For those of you who don't pay attention to such things, there's currently an outcry on LiveJournal over several communities and journals that were deleted for references to incest, pedophilia, child porn, etc. Several of the community and journal contributors, particularly in SF fandom, have complained bitterly about losing legitimate stories and communities to the latest moral panic.

There's an interesting discussion to be had about the ethics of all of this, but I'm going to pass. There are other people who know far more about the fanfic scene and about the censorship-versus-protection debate than I do.[1] Instead, let's talk about the LJ admins for a minute.

SixApart (the company that owns LiveJournal) seems to have no one on staff who knows anything about how to respond to a public relations crisis. I used to work with people who do this for a living. The rules are:

1. Get in front of the story. Got bad news to release? Release it yourself, up front, and explain how you're going to fix the problem.

2. Don't stonewall. There is nothing that will destroy customer trust faster than the perception that Big Brother Doesn't Care About You. Answer the damn questions.

3. Keep updating. You have succeeded when everybody involved becomes bored. That means: constant updates, constant communication, and keeping a friendly, visible face available all the time.

4. Be honest. Self-explanatory.

As far as I can tell, SixApart has screwed up in every possible area. They stonewalled for 24 hours despite ever-increasing press coverage and fury. They still haven't explained how the process works to evaluate these communities. Nor have they explained who to appeal to if the community owners feel they've been unfairly targeted. Nor have they tried to communicate directly with users about the problem, insofar as I know. Their quotes in the CNet article were classic cover-your-ass weasel-wording with no real solutions.

The next few days should be interesting to watch.

[1] I will note only that while almost all fanfic is fun and harmless, I have seen some truly twisted stuff that tries to call itself "fanfic." If I never see another Hermione Granger torture-and-rape fantasy I will die a happier man.

Standing-room only airplanes.

Coming soon to an airport near you, maybe, according to the New York Times.

Soon they'll give up on comfort entirely, strap all the economy passengers to spinal boards, and toss them in like cordwood.

One of my more religious family members and I got to talking about evolution last weekend. We agreed that not only is evolution supported by the Bible, it makes the Bible more interesting. I find the fundamentalist idea of God to be profoundly limited, human, and dull. If God's creation can grow and change, does that not speak well of His power and subtlety?

Case in point, from an MSNBC article:

Scientists have caught a fossil fish in the act of adapting toward a life on land, a discovery that sheds new light one of the greatest transformations in the history of animals....

The new find of several specimens looks more like a land-dweller than the few other fossil fish known from the transitional period, and researchers speculate that it may have taken brief excursions out of the water.

ETA: Not trying to convert anyone, still thoroughly agnostic. Just, y'know, thinking out loud.

Last weekend's windstorm was a bit more entertaining for many people than I let on, evidently. I've gotten lots of reports of fallen trees, downed power lines, long power outages, and more.

The best windstorm story I heard, though, wasn't from Seattle, it was from San Juan Island. And it wasn't Saturday. It was last Tuesday.

Yep, Tuesday. We didn't realize it, but they had quite a wind storm up on the islands that day. A Douglas fir that was about 500 years old and eight feet around at the base came crashing through some poor guy's house, destroying the desk where he'd been working less than an hour earlier. Another tree fell on an SJI patrol car.

On Saturday, the wind wasn't the problem as much as the storm surge. See here for pictures of the flooding. This is a neighborhood very close to my parents' house. I go walking and jogging through here frequently when I'm visiting.

Nature, red in tooth and claw. - Alfred, Lord Tennyson

Jethro Tull, "Fallen on Hard Times"

I found myself a good RSS reader awhile back, which means I've been able to do a much better job keeping track of blogs, news, et al. I'm not convinced this is a good thing.

( Skip if easily triggered )

I have very odd taste in random web surfing.

Aside from all the usual stuff one looks at on the Internet (heh heh), I've developed a minor addiction to the Wikipedia.

For instance, it says here that today is the anniversary of the completion of the Aswan High Dam, one of the two big dams on the Nile in Egypt. Cheerful thought of the day: since most of the population of Egypt is in the Nile valley, destroying the Aswan High Dam would essentially wipe out all of Egypt as Lake Nasser drained into the valley. Rumor has it, according to Wikipedia, that Israel pointed this out by paint-bombing the dam during the Yom Kippur War.

---

If you live in Oregon, (that's you, greyaenigma, among others), go harass your speaker of the house to unblock SB 1000, the civil unions bill.

And even if you don't live in Oregon, check out this stunningly beautiful shot of a stunningly destructive force.

Did you ever have the feeling that you were watching your life unfold in front of you as a dispassionate observer? As if everything that was happening around you was a documentary being filmed by someone else, with lousy production values and a terribly boring script?

OK, maybe not.

---

We're moving. Time to downsize into something a bit smaller and more affordable. I've little idea where, yet, though H has been pursuing an interesting sustainable-construction project one neighborhood south of here. We're not leaving town, since H is in school. We kinda like it here anyway.

The first challenge will be to sell the current place. We've hired a jaded-but-highly-effective real estate agent and her brother to help us get something together. The current plan is to get the place cleaned out and ready to show by early September. And hope and pray that it sells quickly so we can get on with our lives.

I hadn't wanted to do this yet, particularly since we're likely to move again in about 4-5 years or so once H gets out of school. Oh well. Change is good.

---

I seem to be terribly nonverbal tonight. I'll try this again tomorrow.

Continuing the previous thought:

Since I started hanging out with security people all day, I've noticed the seductive nature of threats.

When all that you do, day in and day out, is look at ways that people can screw with you, and the damage that they could do, and the profiles of the people who want to do you harm, you develop...a different way of looking at the world. It's beyond cynicism, not quite fear. All the world becomes evenly divided into targets and potential enemies. You picture yourself as the last bastion, Horatius at the bridge, defending what you care about at any and all costs. And hell, that's just with software.

I picture Cheney, waking up every morning to his daily threat matrix report, all the rumors and suspicions and low-grade intelligence about people who would burn America to the ground and sow the fields with salt, did they but have the means. He was, evidently, the guy who thought about the disasters, the bioweapons and the chemical agents that melt your skin and blister your brain and the low-grade tactical nukes that could take out an entire downtown core.

That twists your mind. The urge to strike back, to do something must be enticing indeed.

I've no idea if that's how this war got started, but it's an interesting idea..

I haven't heard this officially, but family rumor is that my cousin the Captain has a new assignment, somewhere not Iraq. Still waiting...

I'm currently about two-thirds through Bob Woodward's Plan of Attack. It's a meticulously researched, thoughtful, behind-the-scenes account of how we got into the Iraq war. In retrospect, there's a very melancholy theme: in some ways, it shows, the Iraq war was absolutely inevitable from the day after September 11. The hawks wanted a war, and they were going to get one.

The oddest figure in the entire book is Dick Cheney. Woodward has written about him in wartime before. He was the secretary of defense during the 1991 Gulf War. In The Commanders, Woodward's book on the Gulf War, Colin Powell and others were quoted about Dick Cheney's calm, steady demeanor. This is the quote from Plan of Attack, and it gave me chills:

[Colin] Powell detected a kind of fever in Cheney. He was not the steady, unemotional rock that he had witnessed a dozen years earlier during the run-up to the Gulf War. The vice president was beyond hell-bent for action against Saddam. It was as if nothing else existed.

Saddam Hussein apparently scared the hell out of him. Cheney was convinced that Saddam would detonate a nuke or launch a bioweapons attack in the US. The only way to get rid of him was a war. So Cheney made sure there was a war.

Scary.

Hail and farewell, Richard Biggs, who died suddenly a few days ago. He'll be missed.

Biggs was an actor, mainly known for soap opera work. SF fans know him as Dr. Stephen Franklin from "Babylon 5."

Bob Edwards is retiring from NPR's Morning Edition after 25 years on the job to become a "senior correspondent" for NPR. His last day will be April 30.

Wow, that's going to be an adjustment. I've woken up to Bob Edwards' mellow voice every morning for years, since my CD alarm clock broke in about 1996. Even when I travel, I usually find the local NPR station to wake up to. I've listened to him on both coasts, in at least ten different cities that I can think of offhand. I don't miss much American culture when I travel abroad, but I do miss waking up to "Morning Edition."

What's wonderful about Edwards is that no matter what the disaster of the day or how strange the interview, he always sounds calm and considered about it. You think: ah, he's calm about it. I guess the world hasn't ended yet after all

Thanks again, Bob. Enjoy sleeping in.

-begin rant-

This story (from my most recent contribution to nikkinewsnet) really pisses me off, and not just for the obvious reasons:

Last week, a gun battle erupted outside a Philadelphia elementary school, involving two groups of men, six guns and almost a hundred bullets fired. Kids were just arriving at the school for the morning and many of them were playing outside. One third-grader was caught in the face by a stray round and is on life-support; a crossing guard took a round in the foot. The incident has enraged city officials and local community leaders, who have offered a substantial reward and witness protection for anyone who might testify against the shooters.

The next time somebody starts talking about racism in the media, I hope they bring up this story. It made the front page of the Philadelphia Inquirer, but I didn't find one reference to it in any national news source.

Let me give an alternate scenario for a moment: a gun battle erupts in front of a suburban, mostly white school in Colorado or California. Shooters fire almost one hundred rounds at each other while a crowd of young kids screams and dives for cover. One student and a teacher are severely wounded. We all know that the school in question would be instantly surrounded by SWAT teams and every news organization with a van, a camera, and a satellite antenna, and the pundits would be going on for weeks about what a tragedy it was.

Why didn't that level of coverage happen here? Well, the elementary school in question is in north Philadelphia, a predominantely black and poor neighborhood with a long history of drugs and violent incidents. Suddenly it's no longer interesting, because it doesn't involve any cute white kids.

Stepping back a couple years, JonBenét Ramsey's death wouldn't have rated a mention on page 23, except that she was white and a preschool model and had tons of glamour shots ready for the networks to show endlessly.

Memo to news editors: let's think a little harder about what you choose to cover and what you choose to ignore, huh?

-end rant-

Oh, good grief.

As mentioned earlier, I watched about half of the Super Bowl with friends, but we were skipping through the halftime show and therefore missed Janet Jackson's breast hanging out, thanks to Justin Timberlake. (Warning: Not safe for work. Here's a SFW story courtesy of tafkar.)

Consensus of LiveJournal opinion seems to be that Janet was wearing a gawdawful big nipple ring.

Let's hear it for aging sex symbols trying to stay in the game! Er, so to speak.

Here's a tale of a ship without a port.

Before the Space Needle was built, one of the defining icons of Seattle was the M.V. Kalakala. The Kalakala is a ferry boat, rebuilt from the hull of a destroyed ferry called the Peralta in the 1930s. It was advertised as "the World's First Streamlined Vessel" and has a unique Art Deco look to it, with hardly a right angle to be seen.

After 30 years of service, the Kalakala was retired in 1967. After going through several owners, by the 1980s it was a rusted wreck, deliberately grounded in an Alaskan cove and used occasionally as a cannery.

A Seattle native named Peter Bevis found the ferry in the 80s. Between 1995 and 1998, using more ingenuity and friends than money, he managed to refloat the ferry and had it towed home, first to Pier 66 on Seattle's waterfront, later to an inland harbor at the north end of Lake Union.

Unfortunately, Bevis was never able raise enough money to complete the restoration. The Port of Seattle turned down a proposal to restore the Kalakala and add it permanently to the waterfront at Pier 66. Political infighting deeply factionalized Bevis' foundation, which later ousted him. The owners of the dock where the Kalakala is moored want it gone. Why? Well, they want to get rid of it partly because the foundation has defaulted on rent for months, and partly because it's currently an eyesore: floating, but still badly rusted and in desperate need of restoration.

At last the Kalakala foundation ran out of money and was forced to sell the Kalakala at auction. It was purchased earlier this week by a team led by a California developer, Charles Medlin, who says he plans to restore her and operate her as a cultural facility on the San Francisco waterfront.

But wait, there's a sequel. The auction house claims they never received payment. That means the second bidder, a group of Seattle-area investors, gets the Kalakala. Except that Medlin says there was a paperwork screwup, he did send the balance owed, and he's willing to go to court to defend his purchase.

Many Seattle residents (myself included) wish these guys would get organized, restore the Kalakala, and keep it in Seattle. At this point it doesn't look too likely, unless someone with very deep pockets steps in to save the boat. Paging Paul Allen: please call.