Guess the year II

" ‘The best thing going for the Republicans in this election,’ he wrote, ‘is the weakness of the Democrats. There has never been such a motley collection,’ he said, ‘of what former Ambassador William Bullitt used to call "first-rate second-rate men." ‘

"But it does not matter. George Herbert Walker Bush [okay, the name gives this one away] will not be with us much longer. By next Halloween, he will be living somewhere in New Jersey not far from the Nixon homestead."

(Hunter S. Thompson, October 5, 1987. From Generation of Swine – Gonzo Papers Vol.2: Tales of Shame and Degradation in the ’80’s)

Ulysses meet O.J.?

A friend just sent me a link to a Talk of the Town piece by Jeffrey Toobin in the latest New Yorker about Pablo Fenjves. (Dec. 4 issue; article posted on the New Yorker Web site Nov. 22)

What’s Fenjves’ most immediate and glaring claim to fame?

He’s the ghostwriter for "If I did it" — O.J. Simpson’s un-confession. A book that Rupert Murdoch, in a rare fit of apparent social sensitivity, put the kybosh on before it hit the shelves.

The article is interesting, informative and enjoyable to read, in standard Talk of the Town style, but the ending is priceless. Fenjves’ response to Murdoch’s cancellation of the book:

Still, Fenjves is undaunted. “It’s going to be bigger than ever,” he said. “It’s like ‘Ulysses,’ except without the talent.”

BPD meets YouTube — and we’re all connected…more than we realise

I have previously described the Boston Police Department’s Weblog as not being particularly blog-like, as I have come to understand the term. The posts are written in standard police report format with accordingly often stiff phrasing and awkward construction: "A registration check revealed that the vehicle license plate had been reported stolen." — What was stolen? The license plate, or the car? "…the officer discontinued following the suspect vehicle. " Discontinued?

I have also noted that the information contained in the blog is nowhere near as searchable — and consequently only a fraction as useful  — as that provided by the Chicago Police Department and collected, sorted, collated and merged with Google mapping software by Adrian Holovaty on his site chicagocrime.org.

However, after a little time spent this morning cruising the BPD blog, my respect and appreciation have increased. I’m also impressed.

In an entry posted on Sept. 25, the BPD seeks the public’s help in identifying a woman whose partially decomposed body was found last year in a chimney. To this end, the BPD has inserted a video taken from YouTube. The video is of a digital reconstruction of the woman, showing what she might have looked like before she died.

I tried the video and it didn’t work. That could have been due to the age and decrepitude of the computer on which I’m composing this. However, the BPD anticipated this possibility and included below the video a link to a PDF file of still photos.

At the bottom of the entry are other links: to a PDF document with photos and identifying details; to the America’s Most Wanted page on this case (it was profiled on that show in mid-September); and to another bpdnews.com post asking for help in identifying a body found on Causeway Street (Boston) in early June.

These are the moments when I am awed by the people-connecting power of the Internet/World Wide Web.

These are the moments when I am awed by the potential power of tens, hundreds, thousands or even millions of strangers contributing their small part to work towards a whole that is much greater than anyone can envision.

And the truly stunning element of this is that most of those people will probably never know the extent of their contributions. Will never know how many lives they affect or touch.

It is, indeed, the ultimate web. (Especially once the world of the Web reaches at last the few billion "un-connected" people. Although whether that will be an unequivocally good thing is debatable — but that’s a whole other discussion…)

BPD blog hacked — the info.

So here it is, from a posting by Caroline Roberts on bostonist.com:

Much to the dismay of those hoping to keep up with non-fatal shootings, non-fatal stabbings, and bachelorette parties "gone wrong," BPD News, the Boston police department’s online blotter, has fallen prey to individuals who claim to be Turkish hackers. "hacked by metlak / Ownz here / F*&k papa." originally replaced the site’s content. Metlak, is that meant to be an insult of Big Papi? Metlak and company have left their fingerprints on Massachusetts news websites before – the hacker took down the website for the Greenfield Recorder back in June. Turkish hackers have been blamed for taking down even bigger fish than the BPD blog, including European websites for Sony Music and the Bolivian Foreign Ministry.

According to a Boston Police Department missive on Universal Hub and the Globe, the BPD’s hosting service is working on the problem, and the "F*&k papa" message is gone. They’re making progress as a "test post" is now up and the BPD site seems to be recovering. If you have the urge to read BPD News, you can still access older pages through Internet search engines and cached files. The BPD News site is hosted by an external company and doesn’t’ sit on a city server. Perhaps if they were under the protection of Government Center (or even the Roxbury fortress) rather than out milling about in the open sea of cyberspace they wouldn’t be a Cyprus for the Turks to invade.

And, from boston.com, The Boston Globe’s website, in the New England in Brief section (Sept. 22):

Boston police are investigating the invasion of the department’s online news blog last evening. Someone hacked into BPDNews.com and left a line that read, “hacked by metlak / Ownz here / . . ." along with some profane language. The department took down the site about 9:30 p.m., soon after it was contacted by the media. Elaine Driscoll, the Police Department spokeswoman , said she did not know when the hacking occurred. “This is an unfortunate incident," she said. “We’re going to investigate this matter immediately. It is a very important tool that we use to disseminate timely information."

The power of blogs?

A photojournalist friend of mine just sent me a link to the blog of Josh Wolf, who was arrested last month in the San Francisco Bay Area on a first amendment issue. From an Aug. 7 comment posted on Wolf’s blog:

In case you haven’t heard about it yet, Josh Wolf, a blogger who covered the recent G8 Summit in Scotland where some violence erupted has been jailed for not turning over to the authorities the video he shot of the event.

Wolf was jailed in early August. In early September he was released on bail. For the past month-plus Wolf’s mother and friends, and Wolf himself, under the code name "Insurgent," have been posting updates on Wolf’s blog. On Sept. 20 Wolf was granted a 2-day reprieve, which allowed him to attend a benefit for him held in San Francisco (where Wolf has been based for a while):

In Wolf’s reply brief to the court, he and his lawyers argue:

"… a fair reading of Supreme Court precedent requires a finding that there is a “substantial connection” between the information sought and the criminal conduct under investigation before a witness may be held in contempt for refusing to answer question that implicate First Amendment rights.

"The district court here declined to engage in the required balancing, specifically refusing to view the videotape to determine whether it bears a substantial or merely a ‘remote and tenuous relationship to the subject of the investigation’ and whether its production was required to satisfy a ‘legitimate need of law enforcement.’"

Having lived for a little more than a decade in the SF Bay Area, I know that there is a vigorous freedom of the press/independent media/intellectual property protection movement there, led by Media Alliance. Media Alliance’s executive director, Jeff Perlstein, was scheduled to speak at the Wolf benefit.

The Bay Area chapter of the National Writer’s Union and Truthout.org, an SF Bay area-based organisation "dedicated to establishing a powerful, stable voice for independent journalism," are also fighting on Wolf’s behalf.

What does this fight for a relatively obscure blogger’s rights as a "legitimate journalist" signify?

It seems to be a maybe small but possibly crucial battle in the war for establishment of full journalistic rights — and responsibilities — for bloggers who view themselves as journalists and act accordingly.

(Writer’s note: sorry about the misaligned paragraphs. Cutting and pasting wreaks havoc with my typesetting.)

Citizen Journalism

My online journalism class has been conducting an ongoing and vibrant (and online, of course, through blog-style entries) discussion about the future of journalism, especially print journalism.

Journalism as we’ve known it is in the throes of change — from dictatorial-style "we tell you what the news is and you’ll take in the format we decide on" traditional newspapers to other, much more fluid forums like blogging and online news services.

One of the key elements of this change is the fact that, because they have access to news all the time, readers are demanding more involvement in the type of news they get from their daily paper — and the style in which that news is presented.

Former San Jose Mercury News columnist, Dan Gilmore, in his feverishly frequently updated blog about "grassroots journalism" references a Wall Street Journal article (April 11) about exactly this phenomenon.

Mary Lou Fulton, publisher of the Northwest Voice, a free community newspaper delivered every other Thursday to 21,700 homes in and around Bakersfield, CA, is way ahead of the game in all of this. She has created a community newspaper based on the "do it yourself" approach of such wildly successful online sites as Craigs List and Google Ad Sense. Most of the information and pictures in The Voice are submitted by readers, community organizations, churches and schools.

Violent Youth

Two high school varsity baseball coach friends and I stumbled the other night into a discussion about the realism inherent in video games available — and wildly popular — now, and the disturbing way in which this is divorcing teens from the physical reality of violent behaviour towards real human beings.

This study by the American Psychological Association found that

"students who reported playing more violent video games in junior and high school engaged in more aggressive behavior," said lead author Anderson, of Iowa State University.

The studies were conducted in 2000. Video game realism has increased exponentially since then.

Playing games like Grand Theft Auto (GTA), Vice City, and Sin City — which now has its own movie — is practically a rite of acceptance among male youth.

Homicide in Detroit – Echoes of Violence, an award-winning photo essay/series of articles by the Detroit Free Press, asks

"Why is this city killing itself? What has it done to the community’s soul? "

How badly are our youth becoming divorced from the real physical, mental, emotional consequences of their actions?

How much are parents contributing to this, by not imposing consequences on their teenagers for actions that violate the rights of others?

A Smack in Time…?

According to a new national survey of New Zealand parents, almost half the parental population of the country (49%) claims not to have used physical discipline on their children in the past three months. This is double the number (25%) who made the same claim twelve years ago.

If this trend continues, the Prime Minister of New Zealand, Helen Clark, will consider repealing section 59 of the Crimes Act, which allows parents to use "reasonable" force, "by way of correction towards the child".

I wonder what the percentage would have been in 1970, the year I was born.

My mother had a wooden spoon called George. Most of the time, George spent his days head down in a stew or cake mix. But, on those rare occasions when my recalcitrance and truculance pushed my mother beyond the limits of her forebearance (in other words: when I drove her around the bend), George was allowed to pull his head out of the pot and and whap it against my bottom instead.

Usually, of course, the mere threat of George was enough to send me cringing to the floor, whimpering that I’d stop whatever insanity-causing behaviour I was engaged in. For instances of mild disobedience, a smack to my bottom or a rap of something hard against my hand conveyed my parents’ (and my teachers’) displeasure.

My parents were hard-working, thrifty, generous, thoughtful of the needs of others, welcoming, self-disciplined, self-sufficient, unjudgemental and, above all, honourable. Through their actions, their words — and their discipline, they instilled within me the importance of living my life to their standards. Which I try to do, every day.

If I had been born in 2005 instead of 1970, upon the eve of the repeal of section 59 of the Crimes Act, my parents would be borderline criminals.

I don’t know whether a little smacking hurts a child. I don’t believe it hurt me. I have a good relationship with all of the wooden spoons in my life, with no lingering traumatic assocations.

And I have never as an adult had the desire to hit another person to hurt them.