Eugene Volokh has some interesting discussion about the limits of free speech. The Supreme Court commented this morning on the question of free speech as it applies to explanations of how to commit a crime. In short, they refused to hear an appeal of a decision in which a lower court essentially claimed such explanations were protected. However, the Supreme Court also explicitly stated that they were not agreeing with the lower court in that decision.
Population: One
If you’re a New England sports fan, there are certain rules:
In basketball, detest the Lakers above all others. Also, cheer against Philadelphia, because they’re the only other team to pose a significant threat to the Celtics in the 80s and there was that whole Wilt Chamberlain thing as well. It’s also good to hate any team that features a player who’s been called “better than Larry Bird,” but only while that player is active. No point hating the Chicago Bulls at this point, for example.
In baseball, the Yankees are the spawn of Satan. Everything else is inconsequential, although you must always root against the Mets in retribution for 1986. If the Yankees and the Mets meet in the World Series, then you must explain that baseball is a shadow of its former self.
In football, mostly hate other AFC East teams. Miami and the Jets are the prime targets. Also, hate the Oakland Raiders, because there was some sort of disputed call a century or so ago and the Raiders won the game as a result. Any disputed calls in Raiders/Patriots games that go for the Patriots are merely karma. Karma should continue pounding the Raiders forever.
In hockey, it’s really only worth hating the Original Eight. Any other team is basically an expansion team and beneath your notice. This attitude may explain why the Bruins haven’t gotten very deep into the playoffs for a while. Hate Montreal in particular, because they don’t speak English, the freaks. Don’t bother hating Hartford anymore. It was wrong of them to invade New England, but they have since moved and you’ve forgotten what their new name is.
When trying to figure out who to hate in a playoff game that doesn’t involve a New England team, the above rules take precedence. Also, hate any team from LA on general principles. General principles involve the Lakers, whose miasma of evil infects all teams in the vicinity. Besides, LA thinks it’s such a great city. (Note that this is an additional reason to hate the Raiders — they went to LA on purpose. How dorky.)
The same sort of thing goes for New York teams, which are all infected by the Yankees. And New York thinks it’s a great city too. What do they know? It’s hard to say which city should be more hated. If the Knicks play the Lakers, cheer for the Knicks. If the Yankees play the Angels, cheer for the Angels.
Come to think of it, any city which thinks it has an edge on Boston needs some stern boos, unless it’s a cute little city, in which case treat it like your adored pet terrier. Nobody would ever mistake any city in Texas for a great city, for example, so it’s just cute when the Mavericks do well. But Chicago, there’s a city that gets too big for its britches.
This guide has been brought to you by the Major League Soccer championship game, in which (on my TiVo) the New England Revolution and the LA Galaxy are tied 0-0 with ten minutes to go in regulation. The announcers have made approximately fifty comments to the effect that the Galaxy are glamorous and the Revolution has a blue collar team-oriented approach. This is, I believe, obligatory any time you have an LA team and a New England team playing.
This is probably illegal, but here’s the transcript of the Supreme Court arguments in Eldred vs. Ashcroft. (I say illegal because I’m pretty sure Lexis/Nexis has some sort of copyright on the collection of transcripts. Consider it civil disobedience.)
The US is now floating a compromise resolution in the UN, which would not mandate military action if inspections fail. It would leave the door open for an invasion, but it wouldn’t explicitly link the two.
This comes after strong criticism from most of the world in open UN debate. You’d expect Middle Eastern countries to be edgy about the whole thing, but even Australia recommended against linking military action to failed inspections. I should perhaps be more confident in the system.
The news becomes more interesting to me in that some right wing pundits had predicted disaster arising from anything short of Bush’s original resolution. At this point, it looks like the original resolution won’t happen. So what happens if there’s no disaster?
By the same token, left-wing pundits who called for Bush to follow the UN’s guidance on this need to accept it if this path leads to war. And it might. It probably will, and it probably should: while I’m still suspicious that we’re distracting ourselves from Al Qaeda by attacking Iraq, the UN isn’t at war with Al Qaeda. The UN does have an ongoing problem with Iraq’s refusal to abide by UN resolutions. If the US is willing to sacrifice its own interests to help the UN out, well, I can’t really argue that the UN should decline our gracious assistance.
Hopefully we’ll remember to deal with that nagging Osama bin Laden problem at some point.
Aimee Mann will be appearing on Buffy later this fall. For the obsessive Mann fans like myself, this will mark the second time Aimee Mann’s music has been featured alongside Sarah Michelle Gellar. “You Could Make a Killing” showed up in Cruel Intentions, a sadly underrated… well, OK, not so underrated. I kind of enjoyed it, in a sleazy Wild Things kind of a way. And the director says charming things about Aimee Mann on the DVD commentary track.
Every little boy in the world wants to be a rock star, a knight (or samurai, or anyhow somebody with a sword), and a pilot. Bruce Dickinson, former lead singer for Iron Maiden, managed the trifecta. Not just casually, either; he’s got a real job as a jet pilot, and was at one point ranked seventh in the UK in foil.
I expect in a couple of years we’ll be reading about Bruce Dickinson, fireman. Astronaut can’t be far behind.
This atrocity (a word I use carefully) is deeply regrettable and not at all surprising. Possibly, if the right wing thinks about it a little, they’ll understand why it’s also such a good illustration of the stupidity of this attitude.
Yes, throwing milk on PETA protestors is funny and ironic. But in a civilized society, we do not adopt the belief that it’s OK to reply to bad behavior with more bad behavior.
Pym Fortuyn’s party is collapsing, which is no great surprise when you get right down to it. Fortuyn himself was assassinated this summer, right before the Dutch elections, which did not prevent his party from becoming the second largest party in the Dutch government. But without Fortuyn at the center of the party, it’s dissolved into squabbles and factionalism.
What this says to me is that Fortuyn was never a politician. He was a charismatic figure who was able to assemble a coalition by force of personality, but he wasn’t a politician. His party had no strength at the core, no ability to function without him.
There’s no question that his death was tragic, but I’m pretty certain I’m correct in classifying the man as a right-wing demogogue.
Now that my MT -> LJ bridge is finally working the way I want it to, I’ll take the time to do a little documentation.
The basic architecture is as follows. I have an MT template containing a verbose RSS .91 feed, which is an index template, so the page it produces is rebuilt every time I post. I added a CGI script residing on my server to the list of URLs to ping when my blog is updated. The CGI runs blagg (an RSS aggregator) with the LiveJournal plugin, which pushes the post to my LiveJournal.
Notes:
Blagg is not a very smart parser; it expects the RSS tags to come in a certain order. Specifically, it requires first <title>, then <link> then <description>. As it happens, this is not the order in which the default MT RSS .91 template presents the tags, so I had to modify a copy of the template to put things in an order blagg would understand. I also expanded the description field to contain the entire post, since I wanted people to be able to read the full entry without leaving the LJ page. Finally, I replaced encode_xml=”1” with encode_html=”1” throughout the template, since encode_xml encodes some characters in a way that most browsers won’t understand. Specifically, IE can’t make sense of '.
My CGI script looks like this:
#!/usr/bin/perl -w
use strict;
use XMLRPC::Transport::HTTP;
my $server = XMLRPC::Transport::HTTP::CGI
-> dispatch_to('weblogUpdates')
-> handle
;
package weblogUpdates;
sub ping {
`/home/durrell/bin/pushlj.sh &`;
return "OK";
}
pushlj.sh is this:
#!/bin/sh lockfile=/tmp/lj-bridge.lck blagg=/home/durrell/bin/blagg plugin=-plugin=livejournal mode=-mode=automatic login=-login=bryant REQUEST_METHOD= i=1 while [ $i -lt 5 ]; do if [ ! -e $lockfile ]; then touch $lockfile $blagg $plugin $mode $login rm $lockfile i=5 else sleep 60 i=$(( $i + 1 )) fi done
Why a separate script? Because in case I run into a lock, I don’t want the CGI to sit around waiting for the lock to vanish. Also, I intend to put a five minute delay in there to give me time to edit a bad post before it hits LJ.
Why the REQUEST_METHOD= bit? Because blagg processes its command line switches with CGI.pm. This is a very clever method of processing arbitrary switches in an elegant manner, but if REQUEST_METHOD is set, then CGI.pm won’t look for parameters on the command line. So I have to unset it somewhere. Getopt::Long really ought to have a method for processing arbitrary switches, but that’s a rant for another post.
Finally, since I’m using version 1.0 of the livejournal plugin, I had to edit the plugin a little to make it set the preformatted flag for posting. I also tweaked it a little to store the password in the plugin itself, since I don’t like the idea of exposing the password on the command line (and thus in the process table). Version 1.1 of the plugin allows you to specify preformatted mode with a command line switch, but I haven’t upgraded yet.
Knockaround Guys is probably the last chance you’ll get to see Vin Diesel in a supporting role for a while, but that’s not why you want to see it. You want to see it because it’s a nifty little ensemble drama with a nasty sense of humor and a tight story structure. Sure, Vin is good and he gets to beat people up, but Barry Pepper and Seth Green and Andrew Davoli are pretty good too. Dennis Hopper’s kind of phoning it in, but John Malkovich is delightful. Solid stuff.
The guys who wrote and directed this also wrote Rounders, which I thought was really good if you cut away the obligatory romance bit. Knockaround Guys has no romance, and thus is free to be purely what it is. It’s a Mafia movie in the sense that the Mafia is the context within which the characters operate, but it’s not about the Mafia in the way that (say) Goodfellas was about the Mafia. It’s about friendship and manhood and other such manly matters… oh, hell, I’ll just say it. It’s a coming of age movie.
But it does have some good fight scenes.