The Protocols of the Yuppies of Zion

March 29, 2004

INTRODUCING INDIEROCK (A.K.A. "THAT ITUNES THINGIE")

Notice that "what's been playing recently in iTunes" widget on the front page of this site? (Well, I know some of you have, since I've gotten e-mails about it. :-) ) It's powered by a new application called IndieRock. And I get to crow about how it got developed (and beta-tested, and added to), because its genesis was in a post I made to AskMetafilter back on March 1st of this year. I was asking for ideas on how to post iTunes information to a blog if you were a Windows user, since Mac users already had an application called Kung-Tunes that does just that and I was kinda jealous.

Well, it turns out that a Metafilter member with the username "krunk"--otherwise known as a nice Canadian engineering student named Robin Senior--decided to take up the challenge of creating just such an application. Mining iTunes for Windows' XML file, in which it keeps all its "last played on" data, he wrote a teensy tiny little application to detect changes in the XML file and automatically upload the results to a web server. The application, now in version 0.9.4, is called Indierock, and not only is it way cool, it's also free! It's also perhaps the best answer to an AskMetafilter question ever.

If you want a similar widget for your website, and you run iTunes for Windows, you'll need to do the following things:

March 25, 2004

WHAT HAPPENS WHEN YOU MESS WITH BIG BUBBA

While I of course didn't watch the entirety of the 9/11 hearings, I found one key element missing.

We hear endless condemnations of the Clinton White House for their lack of action against Al Qaeda. What we don't hear is that, while all this was going on, the above-all-else isolationist Republican Party jumped right down Clinton's throat for every single thing he did do to fight terrorism.

March 24, 2004

THE POETRY OF HATE

One of the very first blog entries I ever wrote was about some grotesque "poetry" published in a Palestinian newspaper about the glory of suicide bombings. Though not quite as extreme as that example, here's a new bit of twisted doggerel I just came across. I'm sure it will be included in the Norton Anthology of America Deserved 9/11 that the University of California Berkeley Press will no doubt be publishing some day. Found on Fuzzynet.co.uk, "for folk who like reading", dated June, 2002, it's entitled "Oh, America". Three guesses as to its subject matter:

"Oh America, did you not see? At the height of the fire, liquid assets flowed like sweet honey from your vaults, ran in streams from your marbled emporiums, past helpless security guards, disarmed by their confusion, and out onto the gold-paved, cinder-caked streets. Tossing aside the theatre of sorrow, reptilian shoals of cocaine-driven brokers, Prozac-popping investors and valium-blind shareholders rushed forward to consider possible gain through the consolidation of loss; shipless pirates training their singular eyes upon a singular windfall. Who really cared from whence the storm had blown? While the buried struggled for air and the caves were as yet inhabited only by the goats, turgid glitterati paced the sidewalks emptily ogling plastic dummies dressed-up to the nines in the fur of animism depleted, exchanging vacuous synthetic smiles, waiting to see who'd laugh last; no one knew which was which or who was what, no one cared. They were all 'other'. Stifling on the fog of deceit that blinded every bit as much as the dust and smoke, yet sensing deep down that somehow they were somehow complicit in the carnage, corpulent corporate tycoons were aided from the clammy leather back-seats of over-stretched limousines to be led to illicit private bookings..."

That's just an excerpt. And as if that ain't enough, the poem is supposed to be from the POV of Lady Liberty. No, really. I think Amiri Baraka (a.k.a. LeRoi Jones) and Andrew Motion may have themselves some competition here!

Personally, I much preferred Tim Blair's poet laureate contest from last year, which yielded some hilarious entries. Will Warren's amazing all-poetry blog, Unremitting Verse, is much-missed, too. His Now Courage Call, and Dark Concerns Dispel was one of my favorites, as was A Low Dishonest Decade, his update of the famous Auden poem.

COVER THE MIKE

When not reading up for further bouts in C&C; Generals: Zero Hour or looking at naked ladies on the internet, I'm glued to the 9/11 hearings.

More to come...

March 22, 2004

SHEIK IS ALL OVER

Despite my visceral glee at the death of Sheik Yassin, it's not actually a wonderfully great event.

While it will trigger more suicide bombings, that is classic Palestinian theatre. They are determined to wipe out Israel, but also content to time their bombings for maximum approval from the global left wing. They'll attack harder now, but with resources that were saved up for just such an event.

It's possible that this assassination will spur recruitment, but I have yet to see or hear of any Palestinian terror organization suffering from a recruiting drought. Arafat's public "education" system has seen to that.

HELMSMAN, REVERSE GENDER ROLES!

As of today, Brookie and I have swapped roles in our household, and neither of us could be happier about it.

Since TV Shows are produced in what we Hollywood types call "Seasons", anyone who works on one in a production capacity is bound to get some time off, whether they want it or not. I happen to be one of those who want it, and want it desperately.

Brooke, meanwhile is still in the honeymoon period of her new job, making such lunatic, demented utterances as "Oh boy, I get to go to work tomorrow!" (This, as you can well imagine, prompted me to rent "Invasion of the Bodysnatchers", for reference.)

The point being, I'm free. Gloriously free. For at least the next three months, I have nothing on my plate but you nice people, an exercise facility, and, well... a massive DVD library and video game system. Okay, fine, you'll still be neglected. But you'll know that I'm significantly happier.

March 19, 2004

SPAM, SPAM, SPAM, WONDERFUL SPAM

You know your blog has really made it when you start getting comment spam for male-pattern-baldness pills on a blog entry you wrote years ago about the Salute to Israel parade. (I deleted the offending ads forthwith.)

Looks like I'll be installing MT-Blacklist this weekend.

March 16, 2004

A WATERSHED EVENT

All day long, as I sat at my new job going through oodles of XSL and digging through a complicated multi-platform system that I really need to be learning cold, my mind kept wandering off when it shouldn't have. The fault lay in the continuing news out of Madrid following the recent tragedy on 3/11--and the greater tragedy that came only three days later.

Yes, I said greater tragedy. I'm not trying to minmize the deaths of 201 innocent people. But, to be frank in a very ugly way, it's the political ramifications of those deaths, the response to those deaths, that has me far, far more worried and upset. The way I see it, we the living all owe two things to the victim of a suicide bombing or other terrorist atack: that the perpetrator(s) will be brought to justice (or outright killed, whatever's more expedient) and that such a thing will never happen again.

Spain, I have no doubt, will fulfill the former of those debts. They will track down and prosecute the bombers and those who helped them. But in the case of the latter debt, they have done something really extraordinary. Rather than creating a climate of "never again", they have instead greatly, massively, and unquestionably increased the chances that such things will happen again, to more innocent people. That's horrific and a terrible legacy to leave the dead of 3/11: that their murders were not an aberration, but almost certainly just the beginning of a string of bolder attacks against cowering people and cowardly goverments.

OUR SERVER CAN GO FUCK ITSELF

I had constructed a very long, elaborate post about the many Op-Eds in the NY Times today, but our server crashed and ate the whole thing.

So, super brief:

Brooks and Luttwak wrote great pieces about Spain today.

By contrast, the non-bylined Editorial failed utterly because it did not even consider that Spain's reaction was not one of pride and mourning, but fear.

After work ends this week, expect to see me on here more often. Until then, our server and I are not on speaking terms.

March 15, 2004

HAVING YOUR IRAQI CAKE AND EATING IT TOO

Jeff Jarvis--journalist, blogger, 9/11 survivor, "Tom Friedman liberal hawk", and creator of a few magazines you may have read--has a post up about the 3/11 train bombings in Madrid, Spain. Specifically, he's pissed off at people slinking out of the woodwork to say that they "opposed the war in Iraq was because it could fire up al Qaeda and cause an attack like Spain's tragic 3/11". Jeff thinks that "argument" is just more warmed-over appeasement, and dead wrong. He outlines a bunch of reasons why considering "the tactics and morality of support" in such a craven manner is so offensive, and starts off with this:

"First, I do not find it acceptable to decide not to oust Saddam Hussein because we're afraid it would get terrorists' dander up. You can have other reasons to say we shouldn't have invaded Iraq (I don't), but that's not one of them. That is allowing the terrorists to manage us. We cannot find ourselves in a position of deciding what we should and should not do in the world based on what bin Laden might do."

(Emphasis mine.) He goes on to quote Olivier Travers: "you can't have your "Iraq is not connected to terrorism" cake and eat it too." You can't claim that fighting terrorism and ousting Saddam Hussein have nothing to do with one another, that the war in Iraq was just an oil grab or a diversion or whatever, and then turn around and say that Spain got bombed by Al Qaeda because Spain helped liberate Iraq, an action which damaged and upset Al Qaeda. Pick a consistent point of view, please.

MAPPING HOSTILITIES

Israel Insider has a cool Flash application that displays a map of Israel, Gaza, and the West Bank and shows the locations of the latest "security incidents", broken down by attacks on Israelis, Palestinians, Both, or Neither. The location of the newest incidents are blinking. Use the pull-down menu in the top righthand corner to see data from previous weeks to get an overview of the hostilities through time.

They also have a number of really cool other Flash apps online, including one that shows the breakdown of the different political parties in the Knesset, one that shows the make-up of Sharon's government, one that shows the changing borders of Israel over the years, one that shows the various Jewish/Arab/Druze communities in the disputed territories, etc.

It's very well done (both the Flash and the web design look very spiffy) and does a good job of using the web to convey complex information in a visually appealling and easy to understand manner. And it's also quite informative--did you know that Israeli cabinet positions are split proportionally amongst the ruling coalition's different political parties, so that, for example, Finance is controlled by Likud but Justice is controlled by Shinui? Yikes. No wonder they have such problems governing over there; that seems like a recipe for total gridlock.

March 11, 2004

JUST A NOTE

In light of the recent announcement that today's massacre in Madrid may actually have been carried out by Al Qaeda and not the ETA, I thought I'd just point out that today, March 11th, is the two-and-a-half year anniversary of 9/11. Today's attacks come three days before Spain's elections; New York City was holding primary elections on 9/11.

I'm just sayin', is all.