marketing.”

It has always been my assumption that whatever information I give to the county when registering to vote would be confidential. Evidently this is not the case at all.

The law protects the anonymity of the voter once he or she has entered the booth, it should also protect voter privacy before and after the fact. Politicians, parties and especially marketers do not have any right to know when or if I vote, just as they have no right to know how I vote.

This is another instance in which the privacy of citizens is being dramatically eroded. Our personal information—Social Security, phone and credit card numbers, postal and email addresses, age, income level, etc—is on sale to anyone who is interested in it and willing to pay, from the government to advertisers.

In addition, the government has continually pressed for more lenient restrictions on searches, phone taps, collection of online activity records, etc. in the name of protecting national security.

The right to let alone is granted by the Constitution of the United States and the Supreme Court has repeatedly reinforced this right through its decisions. It is a core belief in this country that other people and organizations need to know only the information about us that we choose to share. We need laws that secure our right to know when and how our personal information is being used. We also need the ability to opt-out of any potential distribution without penalty.

Just as we can place out phone numbers on a do-not-call list we need the ability to specify to each collector how we want or don’t want our information used.

There’s a lot to talk about this week in the news. Here are a few items in which I’m particularly interested.

• Companies from nations opposed to the invasion of Iraq will be barred from bidding on Iraqi reconstruction projects.
• Al Gore endorsed Howard Dean for the Democratic Presidential nomination on Monday.
• Secretary of Homeland Security Tom Ridge suggested that we legalize all illegal immigrants.
• President Bush signed the Medicare bill on Tuesday.
• Taiwan is progressing with a controversial referendum that could drag it, and the US, into a conflict with China.

Look for some additional commentary in the next few days on these and a few other things I’ve been thinking about.

For all of you who weren’t paying attention, that last post was written by my good friend John Hopkins. John, if you are completely devoid of deductive powers, is currently living in London where they say silly things like “bullocks.”

John may be posting from time to time here until he finds a more permanent home on the Net. I assure you that he is far more interesting, intelligent, and amusing than I am, and so I encourage you to to jump ship the moment he does.

Happy reading. Lars

Today I learned what a bollock is. A bollock is a ball. A nut. Half your tackle, one of your eggs, a berry resting near your twig. The dictionary reads thus:

BOLLOCK ‘b稷uk 1. (n) a pulley-block at the head of a topmast 2. (n) one of the two male reproductive glands that produce spermatozoa and secrete androgens; “she kicked him in the balls and got away”

As if this were not explanitory enough, it suggests you consult other entries, including, but not limited to, “cobblers,” “gonad,” and “family jewels.”

This whole subject came up today, as I mentioned, when I was buying my gin. (For those of you who as of yet are unacquainted with a certain tall gentleman dressed in blue, styling himself “Sapphire,” and claiming to be from Bombay, do go out and seek his friendship.)

Anyway, I gave the man a twenty pound note, and he counted out the wrong change. It was only a pound, but the USD is so weak against British Pounds Sterling that it amounts to a small fortune, so I politely asked for the additional pound to which I was entitled. The whole conversation was very civilized and went something like this:

Me: I’m sorry, but I should have another pound change. Him: Bollocks! Next!

Now I had heard this expression before, but not knowing what it meant, I was unsure how to proceed. It occured to me that getting angry was probably the best option.

Several minutes later I had left the shop after hearing many words with which I am unfamiliar, some of which may have been Celtic, and lost another twenty pounds to pay for the second bottle of gin and airplane-sized bottles of wine I had broken when the man had yelled, “Bullocks!”

I asked the nice lady who helped me up what it meant, and, being a lady, she very politely pretended to not speak English, though I had heard her on her mobile not two minutes previous complaining about a corn on her left foot.

Leave it to the British to call an exit the “way out,” fries “chips,” parking lots “car parks,” trunks “boots,” and testicles “bollocks.”

Sidenote: Despite popular belief, is very easy to distinguish a 20 pound note from other British money in that it is a different size, shape, and color entirely, rendering a standard wallet totally useless.

Ever ready as I am to share with the world important and impacting news and information, I feel that I have to take a moment to share something a little on the less-important side. Although, I can find reasons why we should all be worried about this latest trend in “cosmetic” surgery.

Along with the growth in popularity of high-heeled, high-fashion shoes from Manolo Blahnik and Jimmy Choo has come a rise in foot alteration surgery. In order to wear these shoes women are literally having parts of their toes removed in order to ensure a better fit.

I asked my friend Corbin about this. He works for Aldo Shoes and his coworkers and he all agree that it is worth it to have the most fashionable shoes available. Corbin says, “Fashion and beauty is supposed to be an expensive, painful challenge. If fashion were comfortable then everyone would look frumpy.”

Clearly if ladies must have their toes removed in order to fit into shoes then Manolo Blahnik, Jimmy Choo, et al. are masochists of a different order. It is appalling that we place so much emphasis on beauty that society requires women to self-mutilate in order to be considered attractive. It does not speak well for American culture that we have reverted to practices akin to Chinese foot-binding.

Read the New York Times report on this new trend.

It’s the end of the semester, that wonderful time of year when the whole world comes crashing down on students everywhere. This is a magical season of last-minute papers, all-night cramming sessions (so I hear), and a pervasive, indeterminate spastic feeling in the air.

Normally I use the opportunity this end-of-the-semester fun offers me to make fun of my friends and gloat that I don’t have any exams at all. But I think the gods were angry with this behavior and are punishing me for it. This weekend I have to:

1. write a 5 - 8 page paper for my Advertising & Society class
2. write a 4 - 5 page paper for my Mass Media, Global Communication & the Future course
3. finish my last web development assignment

Then I have during exam week I have three tests spread out over the course of the whole week. My last exam is on the last possible day.

It’s going to be great fun, and I know you all care a lot so be thinking about me during this trying time.

Amazingly researchers have identified something that the rest of us have known forever—Texans speak a different language than the rest of the country.

The New York Times reports.

It’s funny, I was just thinking that I didn’t have anything to post on because nothing really struck meas important or interesting enough. And then along came this.

An all-boys Chicago High School operated by the Christian Bothers will begin testing all students for drug use next Fall. The school says that the program will “take a little peer pressure off of [students]” and give them “a good reason to say no to drugs.” And according to a report, the program is widely supported by the parents at the school.

It’s not clear from the report whether the school is private, but I am going to assume that it is because the religious order that runs it also runs schools in Louisiana and Tennessee with similar policies.

Principal Joseph Schmidt says that he wants the policy to become a catalyst for the spread of this policy throughout the state of Illinois, and I can only assume also all over the United States.