Who You Gonna Call

This is one of those things that’s sort of hard to believe, but it’s true. The CIA has a “Terrorist Buster” logo. 

Now, I’m not the first to point this out, but…

Actually, though, I think Princess Sparkle Pony nailed it by calling it the “Beware of Darkies” logo. 

It seems to have popped up all over the place today, but apparently has been around for a couple of years. Is it working? 

Keeping an Eye on Things

Comcast: It Gets Worse

I wrote the other day about how Comcast is now blocking P2P services – including legal uses of them – by tricking P2P seeding sources into shutting down. Via Dwight Silverman – another service you can add to Comcast’s list of evil things that must not be allowed is Lotus Notes. 

If you’ve a Comcast customer who’s had trouble getting into your work email on Notes, sounds like the easiest fix might be switching providers. 

They are truly a devious, shitty company. 

Kylie in Old Compton Street

You know, the Kylie Minogue thing just never took hold in gay America, but in Britain, it’s a whole other story.

Minogue’s most loyal gay fans campaigned for gaining permission to have a statue of the Aussie erected above the Old Compton Street.

A bronze model of the 39-year-old singer, which will be placed on an arch over-looking the street, will see her in gold hot pants.

“The Eros statue should be in Old Compton Street, not Piccadilly Circus. But we’re having our very own little goddess of love, in the form of Kylie,” The Daily Star quoted an insider, as saying.

“There are plans for a similar Kylie statue on Canal Street in Manchester. But London will be Britain’s first city to be blessed with her bronzed buttocks.

“We don’t want her bottom to be worn to a nubbin from daily rubbings from the superstitious and deviant, so we want her most famous area to be out of reach,” the insider added.

I will confess to just not getting it. Oh well.

Oh Albus, You Big Queen

It’s certainly not surprising that some folks are miffed by J.K. Rowling’s announcement that Dumbledore, the headmaster in the Harry Potter books, is gay…

One major anti-Potter crusader is Laura Mallory, a mother of four from Georgia, who made headlines earlier this month when she told the Gwinnett County Board of Education that the series was trying to indoctrinate children into the Wicca religion. In response to Dumbledore’s outing, Mallory told ABC News that the Potter series has “an anti-Christian agenda,” and, “this only further supports that.”

“My prayer is that parents would wake up, that the subtle way this is presented as harmless fantasy would be exposed for what it really is — a subtle indoctrination into anti-Christian values,” said Mallory. “The kids are being introduced to a cult and witchcraft practices.

“A homosexual lifestyle is a harmful one,” she added. “That’s proven, medically.”

Not surprisingly, conservatives at Saturday’s Values Voters’ summit in Washington also had some thoughts on the now controversial wizard.

“I feel like children’s books shouldn’t be political — they shouldn’t have political ties, they’re entertainment,” attendee Katie Beach said. “I think it’s pretty ridiculous for her to say that or to do that.”

There’s so much silliness here. 

First: having a gay character in book is “political,” we are told, by somebody who has made her religions – a chosen lifestyle, we should note – the center of her political beliefs. It’s one of the fundamental tenets of these folks – the simple observation that gay people exist is somehow a controversial thing. Even the KKK admits that there is such a thing as a black person. 

Second: this idea that fantasy books are a plot to turn kids into pagans or something. What a sad, drab world these folks inhabit, where imagination is such a threat. People are perfectly capable of imagining a world of magic and spells, or aliens, or a historical setting, without confusing that with reality. Even children – especially children. 

It’s very sad to think about these folks’ children, being raised to celebrate their own ignorance and having their capacity to dream and speculate drummed out of them. 

Third: they are getting worked up about the sexual orientation of a fictional character. That does shed some light on point two; apparently they are convinced their children are as stupid as they are. 

I have heard a few people comment that they thought Rowling’s comment was sort of strange, because the character’s gayness never figured into the books. That’s true, but most writers, when they create a character, have thought out a lot of aspects of the character’s life and personality that never show up in their fiction. 

It’s not unusual for a writer to create a broader sketch of a character with detail that never comes to light – but which does help the writer understand her character better, and thereby use the character in her fiction in a way that rings true. I have no idea if that’s the process Rowling uses, but it’s easy for me to suppose that she’s been sitting writing these books thinking of Dumbledore as the gay headmaster of Hogwarts for years without it ever coming up in the books. 

Let’s Try This Again

(OK, Blogger is being cranky but sort of working now so here we go.)

First of all, Teddy says Hi!

Back to the vet yesterday, because he keeps getting diarrhea, so we are on some new medicine in case some of the giardia is still lurking. Pumpkin, suggested by a helpful reader, does seem to help a bit. He’s been his happy crazy self, just having this digestive issue. Hopefully this will take care of it. The good news was that they did a skin scraping of his mangey spots and – no mites! So another week of the cream to be sure, but it looks a lot better (you can still see that bit of red on his snout in the picture).

It was a lovely day that I sort of whiled away. I did get to Target to get a bunch of crap; bad planning to go there on Saturday, between screeching whelplings and whiny people and people sitting blocking the way in the parking lot because if they just pulled into the empty space a little farther down, they’d have to walk another twenty seconds, I was annoyed by the time I got into the store. I really need to go there during the week when it’s calm.

In the parking lot, a woman was pleading with her son who kept wandering into the traffic lane. She was trying to bribe him to the car by offering him treats. Lady, how about “Get over here RIGHT NOW or else!” instead of “Honey, want a juice box?” It made me think of an article from Philadelphia magazine that MWK passed on to me after reading it on a plane, about how a whole generation of kids is being raised to be self-involved and in need of constant praise. (I can’t link to the article because the magazine’s site really sucks ass.)

Then at home I started playing with Photo Booth on my MacBook. It has fun effects!

Some days I am easily amused.

Then I dozed off on the couch. Yay Saturday.

Oh yeah, and I got a haircut, and my hair is nice and short again, and I look like my driver’s licence photo.

Saturday Stuff

There was going to be a cute post with pictures and everything here, but Blogger is broken – oh how surprising! Maybe tomorrow.

"And Jesus, don’t forget to wash behind your ears."

A local woman says Jesus has appeared to her in a dirty towel. 

A Houston woman says the face of Jesus is a message sent straight from God and left on a bathroom towel. And she’s not wasting anytime sharing her newfound discovery with others.

You may have heard of the shroud of Turin, purported to be the linen cloth in which Jesus was buried after he was crucified. It bears the image of a man’s body, who many say is that of Jesus. There’s a cloth in Houston that has no such historical significance, but relies on just as much faith. Lucille Lopez is a woman of faith.

She said, “This room has been where I come every morning, every evening.”

OMG, she goes into her bathroom every morning? Amazing.

I’m not sure why somebody being convinced that a stain on a towel is Jesus is newsworthy in the judgment of our local ABC affiliate; I bet there are lots of people all over this city seeing Elvis on a Kleenex or Jimmy Hoffa in an oil slick on the street; how about some news time for them?

Oh, right, it’s Jesus, which means the person seeing it is a person of deep faith, instead of just kind of crazy.

Credit Where It’s Due

Fairness makes me feel I should note this. I’ve written, here and on my marketing blog, about AT&T’s assorted heinous behavior, and how they seemed to be doing their best to make it very hard for anybody to order the $10/month DSL package that they are offering as part of their agreement with the FTC when they swallowed up BellSouth. 

Well, I just went through the process of helping my Dad order that very service, and it worked fine. We found it quickly on the web site, the order went through smoothly (through the used-to-be-BellSouth part of the company, his equipment arrived, and he is up and running with broadband.  

I still am not fond of AT&T but it seemed only fair to report that. 

Absolutely Comcastic

If you spend more minutes talking on your mobile phone than your plan allows for, you get charged more. If you run your air conditioning a lot and use lots of electricity, you pay for it. If you drive more than most people, you have to pay for the gas. And if you’re a Comcast customer and you use a lot more bandwidth than most broadband users, you… get stopped in your tracks. 

Comcast Corp. actively interferes with attempts by some of its high-speed Internet subscribers to share files online, a move that runs counter to the tradition of treating all types of Net traffic equally.

The interference, which The Associated Press confirmed through nationwide tests, is the most drastic example yet of data discrimination by a U.S. Internet service provider. It involves company computers masquerading as those of its users.

They’ve picked a rather deceptive way to do this:

Comcast’s technology kicks in, though not consistently, when one BitTorrent user attempts to share a complete file with another user.

Each PC gets a message invisible to the user that looks like it comes from the other computer, telling it to stop communicating. But neither message originated from the other computer _ it comes from Comcast. If it were a telephone conversation, it would be like the operator breaking into the conversation, telling each talker in the voice of the other: “Sorry, I have to hang up. Good bye.”

Note that this is not about piracy, though the applications they’re blocking are often used for that purpose. They are also used legally. And the same technology could be used to shut down Skype calls, non-Comcast television over IP services, or just about anything Comcast decides you shouldn’t be doing. 

Now, Comcast’s concerns about network use are perfectly legitimate; if a small number of users eats up tons of capacity, everybody else’s service degrades. There is, of course, a better way to deal with this: put a ceiling on how much you can use and charge extra if you want more. The power users would pay power user prices. Regular users (that would be almost everyone) wouldn’t. That would be honest, transparent, and fair – but this is Comcast, and those concepts are not part of their corporate culture. 

So, who thinks it’s a good idea to get rid of net neutrality and give companies like this more control over the internet traffic on their networks? 

Meanwhile, things like this – on top of Comcast’s inept customer service and generally crappy reliability – make it hard not to root for this Virginia lawbreaker who took out her frustrations with Comcast in a rather dramatic way, after going to their office to resolve a problem, being told to wait outside in the August sun for a supervisor, and then being told “Sorry, the supervisor just went home!”:

So, after stewing over it all weekend, on the following Monday, she went downstairs, got Don’s claw hammer and said: “C’mon, honey, we’re going to Comcast.”

…

Hammer time: Shaw storms in the company’s office. BAM! She whacks the keyboard of the customer service rep. BAM! Down goes the monitor. BAM! She totals the telephone. People scatter, scream, cops show up and what does she do? POW! A parting shot to the phone!

“They cuffed me right then,” she says.

Her take on Comcast: “What a bunch of sub-moronic imbeciles.”

Most companies try hard to get their customers to care about them, and fail. Not Comcast! Congratulations! You can’t buy that kind of word of mouth!