christophe thinks out loud

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“You are the path you take,” London, 2001

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For security reasons, we are now enforcing that rule.

Robotic Swarming Traffic Cones

That pretty much says it all. If these do not appear in a science fiction story in the next two months, writers everywhere should be ashamed.

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For security reasons, you will need to walk from here.

Good to Eat, and Good for You

Wired News has a very good, balanced article looking at the pros and cons of genetically-modified food, and a new approach that reduces some of the risks involved in GM, while retaining the benefits.

The reality is that just about everything we eat (with the exception of, perhaps, edible fungus) is “modified” through years of selective breeding. Wheat has required human intervention to breed for the last few thousand years; modern cattle are a pale shadow of their ancestors.

So, what’s the problem with GM?

• The benefits to the consumer are tenuous; mostly, it’s the farmer and the seed companies that get the goodies from GM. That’s one of the main reasons that GM has found the most success in “ingredient” plants like soy (edamame notwithstanding). Saying that Roundup Ready soybeans are great because you can drench the field with herbicide like it was bubblebath doesn’t make me want to put the stuff in my mouth.
• People understand breeding. They don’t understand GM. The seed companies completely blew the PR battle by trying to make GM sound like it was something you could do at home with a high-school chemistry kit. They also painted anyone who raised issues with the technology as a moronic neo-luddite, rather than just addressing the concerns head-on.
• Although it’s admittedly a bit naïve, people think that a nice unbroken chain exists between the plants they grow in pots at home and those that spring out of the ground in large farms. GM plants seem like alien experiments, not nice tomatoes that you might find around the house. When you order seeds from Burpee, you don’t have to sign a long licensing agreement.
• This might just be me, but being specifically prohibited from replanting seeds from a plant that you grew seems like an absurd violation of the whole idea of fair use (and agriculture, for that matter).

Personally, I’m not impressed by some of the more hysterical anti-GM arguments. But while glowing fish are nifty enough, I’m not quite prepared to eat them.

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For security reasons, do not stare at the government building for an extended period.

And you can always just wind up the key on the back

When we lived in the UK, the Smart Car was just starting to catch on. Smart had a dealership in the Green Park Underground station, which shows you just how compact those things are . . . but I was able to fit into one just fine, all 6' of me.

I’d buy one in a heartbeat, especially living in San Francisco. If they made one as a hybrid, it would be darn near the perfect city car. Sadly, DaimlerChrysler has said that they aren’t planning to sell them in the US until 2006.

It’s just a myth that SUVs are somehow safer than other cars, even though we still have idiots here in America who seem to view the road as a Monster Truck Pull. Being able to park in a microscopic space is something every city-dweller can relate to. And now that gasoline prices are finally getting high enough that people have to think about how much they’re burning, the fuel economy matters, too. It’s time. And I think one would look great with a foam-rubber key glued to the back.

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For security reasons, that, and anything like it, should only be done in the privacy of your home.

Swanning Along

Dancing swan, Hyde Park, London, 2001

Speaking of animal rescue organizations, I also must mention the Swan Sanctuary in Surrey, England, another wonderful organization doing good work for feathered friends. And another another organization that was having trouble with small-minded bureaucrats.

If you visit, say hi to Franklin for us.

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Pigeon deflector,
San Francisco, 2004

We write the microcode, so you don’t have to

Well, that’s cool.

A company called Stretch (a name that is full of history in computing) has announced a chip that combines a plain ol’ RISC processor with a large programmable logic array. This, by itself, isn’t that wild. What’s interesting is that they claim that their proprietary C/C++ compiler will detect patterns in code that will benefit from having custom instructions produced . . . and will create them on the fly in the programmable logic array.

Although I’m not sure that it will find much use in personal computers or servers, at least right away (can you imagine having to swap out an entire PLA each time you change processes?), it sounds very cool for embedded applications.

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For security reasons, do not adjust the thermostat.

Today’s Chicken Bulletin

I first heard about the Chicken Rescue Center when my wife adopted a rooster for me as an anniversary present . . . quite possibly the best anniversary present I’d ever received. The proprietor clearly loves chickens with all his heart, and looks after chickens that have been abused or neglected, especially by battery-farming. It’s good to know that people like this exist in the world.

The Religious Policeman

On the web, like everywhere else, things that are too good to be true usually are. That being said, The Religious Policeman, a blog that is (supposedly) written by a Saudi about life in, as he puts it, "the Magic Kingdom," is hilarious.

Such a blog has an internal contradiction: If Saudi Arabia is such a closed, repressive society, how he is managing to get away with it? I can’t quite decide if it has the ring of truth or not, but it’s entertaining regardless.

(It’s amazing that we consider such a country a close ally. Of course, the geopolitics behind this are very complex, no doubt.)

Leonardo’s Automobile

Who would have thought that the Italian tradition of fine automotive engineering would date back so far?

Researchers at the Florence Istituto e Museo di Storia della Scienza (Institute and Museum of the History of Science, a truly fascinating place) have constructed a self-propelled wagon from notes in Leonardo da Vinci's Atlanticus Codex.

You Go, Kamala

Penni Gladstone,
San Francisco Chronicle

One of the better (and rarer) things that can happen in politics is to have the person you didn’t vote win, and then take positions that you approve of. I didn’t vote for Kamala Harris for San Francisco District Attorney, but her stance against seeking the death penalty in a cop-killing case is honorable.

When one is running for District Attorney in San Francisco, the death penalty is the big issue one must confront. San Francisco is overwhelming against the death penalty; California is largely in favor of it. DA is a traditional stepping stone to higher office. So, what’s the decision? Represent the people who voted for you (you know, that democracy thing we hear so much about), or avoid giving Orange County rightists something to beat you up on when you run for Attorney General?

While she was running, she said she wouldn’t seek the death penalty. She won. She’s still saying it. Good for her.

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For security reasons, those schedules are out of date. All the trains are gone for the day.

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Bird tracks in cement,
San Francisco, 2004

NYT: “Sex Videos on Pause, and Idled Actors Fret”

Reuters

The New York Times has run a very good article about the current HIV incident.

The Fifth Sentence

“But the most compelling evidence is that he spent most if not all of this period abroad, either funded by these same means or, what is more likely, working, as his step-uncle, Thomas Alured, had done, as tutor and companion to a young man of means.”

— Nicholas Murray, World Enough and Time:
The Life of Andrew Marvell

Instructions: Grab the nearest book, open it to page 23, find the 5th sentence, and post its text along with these instructions. Point back to where you got the idea so that we can follow the threads. I got it from ongoing.

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For security reasons, use the back entrance to your work location for the next week.

Diebold Votes, So You Don’t Have To

This item appeared on Boing Boing today, but I’m quoting it here even so. First, this is a blog, for crying out loud, and if the instant repetition of everything else that happens in the Blogosphere isn’t blogging, what is? Second, this is awfully darn important; we could very well be moving to a situation in which the free and fair elections on which this whole democracy experiment depends become a bad joke.

The subject is, of course, electronic voting. The mad rush to electronic voting has been full of potholes, introducing systems that are highly vulnerable to compromise, and, perhaps, even outright fraud.

Any electronic voting system, at an absolute minimum, must produce paper records of each and every vote, stored securely after review by the voter. Relying on the electronic records themselves for recounts is utter nonsense. Of course a recount based on the electronic records will match the the first count . . . that’s true by definition. No one is questioning whether not the voting machines can add properly; it’s whether or not they are recording the voter’s actual choices that is open to question.

To anyone with a background in technology, the excuses that are being given are clearly specious, amounting to not much more than, “Trust us, everything’s fine. We have unspecified proprietary solutions to these problems.” My bullshit meter immediately goes off when any company dismisses any problem as being solved in an unspecified way by unspecified proprietary technology. If there was ever an application that demanded utterly unproprietary, utterly transparent solutions, open for all to see and completely beyond reproach, it’s voting technology.

(And, as an aside, one of the reasons given against printers on voting machines is that printers break down all the time, and are utterly unreliable. Gosh, has Diebold told their ATM customers that?)

We’re living in a 50%/50% country these days. Elections like 2000 Florida are likely to become more common, not less. If there was ever a time that we needed absolute certainty in the integrity of the voting process, it was now. The fact that this debate, on the national level, is breaking along partisan lines is not reassuring. You would think that any national party, regardless of their political views, would be absolutely committed to making sure that elections are honest, wouldn’t you?

Otherwise, there will be serious reasons to doubt the legitimacy of any new government. Countries in which the government is not considered legitimate by a significant portion of the population tend to be unpleasant places to live.

[Update 24 April 2004: Diebold is in deep trouble over their actions in California. The company’s spin on this is a masterpiece. If you are ever arrested for holding up a liquor store, be sure to tell the judge that being charged for it “doesn’t solve the problem. It just sets a tone of confrontation at a time when we should be working together to address issues with liquor store security.“ Should work great.]

Smut Vendor Advocates Censorship! Film at 11!

I never thought I’d see the day in which I actually came down in favor of a censoring technology, but . . . well, I have. With, of course, some conditions.

As Mark Morford so colorfully describes, a company called ClearPlay has a technology that will skip over words and scenes that they think might be objectionable. You set the level of bowdlerization you want, and the player takes care of the rest.

I think this is a smashing idea. Really, I do. No sarcasm at all. I would gleefully get the required coding from ClearPlay to put the maximum possible nastiness code on any DVD we produce.

And then, can we get rid of this stupid idea that it makes sense for obscenity to be a crime?

Although you’d never know it to listen to the anti-smut zealots at the Department of Justice, owning pornographic material, even material that is legally obscene, is not a crime. The Supreme Court last took up this issue in Stanley v. Georgia, 394 U.S. 557, 565 (1969), and they have never seemed interested in revisiting it. (This does not, of course, include child pornography, which is an entirely different thing, both legally and morally.)

It does seem a bit insane to have laws against the making and selling of something that is legal to own. Thus, the entire reason behind obscenity laws has to be prevent such things from falling into the hands of people who don’t want them. I’m in favor of that, too, although sending people to Federal prison for a number of years seems like a pretty heavy-handed way of controlling a distribution channel problem. So, let’s bring our smarts and our technology to the problem: Have a DVD player that has a “no-porn” bit, have a bit on the DVD that says, “this is porn!&rdquo, and (now we get to the wishful-thinking part of our entertainment) have that be an affirmative defense against obscenity charges.

People who want to watch porn, can watch porn. People who make porn for a living, can make porn. People who don’t want to watch porn will have the disk spat back out into their lap, just in case they thought Reaming & Screaming: Boss Bitches #17 was kid-friendly. (Take my word for it, those people exist.) Problem solved!

After all, this anti-porn crusade is just an attempt to make sure that people who don’t want to watch porn don’t have to, right? It certainly can’t be yet another assault on the First Amendment or blatant election-era pandering to a hard-right base, or anything so stupid as that? Thought not.

Protect Your Porn

I’m not a single-issue voter. But when a single issue comes down to something that is both a Constitutional right and my livelihood, it requires an awfullly compelling reason for me to vote against both . . . and I’m not seeing that reason this November.

Neither does porn director Chi Chi LaRue, and thus we have the wonderful web site Protect Your Porn. If your porn isn’t worth fighting for, what is?

Quote

“We tried to build a community [web] site, but the members were only interested in talking with each other.”

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For security reasons, all of the restrooms are closed. Yes, all.

Porn and Privacy

The ever-interesting Fleshbot has some links on the subject of Porn and Privacy . . . In particular, the question has been raised of whether publishing the names of the first and second generation of exposed actors in the latest HIV rumpus violated their privacy.

I’m going to avoid talking about the legal aspects of it, as I’m not really up on the statutes in question. Just on the basis of the ethics of the situation, did AIM do the right thing by publishing the list?

Yes, they did, and to say otherwise reflects (at best) a naïveté about what this industry is really like.

For every Nina Hartley in porn, there are a dozen girls (and guys) who are not making very good decisions about their lives. Porn still very much has the underground, travelling-show, gypsies-tramps-and-thieves thing going on. Actors arrive and leave with amazing speed. Laura Roxx, the second confirmed HIV-positive performer, flew into town to make some quick bucks and was planning to fly out again.

Relying on agents, friends, producers and the like to get the word out wouldn’t do it. When Laura Roxx arrived in town, she was told that the only shoot she could get on required a double-anal, when she’d never done anal before. Oh, really? In the entire San Fernando Valley, the only porn shoot was doing just one scene that required a double anal? Bullshit. Whoever told her that was having trouble getting a girl to do a double anal, and leaned on her.

Do you think that person would have tracked her down to tell her that she had been exposed? He would have probably whined that he would have, but he didn’t have her number, and anyway she lives all the way up in Canada and that’s an international call.

Many people in the adult industry truly care and truly do look after each other. But counting on those people is not enough when something like a potential HIV outbreak is involved. Although I can understand the point that having one’s real or potential HIV status splashed across a public web page is not anyone’s idea of a good time, maximum publicity is the only sane way to respond to this.

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For security reasons, we no longer feel that “To Protect and To Serve” is an appropriate motto.

Canon PowerShot S50

I finally broke down and got a digital point-and-shoot camera. I’ve carried around a Yashica T4 for years, and I love it . . . but I was getting tired of missing shots because I hadn’t remembered to load it. Also, to be honest, most “look, there’s a great shot!” moments turn out to be not such great shots in retrospect, but you only discover that after you’ve paid to have the film processed.

The Canon PowerShot S50 seems to occupy the same niche as the T4 used to: It’s a point-and-shoot that Real Photographers won’t call you a girlie-man for using. Digital Photography Review has their usual encyclopedic review of the product.

I’ve only had the S50 for a couple of days, but here are some first impressions.

For a digital camera, the user interface is well-designed. (Although I’m a hardcore Nikon bigot when it comes to SLRs, I will freely grant you this: Nikon user interfaces suck, and their digital camera interfaces suck hard. I’m told the D2H has a good UI; I haven’t quite had the fiscal resources to investigate it.) If you don’t need to change the settings very often, the menu system is fine; otherwise, you can spend a while trying to find the particular setting you need.

As just about everyone who has reviewed the S40/45/50 has mentioned, the “joystick” multicontroller, which is used for just about everything, feels mushy and imprecise. Not a disaster, but something with a firm click would have been much better.

The shutter lag is annoying, like just about any digital camera currently on the market, but not nearly as bad as the previous generation of digital point-and-shoots.

The features that I find particularly nifty about the camera are:

Full manual modes — The S50 does, of course, have the stupid automatic modes that cameras are encrusted with these days, but you can defeat them and set aperature-priority, shutter-priority, and full manual modes. It even has a manual focus mode, although the autofocus seems fine.

RAW file format — You can save and download files in RAW format, and play with them later. This is very cool, especially if you didn’t set the white point quite right when you took the initial picture. The downside of this is that Canon’s software, at least for the Macintosh, is slow and stupid; I’m hoping that the RAW plug-in for Photoshop is less painful to use.

A macro focus setting — You can get up close and very personal. This is very nifty if you see just the right flower or whatever, and want to take an extreme closeup.

Custom white point setting — Like the big digital SLRs, you can set the white point against a photo gray card, or a white target. While you can in theory correct this later, it’s always better to get it right the first time.

All in all, it’s a nice little camera. It is a bit hard to find, and I suspect that Canon might be in the process of discontinuing it (it’s slightly over a year old, which is about 76 in digital camera years). Of course, this does mean that clearance prices might be forthcoming, too.

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For security reasons, do not wear cold-weather clothing to the airport, even if the weather at your destination is, in fact, cold.

Wooden Books

Small, well-produced books are a pleasure like no other.

Wooden Books publishes just such books. They have a large series of elegant little books on a variety of interesting, humanistic topics: The Archimedean Solids, Stonehenge, the cycles of the Sun, Moon, and Earth. Each one is full of clear, beautiful illustrations. Even though I used to design musical instruments, it was only after reading Harmonograph that I felt I understood some of the fundamental principles of harmony.

Once in a while, the books veer towards a tweeness that might make one roll one’s eyes. But it is a bit like being entertained by a very intelligent professor who has some eccentric interests . . . you’re more than willing to indulge the flights of fancy in exchange for the fascinating insights, elegantly presented.

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For security reasons, we will be unable to deal with the flooding promptly.

Patently Absurd

One of the most pernicious trends of the last twenty years is businesses getting patents on “business processes,” usually by claiming that they came up with the idea of taking some normal, real-world process (a shopping cart, an auction, a “buy now” solicitation) and implementing it on a computer. Calling these patents “bullshit” is slandering manure, frankly; at least manure can grow things. Even speaking as someone with a few patents to my name, the current patent system is completely out of control.

Although the vast majority of these patents are utterly invalid, often on the face of them, companies still can use them as legal weapons until they are found invalid. Fighting the necessary fight to get the USPTO to invalidate a patent requires tons of specialized legal work, and specialized legal work is not cheap.

As one of my “What would I do if I won the lottery?” fantasies, I imagined starting a foundation that would do nothing except file challenges against these idiocies. Thus, I am incredibly pleased that the Electronic Freedom Foundation has announced that they are going to start doing precisely that. If I do win the lottery, they’re getting a big old donation. Heck, they are getting one even if I don’t win.

Postal Follies

We at Blowfish have a love-hate relationship with the United States Postal Service. On the one hand, it still to this day provides good value for money . . . when it works. When it doesn’t, well, at least we’re glad to know that we are not alone in our experiences.

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For security reasons, we interrupt this program.

At a Snail's Pace

The Slow Food Movement has been around for a while now, promoting the use of locally-produced, high-quality food . . . and the down-shifted cultural values that respect such things. It has expanded over the years to include branches all over the world, and an educational foundation. The idea of getting a Master of Food degree sounds very appealing.

Although Slow Food makes a direct point about producing food organically, just buying things grown locally is one of the best ecological decisions one can make. It is a bit absurd to buy organic produce if that produce has to be imported (at tremendous energy cost) from thousands of miles of way, akin to driving your Hummer across town to drop off the recycling.

Quote

“The truth is that most people fear and dislike money. They’re relieved not to be stuck with it, the responsibility, the need to consume, invest, recycle. It’s dirty, it’s ugly. It’s covered with engravings of people who you wouldn’t want in your house. Dead people. Royals who are the experts in the silent acquisition of all of the loose change in the universe. They’re born to it. It doesn’t embarrass them. They’re not fazed by creeping Masonic symbolism. If there is a conspiracy, they’re in it. The stuff is like a family album.”

— Iain Sinclair, Lights Out for the Territory

Eastgate Tinderbox

You would think that one of the most obvious uses for a laptop is to take notes. But until recently, I just couldn’t get into the habit. Too many years of taking notes in traditional notebooks. Word is too much in some ways (I spend too much time worrying about getting the text styles right), and not enough in some ways (if you need to start a new, but related, note stream, a new document seems like too big a jump, just hitting return five times seems not like not enough).

Then, I tried out Tinderbox from Eastgate. The initial learning experience, I must admit, was not instantaneous. It was a bit like having a new, eager personal assistant who only spoke Serbo-Croatian . . . the ability and desire to help was obvious, but we just didn’t speak each other’s language.

As with most international relationships, though, this problem was quickly overcome.

Tinderbox can be viewed in a variety of ways: As an outliner; as a lightweight database storing bits of text; as a fast note-taking utility. What’s cool about it is that you can use it in one fashion, then switch to another. For example, you can spend the entire morning taking notes a conference, and go back and organize them using the outlining features and the database functionality, without having to stop to think about those functions while taking notes. It is wonderful for brainstorming-followed-by-organization, and that’s a very common way of working these days.

Although it’s probably going to far to call Tinderbox “programmable,” it does have a very nifty feature called agents. These are, in essence, canned, always-running searches that automatically organize your notes. For example, I have a file that contains notes about a forthcoming Blowfish Video production. Each scene has a note. Each scene-note lists the cast required for that particular scene. I also have an agent that scurries around and creates a note that lists the entire cast. Thus, if I add a cast member, the cast list is automatically updated. Same for locations, props, etc. Whee! It’s quite magical watching it go.

Tinderbox is fast. Given how fast modern computers are, I’m routinely appalled by how slow the software that runs on them can be. I’m a fast typist and all that, but if a 1.3GHz processor cannot keep up with my typing, something is badly broken.

You can export your notes into HTML (and XML) files using templates. There is, in fact, an entire blogging mechanism based on doing HTML export from Tinderbox. I can imagine putting together a shooting schedule, and then publishing it on a web site for use by the crew and cast, by using this feature.

At $145, Tinderbox isn’t particularly cheap, but it is great at what it does . . . something that is always worth paying a bit extra for.

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For security reasons, be sure your blinds are drawn.

A Healthy Glow

Oh, hot damn, I found this again.

A while back, in the Wind and Weather paper catalog, I saw Ambient Device's Weather Beacon product, and snatched up the phone to order it . . . shoot, unavailable, and they didn’t give the manufacturer, so I couldn’t track it down.

Then, out of nowhere, I ran across it again. I love the web.

So, what do the Orb and Beacon do? They take a numeric value (temperature, stock value, etc.), and turn it into a color, which they glow. That’s it. It seems absurdly simple, but the applications are endless, since you can display whatever numeric information you want. (Besides the shape, the only difference I can see betwen the Orb and the Beacon is that the Orb is set up to track stock prices by default, and the Beacon temperature.)

They use a wireless receiver (based on a digital pager’s network) to pick up transmitted data. You can use their web site to configure a variety of streams, but you can also configure it to use a custom data feed, either via the web and wireless, or its serial port. Temperature in your server room? The number of orders that your company is currently receiving? How fast traffic is on your route home? That there are new job or apartment listings? New things on your RSS newsreader? Have it flash red when your remote webcam picks up motion? The possibilities are, as they say, endless.

We live in a constant stream of data, but data are not information. As the data stream gets faster and faster (the “drinking from the firehose” problem), we’ll need more things like this to help us make quick sense of it.

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For security reasons, that yellow sign means something very different from what it used to.

Give Your Friend an Ulcer

For a porn baron, I am unaccountably fond of stuffed animals. (No comments, please.) But not just any stuffed animals: they have to be interesting and unique. The stuffties from Giant Microbes definitely qualify. My personal favorites are Helicobacter pylori (ulcers, right) and Saccharomyces cerevisiae (beer and bread yeast). One of the yeastie beasties presides serenely over the kitchen at my place.

I can hardly wait for the STDs to become available.

Morford Returns

While I was in the UK, Mark Morford’s Morning Fix newsletter was my lifeline back to my home town of San Francisco. Even once I was back, its combination of witty writing, wonderful politics, and interesting features made it a mandatory part of my day’s reading.

Then, a few weeks ago, it just stopped. Bang. Nothing. Horrors. No one was willing to talk about what was going on.

Now, his column at SFGate (the web site of the San Francisco Chronicle) is back. Clearly, he got into some kind of big trouble with Hearst, the publishers, since the header on the announcement says:

We’re currently evaluating aspects of the Morning Fix newsletter and hope to be able to return it to you soon.

This is, of course, management-speak for “We’re not done with the rubber hoses and cigarettes on him, yet.” I hope that it returns soon, and in all its wonderful, irreverent glory.

iPorn

I thought this was a brilliant idea. After all, isn’t porn the killer app of the web?

Then I realized it was a satire. Mentioning Peter North should have been a give-away; he’s so 1998.

But then again, life frequently imitates satire.

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For security reasons, this will be added to your permanent record.

Quote

“The art of taxation consists in so plucking the goose as to obtain the largest possible amount of feathers with the smallest possible amount of hissing.”

— Jean Baptiste Colbert,
finance minister to Louis XIV

The Plague Years

In case you haven’t heard about it by now, the porn industry is in the grip of an HIV crisis. The short form is that a male actor, Darren James, tested postiive for HIV antibodies around April 12th. He had tested negative on March 17th. Since the standard test used for HIV in the industry can take up to 60 days to be 99% accurate, and quite a bit of porn production happens without condoms, anyone he worked with from January 17th onwards could have been exposed to HIV, and thus could contract it.

Most of the major porn production houses have halted production. The performers who worked with James in that period (the “first generation”) and anyone who worked with them (the “second generation”) and so forth are being sought so they can be tested. The date currently being thrown around for restarting production is June 8th, 60 days after James last worked.

But, you ask, isn’t this kind of thing just to be expected in the industry?

It doesn’t have to be.

The adult movie industry went through a period of tremendous denial about HIV, lasting until the early to mid 90’s. Then, in the wake of several high-profile HIV-positive performers, the industry did, in fact, clean up its act. Mandatory HIV tests became de rigeur. AIM, a not-for-profit testing facility, was set up. Without an HIV test less than 30 days old, you just didn’t work.

Amazingly, this self-policing has kept HIV from tearing through the performers. The last confirmed case of HIV in an active performer in the mainstream adult industry was in 1999, four years ago. The fact that many of the major production houses have condom-mandatory policies helped a great deal, too.

That being said, the industry still has its head in the sand (or, more accurately perhaps, up its collective ass) about STDs in general, and HIV in particular. Far too many production companies are condoms-optional, or in some particularly stupid cases, bareback-mandatory. The usual sets of whines accompany any call for mandatory condom use: “It’s not required, the customers won’t buy it, it’s an overreaction, etc., etc.” The time for that kind of mendacious crap is over, done, gone. A production house owner would have to be less than human to look in the eye one of the women who are in James’ first generation of exposure, especially any that turn out to be positive, and repeat that garbage.

The captains of the industry likes to spout the rhetoric of caring for the talent; it’s time to put up, or shut up and admit that they really just think of the talent as one more disposable prop. I have no doubt whatsoever that’s exactly what many of them do think.

This latest crisis comes at a particularly bad time. The DoJ, after a few years of slumber, is finally waking up and starting the prosecution machine. Los Angeles, the homeland of the business, is getting very impatient with it. If the industry does not adopt a strict condom-mandatory policy, the government will do it for it. Is that what it really wants?

Self-policing has worked well, but not well enough. Mandatory condom use is an idea whose time is far overdue. If the captains of the industry are not smart enough to see that, the government will be more than happy to educate them.

Why analysts are overrated

According to Prudential Equity Group (quoted in Forbes), Apple Computer “still needs to make structural changes on the cost side in order to compete more profitably against Dell . . .”

Yeah, those Macintosh clones from Dell are really pounding Apple. I’ve been worried about Lamborghini’s cost structure relative to Skoda, too.

Why Federal spending is difficult to restrain, in one pithy (and possibly apocryphal) talk show quote

Radio talk show host: “Do you think that the taxpayers should pay to rebuild the World Trade Center?”
Caller (shocked): “Of course not! The government should pay the entire cost!”

How to Ruin Your Financial Life

I can’t say that I always agree with Ben Stein, but I always like him. He is erudite and a gentleman in a world in which most pundits are neither.

He has now written a book on personal finance, and in keeping with today being US Tax Day, I picked up a copy. It’s great. The advice (written in his usual, ironic “do this if you want ruin“ style) is spot-on. In a time in which credit card debit has gotten entirely out of control, and most people haven’t a clue how money works, I’m glad that he’s out there, trying to change things.

Of course, the biggest problem is that many people won’t really get the joke, and will just flip through the book, nod, smile, feel smug about all those other people who don’t get how money works . . . and then go buy something they don’t need because they need cheering up after they pay their taxes.

FTC Bans Meanness

Oh, yeah, that will work.

On my way to work, I pass the San Francisco Mission police station. Shortly after 9/11 (I’d guess; I wasn’t in the country then), the curbs to either side of it were painted off as “No Stopping Any Time” zones. This was a brilliant idea: suicide car bombers are always deterred by traffic regulations. (“Curses, our plot against the decadent West is foiled! The enemy has learned that we never double park!”)

Spam is a huge problem, and I have no sympathy whatsoever for cretins who send bulk unsolicited email of any kind, sexually-explicit or no. But the thing that the FTC seems to be missing (or, more than likely, wilfully ignoring) is that these people have already demonstrated that they have no problem whatsoever with breaking the law. I will be astonished if even one prosecution results from this new little tidbit.

The only companies that will obey the new regulation are honest, ethical companies that wouldn’t spam anyway, since they have reputations to lose, and don’t try to hide. The really bad people will just ignore it, and will then have yet another competitive advantage. Brilliant move, guys; thanks for promoting honest commerce.

No magic cure for spam exists, but one thing that would help tremendously is contained in four little words: “Right of private action.” But that’s a different post’s topic.

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For security reasons, none of the questions on the form are optional.

Basta le Barbie

The story of the Russian girl who won an on-line beauty contest despite not being the typical beauty queen type is utterly heart-warming. Even though I deal in a business that is sadly addicted to Barbie-types, often with tragic results, it is wonderful to see blows being struck against that being the only standard of female beauty.

Along those lines, I keep meaning to use this image somewhere; it being horizontal format makes it a bit harder to find a good use of it, but I love it none the less.

Drive a Modest Car

This is Blowfish's 10th anniversary (in less than a month!), and I am still amazed that we've hung in there this long. The company has had plenty of moments in which it did not seem like we'd make it. On the other hand, I have never in my entire life had a job whose satisfactions approached those of being here. I love my job, and cannot imagine working for someone else again. (Of course, my unemployable attitude may be also due to certain former employers.)

Someday, I will write a book about how to run a small company. Until then, though, we have a great alternative: Drive a Modest Car by Ralph Warner, one of the founders of Nolo Press (Nolo Press being one of the Great Good Companies of the universe). It is full of very sound, real-world business advice (something that I have found utterly lacking in most books on business). Warner is encouraging, realistic, and has been there himself. Highly recommended.

(And, for the record: A 2002 Mazda Protege 5. Blue. It's adorable.)

A9 knows what's good for you

Amazon has pulled the wraps off of their new search service, A9. It's built on top of Google, but is enhanced in a variety of ways. John Battelle has written a good article about it.

But what is interesting about it to me is that it apparently has "Safe Search" turned on . . . with no obvious way to turn it off. It doesn't use your Google preferences. Signing in doesn't provide an obvious way of setting your level of safety. Is lowest-common-denominator search the wave of the future?

(Via Boing Boing.)

Death will not release you

In celebration of US Tax Day tomorrow, Inland Revenue (the UK's equivalent of the IRS) sent me my UK tax return form. What fun!

Last I counted, I had about 4 pence of UK income from my dinky little savings account, but once a UK taxpayer, always a UK taxpayer, I guess. In case you think that the two-page US Form 1040 is intimidating, the UK equivalent runs a full 14 pages of extremely colorful line items (plus a 16 page tax calculation guide, if you do not want to take Inland Revenue up on their kind offer to calculate your tax bill for you). And, to make matters more interesting, the UK tax year runs from the first Monday in April, rather than from January 1st.

The UK used to have one of the simplest tax regimes in the world: PAYE, Pay As You Earn. You had tax withheld from your paycheck. At the end of the year, you . . . did nothing, as the amount you owed was exactly the amount that was withheld. Of course, they had to go and muck that all up.

On the other hand, the Pounds Sterling symbol is muchcooler than the dollar symbol.

To serve you better

An actual voice response unit prompt from the merchant account division of some large bank:

"To serve you better, we have changed our system so that you need to enter your 16 digit merchant account number before speaking to a representative." And this is serving me better how, precisely?

To add insult to injury, or vice versa, the representative answered the phone with, "Hello . . . may I have your 16 digit merchant account number, please?"

From Blowfish's customer service rules: Never transfer someone blind. Always make sure that the person who is picking up the phone has as much information as possible about the call, so we never have to start over with, "May I help you?" with the customer.

Today's Chicken Bulletin

It is about time someone designed a chicken house that is both stylish and functional. I look forward to seeing the special chicken-architecture issue of Metropolis in the near future.

(Via Boing Boing.)

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For security reasons, hang up, and try your call again later.

The Twilight Singers / . . . Plays Blackberry Belle

I barely remember the Afghan Whigs, except in a sort of "yeah, that name produces a feeling in me of kind of liking their music. I wonder what it was like" kind of way.

The Twilight Singers are, I suppose, very much like the Afghan Whigs, given that they have the same frontsman. They are wonderful, or at least . . . Plays Blackberry Belle is. They have jangly guitars. They have horns. They have noise and melody together, a combination that always works for me. They have a track that is nearly an anthem, "Papillon," that I sing along to in the car without a shred of embarrassment. It really does all come together nicely.

Am I felonious or not?

Via the rather righty Little Miss Attila, found this article (from another righty blog) questioning the wisdom about the War on Pornography.

I’m not going to hash over (in this post) the idea of whether or not a War on a Concept is a reasonable idea. I'm going to address one of the comments, which rhetorically asks:

So you think we shouldn’t enforce the law because we are fighting terrorism?

In the case of the War on Pornography, it’s not that simple.

In a reasonable world, any average citizen should be able to tell, in advance, if a particular action will break the law or not. For example, whether or not you agree with the War on Drugs, if you are bouncing ashore north of San Diego with a motorboat full of cocaine, it’s hard to argue that you didn't know that you were doing something the law frowns upon.

The problem with the current state of obscenity law (and, please remember, the term "pornography" has no legal definition whatsoever) is that you don’t know. You will never know. The only way to know is to be prosecuted, have your life ruined by the expense and effort of defending yourself, be found innocent . . . and then have to do it all over again with the next book or video you make.

Suppose the only way you could know if taking a prescription drug was legal was to be busted, have all your assets seized, be prosecuted, and then be found innocent. And further suppose that no precedent whatsoever would be established by this: You could still be prosecuted for taking a different medication, and your neighbor down the street could be prosecuted for the same drug that you were just acquitted for.

Welcome to the state of modern obscenity law. It’s not a comfortable place to live. Saying that the government should "just enforce the law" conceals a huge amount of politicized decision-making as to who gets prosecuted, and for what. It's been somewhat academic until recently, as the Clinton administration did not consider obscenity prosecutions a priority, and the Bush administration had, shall we say, other things to think about. But now the Feds have a case that they are sure they can win, and they are probably right.

As with most people in the sex business, I view the prosecution of Extreme Associates with mixed feelings. Rob Black’s (of Extreme) protestations of innocence are utterly disingenuous; this is a guy who has made a living by deliberately pushing the edge, with material that everyone with half a living brain cell knew was prosecution bait. That was his marketing niche: He made videos with shit (sometimes literally) in them that other producers wouldn't touch. If you dance on the edge of the cliff yelling, "Look how close I am!", when you trip and fall, it’s a bit rich to claim you were pushed. It’s doubly rich to take up a collection for your medical bills.

But my peers in the industry have rocks in their head if they think the Extreme Associates prosecution is the end. It's the beginning. The Ashcroft DoJ wants a case they can win, to prove to the public, the sex industry, the demoralized anti-smut zealots within the DoJ, and (most importantly) the Bush administration’s extreme right-wing base that obscenity cases are winnable. If that can be accomplished, hunting season will be open, and we’ll all be in front of the blind.

(Thanks to Jamais for the idea of a War on Concept, btw.)

Richard Kadrey's Photography

Although I'm normally leery of Yahoo! Groups (they seem awfully curious about your personal details just to let you have access to a microscopic bit of space on their server), I'll make an exception to recommend the group for Richard Kadrey's photography.

One of his photos (see right) graced the cover of our first issue of Leviathan, our annual catalog. He's also the author of Metrophage, a book I quite enjoyed even if he seems somewhat embarassed by it now.

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For security reasons, the right lane is closed indefinitely. Expect delays.

StyleMaster

StyleMaster from (I wish I'd thought of this company name) Western Civilization is simply the coolest thing I've run into for building and validating style sheets. Such a tool is important, as style sheets are godawful pains in the neck to get right, given the number of browsers out there.

Speaking of which, allow me to add that Internet Explorer 6 on Windows is a buggy pile of manure that should have never been released, and which has caused me more trouble than all the other browsers put together to get to display this site correctly (thank god for Virtual PC). If you are on a Windows platform running IE6 and are having text display issues, hit reload. A lot. (And before any Microsoft apologists out there get on my case, CSS does not contain a "draw the text and then quickly blank it out only to randomly redraw it on hover" style attribute. I checked.)

Even better, everyone on Windows should switch to Firefox immediately. You will thank me later, I assure you.

The Girls of April

We decided (well, OK, I decided) to run advertisements in Girlfriends and On Our Backs, since they are having anniversary issues and all. Unfortunately, the only images of two women that we had in our files were way too hot for Girlfriends, so a photo shoot was in order. After a few hasty emails and telephone calls, I got a couple of my favorite models to appear on late notice.

It's always wonderful to work with professionals. Thanks to both of them for the great results. (I'll do a proper gallery once a few more are scanned.)

That's a relief

It is reassuring to see that everything in Iraq is going according to plan.

Swans on the Thames

Yes, they are precisely like this.

The Face of Evil

One of our vendors sent this picture to me this morning, and I was inexplicably charmed by it. Not work safe . . . but then again, what is, anymore?

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For security reasons, empty all objects from your pockets. Yes, all.

Hon, get me the zeitgeist, will ya?

If Blowfish ever does a TV commercial, I want either the Brothers Quay or these people to produce it.

Iain Sinclair is cooler than either one of us

You know that experience of not really understanding a word, or not knowing how it is pronounced, learning it, and then seeing it everywhere, as if all those uses of it were just waiting for your knowledge to expand?

Substitute "cultural reference" for "word," and you have the nonfiction of Iain Sinclair.

I've had Lights out for the Territory sitting in front of the couch for months, now. Every time I dip into it, I find something new that I just learned about, and Sinclair has known about for years. It's as if his moving finger is running ahead, writing things down as I discover them.

Last year, on a whim, I saw a feature of the amazing animated films of Brothers Quay at the Red Vic movie house. Next time I pick up Lights Out, there they are. A flyer for Goldmark Art in Rutland falls out of my copy of RA Magazine. Art galleries? In Rutland? Moo. Sinclair's written up Mark Goldmark, the proprietor, in his own chapter. Read about Rachel Whiteread's House installation? Another chapter. Alan Moore and his From Hell graphic novel? Yeah, he and Sinclair (along with Peter Ackroyd) are old psychogeographic chums.

I've only just started London Orbital, and the references are already starting to pile up like a multi-car M25 crash . . . which, given the subject matter and some of the subjects in the book, seems entirely appropriate.

Quote

“I might be making it up as I go along," said the leader, “but it's still true.”

— Victor Pelevin, “A Werewolf Problem in Central Russia”

Lies Programmers Tell Ourselves, 1

"XML is human-readable, and is thus suitable for use in configuration files."

Today's Chicken Bulletin

In today's chicken-related bulletin, we have colored chicks for Easter.

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For security reasons, wait behind the yellow line. Farther back. That's good.

Myco-Art

A few weeks ago at the SF Farmers Market, I was looking through a stall filled with all sorts of wonderful kinds of mushrooms and other fungus, and thinking, "What in the world do you do with all these?"

It did not occur to me to grow them into artwork. This is what separates me from the artists.

However, this did occur to artist Philip Roth, and the result is his show "Organized," at Machine Project in Los Angeles (via Boing Boing).

(Did you know that mushrooms will save the world?)

Simon's Photos

Simon Pride takes much better photographs than I do, even if his level of gratuitous nudity is much lower.

Banned in Bentonville, 2

This is the image that we sent to them instead. How precisely this one is not "showing people having sex" compared to the other is one of those Talmudic questions that only publishers are able to decide.

Banned in Bentonville

I suppose I should take some pleasure in producing an image that was too racy for Mens Edge magazine to use. They say it was because they were just picked up by WalMart. Anything's possible, I suppose, although I notice that they didn't complain about the picture and description of the Aneros that accompanied the ad we sent in.

A page-turner

There are certain people who are both extremely proficient with Flash and have way too much time on their hands.

WorldChanging

My friend Jamais is one of the very, very smart people behind WorldChanging, a very, very smart blog about "models, tools, and ideas for building a better future." This is what Whole Earth Review should have been.

Unless you are comfortable with a position of "après moi, le deluge" towards our treatment of the planet (and that might be more than just a expression), we will have to change our direction on resource consumption, and groups like WorldChanging are part of that new path.

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For security reasons, do not use the name of a loved one as a password.