Accidental Blogger

Amazing High Speed Photos (Sujatha)

Enjoy!

My Vacation Hold

I will be leaving for India tomorrow and will return toward the end of the month. Unless I have something really interesting to report, I will not be posting during this period.  My co-authors will keep the front page refreshed as often as time permits. They may not be able to post daily or as frequently as I do. So please expect a slow down in the blogging rate during the month of October.

Irony of the Day (Joe)

Way back in the day (last October) I went off on Dozier Internet Law for its absurd website terms-of-use page, which made a number of laughable legal claims; these appear to me to basically be intellectual-property claims couched in contract context.  I was particularly impressed by the You May Not Link Here Clause: "we ... do not allow any links to our site without our express permission."

Well, one Accidental Blogger reader recently brought to our attention a new suit filed by Dozier, in which it will reportedly sue an internet user for not linking to its website.*  Nice!

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* I hope or assume that this description is an oversimplification.  Really don't care.  I just like the implication that you can be sued for linking to Dozier's stupid website or, in the alternative, for precisely the opposite.

John McCain suspends his campaign ...

.. and cancels his appearance on the Late Show with David Letterman, apparently because he has to rescue the economy from "cratering."  Asked Letterman: "What are you going to do if you're elected and things get tough? Suspend being president? We've got a guy like that now!"

What's going on?  The Christian Science Monitor speculates.

Match-o-Matic Test

Who's your candidate?  Take the test. I scored once for McCain - on immigration.

(Today is day 11 without electricity in my home)

Ethan Leib: Freakonomist

Fellow blogger and law professor Ethan Leib, whose views on friendship and the law were discussed here at some length a while ago has a gig as a columnist on NYT's Freakonomics blog. Ethan's first post is up and it is about the legal aspects of friendship, natürlich.  At least two more articles authored by Ethan will appear in the coming week. One of them will further expand on his thoughts on friends-in-law and the other will be about juries. Do visit Freakonomics and check out what Ethan has to say.

War on Smears (Sujatha)

We all know someone whose uncle's cousin's wife's brother-in-law forwarded them an email that conclusively PROVED that Obama is a Muslim (photos wearing turban! In Somalia-wherever on God's earth that may be!!1!) , or a Jew (photos wearing yarmulke! At the Wailing Wall!!1!), has black children, is the right-hand man of Bin Laden, leading to (but hardly ending with) the much discussed New Yorker cover that Ruchira referred to in her recent post 'Satire, Slander or no big deal' .

The latest is this is that Obama 'blew off' meeting with troops in Afghanistan to get to a basketball photo-op with the troops. Snopes.com, the motherlode of all internet rumor debunking, has gotten a flurry of responses regarding this and posted the details within barely 24 hours of the circulation of the smear, just as they had done regarding an email that mentioned Obama's words taken from his book distorted or out of context.

It's good to see the action-reaction pairs in the war on smears in action, that too all within a short time frame. If it continues at this pace, somebody is going to come up with an Obama-smear-widget and Obama-rebuttal-widget, just to make things easier for the campaign and its detractors.

Bloggers' Secrets (Sujatha)

Circa December 2006, a new meme started creeping around the blogosphere. It's hard to pinpoint the originator, but it is lost in the mists of the hoary internet past. No one is willing to take ownership of the first time this game of Blog Tag was started.

It is simple: Tell five secrets about yourself and then link to five other bloggers you know and then they have to tell five things you probably don't know about them.

And so on and so forth, propagating this to ever widening numbers of bloggers.

As an interesting variant on this meme, I'm trying it as an intra-blog game, but without the passing on of the blog tag. All authors on A.B., now present four or five secrets that you never knew or would have guessed about them. Believe them (or not)!

Andrew's Secrets:

1. I voted for Nader in 1996 (but not in 2000!)
2. As a solitary freelancer, I sometimes pass the time by inventing an elaborate inner life for my cat (as a Lacanian feminist, for instance).
3. In high school, my friends and I used to slide down the hills of a golf course on blocks of ice.
4. (Courtesy Anna)"I have a secret about Andrew to share (more fun than sharing my own): when he was a child, he was taken by his grandma and parents to an actual Catskills hotel, where he nearly fell out of his chair laughing at the terrible comedy show, leading to warm congratulations from alter cockers at nearby tables about young Andrew's fine sense of humor."

Anna's Secrets:

1. When I started school, the teacher called home concerned that my loud,assertive voice meant that I had a hearing problem. I do not.
2. I co-directed a radio show in high school called, "Eclecticity is almost as fun as inventing words." We played everything from Alberta Hunter to the Pixies to A Tribe Called Quest. One time we received an irritated call from the public because we'd taken a smoking break while playing an 8-track Mormon public service announcement about STDs, which therefore played on a 15 minute endless loop.
3. When I was 22, I moved to Italy, where I co-founded a life drawing group and volunteered at a summer camp for people with developmental disabilities. As a result, my Italian includes useful expressions like "for the 15 minute pose, I'm using watercolor on packing paper" and "please don't go in the pool without floaties."
4. In my mind, I belong to a boys club that includes Ernest Borgnine, Dr. John, and  Dr. Lonnie Smith. I don't think this would actually make for a good club in real life, but I love those guys.
5. While jogging, I often compose letters in my mind to people with whom I'm no longer in touch.

Dean's Secrets:

1. Used to make beads for a living.
2. Worked at Oxford University. (I would be more specific--I worked at the Bodleian Library at OU--but might that be too telling a hint?)
3. Performed in a band introduced live by a popular radio DJ as "the ultimate in embarrassment rock."
4. Portrayed a clothespin, the lead character in a children's play.
5. Reverse-shoplifted with friends, i.e., created fake product and smuggled it into stores.

Sujatha's Secrets:

1. I have a knack for getting things(software, computers, appliances,etc.) to work, by hook or crook, or even hairpin, on occasion. I firmly believe that there is nothing that a hairpin cannot accomplish, from the task of a box cutter to picking locks or subbing for a stiletto.
2. Despite my professed fondness for classical music (Indian and Western), I do nod off to sleep after about an hour of listening to concerts. Advancing age, fatigue or boredom- you be the judge!
3. If you met me at a noisy party, and I seem to nod in blissful agreement with you no matter how provocative your assertions, it's not due to your silver tongued persuasion, but tinnitus which prevents me from hearing what you are saying in the first place.
4. I'm a Buddha wannabe, in my spare time (between yelling at kids, blogging, reading and work). Try reading 'The Power of Now' by Eckhart Tolle when kids barge in on you with a gazillion requests- you can see how rapidly I will achieve Buddha-hood. Probably after the next 100 lifetimes, I guess.
5. I am deathly afraid of  mice and rats, ever since I thought I saw one nibbling on my toes when I napped in my grandmother's village house as a kid. So based on the Chinese proverb reasoning from Ruchira's cat quote( "He who dislikes the cat, was in his former life, a rat."), that might indicate that I was, in a former life, an elephant.

Ruchira's Secrets:

1. Although I am more comfortable reading and writing English, I count and do mental math in Bengali. I ascribe this to the fact that my father taught me numbers and simple arithmetic long before I was enrolled in school, using Bengali as the medium.
2. Despite the fact that I don't subscribe to any religious faith and harbor hardly any superstitions, I do believe that I may have had two separate ghostly experiences in my life. One occurred in the dark of the night while I was asleep and the other in broad day light when I was wide awake. (This one probably deserves a separate post of its own:-)
3. I know very little about botany and plant care. Yet everything I plant thrives, blooms and fruits. My expert gardener friends are flummoxed by my "brown" brain and "green" thumb. ( I sometimes suspect that I may have benefited from the same dumb luck with child rearing)
4. In nearly perfect health all my life, early last year I was diagnosed with a very rare autoimmune disorder, which, according to available epidemiological data, shouldn't have afflicted me at my age. But the experts were adamant about the diagnosis and predicted that the rest of my life would be spent at the mercy of powerful immuno-suppressant drugs. However, just as mysteriously as I was struck with this possibly debilitating condition, I was "cured" by having a tooth pulled. No, it wasn't magical thinking. It took some very rational and systematic sleuthing through medical literature by my husband and a corroboration of the findings by my dentist. (This one does deserve a post of its own, if only as a cautionary tale.)
5. I am generally a thoroughly law abiding and ethical  person, especially when it comes to matters of money. But in 1982 when on a trip to Bulgaria (a draconian communist nation then with a notorious prison system), I routinely changed money illegally at street corners from waiters, boat captains and other more shady characters. Those "unoffficial" currency changers offered a far more reasonable exchange rate for the Deutsche Mark than the "official" usurious government rate allowed.  I must note that if caught, the offense was punishable by a steep fine and jail time as numerous notices in public places warned tourists.

Joe's Secrets:

1. Read the C.S. Lewis books many times and never realized Aslan was Jesus.
2. Once bought a Britney Spears album.
3. Sometimes talk to myself out loud without realizing that I'm doing  when working.
4. I am Fafnir. And Dadahead .

Satire, Slander or No Big Deal?

A couple of days ago a friend forwarded me an email that she received from a friend of hers. No, this was not a "from a friend to a friend to a friend" type of chain letter originating at an obscure source. The message came from a "real" man with a name whom my friend knows. The writer of the email is a Democrat to boot. But he makes it clear that he is not going to vote for Barack Obama in November for several "in his own words" (without the full context, of course) reasons he lists after painstakingly scouring through the two books that Obama has authored. The fact that a Democrat can harbor so many suspicions about Obama's character and intent, (see the e-mail below the fold) made me wonder what the other side is thinking.

That brings me to the cover of the recent issue of the New Yorker (see left) the analysis of whose possible impact on the upcoming presidential race has been all over the mainstream media and blogs for the last 48 hours. In fact my friend forwarded me the e-mail of the disgruntled Dem after the New Yorker cover story broke. My own take on the cartoon is mixed. While I feel that a magazine has the right to publish whatever they wish, good satire takes a grain of truth and exaggerates it and usually makes it quite clear where it is going with the humor and irony. In the case of the "no comment necessary" style of the New Yorker cartoon, for those select few who are familiar with its brand of humor it will be sufficiently clear that the cartoonist intended to lampoon those who slander Obama (and his wife) with whispers about his "un-American, unpatriotic" values and insinuate that he might be Manchurian Muslim Candidate out to destroy a Christian nation from within. But without a proper context (say, McCain fantasizing about vilifying the Obamas) it may not be clear to a casual observer whether the cover picture is satire or an affirmation of the now infamous "terrorist fist jab" between Mr. and Mrs. Obama, an expression coined by Fox News after Obama won the Democratic Party's nomination. I asked my co-bloggers what they thought of the New Yorker cover art and heard back from three of them:

Anna: The thinking may be that what it means to be a New Yorker is that we're all so hip, we can make fun of racists by making tongue in cheek use of their stereotypes. Given that the imagery of Michelle Obama as an angry black radical and Barack Obama as in cahoots with Muslim fundamentalists is pretty main-stream on the right, however, it seems ill-advised, to say the least.

Joe: I know that Fox News referred to the famous fist bump incident as "a terrorist fist jab." [H]opefully part of the intent was to make fun of that.

Sujatha: Surprisingly (or perhaps not), the article inside the New Yorker bears zero relation to the cover. Maybe they should have gone with the cartoon that depicts Obama as a wolf in sheep's clothing rather than Osama-lite/blaxpoitation Michelle. This is an editorial decision that smacks not of poor judgement but is suspiciously sensationalist.

While many  have defended the New Yorker cover artist Barry Blitt, others including some cartoonists, found the art work failing as satire. One popular political commentator called it gutless.

Ann Telnaes, a Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial cartoonist, defended the magazine cover against critics who say it is offensive.

The cover, Telnaes wrote in an email, “was meant to be satirical and comment on the ludicrous rumors which have been going around the Internet and repeated endlessly on cable news.” According to Telnaes, the campaign operatives and pundits who have attacked the cartoon have been misreading the image.

Nick Anderson, who also won a Pulitzer for his cartooning and serves as president of the American Association of Editorial cartoonists, agreed with Telnaes that the cartoon was intended as satire. But he also had some sharp words for the New Yorker cartoonist.

“I think, as a piece of satire, it utterly fails,” Anderson told Politico. “The artist and the New Yorker editor [David Remnick] have claimed that it is so over the top that it is clearly absurd. But it’s not sufficiently over the top. It is merely depicting what the whisper campaigns have been suggesting.”

Anderson added that the cover might have been more effective if it had included the title of the cartoon, “The Politics of Fear,” on the front of the magazine.

“It would have been even stronger had they shown an enemy of Obama painting the picture, or imagining it in their head,” he said.

Stephen Hess, a scholar at the Brookings Institution who co-authored Drawn and Quartered: The History of American Political Cartoons, also said that it would have been helpful for readers to have the title of the cartoon as context.

The Obama campaign (as also that of Sen McCain) condemned the cartoon as tasteless and offensive.  Senator Obama himself was more restrained in his assessment.

Now for the email that my friend forwarded to me which illustrates why many Democrats are concerned that the New Yorker's attempt at humor may have unwittingly added fuel to fire.

Where is Dadahead? Or how do blogs die?

It's funny that Brian Leiter was wondering about Dadahead recently. I too thought of this blogger when I found myself lethargic and extremely reluctant to blog. (Except when I travel, I have never gone this long any time previously without posting fresh material.) Dadahead used to be on our blogroll and we exchanged links and lively comments with him from time to time. I loved the wicked humor Dada displayed in eviscerating hypocrites (conservative right wingers mostly) and given the popularity of his blog, fully expected him to stick around for some time. Then one day more than two years ago, after posting a somewhat enigmatic stream of consciousness piece he suddenly disappeared and hasn't been heard from since.  No goodbye and no explanation were forthcoming from Dada.

Among the millions of blogs jostling for attention in cyberspace surely the disappearance of blogs is routine.  I don't know if there is any data out there reflecting the average longevity of blogs. In the three and a half years since I first became acquainted with the blogging phenomenon, I have seen quite a few blogs go out of operation. Most bloggers give a clear signal or explanation before the demise of their sites. Others disappear without a warning, occasionally deleting pages and pages of outpourings spanning months or years. I am always curious to know why a blogger closes shop. Those who do stop to explain, almost always cite tedium or the time and attention taken away from other pursuits. Dissemination, the first blog I was associated with previously as an author, too ended within a few short months after its launch.  To this day, I am not entirely certain why. But I suspect that Ethan Leib, the principal author who had at that time also started a new blog with his academic colleagues, lost interest in Dissemination which he had created earlier with his friends.

Anyway, why am I talking about blogs dying? Only because lately my mind has strayed away from blogging.  I have not felt the urge to write or share ideas as enthusiastically as I normally do. When I noted that I couldn't even get myself fired up enough to belt out a suitable diatribe against the recently departed Jesse Helms, the former N. Carolina senator, for whom vicious race baiting was not just a means but an end, I realized that I was truly distracted. All this does not mean that this blog is about to be discontinued or deleted.  But as my co-authors too have not been posting much recently, I am afraid that A.B. is likely to remain idle for longer periods of time than has been customary until now.  Long time readers may find the lack of regular updates a bit disappointing. I will of course continue to post whenever I feel the urge. I am sure the other authors will too if they feel so inclined. I hope to again pick up pace after I return from vacation in August. Until then, please keep checking us out from time to time. Even if there is not much going on here, be assured that we are not retiring yet.