One of the bloggers at This Modern World got called in for jury duty, and that reminded me: so did I. That is to say that my father informed me on Skype that I got a notice in the mail telling me that I’d have to show up.

Fine with me, so long as they fork over the airfare.

It’s pretty interesting, but I guess that they don’t necessarily have a way of telling whether someone on the absentee ballot list is permanently residing overseas or if they’re just traveling abroad temporarily.

This is the second time I’ve been called in for jury duty–and the second time that my location has gotten me out of it. The first time it happened, I was called in to appear just a week or so after my planned move to another county. When I called the courthouse to tell them about this, the person at the other end joked, “Some people will do anything to get out of jury duty!”

Well, this time it’s not so close a call–I’ve been living in Japan for eight years straight (or will have been in two months), so nobody can accuse me of fleeing the country to avoid forty bucks a day.

One story in the press this week is about the supposed discovery of the tombs of Jesus, Mary Magdalena, and their conjectured son Judah. Behind it are the “Exodus Code” producers Simcha Jacobovici and James Cameron.

From what I understand, the tombs will be opened on live TV, whereupon ghostly apparitions will fly out, and James Cameron’s face will melt while Jacobovici’s head will explode.

Seriously, what the hell is with Cameron? He used to make awesome films. I guess he got all the money he needed after Titanic, and can do whatever the hell he wants now. I can understand why he went on a decade-long kick on deep-sea submersibles and just made documentaries about Titanic and related subjects–the guy probably just loved doing it and figured he’d focus on that.

But now Cameron seems to be behind a new string of Christian-themed movies-of-the-month, becoming a new huckster for cheap religion-masquerading-as-science crapola. A new hobby I can understand, but a Bible fetish and spurious claims of having proven the Red Sea parting or finding Jesus’ tomb… that’s straying well into wacko territory.

What happened, did a cult get their hands on him or something?

The U.S. Postal Service is hiking rates again, but is making a big deal out of its “Forever Stamps.” The stamps, to be sold at 41 cents, will suffice for first-class postage for as long as the USPS exists.

The problem: the price of stamps rises at about the same rate as inflation in general–meaning that you get no benefit from the purchase. In fact, since you could invest the money and make interest off of it instead of holding on to stamps, the stamps will turn out to be a bad idea–and that’s assuming that the stamps don’t get damaged or lost over time. True, it would end the annoyance of buying 2- or 3-cent stamps to add to your old first-class stamps whenever there’s a price increase, but you may end up paying a lot more for avoiding that annoyance than is worth it. (Really, a single trip to the post office every several years and having to put more than one stamp on a letter? Heavens to Betsy, however have we survived up until now?)

The thing is, keeping them long enough to get any “value” out of them means keeping them for at least 2-3 years minimum, the shortest probable span between price hikes for stamps. You’d probably have to buy 5 years’ worth or more to have any “effect,” and the longer they are kept, the greater the chance that a lot of those stamps will be lost in one way or another. Seniors may go for this idea in a serious way, meaning that when they die, the stamps may not even be redeemed. Meanwhile, the Postal Service makes interest off that money instead of you.

This seems to be part of a new trend in government to take on business-like tactics. Take the U.S. Mint, for example, and their series of State Quarters and now President Dollar Coins. The idea seems less and less about providing a simple, basic public service, and more and more to market the service in the best possible way to get people to spend their money to put more cash in the government’s hands.

I suppose the trend started (or at least accelerated) in the Lottery Boom a few decades ago, instituting a kind of Idiot Tax (or, alternatively, a Fantasize-About-A-Rich-Life Tax). Remember how the states rationalized it by saying that all or most of the proceeds would go to public schools? Naturally, that was yet another fraud: if school districts actually wound up getting any money, it was snatched right back away again by de-funding the districts’ original budget–taking money out of one pocket while your putting money into another.

And like the Stamp and Coin campaigns, the lotteries similarly are financially smart business propositions for the state governments, who of course pay out the money over 20 years (giving you the option to take a much-reduced lump sum). Th odds of winning are so small, you get cases like this where the guy who actually beats the astronomical odds doesn’t realize he’s won for a month and a half. Apparently, he rationally believed that he had a snowball’s chance in hell of winning, so irony stepped in and gave him the winning number.

In short, we seem to be seeing more and more get-revenues-quick marketing ploys executed by the government–ploys that probably get most of their money by getting people in the lower income brackets to buy into stupid ideas or otherwise throw their money away, into the hands of the government–which is steadily decreasing the tax burden of wealthy people. Add the fact that government is cutting services to lower-income citizens more and more, and you have an interesting combined effect.

So, what’s next? Government-sponsored Pyramid schemes? Casinos operated by the IRS? Privatized Social Security Accounts?

I’m not joking on that last one–it’s a pure gamble. The stock market gets depressed when you retire, and you’re SOL. But then, the attitude reflected by this new trend of Government-as-Sham-Business seems to be, “if you’re stupid enough to buy into it, then you deserve what you get out of it.”

…But I have heard that Bush is demanding a recount.

Sorry, I couldn’t help myself. But indeed Gore did win; An Inconvenient Truth won not only Best Documentary, but it also scored Best Original Song, “I Need to Wake Up” by Melissa Etheridge.

CNN has a predictable take on it; their headline: “Gore uses Oscar speech to plug environmental cause.” As if it were inappropriate. Well, duh he used the speech to plug the message. Gore wins an Oscar for making a documentary on the environment, you think he’s gonna talk about Britney Spears? The Oscar is a strong kind of public validation for his documentary and its message, the award stage is completely appropriate for that message.

The right wingers will, naturally, blow this all off as Doofus Al Gore getting kudos from ultra-liberal Hollywood, as if that’s enough reason to further entrench themselves in the belief that Gore is wrong, and that a Gore presidency would have been a disaster.

However, let’s look at two key pieces of evidence in plain sight. First, Al Gore did not just jump on the global climate change bandwagon yesterday. He was way ahead of the curve, trying to spread the word for the past three decades. As he makes clear in the documentary, he was turned on initially by evidence that greenhouse gas emissions and global temperatures were both rising at the same time; he studied the subject seriously, saw much farther than a lot of others on the subject, and has been vindicated by ever-growing scientific consensus that global climate change is real and is man-made.

This just a few weeks ago from the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change), a highly-regarded scientific organization made up of top scientists studying climate change:

• Warming of the climate system is unequivocal
• Most of the observed increase in globally averaged temperatures since the mid-20th century is very likely (greater than 90% likely) due to the observed increase in anthropogenic (human) greenhouse gas concentrations
• The probability that this is caused by natural climatic processes alone is less than 5%

It is becoming more and more clear that Gore was right on this all along. Early action to stem the crisis could potentially save the U.S. trillions of dollars down the road. The right wing’s reaction: let’s distort what he’s saying and ridicule him.

Second point: Al Gore saw the Internet coming, understood its value long before most others, and made its present form possible.

Gore saw the value of a high-speed national computer network as far back as the 1970’s (when the Internet was still in its infancy); in the 1980’s, when civilian use of the Internet was being defunded by the Pentagon, Gore pushed for it to be used beyond strict scientific research, and eventually got the “Gore Bill” passed–officially, the “High Performance Computing and Communications Act” of 1991, which was at the time aimed at creating “a high-tech ‘data superhighway'” that would “link computers in the nation’s research, education and military establishments” and “eventually will evolve into a universally available National Public Telecomputing Network that may be the successor to the telephone system, marrying the entertainment, communications and computer industries.” This act led to billion-dollar funding for the development of the Internet.

It is the contention of the creators of the Internet that Al Gore was instrumental to building the foundation of the Internet as we know it today; without the legislation authored and pushed by Al Gore, the Internet boom of the 90’s, with its value of trillions of dollars to the U.S. economy, would have been far less than it was.

The right wing’s reaction: twist Gore’s words taking credit for his actions, and ridicule him mercilessly.

So when the right wing derides Gore for winning an Oscar tonight, they’ll be right on the same track they’ve always been on.

The thing is, on two major subjects of great importance to our society, Al Gore was prescient, seeing the value of both issues decades before they gained popular acceptance.

Isn’t that a quality you would want in a leader? Take a look at George W. Bush. His major prediction about what is important was the invasion of Iraq, and on just about every single aspect of the operation including its overall necessity, he was dead wrong. The result: The United States has lost significant power as a world leader, the region is erupting into chaos, our military has been weakened to the point of breaking, terrorist organizations are thriving, and our country is paying in thousands of lives and hundreds of billions of dollars.

And the right wing lauds this man as a visionary and a hero.

Some dare to speak of Al Gore running for president. A tough sell in a Democratic field already choked with strong contenders, and more set to enter soon. Despite Gore’s clear vision and achievements, the public image of a man ridiculed is still strong, and Gore himself has said he would not run. The “Draft Gore” movement might have the right man and a strong will, and personally I would have a tough time finding anyone more capable than Gore to be president.

Unfortunately for us, that will probably not happen. Fortunately, however, Gore is still going to be around and very visible in pushing for a better world.

Just two years and thirteen days ago, I spotted a nice Red-flanked Bluetail in my neighborhood park:

It was nice, but it was also the less-colorful female. Today, I asked Sachi to go on a walk through that park again to see if we could spot one–and indeed we did. Or, I should say, Sachi did–she’s got sharp eyes. After a minute of her pointing out its location, I took a large number of shots–95% of which I couldn’t use because the bird was hiding in the shade, and most of the images (at only 1/15th of a second exposure) we too blurry. However, a few were good enough to print, and shows that we got a beautiful blue male in good color:

But here’s the best shot before it flew off:

Nice little birdie!

The interesting thing is that we saw Great Tits, a Red-flanked Bluetail, crows, bulbuls, a Dusky Thrush, Tree Sparrows, and a few Black Kites. That was the whole roster–and looking at my post from two years ago, that was exactly the list of birds I saw back then.

In the United States, sports stadiums have started changing names due to corporate sponsorship–note Candlestick Park in San Francisco, which has gone through the names 3Com Park and now Monster Park. But the names of the teams change only when a franchise moves to a new city.

In Japan, however, franchises are not awarded by location; you don’t really hear about a city getting a baseball team, rather a corporation getting one. Baseball teams take on whatever name the owners desire, which means that you’ve got names of the teams themselves morphing from one to another. I just saw a story about the Softbank Hawks, and thought, wha? They used to be the Fukuoka Daiei Hawks (Daiei is a supermarket chain), though when I first came to Japan, they were the Nankai Hawks (Nankai is a railway firm).

Other teams have similar name histories. The Swallows were originally the Kokutetsu Swallows (another railroad firm, this one the now-defunct JNR, the national railway corporation), then they were briefly the Sankei (newspaper) Atoms, then they became the Yakult (beverage) Swallows. The Yokohama Baystars started out as the Taiyo (?) Whales, became the Taiyo-Shochiku (alcoholic beverage) Robins, then the Taiyo Whales again, and then the Yokohama Taiyo Whales.

Then there is the Hankyu (railway) Braves, which became the Orix (financial group) BlueWave, which merged in a businesslike manner with the Kintetsu Buffaloes (formerly the Kintetsu Buffalo before the herd increased I guess, and before that, the Kintetsu Pearls, owned by the hilariously-named Kinki Nippon Railway) and became the Orix Kintetsu Buffaloes, later to be renamed the Orix Buffaloes.

One team name I particularly enjoy is the Nippon Ham (meat-packing company) Fighters, now the Hokkaido Nippon Ham Fighters. Often the name of the team is misinterpreted as the “Ham Fighters,” which I think is much better than just “Fighters,” myself.

One note: for a sport which claims to have acquired its own unique Japanese identity, the names are all English–including even the more-Asian-flavored names, the Carp and the Dragons. The Giants are sometimes called the “Kyojin” (Japanese for “Giants”), but that’s a nickname, not an official one. I have to wonder if that’s a rule or something, because you gotta figure that “Samurai” would be the perfect name for a Japanese team. However, Japanese people would find such names odd. What might appeal to English speakers would sound strange or even comical to Japanese–take the name “Ninjas,” for example. A Japanese person would laugh at any baseball team with that name.

In the meantime, you gotta have a scorecard to keep track of the name changes.

Go check out the YouTube video Paul found. It’s a hilarious Conan O’Brien piece. Yes, I know, I could embed it here myself. But Paul found it, and you should check out his blog anyway.

I went to Tokyo Port Wild Bird Park a little bit ago. I don’t know about the claim that December to February are the best birding months. I’ve heard people say that, and I did miss the first two months of that… but if February is any indication, I haven’t been missing much. Though I am focusing more on waterfowl, and maybe I should be looking for passerines much more. But there were a few birds there which provided interesting shots.

A Mejiro (Japanese White-Eye) in flight.

Common Buzzards at a distance. The second one is to the left of the first, very hard to see. Can you pick it out?

A Common Sandpiper came close.

An Oriental Turtledove, even closer. A beautiful bird, the Turtledove. Lovely plumage.

This photo just struck me as funny. The Cormorant drying off, the ducks on one foot, and the gull ducking. A lot of little stuff in a small arc.

And a Little Egret posing among the ducks.

There’s been so much on Iraq lately. Nine U.S. helicopters shot down in five weeks. Several blasts using chlorine trucks as dirty bombs as part of a new offensive by the insurgents. Six months of escalated deaths of our soldiers, averaging three of our best killed every day for half a year straight–the longest sustained death rate at that level in the war so far. The “Surge” forcing thousands upon thousands of servicemen and women to return for second and third tours of duty, hardship beyond reason.

And on the political side, Republicans using the filibuster to repeatedly block even the weakest joint non-binding resolution speaking out against Bush’s war, signaling even greater opposition should Democrats attempt to take any action stronger than that–and then Republicans whip around and lash out at Democrats for not having the “will” to do anything. All this while Dick Cheney becomes the Nth Bush ally to say for the Nth time that opposition to the Bush war is tantamount to treason, and how opposing whatever Bush dictates is equal to selling out to al Qaeda, an echo of the 2004 GOP line that a vote for Kerry was a vote for bin Laden.

Essentially, it boils down to the simple fact that Democrats would call the troops home today if they had the ability to do so. This is crystal clear. They do not have that ability; that is just as clear. Any such decision would be filibustered by Republicans in Congress, and even if it got past that, it would carry so few Republican votes that Bush would instantly veto it without the slightest worry over Congress overriding the veto. Just as Democrats are blamed for allowing the war by voting for the war powers resolution–despite the fact that had every Democratic senator voted “Nay,” Republicans still would have passed it, and nothing would have differed in terms of outcome. Democrats have been powerless to stop this since the beginning, and still are now–not for lack of trying, but because they do not have enough votes to carry through anything that would have any real effect. Witness that they cannot even pass a non-binding resolution in the Senate.

I would take bitter satisfaction in knowing that the catastrophic outcome which this will inevitably bring would be seen as Bush’s legacy, except for two things. First, it looks more and more like the Democrats will be blamed, for not stopping Bush even as Bush ironically is given a bye on this whole debacle for having strong convictions and doing it all in the name of the war on terror. And second, even if Bush does get the blame, it will be the worst sort of Pyrrhic victory, won with the blood of thousands of our people, hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians, the breakdown of what little stability there used to be in the Middle East, the decimation of our military, the soiling of our image in the world, the loss of our civil liberties, rights, and freedoms, and the stark division of our country at the hands of “a Uniter, not a Divider.”

It is sometimes hard to remember that things are bound to get better for no other reason than that they can hardly get worse.

Josh Marshall just posted this video, and I can see why. You really should watch it. It is Barack Obama in a discussion from November 2002, months before the Iraq invasion.

This guy foresaw the sectarian divisions, the long-term quagmire, and stated that had he been a Senator then, he would have voted “Nay” on the war powers resolution. This is before the war started, back when the country was still in high-flag-waving gear.

Is this not the sort of person you would want making decisions? People talk about his inexperience. Well, how many people with more experience than Obama made the wrong decision? I don’t care if Obama has only been a senator for less than two years.

Having good sense and the courage to say and do the right thing does not require experience, and having experience does not ensure good sense and the courage to say and do the right thing.

When I left home this morning, I knew it might rain tonight, so I wanted to keep the bulk of my backpack down. So I decided not to take my digital camera with me, figuring that there would not be anything worth photographing, anyway.

Soon after leaving home, traffic on a one-lane avenue was stalled. I was annoyed until I got around the bend in the road and saw what the problem was–and then I wished I had brought my camera. A truck carrying large boxes of toilet paper had lost a case. Ever see a road teepeed? Now I have. At the point of impact, the asphalt was half-carpeted in white. Better yet, it happened just as the road sloped down a hill, so rolls of toilet paper leaving long, white trails behind them streaked the road all the way to the bottom. All this as the truck’s two occupants scrambled to pick everything up.

I gotta start bringing my camera with me wherever I go. Or at least get a cheap second camera that’ll fit into a pocket.

Addendum: By the way, 1300 days of nonstop blogging today.

About a week and a half ago, the mainstream media went into high gear to play the right-wing’s fantasies about Nancy Pelosi “demanding” a very large and luxurious jet so she could ferry around her contributors, cronies and lobbyists. Of course, it turns out that the entire story was a completely fabricated lie based upon nothing more than the unimpeachable House Sergeant-at-Arms requesting a jet for Pelosi that could fly non-stop to San Francisco, thus avoiding security problems with unexpected layovers. The press, however, just went with the right-wing version of it, and went with it big. The lie was aimed at making Pelosi seem like some prima donna who didn’t want to demean herself to flying with the lowly public.

Certainly the media would act in exactly the same way if a major Republican figure were to be caught in a similar fiasco? Right? Right?

Well, guess what? It now looks like the newest Republican front-runner for the 2008 presidential race, Rudy Giuliani, has his own hot story involving a jet and demands for luxurious perks–and the media is studiously ignoring it. Right now, it’s running on The Smoking Gun web site. While I am not sure if it has been verified as 100% true yet, the media didn’t wait around for the Pelosi story to be verified, and The Smoking Gun has a pretty good track record on this kind of thing.

The five-page contract which outlines Giuliani’s requirements for his $100,000 speaking engagement includes an option for a private jet, and the agreement emphasizes in bold lettering that “the private aircraft MUST BE a Gulfstream IV or bigger.” Giuliani also demands a “pre-registered, large two bedroom, non-smoking suite with a king-size bed, on an upper floor, with a balcony and view if applicable.” In addition, four other rooms on the same floor are demanded for Giuliani’s entourage. Giuliani specifies exactly what sort of photographs may be taken (“without flash bulbs”), and that no “candid” shots be taken.

So, is the media going into a frenzy over the juicy details? Are they reporting for days on end about how Giuliani is a glutton for opulence and considers himself above the rest of us? The answer is, in a nutshell, no. One or two stories ran (Raw Story and NY Daily News) in major media outlets. That’s it. Google News produces a list of nearly a thousand stories when searching for “Pelosi jet,” but almost nothing on Giuliani’s story appears.

Now, I am not suggesting that Giuliani is out of line for demanding what he does. He’s a big name, and big names can draw big speaking fees with all sorts of great perks. Nothing wrong with that.

But the issue here is parity. A fabricated lie about the Democratic Speaker of the House (who is not running for anything at the moment) demanding a jet is swarmed over by the media, primarily on the basis that Pelosi is being a diva and insisting on swanky, queen-bee perks; a more-likely-true leak about Giuliani demanding a jet with his own classy perks is virtually ignored–despite the fact that this guy just announced that he’s running for president and is considered one of two front-runners for his party’s ticket. Yes, the Pelosi jet story concerned use of public funds–but that was not what the stories zeroed in on, rather it was Pelosi acting imperiously and demanding lavishness.

The clear conclusion, of course, is that there is nothing close to parity in the coverage here. It’s just that damned liberal media, at it again.

You may or may not have heard of a company called Steorn, which is hyping a product called “Orbo.” Despite the names, the company is not Norwegian–it’s Irish (though the name “Steorn” is Norwegian, meaning to guide or manage). And the product is not a new piece of computer equipment or fashion accessory, it is, supposedly, a source of free energy:

Orbo produces free, clean and constant energy – that is our claim. By free we mean that the energy produced is done so without recourse to external source. By clean we mean that during operation the technology produces no emissions. By constant we mean that with the exception of mechanical failure the technology will continue to operate indefinitely.

Okay, already your skeptic’s hat is firmly planted atop your head by now, no doubt. Interestingly, on the exact same page the above claim is made, the entrepreneurs themselves admit that “The sum of these claims for our Orbo technology is a violation of the principle of conservation of energy, perhaps the most fundamental of scientific principles.”

Every so often, you get claims like this. Sometimes it’s a promise of an invisibility cloak, other times it’s a car that gets 200 miles to the gallon, but usually it’s like the contention above–a free, clean energy technology which is also potentially a perpetual-motion machine, or close enough to one.

The interesting thing about this claim is that it’s just odd and bold enough to make your tinfoil hat slip ever so slightly off-center so that the bozo rays from this company make you wonder just a tiny bit if there’s actually something to it.

And admit it: you want it to be true. It would be so cool.

Here’s the deal: these guys published a full-page ad in The Economist (which likely cost $160,000) last year claiming that they developed a technology which provides a “free, clean, and constant energy” source. They have invited skeptics and scientists to come and review the technology first-hand. The firm’s CEO is not some conspiracy-theory nutcase (he says he doesn’t believe in them), is not claiming that anyone is trying to suppress their findings, and promises to reveal and license the technology later this year after the independent scientific review has been completed. The noises they’re making sound very much on-the-level (“until this thing is validated by science we won’t be doing anything commercial with it”), and their process of validation seems like they’re willing to pony up the goods for independent verification.

Facts like these are what makes the claim intriguing. On the other hand, the company has released no firm explanation or proof of the new technology; it has a very shaky financial history; and, let’s face it, the technology they claim to have would violate the first law of thermodynamics. That being the case, a patent for the whole technology cannot be granted, which is convenient as a way to avoid revealing the whole technology in a patent application.

Nevertheless, the claims are enticing if vaporish:

Sean McCarthy stated in an RTE radio interview that, “What we have developed is a way to construct magnetic fields so that when you travel round the magnetic fields, starting and stopping at the same position, you have gained energy… The energy isn’t being converted from any other source such as the energy within the magnet. It’s literally created. Once the technology operates it provides a constant stream of clean energy.”

In a demonstration to The Guardian at Steorn’s office, a computer display reported the device to have an efficiency of 285%. The article goes on to say that Steorn claims to have measured efficiencies up to 400%. The device has been reported to be an all-magnet motor, with no electromagnetic component. Steorn also claims that according to its research the device can be scaled to almost any size, powering anything from a flashlight to an airplane.

None of these claims have been independently verified.

There is a huge chance that these guys are very clever scam artists who are trying to get investors to pour money into a fake technology which they can claim was an honest but failed attempt at a free and clean energy source (apparently, they have raised two and a half million euros, though that was before the public announcement–they claim that since the announcement and until the results of the validation are complete, they will raise no new investments).

But in the same way you hope that this time your lottery ticket will have the winning numbers, you find yourself willing, even if just a little bit, to suspend disbelief and imagine what it would be like if these guys were actually on the level and actually had something here.

Here’s the CEO of the company talking about the whole shebang:

Unlike his comedy bit from way back, this time Al Franken is running for something. And despite the media attention he’s been getting, I think that he has a much better chance of winning Paul Wellstone’s seat than the commentators give him credit for. If you haven’t listened to him on his radio show for more than a few minutes at a time, then you don’t know the reason why. If you have listened to him extensively and you still don’t like him or think he’s electable, then we simply disagree–because I think he’s got a lot going for him. Watch the recorded message above and you’ll get a bit of an idea why.

Despite his usual placement in media coverage as being opposite Rush Limbaugh, Ann Coulter, and Bill O’Reilly (he has to cover those three and sometimes more, because there are for too many more conservatives with their own shows or widespread coverage than there are liberals), Franken is not equal to them in temperament. In fact, his character is as opposite theirs as his politics is; instead of arrogant and fatuous like Limbaugh, Franken is generally mild-mannered and self-effacing; instead of being outrageously offensive to bait the other side, he is simply opinionated, and can get along with people he doesn’t agree with quite well (as he did with Arianna Huffington when she was still a conservative); and unlike O’Reilly, Franken does not have a complete disregard for the facts, nor does he treat anyone like garbage. Franken may be painted as some ultra-liberal nutball by the right wing, but then again, the right wing tries to paint every liberal as an ultra-liberal nutball. It’s their way of saying, “we hate your guts because you disagree with us.”

But Franken is also heartfelt and caring. His concern for the soldiery, for example, is something which is impossible to miss. Whereas right-wingers tend to disregard and mistreat the troops they use as political props, Franken is a long-time entertainer for the troops, having done at least seven USO tours, including at least two that went through Europe to Bosnia and Kosovo in ’99 and 2000, and several in Iraq and Afghanistan, the last one being just a few months ago. He honestly and strongly respects the troops, and when he sees them as being mistreated, he gets very, very emotional about it. And one can’t simply dismiss this as a political hopeful posing–unless you figure Franken has been posing for eight years now at least.

Despite his books which devastate Limbaugh and O’Reilly, listening to Franken, you don’t get the feeling that he’s mean-spirited in the least (unless you are Limbaugh or O’Reilly, one must suppose). Franken’s a satirist. He lampoons people he sees as pompous and overbearing for a living. But you don’t come away feeling like he truly hates their guts and wants to hurt them, not like when you listen to Limbaugh and O’Reilly themselves. He’ll say what he says with wryness and a chuckle, and will just as easily slip into Stewart Smalley and make fun of himself.

But none of these are the best reasons for hoping that Franken makes it into a senate seat. The best reason is his intellect. Not that he’s never made a mistake or been wrong about anything. Rather, the man has an open mind and most importantly a respect for the facts. He doesn’t just blow out commentaries without knowing what he’ talking about, and when he gets something wrong–usually minor details if anything–he quickly and readily admits it and moves onward. He is smart, and doggone it, people like him.

Well, not all conservatives, to be sure.

The thing is, Franken gets it. He understands what’s important. He understands the issues, and you can bet on his making the move he feels is right, not the move he feels is politically sound.

A few articles on him have voiced concerns over celebrity politicians, especially Jesse Ventura, his having been a Minnesota pol himself. But Ventura was a brassy showman–you could tell before he entered office that it would be about Ventura being a star. It’s impossible to even imagine Franken would be like that. Franken is more like the politician you’d like to see in office, but got sidetracked by a career as a comic.

If Franken doesn’t make it through the primaries as the Democratic candidate, then it’ll be the party’s loss; if he doesn’t get elected to the Senate, then it’s a loss for Minnesotans and the rest of us. This is a good guy. A wiseass, but still, a good guy.

Something that I just noticed: spammers are now adding a new tactic to their spamming: searching my blog. Not with Google, but rather using my own blog’s internal software. My blog’s internal search engine records the searches done by visitors; usually it just reads search keywords like “nova drug arrest,” “hypnotoad,” “right eye twitching,” or “google video,” to name four legitimate searches done in the past few days.

However, I am now seeing a few hundred searches performed every week which look for spam keywords; apparently, the spammers have automated programs access my blog’s search engine script to look for spam terms they have undoubtedly tried to get past my filters in comment spam. In the past one week, 127 searches were made for URLs for legitimate sites (usually educational addresses), with words like “viagra” or “cialis” tacked onto the end. Another 44 searches were made directly for the spam terms themselves, like “used rolex,” airline flight tickets cheap airline tickets,” or even strings like “This excellent site!!! Want you good luck!!!” (clearly one of the fake compliments posted riding a spam link).

Apparently, Google ain’t good enough for them. Now they have to directly access the blog’s own search engine script to see if their spam has stuck. Which, of course, it hasn’t. In the same 1-week period, SpamLookup blocked 1,681 comment spam. MT-Blacklist blocks a lot more than that–between 1,000 and 1,500 on any given day. MT-Blacklist blocks spam which matches the blacklist filter; SpamLookup stops the rest that get through, usually on the basis of having URLs or recognized spammer IP addresses, or whatnot.

But to the best of my knowledge, out of 2,301 blog posts and 5,513 comments over the past four years minus a few months, not a single shred or hint of spam exists on this blog. That ain’t gonna stop ’em from continuing their barrage, of course.

Steve Job’s polemic on DRM drew many responses, but they’re essentially all the same: full of hot air and horse manure. As a representative sample, here’s the one from Fred Amoroso, CEO & President of Macrovision, a company that specializes in the production of DRM schemes:

DRM is broader than just music —
While your thoughts are seemingly directed solely to the music industry, the fact is that DRM also has a broad impact across many different forms of content and across many media devices. Therefore, the discussion should not be limited to just music.

He’s right. DRM should be removed from all media, not just music. DVD region encoding, for example, is in place for no other reason than to defeat the open marketplace and gouge customers in each region for as much as they can be shaken down for. And Jobs’ argument applies equally well to all DRM: it can be and regularly is broken, and so DRM, in every form, does nothing but hobble honest, paying customers so that the companies applying the DRM can cheat them. The entire argument that DRM has anything at all to do with piracy is bunk–it is clearly and simply about controlling media after a customer has bought it so that the paying customer must pay the highest price possible, and pay that price again and again for the same media.

DRM increases not decreases consumer value —
I believe that most piracy occurs because the technology available today has not yet been widely deployed to make DRM-protected legitimate content as easily accessible and convenient as unprotected illegitimate content is to consumers. The solution is to accelerate the deployment of convenient DRM-protected distribution channels—not to abandon them.

This is just one of the many places in this argument where Macrovision’s bias as a DRM-producing company shows through. The point Jobs made, the point which is absolutely and glaringly true and real, is that DRM will never work. So long as there is a clear picture and clear sound output at one end, pirates will always find a way around whatever DRM scheme is thrown at them. Macrovision just wants to get the perpetual contracts to make yet another DRM scheme when each successive one is defeated.

Without a reasonable, consistent and transparent DRM we will only delay consumers in receiving premium content in the home, in the way they want it.

There’s a bald-faced lie if there ever was one. The way customers want it is without DRM. What Amoroso is saying here is supposedly that DRM can allow a customer to choose between delivery systems and viewing devices. What he really means is that without DRM, a customer would actually be able to view media without restrictions–i.e., you buy it, you own it–and that’s the last thing Macrovision or the media producers want. They want to charge the customer for the same media again and again and again, as many times as they can. Pay once for viewing over cable, again for renting, again for buying to watch on TV, again for buying to watch on your iPod, and so forth and so on.

Abandoning DRM now will unnecessarily doom all consumers to a “one size fits all” situation that will increase costs for many of them.

Yeah, customers would really hate owning something outright after paying for it, without restrictions about how how and where and how often they can play it. That would suck. What Amoroso is probably talking about, however, is the idea that without DRM, one high price would have to be paid instead of many small prices. Which, of course, is BS. It all tracks back to the idea that somehow media can’t be made available without DRM–that if even one version is free and clear, it will ruin all other sales. But since most media is sold without DRM, and all DRM is breakable, and yet the media producers are still making many, many billions in a lucrative business, that’s clearly bull.

Besides which, it does not mean that DRM must be universally applied. Want to DRM a rental movie which is only intended to play 2 or 3 times? Fine. If I rent it, then I don’t own it, so DRM away; I don’t expect rental material to be permanent, or else I would wonder why NetFlix wanted their DVD back. You think that DRM is necessary for the subscription music services, where people pay for access and not ownership? Again, fine–if ownership stays in your hands, you may DRM till the cows come home. But if I pay to own the media, then keep your grubby little DRM paws off of it, thank you very much. I just paid your highest price, the “one size fits all,” and now it’s mine.

In fact, Amoroso’s statement itself suggests that the highest price to be paid deserves no DRM. The “one price fits all” he mentioned must be the highest possible price, and that price is for outright ownership–and Amoroso said plainly that such a price would be tied to “abandoning DRM.” Thanks, Fred! You just made Steve Jobs’ case for him.

DRM will increase electronic distribution—

… Quite simply, if the owners of high-value video entertainment are asked to enter, or stay in a digital world that is free of DRM, without protection for their content, then there will be no reason for them to enter, or to stay if they’ve already entered. The risk will be too great.

You mean like every single movie and TV show now made, which are all transferred eagerly to DVDs which have either no DRM, or DRM that is so easy to break that there is no practical difference? What horse crap. All music and all video is already in a DRM-free world, in that every single piece of media can be separated from DRM easily and effortlessly by pirates, which is supposed to be the whole purpose of DRM, right? And yet all these media producers just can’t wait to release their material because of the immense profits waiting for them despite the “devastating” effect of piracy (which, of course, is little or no effect at all).

In short, adding DRM will not increase the release of media at all, for the simple reason that all media which can be released, is being released already. You can’t increase the amount being released when everything is being released. And with DVD sales now exceeding box office revenues, the suggestion that movie studios would pull out of the DVD market if DRM were not available is so ludicrous as to be laughable.

DRM needs to be interoperable and open –

No need to go over this–the paragraph is simply a swipe at Steve Jobs, daring him to license FairPlay, with the insinuation that he’s the one ruining things by running a monopoly.

The rest of the statement is more PR gobbledygook, essentially saying that a reliable and pirate-proof DRM can be achieved (wrong), and the good people at Macrovision are just the people to do it. Blah blah blah.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: DRM has no relation to piracy, zero. It’s about shaking down paying customers for more. It’s like the guy who ties a string around a quarter so that after the vending machine accepts it, he can yank it back out; the content producers want to use DRM as the string around the media they “sell” to you, so that after you pay them for it, they can still yank it back and keep charging you for it.

One and a half years ago, I made the decision to buy a new 1.67 GHz G4 PowerBook, even though it had just been announced that Apple would switch to Intel. Part of that decision was based upon the announcement that the transition would begin one year later and might take another year before all the models had made the switch; that meant a potential 2-year wait for a high-end laptop to come out.

Another part of the decision has to do with my standard 3-year turnover with such purchases, and the idea that early adopters sometimes get burned with problems in the new hardware. I decided that if I bought a PowerBook G4 in June 2005, I would then wait 1-2 years for a new Intel model to come out, then another year or so for the second-generation model to be released, and that would mean a smooth transition.

One other factor that motivated me was that I was, at the time, stuck with an 800MHz PowerBook G4 that was way too slow for me, and was itching to upgrade. So I made the decision to go for the 1.67 GHz G4.

Well, Apple switched to Intel way faster than anyone anticipated; in fact, the MacBook Pro was one of the first new Intel models to come out, in January of 2006, just six months after my purchase. Furthermore, there were no significant reports of problems with the new hardware, so early adopters weren’t really burned.

So, a year after the MacTels came out, I’m saddled with a G4 PowerBook that will have to last me for another year and a half. Not the first wrong move I’ve ever made, that’s for sure.

But just yesterday, I came across an article that caught my attention. The story was on the excellent resale value of Macs, something that helped me make the decision to get this G4 PowerBook in 2005: I was able to sell my aging 800 MHz machine for ¥80,000, which subsidized maybe 30% of my new purchase. My current PowerBook now has a resale value of $975. At almost the same time as I found the first article, I saw a report on refurbished MacBooks, where a top-of-the-line black MacBook model is selling for $1300. That got me to thinking. A refurbished MacBook with a new 1-year warranty could very easily outshine my old, out-of-warranty PowerBook, and it would cost me a lot less than a brand-new computer would.

Hmmm…

Of course, there’s more to it than that. The models are fairly different from each other. I’d have to give up my 15″ screen for a 13.3″ one; however, the smaller screen would have nearly the same resolution, and perhaps better contrast & brightness, so that’s kind of a wash. The MacBook has no PC Card slot, which for me is a bit of a big thing as I always use that to load my digital camera images via a Compact Flash card reader. However, I could just bite the bullet and start using the camera-to-computer USB cable like most people use (I just don’t like to carry cables around). The new MacBook also has an inferior graphics card (an Intel GMA 950 versus the G4’s Radeon 9700–I think the Radeon is much better, I’ll have to research that). The MacBook has fewer ports, but none that I’d miss; the FireWire 800 port is the only one not matched, and I never use that anyway. Also, the MacBook’s DVD burner is 6x speed, as opposed to the G4’s 8x–a difference I’d hardly notice–just as I’d never use the MacBook’s dual-layer option.

These disadvantages are minor, however, compared to the plusses of the MacBook. First, it has a 2.0 GHz Core 2 Duo processor, which is a huge leap ahead of the 1.67 GHz G4. The MacBook also sports a 4MB L2 cache and 667 MHz system bus, compared to the G4’s weak-ass 512 KB cache and 167 MHz bus. The hard drive is bigger (120GB vs. 80GB). The MacBook also comes with an iSight camera, one of those magnetic power adaptors, and might even have the upgradable WiFi-n option (I’d have to look that up as well). The MacBook is also smaller and a little lighter.

Additionally, the ability to run Windows using Parallels would be a huge thing, as I teach Windows in my Computer course and XP under Virtual PC on an aging G4 just isn’t cutting it. Using Parallels would be a major improvement for me.

The MacBook comes with Apple’s crappy new 2-chip RAM arrangement, with 1 GB built-in, meaning that if I want to match my current 1.5 GB of RAM, I’d have to shell out close to $90 for a 1GB replacement chip, or $180 if I wanted to go for 2GB (which is likely).

SofMap says that they would pay ¥108,000 ($900) for the G4 I have now. That’s their top range and could be reduced if they find anything they don’t like, but this machine is in good shape and even has an extra GB of RAM inside. If I tried to sell the computer through ads, I might get an extra ten thousand yen or two.

The refurbished MacBook is $1400 including tax. Add $70 for shipping from the U.S., and $180 for new RAM, and it comes to a whopping $1650. That would make the difference $750 (or $590 to $670 if I can get a better price by selling via an ad)–more than a thousand dollars less than the same un-refurbished MacBook would cost with the same configuration ($1812, add $70 for shipping).

This idea has occurred to me just now, and this blog post is kind of a part of my rumination process on the issue; I am still pretty far from making a final choice, and have some looking-into to do (e.g., are there refurbished MacBooks here in Japan and for how much, etc.). I’d love your feedback as well, of course, and any alternate ideas or information.

Well, in case you had some doubt, here’s proof that conservatives are not just trying to “protect marriage,” but in fact are aggressively trying to bash gays. Kevin Drum notes a report on one consequence of Michigan’s “defense of marriage” law, which stated “The union of one man and one woman in marriage shall be the only agreement recognized as a marriage or similar union for any purpose.” At the time, it was sold as simply keeping gays from marrying. But now, it has been used by the Republican state attorney general to actively ban any state-run institution from offering spousal benefits to gay people. It looks like it’s going to be upheld and that next year, gay people who receive such benefits will be cut off.

Now, consider that for a moment. The idea that allowing gays to marry will somehow harm the institution of marriage is already a grotesquely transparent excuse for homophobia. But to accept this new attack as anything but pure gay bashing would suggest that there are actually people out there who would rethink the idea of heterosexual marriage because the state of Michigan extends family support benefits to gay people.

Even the most hardcore fundamentalist bigots would not be able to suppress their gag reflex upon trying to swallow that particular throbbing foot-long delivery of homophobic pseudo-logic.

Here’s a video clip from Fox’s new show, The 1/2 Hour News Hour. Intended to be the right wing’s answer to The Daily Show, you can see that they ripped off the studio design, camera moves, music style, and even the feel of the graphics directly from the Comedy Central show. Unfortunately, they couldn’t rip off a good sense of humor or a talented host.

The clip is almost painful to watch. The best gag they have is the name of a magazine for Barack Obama: “BO.” That’s about as good as it gets. But the bad jokes are not what’s painful–it’s the laugh track. During the in-studio news desk bits, the laughter comes from a live audience, but it is clearly forced, and sounds angry; for example, when Obama is stuck with a barb, the laughter seems to come mostly from three or four conspicuously loud men in the audience, one of whom shouts, “Yeah!!”

But during the video piece, the laughter is clearly canned. Aside from being very different in quality than the live-audience laughter a few moments before, each burst of laughter sounds nearly identical, and artificially timed. There is also too much effort to shove each joke in your face: in the piece, the “BO” magazine has five gag headlines; if The Daily Show makes such a mock-up, they might mention one or two and then comment on how people taping the show will be able to view the rest. On The 1/2 Hour News Hour, they painfully zoom in on every last one to make sure you don’t miss their cleverness, with the canned laughter punctuating each one, turning neatly to applause at the end.

The anchors themselves look like SNL “Weekend Update” rejects, reading their cue-card-driven conversation with less skill than an Academy Awards show presenter. The Daily Show became popular because Jon Stewart has real talent; this show is based rather on sheer political will in the absence of comic talent. And Stewart is not only clever, he also clearly enjoys himself and is open about the gags; the Fox hosts are rigid and posing, taking themselves as seriously as Colbert ironically pretends to. They lack the ability to project that we’re all having a good time, and come across more like amateurs reading cue cards with jokes they don’t quite get themselves.

As so many are pointing out, this show is not really a comedy show, it is a right-wing political attack show disguised as comedy. The Daily Show combs the news for anything that’s funny, and runs with that. They’ll go after anything stupid, a key strategy. If the Democrats can bolster their control of Congress and elect a president in 2008, you know that The Daily Show will shift focus onto them, simply because they’ll be in the news doing the most stupid stuff–and their liberal-leaning audience will still love the show. This new Fox show simply throws vicious barbs at Democrats; were the Republicans to take over Congress again and get a Republican in the White House in 2008, the show would just scrape deeper and deeper into the crap barrel for something angry to throw at what little there was to say about Democrats. They’re not going after anything stupid, they’re going after anything liberal. If Jon Stewart took the same strategy in the other direction, he’d fall flat and people would stop watching.

The question now is, will the show were to last for more than a few months. It’ll certainly gain the hardcore crowd that loves Ann Coulter and Rush Limbaugh, but it will never gain the much broader audience that Stewart and Colbert enjoy. If it stays on the air for more than just the short time it’ll take for people to figure out it sucks, it’ll be because Murdoch and Fox are subsidizing it in the hope that one day it’ll catch on–like Bill Gates is doing with the Zune.

But just in case you want to see more really bad comedy, here you go.

In Japan, roads can be pretty narrow, and it’s not uncommon to find a street which is so narrow that you can hardly believe it’s even a one-way street, and then you realize it’s used for two-way traffic. Wide roads exist, but they are few and far between. A three- or four-lane road is fairly hard to find in Japan, with highways (expressways) being no exception to that rule. Commonly, two lanes is a wide thoroughfare in Japan, and most of the major traffic arteries in Tokyo are two lanes almost all the way.

So naturally, truckers make parking lots out of them. I see this pretty much every day on the way to work. I take Route 20, or Koushu Kaido, one of the major east-west routes going through western Tokyo Prefecture. And on the stretches where there are not many businesses, trucks are commonly parked along the side of the road, their drivers taking a nap or break or something. Here’s one I spotted yesterday. In the photo, with time frozen, it’s kind of hard to see that the purple truck on the left is not moving (I should have taken a longer exposure to blur moving traffic), but you can see its parking lights are on. Also note the no-parking sign at top left.

And no, there are no construction sites nearby to explain why they’ve stopped at that location–no unloading is going on, nothing. They’re just parked there. While this happens mostly on the major roads, I’ve seen it on most two-lane streets that I regularly drive on.

This of course forces all traffic for about a hundred meters or more behind the truck to merge into a single lane, and I have often seen three or four trucks parked like this along a few hundred meter’s stretch of road, essentially making a major boulevard into a one-lane street for a considerable length–enough to cause traffic jams.

And, as is usual for this kind of thing in Japan, nobody seems to mind or care or complain. Certainly the police never do anything about it.