Focus on the Fundies: Thumb-sucking edition

Faced with charges that he misused school funds for personal use, the president of Oral Roberts University, Richard Roberts, resigned from office last week. Today he told students that God had told him to resign, and in return would bless the school.

God told him on Thanksgiving that he should resign the next day, Roberts told students in the university's chapel. "Every ounce of my flesh said 'no'" to the idea, Roberts said, but he prayed over the decision with his wife and his father, Oral Roberts, and decided to step down.

Roberts said he wanted to "strike out" against the people who were persecuting him, and considered countersuing, but "the Lord said, 'don't do that,'" he said. ...

Roberts said God told him he would "do something supernatural for the university" if he stepped down from the job he held at the 5,700-student school since 1993.

This infantile view of God is so pathetic and ignorant that you have to wonder how these people ever heard of such a thing as a "university," much less how they were able to start and maintain one. The school -- if one can truly use that word -- is a branch of the Roberts "ministry," which is a word they use because they are afraid to call it a "church."

If this sort of "God told me" religion sounds familiar, that's because it's the same faith practiced by Pat Robertson, who has become a laughingstock for his "prophecies" that God will blast this or that city with a hurricane or earthquake if they vote the wrong way. (For example: "Mass killing" to strike U.S.; declares fatwa on Hugo Chavez; wants to drop nuke on State Department.)

technorati: Richard Roberts, charismatics, Pat Robertson

Humorous coda to 'Alice's Restaurant'

Last evening I was doing errands in the car when I happened to hear the 1995 live version of Arlo Guthrie performing "Alice's Restaurant."

As a coda on the 30th anniversary of the original events that inspired the song, he adds an anecdote in which Jimmy Carter's son Chip tells him of discovering, when the Carter family moved into the White House, the "Alice's Restaurant" album. The text of the anecdote is at the link above. Funny.

Arlo Guthrie, born in 1947, would have been only 18 in 1965 when the "massacree" transpired, 20 in 1967 when the original recording was made, and 22 when he appeared as himself in the Arthur Penn movie.

Yet he is now an old man. How do these things happen? Arlo Guthrie grown up, I can handle; middle-aged, okay. But not like this.

technorati: Arlo Guthrie, Alice's Restaurant, 1995

Bad Behavior bonus edition

Italian women are off da hook, and if it's because of their sexist society, well that's their problem, says a British journalist.

Among the holiday murder-suicides were this one in Vallejo (a working class town in the SF area) and this one in Maryland. Holidays: bad for families.

Don't drop your iPhone

A guy who buys broken iPhones and fixes them says "I've gotten ones that have been dropped, and it's like an atomic bomb exploded inside them."

It's Bad Behavior Saturday™! -- Senseless Acts edition

Facebook has been banned in Syria.

Dig this story from the Twin Cities: Pal says Qwest vandalism fits a pattern of senseless acts. Think about that for a second -- a pattern of senseless acts. I guess you could say that about a lot of heads of state. In this case the "ringleader" just liked to fuck things up, apparently. And he got a siren and lights so he could pull people over and shake them down. His spree ended when he pulled over an off-duty cop.

Stories with the words "ringleader" and "spree" are always entertaining, aren't they?

A passenger on a plane from San Francisco to Atlanta was arrested today on sexual assault charges after he twice groped the woman sitting next to him.

Boy George is in the news after "a Norwegian man claimed the singer handcuffed him to a bed and threatened him with sex toys." Sounds like a simple misunderstanding to me, but he's being charged with false imprisonment. Worst cut of all: being described in the story as "the aging pop star." At least that's better than being described as "the aging former pop star."

Thieves in New York are stealing bronze and copper grave markers from cemeteries. The metal has become valuable enough for Americans to act like Third Worlders.

Just wait til the oil crunch, then we'll see some real scavenging.

In an L.A. suburb, someone stole ten puppies worth $15,000 from a pet shop. And in Riverside, also in Southern California but too far away from L.A. to be a suburb, a man accidentally killed himself while "kind of fumbling around" with a shotgun.

In London, 82,000 people visited "the world's largest lifestyle show for freethinking adults who are comfortable with their sexuality." And speaking of sex, the disgustingly rich producer of the "Girls Gone Wild" titty tapes complained he was abused by jail guards when he spent two days in an Oklahoma jail. The guy's life is melting down in a spectacularly satisfying way:

He has been in jail since April, when he was cited for contempt after yelling at attorneys during mediation in a federal lawsuit brought by women who were underage when his production company filmed them in 2003.

That lawsuit has since been settled, but Francis' bond was revoked on criminal charges related to the 2003 filming when he was charged with having contraband -- $700 and prescription anti-anxiety medication -- in the Bay County jail. Federal officials then extradited him to Nevada to face tax evasion charges.

I do lack sympathy for this asshole, who made millions from exploiting drunken teenagers who never got a nickel of the money he made when they performed for his cameras.

But topping them all is this post from a few weeks ago on Amy's Robot. If you're not ready to turn your back on Bad Behavior for the rest of the day, this will do it.

Best band name ever for a non-existent band

From Alexis:

The Blob That Ate Tasha Yar

That rocks so hard. I am putting Alexis on notice right now, I'm stealing that for inclusion in my book. Of course, that doesn't mean others can't steal it.

Yay, it's a novel

I went over 75,000 words today. The novel isn't finished, but it feels like a real book now. Maybe a few more work sessions and the first draft will be done.

It was hard today. I was distracted for hours. Things came slowly, and I rewrote the same four paragraphs three times -- that rarely happens. But I finally latched onto a thread and was able to create a scene that works. Whew.

Click over there

I don't have a huge amount to say for myself, but look at the Metblogs over there on the right, where I'm posting up a storm, and at the Scratchpad beneath it, where I'm posting stories of interest without comment.

I did manage about a thousand words today. I don't mind it not being more; I set myself up for a big day next time.

Dept. of No Explanation Needed

The Munchkins got their own star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.

Who Twinka was

In my looking around the internet for references to Henry Miller, I ran across an interview with the painter Wayne Thiebaud, whose candy-colored paintings of California I have always liked. In the interview, Thiebaud mentions a daughter Twinka (b. 1945). The name rang a bell, and I thought of this famous photograph:

I knew the title of the photo was "Imogen and Twinka," and I thought, hell, there must be only one Twinka. Wow, I never knew the gorgeous woman in that famous photo was the daughter of a famous painter.

The photographer is Judy Dater, and another of her pictures of the famous painter's daughter can be seen here.

Anyway, according to the interview, Twinka Thiebaud "helped take care of Henry Miller in the end of his life. She was friends with his daughter" and also edited a book of Miller's miscellanea titled "Reflections." She is seen with Miller in the small image at the top of this blog post, which has links to this amusing anecdote by a newly minted mail carrier who met Miller and Twinka. And here is the uncropped image of the two of them.

technorati: Imogen Cunningham

Marine's haunted second act

Here's a very interesting story by Luis Sinco, the photojournalist who took the famous picture of the exhausted cigarette smoking U.S. Marine, about how he got the photo, how he came to know its subject, and what happened to the young man after he was kicked out of the service for the PTSD he got serving in Iraq. I think the thing that shocked me the most was hearing that the 21-year-old's father was only 43.

Random links to Henry Miller

In writing my current book, I'm engrossing myself in the work of Henry Miller, digging through the Tropics and the Rosy Crucifixion trilogy (I'm now almost finished with Plexus.) At the same time I'm reading a biography, The Happiest Man Alive. Miller is clearly of a piece with Jack Kerouac in that his novels consists mostly of fictionalized autobiography, and I was looking on the internet for something that would be the equivalent of this chart of Kerouac's characters in On the Road and their real-life equivalents.

I found this blog entry by another Miller aficionado with a small graphic of such a chart that Miller himself kept, but not even the original graphic, much less a chart than anyone else compiled. Maybe I'll do it myself -- but not at the moment.

Meanwhile, here are a few interesting things I ran into on the way, thanks to Google and others' links:

• April 2007 SF Chronicle: Novelist Herbert Gold on his acquaintance with Miller. I was particularly amused by Gold's saying that in his later writing Miller "declared loudly and hotly, with dash, brio, careless grammar, repetitiveness and bawdy self-centeredness, that idleness, drunkenness and sexual complications were essential to a life of proper dignity." And also that "He was a Jack Kerouac who really liked sex."
• October 2007 Guardian: a short appreciation, but I liked the author's statement that without Miller leading the way "authors such as Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, William S Burroughs, Charles Bukowski, Kathy Acker, and Michel Houellebecq" would never have found the audiences they did.
• Style, June 1997: a scholarly article on "Henry Miller's bourgeois family Christmas in 'Nexus'"
• And finally, a big fan page of links to more Henry Miller-related stuff.

technorati: Henry Miller, writers

'Anticipatory conformity'

Reprinted from the Washington Post, 16 Nov 07, as a public service.

The Picture Of Conformity

In a Watched Society, More Security Comes With Tempered Actions

By Lynne Duke
Washington Post Staff Writer
 

Don't look now. Somebody's watching.

But you knew that, didn't you? How could you not? It's been apparent for years that we're being watched and monitored as we traverse airports and train stations, as we drive, train, fly, surf the Web, e-mail, talk on the phone, get the morning coffee, visit the doctor, go to the bank, go to work, shop for groceries, shop for shoes, buy a TV, walk down the street. Cameras, electronic card readers and transponders are ubiquitous. And in that parallel virtual universe, data miners are busily and constantly culling our cyber selves.

Is anywhere safe from the watchers, the trackers? Is it impossible to just be let alone?

There, in that quintessentially public space, the Mall, came Michael Thrasher, 43, an ordinary guy, just strolling on a lovely recent day. We found him near an entrance to the Franklin Delano Roosevelt Memorial, where a tower-high surveillance camera loomed overhead.

Thrasher didn't immediately see it. But when asked his feelings about privacy and surveillance, he said, "You just feel like there's always someone looking at you."

He's a baggage handler at Reagan National Airport, so he knows that he's watched at the workplace. Since Sept. 11, 2001, transit hubs have been laden with layer upon layer of surveillance: cameras, biometrics, sensors, even a new thing called the "behavior detection officer."

And it's good, Thrasher says, that someone's watching out for the bad guys. "Look what kind of world we're in now."

But Thrasher doesn't like the way his private space is shrinking. Like surfing the Web and knowing his data trail can easily be mined: "If I'm not doing anything illegal, why is it any of their business?"

Like being on the telephone and believing it could be tapped: "In the back of my mind, I'm thinking anybody could be listening to whatever I say."

And just going about one's daily business, walking down the street, going to the market?

"It just feels like there's no privacy now at all when you're doing public stuff."

Suddenly, he sees the camera, his exclamation point, and throws his hands in the air.

A Watching Culture

All this surveillance, monitoring and eavesdropping is changing our culture, affecting people's behavior, altering their sense of freedom, of autonomy. That's what the experts say: that surveillance robs people of their public anonymity. And they go even further, saying that pressure for conformity is endemic in a surveillance culture; that creativity and uniqueness become its casualties.

While there are benefits to surveillance -- the sense of security, the ability to view crime scenes -- the loss of autonomy represents the downside of our surveillance-heavy culture, says Jeffrey Rosen, a George Washington University law professor and author of "The Naked Crowd: Reclaiming Security and Freedom in an Anxious Age."

"You need a sphere of immunity from surveillance to be yourself and do things that people in a free society take for granted," says Rosen. Things like going to the park or to the market. The loss of such autonomy is one of the "amorphous costs of having a world where there's no immunity from surveillance.

"This will transform the nature of public spaces in ways we could hardly imagine," he says. "People obviously behave differently when they're unsure about whether they're being observed. We know this from personal experience.

"I'm not at all suggesting that Orwell's '1984' is around the corner," he continues. "But things will change, and some of the changes will be good and others will be bad."

Christopher Slobogin, a University of Florida law professor, writes in his upcoming book, "Privacy at Risk":

"Anonymity in public promotes freedom of action and an open society. Lack of public anonymity promotes conformity and an oppressive society."

After all, who is Big Brother looking for in all this surveillance? People who are different, who do not fit a preconceived norm.

In their insistent way, those public digital message boards that urge us to "Report Suspicious Activity" are pushing a sense of that norm. In effect, they call upon ordinary people with no training or expertise to become surveillants and enforce a code of conduct, an expected norm, based on what might seem, to them, suspicious, or just different.

We watch what we say on the phone. Where once it was just a joke, now it is real: You never know if you might be tapped. We don't joke about bombs or hijacking, especially not in public. Not that we'd want to, mind you, but who remembers the days when it was just a joke? In mixed company, we don't say anything about al-Qaeda that isn't flat out condemnatory. And we are aware, alas, that our library book selections could be added to our possible dossiers, as per the USA Patriot Act.

How far can it go? We have only to recall the 2006 film "The Lives of Others," which portrays how the Stasi of Communist East Germany deployed hundreds of thousands of ordinary people to spy on their fellow citizens and turn them in.

The work of the new "behavior detection officers" watching us at airports is all about enforcing a norm. Part of the Transportation Security Administration, the officers are trained to detect extremely nervous, deceitful or unusual travelers by observing travelers' facial expressions and their behavior.

In training the BDOs, "we teach that everybody's been in an airport long enough to know what the norm is," says Carl Maccario, a program analyst for what the TSA calls SPOT, or Screening Passengers by Observation Techniques. "There's an expected norm or an expected baseline environment. . . . We teach the BDOs, in a simplified form, to look for anomalous behavior in that environment."

Being different? A big problem.

Becoming Invisible

If we know we're being watched and know there is an expected mode of behavior, how does that change our actions?

Call it "anticipatory conformity." Shoshana Zuboff, a Harvard social psychologist who has studied information technology for decades, coined the phrase in 1988.

Applying that concept to the post-9/11 era, Zuboff says she sees anticipatory conformity all around and expects it to grow even more intense.

"I think the first level of that is we anticipate surveillance and we conform, and we do that with awareness," she says. "We know, for example, when we're going through the security line at the airport not to make jokes about terrorists or we'll get nailed, and nobody wants to get nailed for cracking a joke. It's within our awareness to self-censor. And that self-censorship represents a diminution of our freedom."

We self-censor, she says, not only to follow the rules, but also to avoid the shame of being publicly singled out.

Once anticipatory conformity becomes second nature, it becomes progressively easier for people to adapt to new impositions on their privacy, their freedoms. The habit has been set. People have "internalized the surveillance architecture" within their own subconscious.

We have yet to reach the level of surveillance of, say, the ubiquitous retina-scanning in the movie "Minority Report." But the technology is changing quickly.

"The next thing is they'll just have cameras everywhere," Zuboff says. "They'll have software programmed with algorithms, and the algorithms will be able to detect these so-called anomalies. And so you may be distraught because you're flying home to your grandmother's funeral, but the algorithm has detected an anomalous behavior, and the next thing you're being strip-searched by a couple of FBI agents."

And the technology advances so insidiously, so imperceptibly, that only later will we notice how deep the changes in our lives have been.

"It's a little bit like locked doors," says Paul Saffo, a technology forecaster and Stanford University instructor. "Today nobody has any concept of what it's like to have a house without a locked door or a security system.

"As the memory of a world without surveillance disappears, society will just create a new normal, and then you'll see worse horrors," he says. "Our whole lives will become like the TSA checkpoint. You walk in there, you don't look mad, don't look upset, don't look distracted. Do nothing to stand out."

Recalling an old Japanese saying that "the pheasant who flies gets shot," Saffo says the mindset of the future may be: "Practice being invisible."

Public Reaction

Surveys reflect a mixed national mood on Big Brother. In a Washington Post-Kaiser Family Foundation-Harvard University poll conducted earlier this year respondents were split, 48 to 48 percent, on whether the government is doing enough to protect civil liberties as it fights terrorism.

More than a year earlier, in a Post-ABC News poll, 62 percent said the FBI should continue to have extra authority for wiretapping, obtaining records and surveillance in terror investigations.

In a different kind of opinion sample, Slobogin, the law professor, randomly selected 70 people from Florida jury pools and asked them to rank the level of intrusiveness of 25 law enforcement tactics, including several surveillance techniques.

In that 2006 study, the respondents ranked bedroom searches as the highest level of intrusiveness, followed by searches of e-mails, records from banks, pharmacies and credit cards, and the use of snoopware. The police pat-down -- that classic of perceived intrusiveness -- didn't rank as high.

In an earlier study, in 2002, 190 respondents also said bedroom searches were most intrusive, followed by body cavity searches at the border. But the monitoring of street surveillance cameras was a close third, deemed more intrusive than even a helicopter hovering over one's back yard.

People "don't expect to be stalked either by a person or by a camera -- at least they don't like it," says Slobogin. "They expect to get lost in the crowd, or at least not to be monitored continuously."

Scrutiny's Prison

And the "surveillance industrial complex," as some call it, is churning out ever more sophisticated methods for watching us, tracking us. Think: radio frequency identification chips. Think: iris recognition.

The surveillance camera? It is "no longer simply the fixed camera that looks like it's sitting inside a white shoe box pointing at the register of a 7-Eleven," says Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center.

"Now we have cameras that sit in black globes that zoom and pan at 360 degrees, have telescopic lenses and are beginning to interface with databases of facial images to try to do real-time matching of people in public places."

And cyberspace is littered with our spoor, our data trails, just lying there ready for the data miners to probe and find out what we buy, read, eat, how we spend, where we travel.

Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean no one's watching.

In fact, we can be watched and tracked from so many different angles in so many different ways that hints of the Panopticon are hard to ignore. That was the invention of the 18th century British economist Jeremy Bentham, who conceived of the Panopticon as a circular prison in which warders could see prisoners at all times.

The Panopticon would create in the inmate a sense of "conscious and permanent visibility," and yet he "must never know whether he is being looked at at any one moment; but he must be sure that he may always be so," wrote philosopher Michel Foucault in his 1975 book, "Discipline & Punish: The Birth of the Prison."

Today, says Zuboff, we operate within an "information Panopticon."

"In our modern dematerialized world, you don't have to build a building to have permanent surveillance over individuals and their behavior," she says. "You can do it with an information system."

Future Control

There is, admittedly, something creepy about all this: creepy, serious and very real, so much so that ordinary people are aware of the extent to which they are being watched and monitored. All that Doug Gooch asks is that data miners be honest about what they're doing.

"If they're going to monitor my use of the Internet, I should know up front," Gooch says. "Everything, to me, should be disclosed."

Gooch, 51, an engineer on vacation from Michigan, strolled the Mall last month with his wife and law-student son as the family took a few moments to mull the weighty questions of surveillance and a free society. They spoke with a hint of resignation.

"Maybe the free market will sort it out," said Kyle Gooch, 23. He was talking about data mining and the push by government agencies to get the records of some search engines. Maybe people will simply stop using certain sites, he offered.

"There needs to be a balance," said his mother, Shirlene Gooch, 49. While she wants law enforcement to be able to search for terrorists through cyberspace, she worries it could go too far. She worries, too, that worrying may be futile; that the proverbial train is well down the tracks, and it may be too late to intervene in technology's uses.

"It's hard to know when to stop," she said of law enforcement, adding, "There's no way to stop technology."

The Gooches strolled onward, under the surveillance camera's watchful eye.

technorati: privacy, surveillance

How baby boomers took over

The current issue (19 Nov 07) of Newsweek has this remarkable passage:

[As the Spring of 1968 began, President Lyndon] Johnson was bitter. "How is it possible," he repeatedly asked, "that all these people could be so ungrateful to me after I had given them so much? Take the Negroes. I fought for them from the first day I came into office. I spilled my guts in getting them the Civil Rights Act of 1964 through Congress ... I asked so little in return. Just a little thanks. Just a little appreciation. That's all. But look what I got instead. Riots in 175 cities. Looting. Burning. Shooting ..." On and on, Johnson would rant, against the students and poor people who had turned against him, despite all he had done for them, "young people by the thousands leaving their universities, marching in the streets, chanting that horrible song about how many kids had I killed that day ..." ("Hey! Hey! LBJ! ...")

Johnson's worst dream, the most violent and diabolical, began with a twisted take on a cattle stampede. "I felt," Johnson later confided to historian Doris Kearns Goodwin, "that I was being chased on all sides by a giant stampede coming at me from all directions." There were "the rioting blacks, demonstrating students, marching welfare mothers, squawking professors, and hysterical reporters. And then the final straw. The thing that I had feared from the first day of my Presidency was actually coming true. Robert Kennedy had openly announced his intention to reclaim the throne in the memory of his brother. And the American people, swayed by the magic of his name, were dancing in the streets."

How satisfying -- even 30 years later -- to hear a politician actually acknowledging the effect of protests. No wonder baby boomers are so full of themselves now -- they brought down not just Nixon, but Johnson as well.

As for now, can you imagine George Bush even being aware of -- much less being upset by -- the national mood of disgust with him?

technorati: LBJ, 1968

Autumn

I'm in the waiting room of an outpatient surgery center in Palo Alto, where Cris is having some work done on her ankle. I think we've been here ten times in the last several years, as she deals with various orthopedic problems. Once she got something done at Stanford but usually we come to this place on the other side of downtown Palo Alto. After an hour or so we'll head home and she'll install herself on the living room couch along with a little ice chest with a pump; it circulates cold water to a bladder that the surgeon places near the arthroscopy incision when the surgery is over. This is to reduce swelling and promote healing -- a nice innovation. We have gone through this drill so many times that we piled a few of these ice water pump units in the basement at home, and today instead of receiving a new one we tried to give one back to the handsome young man who distributes them. He was very taken aback; apparently no one had ever refused to take a new ice water unit and tried to give him one instead. Eventually we arranged to simply give it to the facility.

I was here myself a couple years ago for a little cortisone injection.

Happy Birthday, Chris Carraher

Happy birthday to my wonderful friend and collaborator Chris Carraher. Before I was a novelist, before she was a painter, we did performance art together in the 80s and early 90s. Behold:

That's a flier from 1986, if I'm not mistaken.

Mission accomplished

Today I took two colleagues from the Long Island, NY office of the big company I work for, along with a local co-worker, to lunch at Bar Bambino in the city. Since the two visitors had done North Beach the previous evening, I was careful to explain that this was the Mission District, that it had been Irish and Italian for many years, and was now Latino and Young Bohemian. I explained how nearby Mission St. was working class like a busy street in Queens, while a block away Valencia St. was full of upscale bars and restaurants.

After listening to me expound for several minutes, one of the visitors said: "So... Mission District... does that have anything to do with Mission furniture?"

That led me to explain about the Franciscans and Mission Dolores and the scene in Vertigo where James Stewart follows Kim Novak into its cemetery, and that it was the only cemetery in San Francisco, since all the other cemeteries had been moved out of town to Colma which was, I said, on the other side of San Bruno Mountain from our office in South City. When I added that Colma was known as the City of the Dead for its predominant population of corpses, they thought that was the funniest thing they ever heard.

technorati: San Francisco, Mission District

End of the weekend

Finishing up another weekend of writing, having redeemed the slow day yesterday with a good 3000 word day today. I'm nearing my 75,000 word count goal for the novel, and now I have another challenge: ending it. Yesterday at the start of work I mapped out several scenes that remain to be written purely from a plotting perspective; even after this weekend, there are at least seven more plot movements to hit.

That will take some doing, but it's pleasurable work; writing the end of a book and hitting plot points that have been prepared for all along is like kissing somebody you've had a crush on for a long time and having it turn out just as much fun as you always imagined.

technorati: writing, novel writing

Rainy day

Drizzle all day, more forecast for all night. I've been inside writing all day, but now I have to walk home in it.

Dig the thing about Gorbachev in the Scratchpad. Maybe someday Barry Bonds will do an ad for Viagra.

Loopt and other services: goodbye to privacy

Reprinting this NYT story as a public service.

New York Times, 23 Oct 07

Privacy Lost: These Phones Can Find You

By LAURA M. HOLSON


Two new questions arise, courtesy of the latest advancement in
cellphone technology: Do you want your friends, family, or colleagues
to know where you are at any given time? And do you want to know where
they are?

Obvious benefits come to mind. Parents can take advantage of the
Global Positioning System chips embedded in many cellphones to track
the whereabouts of their phone-toting children.

And for teenagers and 20-somethings, who are fond of sharing their
comings and goings on the Internet, youth-oriented services like Loopt
and Buddy Beacon are a natural next step.
Sam Altman, the 22-year-old co-founder of Loopt, said he came up with
the idea in early 2005 when he walked out of a lecture hall at
Stanford.

"Two hundred students all pulled out their cellphones, called someone
and said, 'Where are you?' " he said. "People want to connect."

But such services point to a new truth of modern life: If G.P.S. made
it harder to get lost, new cellphone services are now making it harder
to hide.

"There are massive changes going on in society, particularly among
young people who feel comfortable sharing information in a digital
society," said Kevin Bankston, a staff lawyer at the Electronic
Frontier Foundation based in San Francisco.

"We seem to be getting into a period where people are closely watching
each other," he said. "There are privacy risks we haven't begun to
grapple with."

But the practical applications outweigh the worries for some converts.

Kyna Fong, a 24-year-old Stanford graduate student, uses Loopt,
offered by Sprint Nextel. For $2.99 a month, she can see the location
of friends who also have the service, represented by dots on a map on
her phone, with labels identifying their names. They can also see
where she is.

One night last summer she noticed on Loopt that friends she was
meeting for dinner were 40 miles away, and would be late. Instead of
waiting, Ms. Fong arranged her schedule to arrive when they did.
"People don't have to ask 'Where are you?'" she said.

Ms. Fong can control whom she shares the service with, and if at any
point she wants privacy, Ms. Fong can block access. Some people are
not invited to join ― like her mother.

"I don't know if I'd want my mom knowing where I was all the time," she said.

Some situations are not so clear-cut. What if a spouse wants some time
alone and turns off the service? Why on earth, their better half may
ask, are they doing that? What if a boss asks an employee to use the
service?
So far, the market for social-mapping is nascent ― users number in the
hundreds of thousands, industry experts estimate.

But almost 55 percent of all mobile phones sold today in the United
States have the technology that makes such friend-and- family-tracking
services possible, according to Current Analysis, which follows trends
in technology.

So far, it is most popular, industry executives say, among the college set.

But others have found different uses. Mr. Altman said one customer
bought it to keep track of a parent with Alzheimer's. Helio, a mobile
phone service provider that offers Buddy Beacon, said some
small-business owners use it to track employees.

Consumers can turn off their service, making them invisible to people
in their social-mapping network. Still, the G.P.S. service embedded in
the phone means that your whereabouts are not a complete mystery.

"There is a Big Brother component," said Charles S. Golvin, a wireless
analyst at Forrester Research. "The thinking goes that if my friends
can find me, the telephone company knows my location all the time,
too."

Phone companies say they are aware of the potential problems such
services could cause.
If a friend-finding service is viewed as too intrusive, said Mark
Collins, vice president for consumer data at AT&T's wireless unit,
"that is a negative for us." Loopt and similar services say they do
not keep electronic records of people's whereabouts.

Mr. Altman of Loopt said that to protect better against unwelcome
prying by, say, a former friend, Loopt users are sent text messages at
random times, asking if they recognize a certain friend. If not, that
person's viewing ability is disabled
.
Clay Harris, a 25-year-old freelance marketing executive in Memphis,
says he uses Helio's Buddy Beacon mostly to keep in touch with his
friend Gregory Lotz. One night when Mr. Lotz was returning from a
trip, Mr. Harris was happy to see his friend show up unannounced at a
bar where he and some other friends had gathered.

"He had tried to reach me, but I didn't hear my phone ring," Mr.
Harris said. "He just showed up and I thought, 'Wow, this is great.'"

He would never think to block Mr. Lotz. But he would think twice
before inviting a girlfriend into his social-mapping network. "Most
definitely a girl would ask and wonder why I was blocking her," he
said.

technorati: Loopt, privacy, tracking, stalking, mobile phones

It's Bad Behavior Friday™! -- Healing arts edition

This is really my favorite story for a long time. From the SF Chronicle:

Scam artists who use a toxic chemical in a teacup to make their elderly victims feel dizzy and in need of "healing" are on the loose in the Chinese American community, San Francisco police warned today. ...

A victim is approached by three Chinese suspects, a woman and two men, who ask if the victim is feeling sick. The suspects fill a teacup with water and invite the victim to stick a finger in the cup, explaining that it is a sign of illness if the water changes color, police said. When the victims stick in their fingers, they begin to feel dizzy -- apparently from a chemical in the water that is absorbed through the skin. The scam artists then demand money to provide a "cure."

They could also have their victims simply lick a toy fire truck -- I hear that's dangerous too.

DNA scientist James Watson, who has been shooting his mouth off about race for some time, finally announced his retirement at age 79 after being pilloried for saying that Africans' intelligence is not "the same as ours." The co-discoverer of DNA was employed by a genetic research lab in New York. And in another case of an aged doctor, an 89-year-old convicted murderer was paroled in New York. He killed his wife in 1976 by injecting her with Demerol, and was arrested at JFK as he tried to flee the country with "more than $450,000 in cash, securities and valuables from his wife's estate."

Doctors say calm down about drug-resistant staph, and just go wash your hands.

In other news, a teacher who published a satirical novel about a private school similar to the one he worked at is suing the school for wrongful termination.

Authors getting '10 percent of nothing' for foamer books

Five right-wing authors have sued their publisher for marketing huge lots of their books to book clubs and other outlets it owns at vastly reduced prices, meaning that instead of getting the usual 15% royalty on cover price, they get 10% of the publisher's net profit on the internally-marketed books, which is virtually nil.

Said one disgruntled writer: "You get 10 per cent of nothing because they basically give them away." Another complained:

The difference between 10 cents and $4.25 is pretty large when you multiply it by 20,000 to 30,000 books. It suddenly occurred to us that Regnery is making collectively jillions of dollars off of us and paying us a pittance. Why is Regnery acting like a Marxist cartoon of a capitalist company?

I'm not sure where the Marxist part comes into it, unless he's referring to the fact that these writers are already wealthy and the publisher, using the dictum "To each according to his needs," figured they didn't need the money.

Anyway, fun for all. Once you see what books they're talking about, you'll quickly lose any sympathy. The titles include such shit-bombs as "Unfit for Command: Swift Boat Veterans Speak Out Against John Kerry" and "Dereliction of Duty: The Eyewitness Account of How Bill Clinton Compromised America's National Security."

technorati: conservatives, Republicans, right wing

I am still struggling with Technorati

Somewhere along the line it got screwed up.... Here goes again...

Technorati Profile

LitCrawl photo set

Derek Powazek, a terrific photographer, releases the photo set from this year's Litquake, and while he's at it, discusses how to photograph events.

technorati: Litquake, LitCrawl

The only people that interest me are the mad ones

"... I certainly do envy you... The thing I'll always remember about this fellow" -- he looked from one to the other with a melting glow -- "is his inextinguishable gaiety. I don't think I've seen him depressed more than once or twice in all the time I've known him. As long as there's food and a place to flop... isn't that it?" He turned his gaze on me with unmingled affection. "Some of my friends -- you know the ones I mean -- ask me occasionally if you aren't just a bit touched. I always say, 'Certainly he is ... too bad we're not all touched in the same way.' And then they ask me how you support yourself--and your family. There I have to give up..."

We all began to laugh rather hysterically. Ulric laughed even more heartily than the rest of us. He laughed at himself -- for raising such silly issues. Mona, of course, had a different reason for laughing.*

"Sometimes I think I'm living with a madman," she blurted out, tears in her eyes.

"Yes?" said Ulric, drawing the word out.

"Sometimes he wakes up in the middle of the night and begins laughing. He's laughing about something that happened eight years ago. Something tragic usually."

"I'll be damned," said Ulric.

"Sometimes he laughs that way because things are so hopeless he doesn't know what to do. It worries me when he laughs that way."

"Shucks," I said, "it's only another way of weeping."

-- Henry Miller, Plexus

* Miller's wife June -- "Mona" in the book -- supported them by gold-digging.

technorati: Henry Miller,artists,iconoclasm

More experimenting

Trying to shoehorn the tumblr thingy into my right pane over there...

technorati: tumblr

Focus on the Fundies: Nobody for President

Man, if the Democrats manage to fuck this up, there's just no hope.

Evangelicals find little to love in presidential field
...
Republican strategist Arnold Steinberg said that he has found "enormous confusion" among evangelical voters as they consider the GOP presidential field. Social issues such as abortion and same-sex marriage remain fundamental for such voters -- but in an era of war and terrorism, "their concerns about national security have trumped their values concerns," Steinberg said.

"They'll say, 'I disagree with Rudy -- but I'm terribly concerned about national security and Islamo-fascism,'" Steinberg said. "Some people will say they will never vote for a pro-choice Republican, (yet) they're voting for him."

This is one reason why Newt Gingrich decided not to run -- in the eyes of the fundies, with his divorces and all, he's no better than Giuliani.

technorati: fundamentalists, evangelicals, presidential politics

Another fucking beautiful day

I'm not sure how many more of these gorgeous fall days I can take. I took a break from writing in the middle of the day and went home and sat in the garden with Cris for a few minutes. Milagrito the cat was out there with us, enjoying the family feeling. A bumblebee circled about.

Then I walked back to my office and did another 3000 words. This was a good weekend, over 5600.

Work avoidance, a wonderful thing

A Seattle resident found discarded confidential police files in an alley and turned them over to a local TV station. The files contained secret riot control plans, personnel information about suicidal and abusive cops, and all kinds of shit. (Courtesy Pogo Was Right, where almost daily you can read about this happening -- confidential information found in dumpsters and trash piles.)

A Girl Scout leader in Pensacola, Fla. pleaded guilty to stealing the identities of 15 Girl Scouts and using their Social Security numbers and other information to obtain $87,000 in illegal tax refunds.

Experiments

I am experimenting with a new internety thing called Tumblr, using it to manually clip interesting news stories: markpritchard.tumblr.com -- courtesy Alexis. Apparently you can use it to "clip" all sorts of things, but I can't figure out how to make the RSS feed from this blog -- which may well be broken -- appear in it.

I can also train its contents to appear here on this page -- but first I have to figure out a way to keep it from taking over half the page.

Meanwhile, a colleague at work -- I work as a technical writer at a giant software company large enough to have seven tech writers just in our division -- keeps asking me if I plan to do National Novel Writing Month. I said I'm not only already writing another novel as fast as I can, but the NaNo I started in November 2004 took me more than two years to finish and still needs a rewrite. In my opinion, National Novel Writing Month exists primarily to give people permission to start a novel -- and I'm past that point. I may not be past many points in my career as a novelist but I'm past that one.

technorati: writing, National Novel Writing Month, NaNoWriMo