How not to sell George Lucas on a creative idea.

My buddy Rik just posted his magnum opus, Fritters. A must read, especially if you’ve ever been to Eastern Market.

Writing from the Iron Gate Theater on Penn campus, where I have just learned the following equation:

Let x = guy who traveled the world in high school and college playing the clarinet (badly, it must be noted).

Let y = 13 years, two months, and 16 days since the last time said clarinet was picked up.

Let z = approximately 3,468 packs of Marlboro Mediums.

x + y + z = making a 2½ single reed vibrate with your lungs is roughly equivalent to making a two-by-four vibrate by thinking really hard at it.

So I read this article about Woz driving to the South Pole, and my first thought: “Yeah, those tires are big enough to float.”

Key words Jeff missed: “from McMurdo.”

Every once in a while I read a news story which is just so breathtakingly unbelievable that I find myself having to pause a moment, lest I spend the next fifteen minutes running through the streets naked and screaming. Here’s today’s: on the front page of the Washington Post, it seems that the Democrats are concerned and arguing internally, about whether they’ll have sufficient turnout in November to win the election.

Put another way, the Democrats believe that their voters are insufficiently motivated to actually get off their butts and vote. Pelosi and Dean and Emanuel are feuding over the best way to resolve this problem.

In other news, the Democrats are uniformly agreed on the policy of “wait for George W. Bush to boil a dozen puppies in white wine and garlic on live television, and then issue a press release noting that this isn’t polite.”

Nancy. Howard. Rahm. In the alternate universe where the Democrats routinely show the mental acumen to find their asses with both hands, their problem isn’t turnout. Their problem is investing millions of dollars upgrading the polling stations of America so their tidal wave of support doesn’t simultaneously violate 10,000 local fire codes.

For example, here’s some of the ammunition your multidimensional counterparts are using. I’ll note that all of this comes from today’s stories. Who knows? If you’re really lucky, you might have more stories to use tomorrow.

A flailing Iraq reconstruction effort that has been dominated for more than three years by US dollars and companies is being transferred to Iraqis, leaving them the challenge of completing a long list of projects left unfinished by the Americans. More than 500 planned projects have not been started, and the United States lacks a coherent plan for transferring authority to Iraqi control. (A1)

Veterans of the fighting in Iraq are more likely than other US soldiers to suffer mild memory and attention lapses back home. [This] could signal more serious mental health problems down the road. (A2)

President Bush has promoted voluntary measures to curb greenhouse gases, but has consistently opposed mandatory targets. (A3)

The Pentagon’s initial story of how it reacted to the 2001 terrorist attacks may have been part of a deliberate effort to mislead the commission and the public. Suspicion of wrongdoing ran so deep that the commission debated referring the matter to the Justice Department for criminal investigation. (A3)

A draft Bush administration plan for special military courts seeks to expand the reach and authority of such “commissions” to include trials, for the first time, of people who are not members of al-Qaeda or the Taliban and who are not directly involved in acts of international terrorism. The plan would also allow the Secretary of Defense to add crimes at will to those under the military court’s jurisdiction. (A4)

The Senate approved yesterday a bill that would open more than 8 million acres in the Gulf of Mexico to oil and gas drilling, but it must be reconciled with a vastly more permissive House measure that would end a 25-year-old moratorium on drilling off the nation’s Atlantic and Pacific coasts. (A7)

More than 2/3rds of the Army National Guard’s 34 brigades are not combat-ready, largely because of equipment shortfalls that will take as much as $21 billion to correct. (A7)

US District Judge Elizabeth Laporte [approved the Forest Service when it] reversed a Clinton administration rule banning new roads on nearly a third of federal forests. But she questioned whether the agency violated federal law by skipping environmental studies. (A7)

A series of bombings and shootings, most of them targeting Iraqi soldiers and police, killed at least 44 people in Iraq on Tuesday in a new surge of violence against people changed with stabilizing the country. (A11)

Ramadi, the capital of Iraq’s western Anbar province, has sunk into virtual anarchy under the stranglehold of a skilled, well-financed, and ruthless insurgency. Now, for the first time, US and Iraqi forces are engaged in a block-by-block campaign to retake the area. (A12)

Acting FDA Commissioner Andrew C. von Eschenbach struggled yesterday to convince a Senate committee that he deserves to lead the agency on a permanent basis, but his efforts were repeatedly undercut by tough questions about the agency’s flagging reputation and its snail’s-pace review of the emergency contraceptive pill Plan B. (A13)

A member of the [Kansas] state Board of Education who approved new classroom standards that call evolution into question held onto his seat Tuesday, turning back a challenge from two defenders of Darwin. (A14)

Apparently, this is not quite enough for a coherent Democratic turnout strategy. Bring on the puppies!

But while you’re waiting for Bush to do something so egregiously stupid that even you can’t screw up your message, I suggest you pick up the phone and call a professor of history. There are quite good ones at Georgetown, it’s a local call. Ask them about the Whigs, the Populists, and the Grange. Ask them about the usual fate of parties which are so stunningly bad that their members routinely have bumper stickers that say “Wake me in 2008” — an implicit admission that we expect nothing worthwhile of you until then, and maybe not even then.

And then you can while away some time measuring drapes for your inevitable dustbin of history. They’re rather drab, and they’ll need some decoration.

This just came in on my “available gigs” mailing list:

I am looking for a dedicated programmer. Please do not apply if you are a company, looking to subcontract a programmer. Must have experience with PHP, and HTML, MY SQL and Linux a plus.

MUST be willing to work 40 hours a week.

Pay for this project is $650 per month

We have a amazing company that is dedicated to employee satisfaction, it is a great place to utilize your skills and grow!!

I’m not sure how much growth or employee satisfaction you’ll experience when you’re starving at $4.06 an hour.

Greetings from beautiful downtown Washington, DC, where it’s nearly 1 AM and I’m writing from the very scenic Gate C of Union Station. As in the “Stranded at Gate C” Gate C of Union Station.

I suppose I’m not really stranded; after all, I could have boarded my train when it departed 90 minutes late, and arrived in Philadelphia too late to make my connecting train to Atlantic City. So I had my choice of which train station to be stranded in, which I suppose doesn’t completely meet the definition of stranded. I stayed in DC because although the Starbucks is closed, the wifi is live, and there’s a power outlet here. Besides, for some reason DC seems to have a better class of homeless people scattered about than 30th Street.

So I’m passing the time waiting to get to Atlantic City by playing poker online. I would probably think that’s ironic if I gave it much thought.

I wish I could say I’m surprised to be here, but really I’m not. After two decades of being an adult non-driver, and happily carting myself up and down the East Coast via planes, trains, and (other people’s) automobiles, it’s gotten to the point where pretty much every traveling experience has been a negative one. And I’m a guy who’s been stranded by transportation companies on three continents; it really takes a consistent effort to annoy the hell out of me.

Amtrak seems to pride itself on raising surliness and inconvenience to an art form, along with their ticket prices. You can just tell they’re itching to say, “Screw you. If you don’t like it, you can take the bus.”

Which would be tempting, since the train routinely costs three times what the buses charge. But the buses — yeesh. After the gate agents get finished treating you like a suspected terrorist criminal psychotic, you board your bus and spend the trip dealing with the federally mandated quota of terrorist criminal psychotics, whose presence makes you too frightened to sleep, or makes it too loud to sleep without spackling your eardrums.

The only consistent positive experience I’ve had recently is with the “Chinatown” buses, which cart you from one Chinatown to the other for truly dirt cheap rates, and who generally maintain an air of professionalism in the process that exceeds Greyhound’s. But it sort of feels like “hard seat” tickets — bring your food and your nicotine patch with you when you board, because that bus ain’t gonna stop until it gets where it’s going.

I think I’ve had enough, sitting here at 1 AM in downtown DC. I think it’s time to finally do my bit to promote global warming, prop up the economies of countries that donate money to radical Islamists who hate me, tell Amtrak to ram it up their caboose, and send the Greyhound to the glue factory. I’m just too tired of you.

So — does anyone know of a Driver’s Ed class that isn’t filled with teenagers and alcoholics?

My top ten fave search phrases that landed people here, month of May:

1. computer monitoring all telephone calls conspiracy (1/1,500,000!)
2. morality of bombing civilians (1/1,222,000!)
3. osamabinladen@hotmail.com (1/8)
4. ubergeek mac (3/63,400 — man, do I want to pull number one on this search)
5. CFP2006 (3/890! — the first link that’s not actually the CFP website)
6. leahy wiretapping site jeffporten.com (3/6 — Brian still kicks my ass)
7. hershey conspiracy accident (5/42,700)
8. monitor glasses borg (10/56,900)
9. cute Jewish guy (15/2,560,000 — how the hell did I do that?)
10. sleep is for the weak (18/16,100,000)
11. bryan greenberg icons (26,258,000 — Brian, apparently you’re now a Russian demigod)

I’m starting to realize that by naming my blog “Conspiracy” I’m probably getting an even greater share of nutbar eyeballs than my politics would predict. Incidentally, the real Hershey conspiracy accident appears to be a speech by Helen Caldicott, founder of an organization I speak highly of.

“Jeff is an idiot” tracker: now 7 out 6,110,000. It appears that what’s put my rating back up in the top ten are these posts talking about my Google ranking. Bizarre. Perhaps asking Google to rank your own idiocy is a sign of greater idiocy?

Apparently, the archive of your tax records, if you live in the USA, is being outsourced. Which sounds like a fine idea to me, because nothing could possibly go wrong with that.

The office pool is open — how many weird stories will we be reading in tomorrow’s newspapers about 6/6/6?

Neil Gaiman co-writes an essay for Wired on the myth of Superman. I disagree with Gaiman on several of his thoughts, the biggest one being about Clark Kent being the “disguise” for Superman. To my thinking, it’s the other way around — it’s because Superman is Clark Kent, and has the classic American upbringing and mores, that makes him a hero and not a tyrant internally to the storylines, and externally a part of the American mythology. It wasn’t his powers that made him part of our culture — those keep changing. It was his Kansas.

Still on the topic of superheroes, check out this gallery of Photoshopped art from which I’ve illustrated this post. You want proof that modern standards of female beauty are very different than they used to be? Ask yourself if you can imagine seeing any of the women dressed up as Wonder Woman in a modern comic.

Some people have far too much free time in both the real world and a virtual one. (I wasn’t aware that watermelon was a popular fruit during the Middle Ages.)

I am officially too old to have any idea what this sounds like.

Speaking of too old, I thank God Almighty I can’t remember what I was eating in 1971.

I think this is the best $200 you can possibly spend. Bloodsucking bastards.

Don’t even think about going to this mindbending Flash site while drunk or stoned. It’s hard enough to deal with sober. I’m now wondering if I’m living in an atom in my own eyelash.

1. Someone younger than you compliments you on your iTunes playlist.

2. A reverse IP lookup says that someone really interesting is reading your web site.

3. A tourist asks for directions, and you know the Secret Local Method of getting there.

4. Making an exceptionally brilliant call or an exceptionally astute laydown.

5. Finishing the IKEA furniture without any extra grommets, flimflams or whatchamadoodles lying around.

6. The shareware you downloaded yesterday for “someday” testing purposes turns out to be perfect for today’s 3:30 PM crisis.

7. Figuring out a great method of transmogrifying your EyeTV movies onto your new Palm, which provides both portable entertainment and excuse to buy a faster transmogrifier.

8. It’s 4 AM, a mile to the 7-11, and a serious nicotine craving is setting in, and you find one more cig in the “empty” pack of smokes you left lying around yesterday.

I’ve written before about the absolutely wonderful Project Gutenberg, which provides free electronic copies of 18,000 books that are out of copyright. So, for example, if you have a desire to read the complete Sherlock Holmes in the original, with illustrations, it’s all right here for you to enjoy.

The technologically savvy among you might wonder how these century-old (in some cases, millennia-old) works came to be available in electronic format; the answer is, through the magic of optical character recognition and lots of proofreading by dedicated volunteers.

Turns out, there’s a great system for people who want to dabble in such volunteerism. It’s called Distributed Proofreaders, and you can be one of the worker bees. There are a number of ways to get involved, but at its simplest: find a book you’re interested in, ask for a page, edit the OCR text against the scanned image (both of which appear in a convenient web page), and submit your edits. Simple and easy.

In terms of bang for the buck, this is about the best activism around; spend 15 minutes proofing a page, and after you’re done you’ll have played a part in making this book available forever. Tens of thousands of people might someday benefit from your work, which you can do in your bathrobe. Hard to beat that math.

Just by way of example, here are the books I worked on today:

1. A Depression-era oral history of former slaves in Texas
2. A turn-of-the-century history of the US Navy
3. An 1860 work compiling pro-slavery arguments
4. Transcripts of the hearings of the Warren Commission
5. An anthology of great literature (I got a page from Don Quixote)
6. Two encyclopedias

Check out one of the footnotes I found today; this is from a British encylopedia discussing World War I at a time when no one thought it would ever need a number:

[1] The use of gas, as already pointed out, had been forced on the British by its adoption by the Germans. Ultimately the methods invented by British chemists and physicists outgassed the Germans.

I just love this phrasing: of course the only reason the British used poison gas was because the bad guys were just so darned evil about how they used theirs. But when they set their minds to it, of course they were better at it. I’m sure I’ll find similarly interesting quotes if I stick with the pro-slavery book.

Postscript: in case you’re wondering why you might find this interesting yourself (assuming we share the same interest in historical trivia), I have since edited a passage referring to “Bagdad” as a modern Turkish province; a history of Copenhagen; an entry for Copernicus; and I’m currently reviewing the life of Henry Coppée, Penn history and literature professor from 1855-1866, and the first president of Lehigh University. Maybe I’m weird, but I think this is damn cool.

Really, I have nothing more to say that Kevin Drum didn’t say already:

A company that doesn’t believe anyone would ever try to steal an election shouldn’t be in the voting machine business. Jeebus.

In early 1997, I signed up for an AT&T Wireless plan that offered unlimited minutes, roaming, and long distance — a rare combination at the time, and it cost an arm and a leg. But it was worth it because it allowed me to shut down my Bell Atlantic landline, a day of freedom that ranks up there with Passover in terms of raw liberative power.

So I might be accused of having a bit of a bias against Verizon, based solely on eleven years of bad experiences as one of their customers. The thing is, cell phone companies are like airlines: everyone has their own “avoid at all costs” businesses, and everyone’s is different. Since I’m asked this question frequently in relation to cell phones, I thought I’d share my thoughts.

Verizon Wireless is a separate division in Verizon, and scuttlebutt is that they have their acts together much more than the mothership. This has certainly been true when I’ve had to deal with them for clients; their tech people are knowledgeable and helpful, and don’t seem at all like the types who were unable to install a DSL line six years after the marketing guys started selling them.

The problem is that Verizon is still managed by the same idiots. I’m looking right now at an article from April describing one way in which Verizon continues their “screw the customer” mantra. The phones they sell are routinely crippled — i.e., you couldn’t use it to get files off your computer as the manufacturer designed, so Verizon could sell you ringtones for $1.99. The terms of service for EVDO basically disallow using it for anything that you might want broadband for. No streaming media, no network servers, and God forbid you should share your connection.

The techies at Verizon have told me, sotto voce, that they’re not monitoring for these uses — so if you don’t mind being out of license you can do what you please. But if you rely on it for anything important, it’s awfully disturbing to know you can be shut down at any time.

I was a very happy customer of AT&T Wireless Cingular AT&T (Wireless?) for many years; call them 60% clueful but frequently able to unleash a bis-meshugah clause on their customers. Two years ago, when I ended my relationship with them, it was their policy of charging $300 a month for an unlimited GPRS data plan, when T-Mobile down the block was charging $20. I also own an AT&T branded GSM phone, which I paid full boat for, which they refused to unlock. It’s now my Bluetooth remote control.

Until recently, I was completely gung-ho about T-Mobile, and I still am… mostly. Hands down, they have the best price/performance plan for unlimited Internet: $30/month for GPRS or EDGE and T-Mobile hotspots. On the East Coast, you can’t spit without interfering with a T-Mobile wifi signal, so it’s not hard to get to a connection which blows the doors off EVDO — which in turn is much faster than EDGE. But EDGE is good enough for most of my purposes, which means it is more than likely good enough for yours.

Unfortunately, T-Mobile has recently made their call center a hell on Earth; if I need to make a call about a Mac and a data service, I’m guaranteed to need to tell five different people that I need to talk to “Tier 3 Data Services” before I actually, maybe, get someone who can help me. I spent 90 minutes on hold trying to troubleshoot a client’s Samsung last week, and I still don’t have an answer. I’m not sure why T-Mobile thinks it’s saving money by forcing four people to waste their time with me in between making me listen to their hold music.

I can’t say anything much about Sprint; I wasn’t too impressed with their ability to help me with a Treo 600 (they had the bad computer industry habit of referring me to Palm, who referred me back to Sprint), but I haven’t dealt with them enough to have a strong opinion one way or the other. That being said, if I find myself in the market for EVDO, I’ll be checking them out so I can continue avoiding Verizon like the plague.

So somehow in the last few weeks it’s transpired that I’ve been writing more for Brian Greenberg’s blog than I have here. So, if you’re interested, some threads we have going over there.

Leaning to the Right?, in which we debate whether Brian has become as much of a neoconservative nutjob on the right as I have admittedly been on the left for years.

By the Way, Is Data Mining Unconstitutional?, self-explanatory. You can guess which side of that debate I’m on.

More News Cataloging – NSA Call Lists, about wiretapping, FISA, and the other joys of living in the Bush era of freedom.

EU to Microsoft: Don’t Build Any New Products Ever Again, which I’m including here just to prove that sometimes snipe at each other about things other than politics. This time we’re debating PDF formatted documents. Be sure to wear seat belts for this kind of excitement.

Expect to see quite a few more of these. Make your own here.

This inflation-adjusted chart of the price of video game consoles makes one thing clear to me: I need to call my Dad and thank him again for that Atari 2600.