Image taken by Mumbai resident Vinukumar Raganthan

Alexis came home from work and asked if I’d heard what was happening in Mumbai. We turned on the BBC feed on NPR and listened to the awful news coming in for a bit. Hours later, I checked back in via the NYTimes and got sucked into reading some of the eyewitness accounts on CNN, watching a live news feed from India and then, most moving and impressive of all, finding a Flickr feed from Mumbai resident Vinu of the horror. If you haven’t seen it, go look his pictures from last night. It is one of the most important works of journalism I’ve seen.

As a news junky who still harbors dreams of working in a news room for a major national daily, I can’t resist posting this slide show of front pages from around the country today courtesy of HuffPo. I do recognize the irony of loving actual newspapers (I have a collection of historic front pages from my lifetime) juxtaposed with posting about them online.

Interesting news from the LATimes today. Gary Truedau is the creator of the comic Doonsebury. He penned a strip to run on Wednesday that predicts an Obama win. The article is about editors across the country hemming and hawing as they decide whether or not to run it. (Since the comics pags goes to press in the afternoon, there’s no way of knowing if it will be accurate or not, for sure.) I like the story just because it is an interesting take on the election and as Trudeau himself says, he’s putting himself on the line, not editors.

The editor of the LATimes talks about his thoughts on the subject on his blog. He’s got the right answer, I think, and Trudeau makes an excellent point in update response:

If Obama wins, I’m in the flow and commenting on a phenomenon. If he loses, it’ll be a massive upset, and the goofy misprediction of a comic strip will be pretty much lost in the uproar.

But my favorite bit of the piece is the reaction of the McCain camp (never mind the fact that they even GAVE a reaction comment):

From the John McCain camp, spokesman Tucker Bounds said: “We hope the strip proves to be as predictive as it is consistently lame.”

That’s not pathetically angry at all, is it? Kinda sums it all up in a nutshell.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the presidential election (shocking, I know) and I’ve got to tell ya, I’ve been worried. Although I believe wholeheartedly that Barack Obama will be an excellent president, I don’t think that he’s been a terribly good campaigner. Sure, he inspires millions and got the nomination, but it took him an entire primary process and he almost didn’t get there. And in a year when pretty much everyone hates Bush, he should be smashing the Republican nominee. And yet he isn’t.

Now, I appreciate the fact that the problem with his campaining is that he is trying to get elected on the issues rather that by attacking his opponents. I love that he wants Americans to think and doesn’t pander to the lowest common denominator. But, let’s face facts folks, this is America and most Americans are stupid. Mostly, we vote based on soundbites gleaned from 2-minute pieces on cable news and hit pieces published by partisan “new-media” outlets like HuffPo and FoxNews.

So as much as I like to have a candidate who I believe to be smart, sharp and willing to campaign on the issues, I want one who can also play the game, effectively, and win, so that we can all realize his potential. That’s why I like this new ad. It cuts to the chase and let’s McCain/Palin have it. I hope for more like this, as well as hard hitting speeches from Biden and Obama as well as clear policy explanations.

Shocking that they would do this, I know, but for some reason, the Republicans thought it was appropriate to show the 9/11 attacks at their convention this week. Something that, as Keith Olbermann points out, if the media or anyone else did, they would attack.

Please, god, let Obama win. Please.

I get so angry when I hear Republicans talk about Obama as an elitist. People have such a skewed vision of who is actually looking out for the best interests of the people who need the most help these days, and I just don’t understand that.

McCain is a rich, lying, old white man who wants nothing more than the power that comes with the presidency. Of course, Obama wants power too, but I honestly believe he has the best interests of the majority of Americans at heart: That is, those of us who make less than six figures a year, work hard everyday and feel blessed to own even one home, let alone eight.

Here’s an excellent video made by the AFL-CIO and the SEIU about McCain’s elitism in the wake of the foreclosure crisis. I hope it makes you think twice about voting for this man who says one thing and does another or, in some cases, says exactly what he thinks and somehow makes the people who he will trample on the most think he cares for them. Watch it, the please pass this video on.

Google, as well all know, has a motto that makes it seem like the good guy next door: “Do No Evil.” But when one looks at their business model–based as it is in collecting as much information about its users as possible–it’s easy to come to the conclusion that even if they have yet to do something evil with it all, one day, someone will be tempted. Even more worrying is that our government–with the new FISA law, National Security Letters and the PATRIOT Act as evidence–seems to have a motto of “Do A lot of Evil,.” And it can force Google to give up all that information without you or me ever knowing.

All of which makes me think that maybe using Google for my email, my web searches, my web site user tracking, my rss feeds and all the other services of theirs that I use is maybe not such a good idea. Enter one of my favorite radio shows, On the Media, and a piece about Google from last week’s show. During the piece, a plug-in for Firefox called TrackMe Not is mentioned. It’s a handy piece of software which sends Google a burst of fake searches each time you send your own search so Google never knows what it is you are searching for and what the program is searching for.

TrackMe Not doesn’t fix all the possible security lapses one encounters by using Google, and to be honest, they do such a good job that I am not likely to give up my gmail account or any of my other accounts with them, but this one bit of obfuscation is a nice tool to be using.

In other Google news, the next piece on the same OTM show was about the out of court settlement reached in the Pensacola obscenity case I wrote about. There’s some interesting angles to the argument brought up during the interview.

I took the image from grokdotcom.

Who would have thought that pool reports of lavish fund raising dinners for presidential campaigns (which I imagine are themselves tedious in the extreme) could be so entertaining?

There are oaks and Chestnut trees and then there’s the house, with four
Ionic columns and a slate roof and 17 windows across the front and the
Rockefellers apparently suffer no critical shortage of guest bedrooms.
It is a useful reminder that before the Gates and Bloomberg and Warren
B., there was old man John D. Rockefeller, who bequeathed successive
generations of descendants a truly astonishing boodle of money.

But I digress. The fundraiser was standard issue, if it’s Tuesday night
aren’t we dropping $28,500 per to dine with Barack? Your faithful
scribes sat outside in an air-conditioned van whilst drinks were
sipped. Then a staffer led us to an ante-room, where we noticed “The
Reclining Bather” by Pablo Picasso. Just a thought, but I’d place a
mid-two figures wager it was not a print.

Read more of last night’s pool report from the Obama fundraiser at the Rockerfeller’s and enjoy.

(via)

So I have a suspicion and I want your help to find out if I am right about it or not. I have a hunch that there’s at least one reporter at the New York Times who is playing a game and trying to work a certain phrase into articles. In a story today about new top-level domain names for the Web, the phrase “addle and elude” pops up out of nowhere.

Now while this is a wonderful turn of phrase–just say it a couple of times–it’s really not common nor is it terribly necessary. It also has a very similar feel to another phrase that was once the subject of a friendly competition between two reporters. Anyone who has heard the episode on This American Life called “Tough Room” knows the story of Malcom Gladwell and his efforts to put perverse and often baffling in as many stories as possible during a tenure at the Washington Post.

I have no proof about the phrase addle and elude, and in fact a search on the Times’ site turns up nothing and one on Google only gets this story, but doesn’t it just fit? Besides, couldn’t he or she (or they) be just starting?

Anyone who knows anyone at the Times want to enlighten me?

It’s an age-old question in the United States. Sure, the First Amendment guarantees freedom of expression, but the Puritanical interests in this country don’t think that should extend to material they think is obscene. In 1973, a case made it all the way to the Supreme Court that defined obscenity.

What’s obscene? According to the Supreme Court decision, in part, it’s up to the current standards of a community.

Right now in Florida, a court case is testing how obscenity standards are defined. According to The New York Times, a pornographic Web site operator is on trial for plying his trade (which, if you ever read this site or know me at all, you know I think is ridiculous). His defense is trying to show that, according to local community standards, what he is doing is not only acceptable, it’s a desired service. To do that, they’re using information on Internet searches gleaned from Google Trends:

In the trial of a pornographic Web site operator, the defense plans to show that residents of Pensacola are more likely to use Google to search for terms like “orgy” than for “apple pie” or “watermelon.”

Pretty smart. If you take a look at the image, it shows the popularity of the terms “surfing” (in blue), “orgy” (in red), and “Apple Pie” (in orange). “Surfing” is searched for more often than “orgy” but decidedly less so than “Apple Pie.” As the Times reports,

“We tried to come up with comparison search terms that would embody
typical American values,” Mr. Walters [the guy's lawyer] said. “What is more American than
apple pie?” But according to the search service, he said, “people are
at least as interested in group sex and orgies as they are in apple
pie.”

It’s still unclear whether the tactic is going to work, but I think it should. First, I don’t think the term “orgy” or “sex” or “bondage” need to rank higher than any other “non-offensive” term; they just need to be on the same scale to show an interest in smut by community members. If it is, how can it not
be acceptable by community standards?

Thus far the evidence has only been submitted in a deposition and the judge may rule that is not relevant to the case for any number of reasons. In my totally non-lawyerly opinion though, it’s pretty brilliant and is relevant. Apparently jurors tend to convict people for obscenity charges even though they themselves go home and consume porn and take part in other “salacious” activities, according to the article.

The jury in this case may do the same thing, even if this evidence is allowed, but it seems like there would be a pretty good shot at an appeal that could go pretty far. After all, if there is finally a reliable way to gauge the interest of a local community in “obscene” material without infringing on individuals’ right to privacy, then we don’t have to wonder what’s going on behind closed doors or rely on the supposed tastes of a random selection of 12 people anymore.