The horror continues

Via Digby, I learn that the International Committe of the Red Cross confirms that the US is operating the torture prison at Bagram which the US military has been denying. Jeff Kaye has horrifying details.

Prisoners held at Tor, according to investigations by BBC, are tossed into cold concrete cells, where the light is kept on 24 hours. Noise machines fill their cells with constant sound, and prisoners are sleep deprived as a matter of policy, with each cell monitored by a camera, so the authorities will know when someone is falling asleep and come to wake them.

Prisoners are beaten and abused. According to BBC’s article last month, one prisoner was “made to dance to music by American soldiers every time he wanted to use the toilet.”

As Auschwitz was a murder factory, that's an insanity factory. Even the US military admits that most of the people held there are not terrorists. And do I even need to tell you that no one there has stood trial?

We need to let those people free, make apologies and recompense to them and their loved ones, raze the prison to the ground, salt the earth where it once stood, and send everyone involved to the Hague to stand trial for crimes against humanity, up to and including the President of the United States if he knew this was happening.

President Obama, I'm looking at you. I voted for you, and reason ^#1 was that I trusted you to do the right thing about this. I've been trying to believe that you've been slow to correct Guantánamo because institutional inertia has been stopping you. Fool me twice, and I won't get fooled again.

Elves vs Fairies

Patrick McGee, republished on Roger Ebert's blog, warns against losing a tooth on the wrong day.

Santa had a son who fell in love with the Tooth Fairy's daughter. Because Santa could not abide such a mixing of the species, he had the Fairy's daughter killed. The Tooth Fairy responded by killing Santa's son. So began the blood-feud. Elves and Fairies have fought and died by the thousands over the ages. But, most critical, is what happens on Xmas Eve. Should a child be unable to prevent the loss of a tooth on Xmas Eve, it's possible that the Tooth Fairy and Santa end up at that very house at the same time. When this happens, the resulting battle destroys several city blocks.

I should have known.

Cinco de Mayo

In the unlikely event that you saw Grindhouse, you undoubtedly recall the witty trailers for faux exploitation movies that didn't really exist. Perhaps you have heard that Robert Rodriguez was so pleased with his trailer for Machete, with the inimitable Danny Trejo in the title rôle, that he actually fleshed it out into a real movie, coming soon to a theater near you.

Well, Mr Rodriguez and Mr Trejo have a special message, just for today.

Ain't It Cool News helpfully informs us:

Rodriguez is calling this his “Illegal” trailer. You see, Robert talked Fox into letting him put together a Cinco De Mayo message for ARIZONA — given. Well, the way things are in Arizona at this moment — it is kinda insane that there is a movie that was shot over a year ago waiting to be released that is about — THIS EXACT ISSUE... but if, Danny Trejo and buddies went Revolution Wacko as a result.

So I felt I needed to share.

Colours

Randall Munroe, who draws xkcd, “a webcomic of romance, sarcasm, math, and language,” did a survey of people's use of colour names.

First, a few basic discoveries:

• If you ask people to name colors long enough, they go totally crazy.
• “Puke” and “vomit” are totally real colors.
• Colorblind people are more likely than non-colorblind people to type “fuck this” (or some variant) and quit in frustration.
• Indigo was totally just added to the rainbow so it would have 7 colors and make that “ROY G. BIV” acronym work, just like you always suspected. It should really be ROY GBP, with maybe a C or T thrown in there between G and B depending on how the spectrum was converted to RGB.
• A couple dozen people embedded SQL ‘drop table’ statements in the color names. Nice try, kids.
• Nobody can spell “fuchsia”.

What's that about SQL? It seems that a lot of his readers remembered the comic “Exploits of a Mom.”

Lots more under the link. His discussion of his methodology is pretty interesting.

Deadly karaoke

Norimitsu Onishi at the New York Times offers a mindboggling piece about karaoke and violence in the Philipines.

Mr. Gregorio, 63, a witness to countless fistfights and occasional stabbings erupting from disputes over karaoke singing, did not dare choose one beloved classic: Frank Sinatra’s version of “My Way.”

“I used to like ‘My Way,’ but after all the trouble, I stopped singing it,” he said. “You can get killed.”

The article is primarily about “My Way,” but there are some really interesting digressions ...

A subset of karaoke bars with G.R.O.’s — short for guest relations officers, a euphemism for female prostitutes — often employ gay men, who are seen as neutral, to defuse the undercurrent of tension among the male patrons. Since the gay men are not considered rivals for the women’s attention — or rivals in singing, which karaoke machines score and rank — they can use humor to forestall macho face-offs among the patrons.

There's more, though the article leaves out this important tidbit from Wikipedia:

In the Philippines it was believed that [Syd] Vicious' version was inspired by deposed dictator Ferdinand E. Marcos, where in the first part of the song Vicious attempted to imitate the voice of the late dictator.

Of course.

MRE

Ragnell at Written World has an intriguing theory about the design of military Meals Ready to Eat.

All joking aside, MREs are an incredibly social food. Most contain an entree, a sidedish, a dessert, a snack, and a drink. Only one or two of these things will be edible to you (or you've gotten the only meal that anyone seems to feel is entirely good: The Chilimac. This is an anomaly, also no good for me because I don't like the entree--everything else on the menu rocks, though), the rest will either be disgusting or something you personally hate. You can, if you're hungry enough and alone, give up on your pickiness and just eat what you get. But I believe part of the point of the MRE (or an important side effect, since the main point was probably to make a meal that you could quickly eat a little bit of, work or get into a firefight, and then eat a little more of when the action dies down without it spoiling or spilling) is to build unit cohesion by forcing you to sit with the rest of your flight and trade food pouches to build an edible MRE (unless you got the cheese omelet, then you're shit out of luck. Though you probably will attract a crowd as it is such a legendarily disgusting entree that people will want to see your face when you eat it.)

Ragnell also has some good things to say about superheroes, especially Wonder Woman.

Walk on the mild side

That Lou Reed, such a nice young man:

We chatted for a while, and she asked me what my favorite music was. I said the Velvet Underground — assuming, of course, she'd have no clue who they were. Her face lit up and she said, You mean Lou Reed's band???? It turned out she was the cleaning lady for Lou's dorm when he was at Syracuse, and she LOVED him. She said he was the sweetest of all the boys in the dorm, the most well-mannered and the kindest to her. She'd bake cakes and treats for him, and when he left college he would write to her. She said they still corresponded.

Born Free

M.I.A.'s video for her new song “Born Free” is a well-crafted, harrowing political allegory well worth ten minutes of your time. I warn you: it's scary, gruesome and, as they say, “not safe to watch at work;” if you can't watch that sort of thing, check out Jezebel's synopsis.

It's better if you see it without having the surprise spoiled. But unhappily—and of course this is the point—the surprise isn't, fundamentally, surprising. Just like Zbigniew Libera's Lego kit, it is simultaneously absurd yet familiar, and that terrible familiarity is the point.

Design

Local Gas Pump

Originally uploaded by jmspool

Note that I am sure that, considered in isolation, each of these stickers was an improvement over the information design before it was added. It's a perfect example of how incremental design leads to bad design.

Scholarship

Latke vs Hamentash: A Materialist-Feminist Analysis:

To summarize briefly an account that is richly nuanced (in fact, often incomprehensibly convoluted), Shapiro, an anthropologist, begins with the conjecture that the circles and triangles conventionally used to designate women and men on kinship charts are in fact iconic representations of latkes and hamentashen.

She argues, “(I)t is ultimately impossible for us to know whether, in the last analysis, the latke and hamantash should be considered as semiotic representations of the two sexes or whether the two sexes should be seen as semiotic representations of latkes and hamantashen. What is not, however, in doubt, is the association of latkes with the female principle and hamantashen with the male” (Shapiro 1990:3).

What is it that leads Shapiro to argue as a feminist that latkes, which have so clearly been part of the oppressive apparatus upholding the most retrograde patriarchal elements of Judaism, are a more appropriate symbol for women than hamentashen? I will argue that such an interpretation is possible only if analysis remains at a symbolic level which so decontextualizes the subject that there is no trace of the lived experience of the relevant social actors.

History

In honour of Confederate History Month I give you Fengi on Confederate History:

Again with the brazen bigoted fuckwitcha stuff.

Gov. Robert F. McDonnell, reviving a controversy that had been dormant for eight years, has declared that April will be Confederate History Month in Virginia...he did not include a reference to slavery because “there were any number of aspects to that conflict between the states.”

Here is the central truth: The South started the Civil War in order to create a slave owning, white supremacist state. How do we know this? Because they fucking said so.

Virgina's Ordinance of Secession sated it was about “the oppression of the Southern slave holding states”. In the official statements explaining their acts of succession, Georgia denounced “the equality of the black and white races”, and Mississippi proclaimed slavery “the greatest material interest of the world” while complaining about the Union “It advocates negro equality, socially and politically, and promotes insurrection and incendiarism in our midst.”

Texas was the most bold proclaiming their status “as a commonwealth holding, maintaining and protecting the institution known as negro slavery-- the servitude of the African to the white race within her limits-- a relation that had existed from the first settlement of her wilderness by the white race, and which her people intended should exist in all future time.”

The Confederate constitution was a duplicate of American document with extra language making slavery a permanent institution. This included the following language:

The Confederate States may acquire new territory; and Congress shall have power to legislate and provide governments for the inhabitants of all territory belonging to the Confederate States, lying without the limits of the several Sates; and may permit them, at such times, and in such manner as it may by law provide, to form States to be admitted into the Confederacy. In all such territory the institution of negro slavery, as it now exists in the Confederate States, shall be recognized and protected be Congress and by the Territorial government; and the inhabitants of the several Confederate States and Territories shall have the right to take to such Territory any slaves lawfully held by them in any of the States or Territories of the Confederate States.

This shows the Confederacy aspired to be an expanding slave owning empire. Note they specified “negro slavery”.

After the war, some confederates tried to revise history saying rhetoric about protecting the Southern way of life against Northern injustice was about vaguely defined complexities. Prior to the war, they were clear and strident that it was about white people owning African Americans as property (to be bred, burdened, traded and killed at will).

There were bigots a plenty in the North, but this isn't the issue. The South fought a war to create a racist slave empire. The Confederacy's defining - and arguably only - purpose was a crime against humanity.

The defeat of the Confederates is as much a victory as the defeat of Nazis in WWII. Both wer attempts to found a society on racial superiority and brutalized, oppressed and/or killed an entire group of people. Except Germany doesn't have state leaders whining they were only protecting a now vague “way of life”.

ADDENDUM: Offended provincials should realize people accept the diverse 21st Century South is not the Confederacy; it's part of why they think this is bullshit.

iPad

A few weeks back, I was observing a focus group of folks around 20 years old. It turns out that a lot of them bring their laptops with them everywhere. (This is no longer geeky. Hmmm.) As an aside, one of them described the iPad as puzzling, “a laptop for old people.”

Laughter behind the glass.

Take it away, Nick Sweeney:

When I was seven, my dad built me a bed, taking inspiration from a drawing in an old woodworking magazine, scavenging the wood, cutting it to fit the lean in the room. It had three drawers and cupboard space beneath for the games and toys and books I steadily acquired, as well as the growing pile of tapes for my ZX Spectrum.

Around the same time, he carved me a miniature cricket bat the length of my middle finger, notching a V, varnishing it, winding cotton for the handle grip. It’s a precious thing to me.

He has built sheds, paved patios, dug out ponds, knocked out walls, fit gas fires, tied flies — and that’s just in his spare time.

My dad is a maker.

In his twenties, my dad bought a tenor banjo. It’s a beautiful thing: ivory buttons, inlaid mother-of-pearl on the head and fretboard, vellum skin, a duster stuffed behind to keep down the volume. Looking online some years ago, I found a site devoted to vintage banjos, which told me a little about its age and history and the journey it had taken over nearly a century of existence. I told this to my dad, and he was thrilled; I printed out the pages and posted them, because computers remain a mystery to him.

Last year he told me that the screws from a couple of the tuners had broken; finding replacements was difficult, because that gauge wasn’t made any more in Britain. I registered at a banjo forum, asked for help, and within days a kind person from New York not only told me the gauge I needed, but sent a bag of screws that I posted on to my dad. They were a perfect fit. When I described how I got them, I might as well have been telling him that aliens landed in the garden and left them behind.

A couple of Christmases back, I called my parents, who were staying with my sister and her family. Could I speak to my dad, I asked? I’ll give him a shout, said my mother, but he’s been playing on the Wii with the kids from the moment they switched it on.

I finally spoke to him, surprised by what I’d heard. “Bloody marvellous, son.”

When I look at the iPad, I see something my dad could use without hand-holding to find the history of that banjo, to seek out those screws, to look at old video of Sonny Terry, to feed his glorious practical creativity, unencumbered by the need to learn the habits and quirks of computing, and not relying upon a transatlantic support department.

There’s a liberation in open things (and opening things) but there’s a far greater one in how things can open up people.

A laptop for old people. Damn straight.

Sorry, Cory. I still love ya—and bless you for fighting against DRM and in favour of sane intellectual property—but this time you're wrong. I don't want to take a screwdriver to my computer, or to read its schematics; I just want the damned thing to work properly.

3D Illusion

Via Laughing Squid, I learn of a series of beautiful, unsettling animated GIFs by Jaime Martinez.

Electric Sheep

One of the very first things I ever blogged was Patrick Farley's web comics project Electric Sheep. It's still one of my very favourite things on the web. Check it out.

Mr Farley is raising money to go pro, and I just made a contribution:

Happy Pi Day

I remember seeing this trailer and thinking, “Thank God someone made this movie, so I wouldn't have to make it in order to get to see it.”

Olbermann

I'm on my way to a you have to watch this, but I need to take the long way around.

I have spoken in praise of MSNBC's commentator Keith Olbermann before.

Now for a span there during the Bush administration, there were some lefties who looked at him like he was the second coming of Edward R. Murrow ... or like he was the crafty, witty, relentless liberal voice we now have in the form of the amazing Rachel Maddow. Having watched a bit of his show, I have to admit that this is the internet being kind to Olbermann—not in the sense that the people of Left Blogistan were too generous in their praise, but rather that the medium of the net played up his virtues. Folks circulated clips of Olbermann's best Special Comments, but it turns out watching the actual show, that most of the time it's very TV-ish in a bad way: gimmicky, full of cheap shots, and Mr Olbermann sometimes speaks in the voice of outrage at times that are forced and artificial. He plays up the outrage because he's good at it, and I mean that not as a backhanded compliment but a sincere one because expressing outrage well, like expressing anything well, requires talent, skill, and discipline. And so the internet made Olbermann look good because folks could circulate clips of him expressing brilliant outrage when it was called for, unhappily true all too often during the Bush administration.

Given a worthy target, Olbermann's outrage is awesome to behold: right, and necessary, and ... here is where his greatness lies ... delivered with subtlety and profundity to match its vigour.

I have a clip for y’all where Olbermann expresses outrage where it is warranted. That outrage is really only punctuation at an appropriate point in telling a larger story, and mighty as that outrage is, it is not even close to being the heart of his comments. You have to watch this.

It's almost fifteen minutes long, serious, searing, and not work safe—not because it will show anything offensive or embarrassing on your screen, but because it demands a kind of attention that you're not going to be able to muster at your desk at the office. Don't let that deter you. Make a date with yourself to watch it.

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Good work, Mr Olbermann, and thank you.

(That I may keep it handy, here's a link to Crooks and Liars, where they have the clip, a partial transcript, and a link to Olbermann's dKos diary.)

Two of my favourite things

Who would have thought that you could have gotten David Bowie and the Tree of Life in the same picture?

For the win

Via Katherine Summer, I learn of how snowboarder Graham Watanabe describes his sport.

Try to imagine Pegasus mating with a unicorn and the creature that they birth. I somehow tame it and ride it into the sky in the clouds and sunshine and rainbows. That’s what it feels like.

There's a joke about partying with him and Mr Michael Phelps in there somewhere.

Rights

Constitutional lawyer Glenn Greenwald smacks down a canard about Constitutional rights.

This notion that the protections of the Bill of Rights specifically and the Constitution generally apply only to the Government's treatment of American citizens is blatantly, undeniably false — for multiple reasons — yet this myth is growing, as a result of being centrally featured in “War on Terror” propaganda.
....
It is indisputable, well-settled Constitutional law that the Constitution restricts the actions of the Government with respect to both American citizens and foreigners. It's not even within the realm of mainstream legal debate to deny that.

He has Constitutional language, early and recent Supreme Court decisions, and more to back it up.

Tablet

I've been remiss in my duties as an interaction designer to make predictions about the Apple iTablet which everyone presumes will be announced in a few hours. Fortunately, John Gruber has said exactly what I think in two posts. So: what he said.

I'm excited.

I have said for many years that there are only five fundamental form factors for personal computing, yet we have only colonized three of them, and one of them only recently: the Desk, the Clamshell, the Tablet, the Pocket Thing, and the Wrist Thing. Barring some kind of categorical VR breakthrough, the Desk is not going to go away in our lifetimes, though we can expect many of the details to change; even in a world that looks more like 10/GUI or Tog's Starfire demo or Apple's old Knowledge Navigator video, you need a place to sit comfortably, a big display, a way to input text, and a way to point to and act on virtual objects on your display. The Clamshell is basically the laptop we have now; it's a small portable Desk, its minimum size defined by the keyboard; barring the Singluarity, I expect that fifty years from now people will still have devices basically indistinguishable in form factor, much as the software running on them will likely change beyond recognition.

I had an epiphany about the Pocket Thing about a decade ago, when I read that in Southeast Asia cellphones had better market penetration than in the US but a majority of phone users there never used their phones for voice. Never! Instead, they used SMS, and games, and electronic calendars, and so forth. At that time I was an early adopter of both the cellphone and of the Palm Pilot, and I was already resenting having two electronic devices in my pocket. So I prophesied that a hundred years from now, everybody would have a powerful computer in their pocket which they would call a “phone” despite telephony being the least of its functions. Only ten years later, that has come true ... if you consider the knowledge workers of the industrialized world “everybody.”

My thinking about the need for a Tablet has always been informed by the one person I've ever met who used the old Apple Newton the way it was intended. He always had it with him, and he wrote everything in it. His secret: he was a paraplegic who always had a lap to set it on, and kept it in a case strapped to his wheelchair right next to his knee. Aside from arriving before silicon was powerful enough to make it work as well as you would want, the Newton was just a little too bulky; unless you were a paraplegic there was always the temptation to leave it behind. But it wouldn't have to be that much smaller to always go in your bag or your hand. Part of the magic of the Moleskine notebook is that it's precisely the right size for that, and what do you know ... that's the exact same size as the Apple iTablet is rumored to be.

Do you doubt that Apple's designers are Moleskine maniacs?

Some skeptics have said that this in-between form will never survive when you can get “the same thing” from either a laptop or a phone. These people have obviously never been in an office full of people precariously running to meetings with a laptop in one hand and a cup of coffee in another, only to discover that they guessed wrong about whether they needed to lug their laptop to that meeting.

Tablet skeptics have also said that the phone is enough as the device that is always with you. You can already get the web from it, they say. But I think that smartphone web surfing is the gateway drug that will make people understand the desirability of a tablet. Having experienced the value of anywhere, any time access to internet resources, which literally changes your life, you come to be frustrated with accessing it through the tiny window of the phone. When I go out for a solo lunch, I have my iPhone in my pocket and a book in my bag, and because the book may not suit my mood while the web is a bottomless ocean of content, I wind up reading from my squinty little phone about as often as I do from the beautiful trade paperback I have at hand. After a year of that, damn straight I'm willing to pay several hundred dollars for an iTablet that's just a bigger version of the same thing.

Especially if it means I can leave that book at home, because my entire library is available to me in one little device. I commented a couple of years ago about the absurdity of shlepping around data in book form. My movers have informed me that I own over three tons of books; that's more than the mass of all of my other possessions put together, including my motorcycle. I now have vivid fantasies about the time, only a few years away, when I can reduce my book collection to a single shelf of beautiful ornamental relics and have my entire library ... and eventually, every book ever published ... with me anywhere, any time.

The question I wonder about with Apple's expected effort is text entry. Just as I want to stop carrying around books, I want to stop using paper notebooks: what I write on paper isn't backed up, isn't searchable, and isn't easily transcribed into other electronic forms like this blog post. The big surprise of the iPhone was its surprisingly effective soft keyboard and I'm expecting that the iTablet is going to have some equally cunning and surprising text input mechanism, linked to some kind of notetaking tool. I cannot believe that Apple has missed that OneNote is the interesting thing about Microsoft's efforts toward a Tablet.

We'll know soon.

Infographic

I want to have handy that infographic about health care spending between countries.

Impermanence

Caleb Larsen has created an artwork which has put itself on eBay. It comes with an end user license agreement.

1. Artist has created a work of art titled “A Tool to Deceive and Slaughter (2009)” (“the Artwork”) which consists of a black box that places itself for sale on the auction website “eBay” (the “Auction Venue”) every seven (7) days. The Artwork consists of the combination of the black box or cube, the electronics contained therein, and the concept that such a physical object “sells itself” every week.
2. Collector understands and agrees to the underlying concept and function of the Artwork and that the sale of the Artwork by Artist is dependent and conditioned upon Purchaser’s agreement and adherence to the below terms. Such terms are fundamental and crucial to the on-going viability and artistic integrity of the Artwork ....

Consider this: to keep it is to steal it.

For many reasons, not least that I am a fierce critic of most end user license agreements, I say: brilliant.

OK Go

OK Go, the band that gave us that awesome treadmill dance video for their song “Here It Goes Again,” explain that you cannot embed their latest video in your web pages because, well, the music industry cannot figure out their own business model.

four years after we posted our first homemade videos to YouTube and they spread across the globe faster than swine flu, making our bassist’s glasses recognizable to 70-year-olds in Wichita and 5-year-olds in Seoul and eventually turning a tidy little profit for EMI, we’re — unbelievably — stuck in the position of arguing with our own label about the merits of having our videos be easily shared. It’s like the world has gone backwards.

Gee, what could it be?

Apple has finally officially announced an event on 27 January.

I guess Apple isn't being completely coy any more. (Recall that the iPhone was a total surprise announcement, after a long rap about AppleTV.)

I've not taken time to write up my predictions for the Apple Tablet (maybe I'll find time) but I can say that I think John Gruber at Daring Fireball is exactly right in his speculations.

Infrastructure matters

It turns out that Haiti's airport is a limiting factor in getting aid to the Haitians.

Col. Buck Elton, who was given the mission to open up airfield and assist with airlifts, says they have controlled 600+ takeoffs and landings in an airstrip that normally sees three takeoffs and landings a day.

Because the air traffic control tower has collapsed, all of this is being done by radio, on the ground - in a place that only has one runway/taxiway for planes, set directly in the middle of the airport and thus making it difficult for other planes to take off and arrive.

Whoa. If I ever find myself in the company of Col. Elton, I'm buying that man a drink.

Dr Martin Luther King, Jr.

For more than a decade, I've been spamming people with this note every year. Time marches on: this year the primary medium for that will be Facebook. If you were here this time last year, read it again anyway.

Really. Take a few minutes. I think it's important.

Most people have forgotten that at the civil rights march on Washington DC on 28 August 1963, Martin Luther King was not the featured speaker. He was not the icon of the movement that we think of today. He was a major player, yes, but there were others more famous, respected, and important at that time. The speech he gave — the one you know — changed that.

The importance of the speech is distinctively American. The United States, unique among nations, is a frankly artificial creation. France is the place in Europe where people speak French, but the US has no ethnic definition — this place is full of immigrants who decided to be Americans, and their children. Japan is an island, but there's nothing natural about the borders of the US — this place wound up a nation through a chaotic combination of war, purchase, legislative decisions, and (oh yeah) genocide. The US is an idea. Something we just made up.

This is why we have the peculiar veneration of documents that we do. The Declaration of Independence and the Constitution are the holiest of holies in our civic religion because they are made of words, made of ideas. Through acclamation over the years we have chosen a handful of other documents that tell us what the United States is, like Lincoln's Gettysburg address and Martin Luther King, Jr.'s I Have a Dream speech. In that speech, the power of King's rhetoric and ideas was so great that hearing it transformed our understanding of what the nation was about. I know, I know, that's a White guy thing to say: it's not like plenty of folks didn't know about American racial injustice. But on the level of shared understanding of shared destiny, King gave voice to ideas implicit in the American national promise that had too long been denied. And still are denied today.

In a sense we have come to our nation's capital to cash a check. When the architects of our republic wrote the magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, they were signing a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir.

This note was a promise that all men would be guaranteed the inalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. It is obvious today that America has defaulted on this promissory note insofar as her citizens of color are concerned. Instead of honoring this sacred obligation, America has given the Negro people a bad check which has come back marked "insufficient funds." But we refuse to believe that the bank of justice is bankrupt. We refuse to believe that there are insufficient funds in the great vaults of opportunity of this nation.

Go read it right now. It will only take five minutes of your time. With no exaggeration, I think it's your duty as an American. Yeah, this year we can celebrate it seeming almost unremarkable to have a Black President of the United States, but reading it you cannot help but realize that we have a lot of work left to do.

And while you're at it, take a little more time and read Letter from a Birmingham Jail. I know you did it back in school. It's worth doing again.

And if you really want extra credit, go read what he said on the last full day of his life.

Like anybody, I would like to live a long life. Longevity has its place. But I'm not concerned about that now. I just want to do God's will. And He's allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I've looked over. And I've seen the promised land. I may not get there with you ...

Zelig

Roger Ebert's illness has been a tragedy for him but a blessing for the rest of us. Having lost the ability to speak he's started to put more energy into his not-always-related-to-film blog. (His twitter feed is pretty good, too, if you're into that sort of thing.)

A while back, he gave us a long reflection on the mystery of Jerry Berliant.

I was to see Jerry Berliant many times over the years. “This isn't an A-list party,” Marlene told me one night back in Chicago. “Jerry Berliant hasn't crashed it.”

The enigma of Jerry Berliant has fascinated Chicagoans for years. The Sun-Times columnist Irv Kupcinet, listing the stars at a premiere, would add: “...and Jerry Berliant, America's Guest.”

It's a strangely delightful tale of celebrity name-dropping, private security, and social engineering ... including an allusion to T. S. Elliot.

Christ love

A friend of mine whose brief love affair with Christianity ended recently has been disheartened by recent evidence that Pat Robertson is even more a hateful lunatic than you tend to think.

In service of being fair and balanced, I offer Mel White quoting Bishop John Shelby Spong being awesome.

I have made a decision. I will no longer debate the issue of homosexuality in the church with anyone. I will no longer engage the biblical ignorance that emanates from so many right-wing Christians about how the Bible condemns homosexuality, as if that point of view still has any credibility.
....
It is time for the media to announce that there are no longer two sides to the issue of full humanity for gay and lesbian people.
....
I see no way that ignorance and truth can be placed side by side, nor do I believe that evil is somehow less evil if the Bible is quoted to justify it.
....
Therefore, I will from this moment on refuse to dignify the continued public expression of ignorant prejudice by engaging it. I do not tolerate racism or sexism any longer. From this moment on, I will no longer tolerate our culture’s various forms of homophobia.

Yeah.

Gaze

Linda Holmes at NPR has an interesting observation about a sitcom.

I truly despised the pilot of CBS's The Big Bang Theory, which aired in the fall of 2007. I found it unfunny, obnoxious, stilted, and tired. But now, having been persuaded to try it again this fall -- and intrigued by the fact that its audience was steadily growing, which very rarely happened -- I've really come to love it

Funny, I caught an episode of the show early on (maybe it was the pilot) and was similarly unimpressed, and then found myself exposed to it again recently (I think on an airplane?) and had the same reaction. What happened?

She outlines in fascinating detail that the answer is: just a little bit of ... feminism.

When people say things like “male gaze,” it's easy for it to seem (1) extremely obscure and (2) absolutely no fun at all, in addition to (3) not really relevant if you aren't in film school. But the changes in this particular show make for a great example of the fact that you don't just avoid empty, cliched versions of women (or men, and I am looking at you, Sex And The City) because they're offensive or infuriating or anything like that. The best creative reason to avoid them is that they make your show bad.

Click through, if only to see the “Sheldon knocking” montage.

Exploitation movie

Looking at movie listings, I just discovered Bitch Slap playing today. Now I love exploitation movies, so it's not like I don't see what they're going for in the trailer for this picture. I can respect the honesty of pure exploitation that just is what it is, and I can respect good ironic pleasure-alloyed-with-critique, as exemplified by how the violence in Inglorous Basterds very deliberately offers us both pleasure and discomfort with your own enjoyment of it. But there's a school of dishonest exploitation—“it's not really offensive, it's okay because it's ironic”—and I smell it all over the trailer. Paying a visit to the website, I see that it promises ...

a mysterious Female Narrator who comments periodically on the folly of humanity, the plight of the human condition, and the vagaries of life and love through quoting the likes of Dostoyevsky, T. S. Eliot, Sun Tzu, and even Buddha

... which seems like Trying A Little Too Hard. Rotten Tomatoes seems to confirm my suspicion.

I write all of this not because I have a real opinion (having not seen the film) but to set up my disappointment that Roger Ebert hasn't reviewed the movie so he can say to the filmmakers, “I knew Russ Meyer, and you guys ... are no Russ Meyer.”