christophe thinks out loud

They are not amused, but we are.

Do visit this site before Her Majesty’s Government figures out a way of taking it down.

Alabama Views the 20th Century, Runs in Terror

The 11th Circuit Court of Appeals has upheld Alabama’s 1998 (yes, that is right, 1998, not 1898) law banning the sale of “any device designed or marketed as useful primarily for the stimulation of human genital organs for any thing of pecuniary value.”

To quote Boing Boing paraphrasing Andrew Orlowski on the moronic INDUCE Act, one could set up a shop in Alabama selling semiautomatic rifles and dildos, and be arrested for selling the dildos.

It’s time for Blowfish to offer a discount to Alabama customers, clearly.

The arguments against gay marriage have no intellectual merit, part 1.

I should let this topic go, but I'm wired up. It’s probably the doughnuts.

So, let’s get this clear. It is acceptable for individuals to buy firearms because to prevent them from doing so is overweening state power. Even though firearms can unquestionably used to do bad things, having the state tell you that you can’t have them is worse. Even though it is far from uncommon that children die at home in accidents with firearms, the alternative is worse. OK, great, I’m with you so far.

But it’s OK for the state to tell gays they can’t marry, because a married gay person might at some point be not quite as good a parent as could possibly be hoped. And that’s an entirely appropriate use of state power.

Sorry, lost you there. Conservatives should not be in a big hurry to pat themselves on the back about their intellectual rigour.

(And, yes, I know that the Second Amendment deals with the first situation, while no specific Constitutional amendment deals with the second. That’s true, and completely irrelevant. Legalistic arguments are useful when answering the question “What is legal?“, but have no relevance to the question “What should the law be?” The fact that the legalistic argument against gay marriage is thrown up so early in the debate is one more sign of the intellectual bankruptcy of the arguments against it.)

Getting My Fix

There I was, in Portland. It was late at night, but I had to do it. I walked from my safe hotel down to the bad part of town, blocks away. Tucked between the dive bars and night clubs was the door I was looking for. I was jonesing, badly, and I needed my fix.

Fortunately, Voodoo Doughnuts was open.

I consider myself something of a doughnut aficionado, but I have never been to a doughnut place where I thought, “Am I hip enough to buy doughnuts at this establishment?” Until tonight. But I did it anyway. Doughnuts were involved.

And they were wonderful; light and fluffly and not overpoweringly sweet. This is a doughnut store with soul. This is a doughnut store with in-store music events. This is a doughnut store that is open from 10pm to 10am. How cool is that? And when was the last time, when ordering a nut-and-chocolate frosted cake doughnut, you were asked, “Regular or vegan?”

(And, really, how many independent doughnut places are left? Krispy Kreme, of the massive expansion and financial shenanigans, is now making their doughnuts so drenched in glaze that I can barely eat them, which is saying something. Winchells? The less said the better.)

So, the next time you are in Portland, check it out. The dirt doughnuts were especially good.

How to Ruin a Perfectly Nice Trip

So, here I am in Portland, Oregon at a very nice conference. Portland is in Multnomah County, one of the few places in the country where, at least for a while, gays could legally marry.

And, of course, Oregon is also home to idiots (like everywhere else in the country) that seem to be utterly unable to cope with the idea of gays marrying, so they have qualified a petition for the November ballot to prevent that.

All of these stupid anti-same-sex-marriage laws are pointless and antiquated as sodomy laws. I cannot believe that in 2004 we’re continuing to argue over this. I would like you morons to cut it out; you’re embarrassing me in front of my European friends.

And, in addition, the chief private competitor of Oregon’s very reasonably-priced state worker’s compensation insurance company, SAIF, are pushing a petition to put it out of business. I guess that they decided the California model of worker’s compensation would be a good idea. That’s an interesting business strategy: I wonder if I could get a law passed to put my competitors out of business.

I was thinking that Oregon was looking like an attractive place to do businesses. I guess, after November, I’ll know for sure.

Blame Canada

Well, in this case, blame video games. It’s much easier than actually raising your kids.

Fighting the Last War

“Generals are always prepared to fight the last war” is a cliché, and as with most clichés, that is because it is true.

In reading this post on WorldChanging about a site that summarizes the evidence in favor of anthropogenic (i.e., human-caused) global warming, it struck me how the argument, at least in the US, has broken along traditional political lines. The left, by and large, accepts the existence of anthropogenic global warming and wants to make finding answers to it a priority; the right, by and large, argues against it, usually in the alternative (it isn’t happening; if it is happening, humans aren’t causing it; if humans are causing it there is nothing we can do; if there is something we can, it’s too expensive; and if there is something affordable that we can do, what’s wrong with the climate getting warmer, anyway?).

Why is that? Why the resistance to something that is as categorically true as the earth going around the sun?

And then it struck me: The right is not fighting the current war, they’re fighting the last one. From the right’s perspective, this whole thing is a continuation of the (largely-mythological) “technology vs. the Luddite left” war, where the only answer to global warming is to return to the Iron Age (setting aside for a moment that Iron Age-style living with the world’s current population might not be a really great idea, either).

Certainly elements of that exist on the left, but the strange, like the poor, will always be with us, bless ’em.

The reality is that this is a technological problem that will have technological fixes. Unless we are willing to consider things that border on the unthinkable (“what would it take to get the world’s population back to 2 billion?”), we will need to apply every ounce of brain matter to finding very clever fixes for this problem. It’s going to be complicated, and it may well be a bit inconvenient for the first world.

We’ll cope, we always do. This is not about smashing the automated looms; this is about finding a way to continue enjoying the current standard of living. Yes, we will have to find replacements for hydrocarbon power; we found replacements for horse power in cities, and I am not among the few who miss foot-deep horse shit on city streets.

And, a special note to my friends on the right: Some group of people, who may not even know who they are right now, is going to make shitloads of money off of this.

American and the Know-Nothings

One of the things that fascinates me about America is that it is the only modern industrial country that will elect leaders on the basis of how unintelligent they are. In Europe, if you are perceived as dumb, that’s it for your political career; voters there, not unreasonably, expect that the leaders of their countries be smart enough to run the damn thing. It would be as disasterous as admitting to being an atheist would be in the US.

Here, being smart is liability. American anti-intellectualism runs very deep. I expect that a candidate for Congress to say something like, “Well, I don’t know much about fancy finance. I’m just a plain ol’-fashioned boy. That’s why I think I’d be a good Chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee.“

Thus, we have the President of the United States making claims about another country that are, first, not true, and are, second, based on quotes that were lifted from an undergraduate’s paper, and, lastly, with all that, his staff didn’t even get the quotes and their context right.

And, here in Bush’s America, that’s no big deal.

I feel much safer now.

Remember, whatever you do, don’t run a popular fan site about a science fiction show. After all, what are you, some kind of terrorist?

And you can use it for really big miniatures

The Küppersbusch Honeycomb Cooking Tiles system is probably the sexiest cooking surface I’ve ever seen. It reminds me of the "virtual" keyboard that the villain had in his desk in Tron, which made quite the impression on me at that young age.

Of course, at $5,000+ for a complete kit, not counting the custom counter-top work, I doubt it will be in our kitchen when we redo it next year, but we can dream . . .

(Via Gizmodo.)

Life Imitates Satire

First, read this, then this.

(As often the case, via Boing Boing.)

Signal vs. Noise vs. the USPS

USPS 1, Signal vs. Noise 0.

Over at the wonderful blog Signal vs. Noise they have discovered the hell that is the United States Postal Service. (The company behind Signal vs. Noise is the great design firm 37Signals, whose stuff we love even if they apparently don’t like smut and won’t work with us.)

Their commentary is pretty mild and polite. Needless to say, I feel no such contraints.

The whole Priority Mail thing is a joke. The USPS pushes it as if it is a guaranteed, door-to-door second day guaranteed service. It is not. Our experience (and we ship a ton of Priority Mail) is that 3-5 days is about the best you can expect . . . if it gets there at all. The USPS provides no insurance on parcels, unless you follow a Victorian-era paperwork system that would make a mockery of our attempt to process customer shipments effectively. And when you do insure parcels, they pay incredibly slowly, if ever, when there is a loss. And there will be a loss.

Even Express Mail, the ultra-expensive premium service, has service commitments that are almost no commitment at all.

The whole thing is a disaster. Kill it, and start over.

Upside Down, with Little Xs for Eyes

Blowfish gets a positive deluge of spam. Given that we have a bunch of public email addresses, and have had them for years, this is not surprising. After much tinkering, I decided to Get Serious, and on recommendations, I bought a Barracuda Networks 200 dedicated spam filter. (It’s really just a Linux box running custom mail filtering software. It sucks up the mail as your primary MX, and then sends on the stuff that passes the test to your real mail server.)

I installed it with much excitement, and early reports were promising. It was, indeed, much more effective than my home-grown solutions.

And then it all went terribly wrong.

At 8:30am on the Saturday after it was installed, it just stopped working. Plop. Kernel panic message on the console. Power cycle, cross fingers. Nope, Saturday evening, same thing. Fine, whatever, back to our old mail server, call tech support on Monday. (Why do these things only happen on weekends?) The nice tech support guy SSHes in, fixes a file system corruption (!), and the box runs fine.

Until the next Saturday. 10am, plop, dead spam box. This time, it’s even more insidious: it will open connections, but won’t actually accept email, so our monitoring service doesn’t flag it as down. Drive out to Blowfish, cycle power, and same problem.

Hassle with Barracuda tech support again on Monday. This time, they send me out a replacement box. Great! Finally! I really want this to work. So, tonight, I install it and . . . Dead on arrival. It will boot, and the console comes up fine, but even after setting the network address properly, it doesn’t respond over the network interface. No web admin, no ping, nothing.

I can hardly wait for my conversation with Barracuda tomorrow morning. I think I sense a market opportunity out there; anyone want to start a spam filter box company with me?

Fun Furniture

Funfurde is a neat little blog about cool furniture. If you are a furniture fetishist (as I am), this will be a place for you. The only thing I don’t particularly like is the weird. lots. of. periods. design. tic. they. have. Otherwise, it’s great.

This is where I found a charcoal grill I’d have in my back yard, now that I am a proper suburbanite.

Larry Sultan: The Valley

So, why does The XXX Project bug me, and Larry Sultan’s work doesn’t? It’s a good question: they are both mainstream photographers who have ventured, like Victorian explorers, into the heart of the porn industry, and returned to tell the tale.

Part of it is that I just admire Sultan’s work, technically: damn, I wish I could light sets like he does. Part of it is while they are both playing amateur anthropologist, Sultan does not condescend as if the porn industry was a tribe of rare monkies. “This is the first time these Porn People have ever seen a Real Photographer. Let’s watch their interesting rites as they explore the shiny objects we present them with.”

For certain mainstream entertainment types who decide to check out the porn world, they make the ironic distance clear. They may be in the porn world, but they are certainly not of it. They want the reflected glamour of the porn world without acquiring the bottom-caste air that clings to those who actually work in it.

I don’t get that from Sultan’s work; it just seem friendly, not patronizing. (If you’re in San Francisco before 1 August, check it out at SF MOMA.)

Naked Porn Stars!

Perhaps I am just confused. I am sure that Timothy Greenfield-Sanders is a fine photographer. It is clearly true that he can correctly expose film. But can someone tell me why taking 30 pictures of porn stars, whose entire job it is to pose naked for photographers, is being treated as if Vermeer had returned to Earth, complete with HBO special and a gallery show in New York?

I mean, is calling a book of porn star images The XXX Project pretentious or what? I’m sure that legions of photographers are saying, “Naked pictures of Jenna Jameson and Nina Hartley? I have thousands of them! Why does he get a show?”

Oh, well. Jenna Jameson looks quite striking without porn star makeup.

Or maybe . . .

Or perhaps this will be the next cover. So many decisions!

Don’t Even Think About It

“We cannot have free government without elections; and if the rebellion could force us to forego, or postpone a national election, it might fairly claim to have already conquered and ruined us.”

— Abraham Lincoln

They’re Here

In chatting about the Bush administration’s horrible attitude towards civil liberties with more right-wing friends, a steady mantra has been: Don’t worry about the laws. Worry about the prosecutions.

OK, gotcha. The prosecutions are here now, and I’m very, very worried.

An artist whose work is dangerous only in that it is politically provocative is facing charges that could lock him up for 20 years in prison. That’s it. End of story. This is not far from a Soviet-era trial of a writer on charges of parasitism and hooliganism.

You know that assault on liberties that all of us nutso left-wingers complained about with the PATRIOT act? It’s here. It’s happening.

(And, in a Blowfish connection, one of the publishers we carry got a subpoena!)

Update: WorldChanging has a very good post on a way that you can help.

Lies, Damn Lies, and Facts

I'm going to include this attributed statement from Oliver Letwin, the UK Conservative Party’s Shadow Chancellor, because it illustrates wonderfully the uses to which facts can be put:

Mr Letwin said huge amounts of money were being used to fund a Civil Service the same size as the population of Sheffield.

Why, that’s terrible! That’s horrible! That’s . . . um, how many people live in Sheffield, anyway? (417,900 in 2003, according to some cheesy Google-based research I just did.)

Here, we have a superb example of the Context-Free Fact. Is that too many civil servants? Too few? How does that compare with other countries? Does that include doctors and nurses in the NHS, lawyers in Legal Aid? It’s clear that Mr Letwin doesn’t approve, but on what basis does he not approve? How many civil servants would be the right number?

Facts, even if 100% accurate, are useless without context.

Thus, when George Bush’s EPA touts its Green credentials by announcing that it will spend a huge, enormous, whopping $37.5 million on Energy Star, perhaps the most successful energy conservation program the Federal government has come up with, it pays to know that this is $12.5 million less than has been spent on it in previous years, and they are in fact cutting, not expanding, this program. Just for example.

The Next Cover?

I haven’t decided yet if this is going to be the cover of the next Blowfish catalog, but I love the image regardless.

Aid Workers Retrain Man Raised As Chicken

A man in Suva, Fiji, is being taught to act human after being raised as a chicken.

You can read all about it. B'gwauk.

Fishnet

Yet another project of mine has gone live: Fishnet is Blowfish’s revived e-zine for erotica. The design is mine, and one of the Blowfish staff is the editor. Check it out!

Konfabulated by Dashboard

Over at Daring Fireball, you can find an excellent article about Apple’s new Dashboard feature in Tiger vs. the existing Konfabulator system. Short summary: Painting Apple in the villain in this piece isn’t fair.