A week ago, a French oil tanker in Yemen exploded; Yemen officials are now [calling it a terrorist attack](http://www.boston.com/dailyglobe2/287/nation/Yemen_now_said_to_see_terrorism_in_tanker_fire .shtml). Early evidence says it’s an Al Qaeda action. The attack was very similar to the Al Qaeda attack on the USS Cole, in October 2000, and at least one American intelligence official was willing to make the link. So: why would Al Qaeda target a French tanker right now? France is opposing the US resolution in the UN Security Council. This action will strengthen France’s desire to fight terror, not weaken it. If anything, France will now be more willing to support the US. On the face of it, blowing up a French tanker seems really stupid. ...

Happily, an Alabama federal judge has struck down Alabama’s ban on vibrators. I haven’t yet read the decision, but apparently Judge C. Lynwood Smith, Jr., quotes Foucault therein. More judicial decisions need post-modern French semoticist quotes, in my opinion.

Hey, Californians. Dianne Feinstein knows better than you (original). I serve as the senior senator from California, representing 35 million people. That is a formidable task. People have weighed in by the tens of thousands. If I were just to cast a representative vote based on those who have voiced their opinions with my office — and with no other factors — I would have to vote against this resolution. ...

[SCOTUSBlog](http://web.archive.org/web/20070630192455/http://web.archive.org/web/20070630192455/http://www.goldsteinhowe.com/blog/ (original) “SCOTUSBlog”) (original) is one of those places that those of us who like to claim we’re keeping up with politics ought to visit frequently. SCOTUS? Supreme Court of the United States. We sysadmins have no monopoly on acronyms. The Supreme Court is the final check on those unjust laws we so frequently protest, and it shouldn’t take an Eldred v. Ashcroft to get us to pay attention. (I remonstrate with myself, here, as much as with any imaginary typical reader.) Link discovered on the mad tea party.

Apologies to my LiveJournal readers for the unkempt apostrophes; the problem is now fixed. For the curious: the MovableType RSS feed templates escape the posts as if they were XML, and XML includes this ' entity which is not supported by most HTML browsers. So I switched the encoding to HTML style, and nothing seems to be suffering.

After three and a half weeks, my cable installation finally happened. Not currently recommending AT&T Broadband; they are very lucky that a) my landlord won’t let me get DishTV and b) RCN doesn’t go to my street yet. But hey, it’s there now and I’m happy about that. I also got to activate my TiVo. People say this a lot, but it’s an incredibly great invention, implemented quite well. I had my little TiVo epiphany while I was setting up some season passes (which allow you to specify a given show to record for the whole year). By the time I was halfway done, it was five minutes past the hour and I was missing Smackdown. But wait — I had Smackdown on a season pass, and it was recording, so I could just go watch it from the beginning. Superb.

David Chess is utterly brilliant. FROM:PRNCSS. L ORGANA DEAR friend. I AM PRINCESS LEIA ORGANA ONLY SURVIVOR OF THE ROYALFAMILY OF ALDERAN (ALDRN). I AM MOVED TO WRITE YOU THIS LETTER, THIS WAS IN CONFIDENCE CONSIDERING MY PRESENT CIRCUMSTANCE AND SITUATION. “Huh?” you say? See also this.

Red Dragon was just kind of there. Excellent cast, decent enough acting, and the story is strong; alas, the movie didn’t do much for me. Most reviewers have mentioned that Manhunter was a better movie, and it was. But Red Dragon is not so much laboring under the weight of Manhunter as it is crushed under the weight of Silence of the Lambs. Here and there, entire sequences are lifted from Demme’s masterpiece. Brett Ratner did his best to recreate Silence, and he produced something fairly creepy and somewhat enjoyable, but in the process he lost track of what made Thomas Harris’ Red Dragon different than his Silence of the Lambs. Will Graham is not Clarice Starling, and the cracks in their psyches are of a very different nature. The cinematic Red Dragon forgets that Graham’s personal fear is his similarities to the monsters he hunts, and attempts to treat him as though he merely shared Clarice Starling’s fear of failure. But it’s not failure he fears at all. It’s too much success that gives him nightmares.

I’ve upgraded MovableType to the just released 2.5. Looks good. Perceptive people will note the search box on the left (for the fancy-pants version of the blog) or below the main title (if you’re reading the plain version). Edit: I have also made a couple of small tweaks to the alternate view section of the sidebar. You don’t care about those but I wanted to point them out so that I could say “There’s one additional change I made; prize to the first person to notice it,” and not have people say “You added another syndication option.”

The House has passed a bill which will give small webcasters some breathing room (original). Small webcasters (i.e., the ones that aren’t making significant revenue) will pay 7% of their expenses in royalty fees yearly. This is very reasonable compared to the proposed .07 cents per song per listener. It’s still higher than a traditional radio station pays, and there’s some question about how much of the resulting revenues will filter down to the artists. It’s important to remember that while this is better than the original proposal, it is not fair. It’s also important to remember that we ought to donate to our favorite stations, since they clearly need the cash.