Jason Clarke

From my local paper:

Brian Mitchell of Mitchell’s Sheet Metal estimated that about 300 gallons of gasoline had been stolen from his company’s trucks in the last few weeks, so he decided to do something about it.

On Monday, Mitchell set up an alert system in his parking lot and waited, gun by his side, in case something happened.

It didn’t take long. At 12:43 a.m. Tuesday, Mitchell surprised James Alan Waterman, 25, of Knox, and Tasha M. Vigneault, 19, of Freedom as they allegedly attempted to siphon gas from one of his trucks. They were held at gunpoint until sheriff’s deputies arrived to take the pair to jail.

My former high school speech club coach Mike Daisey was “busted” by a blogger for hotlinking to one of the images on her blog- and Mike responded with a reasoned rebuttal.

At first glance you’d probably side with Martha, the blogger whose image Mike re-posted on his site. But that’s why it’s often fun to get deeper into an issue- because that’s where the complexity lies. See, the image Mike linked to wasn’t one of Martha’s own creation, nor is it owned by her. She- keeper of the blog “Your Daily Art“- was meerely linking to a famous painting, available on innumerable other websites (not to mention offline places) throughout the world.

So in linking to the image from her site, Mike makes two arguments in his defense. The first, which I don’t tend to agree with on principle, is that there should be no problem for Martha since his site receives “modest” traffic and hence isn’t likely to cause any realisticaly negative effects on Martha’s website or life (negative effects might include bandwith overage charges; largely irrelevant here since Martha’s site is hosted on Blogger UPDATE: Per the comments below, Martha’s husband Jerry alerts me to the fact that her site is not hosted on Blogger, but on their own web space. My regrets for the error).

Mike’s second argument, which rings much truer in this case (in large part because it’s not conditional) asserts that he wasn’t stealing per se, since Martha’s original posting of the image (one she neither created nor owns) was no different than his own re-posting. Here, Mike’s defense that his site isn’t likely to cause any unfriendly bandwidth problems for Martha’s blog make sense, since in this scenario that appears to be the only potential wrong that could arise as a direct result of his hotlinking Martha’s image (or, more accurately, the image on Martha’s site).

The brunt of Mike’s defense:

It’s also patently absurd that once we’ve moved onto the web, and are living in an era when we put images there that can be instantly downloaded to any location on earth and duplicated digitally millions of times we’re arguing about credit. Not credit for creating the artwork, mind you, but “credit” for hosting–a shared act that every server on the WWW performs every day or you’d never be able to even read this site. Sure there are examples when folks can be linked to and cause massive traffic problems, but I doubt that’s happening today, and if it were a possibility I would exercise some natural diligence.

Perhaps the safest route is for Mike (or anyone in his position) to simply right-click, save the image, and serve it from his own website (or Flickr account?)

Writer’s block, writer’s block, writer’s block, writer’s block, writer’s block, writer’s block, writer’s block, unoriginal thoughts, writer’s block, writer’s block.

Wriiiiiiterrrrrrr’s block.

Now that Joe Wilson is back in the news (part of it his own doing), I thought it would be both quite timely and at least somewhat hilarious to dig up this relic from exactly one year ago today: July 15th of good ole summer 2004:

The image above is a screenshot I captured from John Kerry’s presidential campaign website exactly one year ago, on July 15th 2004. That’s right: During July of last year (until it was curiously taken down a short time after this screenshot), Joe Wilson was proudly heralded by the Kerry campaign as a beacon of “honesty.”

Of course, in just one of the Kerry campaign’s many, many flubs, a short time after Wilson’s “restore honesty” website was posted his credibility and- yes, honesty- were completely obliterated by the Senate Intelligence Report that led, no doubt, to his website being scrubbed from the Kerry campaign site and the web altogether. The whole thing kind of reminds me of how, around the same time, Sandy Berger “resigned” his post as national security advisor to the Kerry campaign after published news reports alleged that he stole documents from the national archives (by hiding them in his socks, don’t forget!).

I’ve only watched 3 episodes so far, but they’ve all been really, really great: it’s Scrubs Season 1 on DVD, and I highly recommend it.

A fascinating post on the economics of dogs barking by Lee at Marginal Revolution.

A prediction: Karl Rove is not Judith Miller’s source. Think about it: if Rove was Miller’s source, don’t you think the NYT would be pressuring Miller to reveal Rove with some kind of damning evidence, thereby effectively ensuring his almost immediate public demise?

Now, consider the flip side: The only explanation for Miller’s ongoing incareration is that Rove is not her source. When you think of it that way, things begin to make sense. Revealing Miller’s source then, by virtue of the fact that he/she is NOT Rove, will only serve to take the heat off Liberal Enemy #1. The NYT knows Rove will then have the opening he needs to recede from the spotlight and, given his extroadinary intelligence and political cunning, make a clean escape (or at least take one for the Bush team).

As the NYT pressures Miller to withold her Non-Rove source, Rove’s situation becomes worse and worse. Next week, after Rove has spent a week flapping in the wind while the White House clams up and the press corps tears him into shreds of bloody meat, I predict that only then will the NYT/Miller reveal her source- and Miller’s source will be the person, most likely a CIA employee, who actually leaked Plame’s name.

By then, Rove will be long gone, everybody having long since forgotten (or never learned in the first place) that he did not (read Matt Cooper’s emails for proof) leak Plame’s name.

It’s just a prediction. But knowing the New York Times, I think it has a good chance of coming true. Of course, knowing Rove, he may well have one up his sleeve on this. After all, he did give the clear for Cooper to reveal his name…

Where I’ve been: Getting used to a new job, fighting a nagging respatory infection, wrangling with a lemon used car purchase, buying stuff for our possible new house, agonizing over a TiVo or MediaCenter PC, and as of late, working on a draft proposal for a new book.

I have no plans to abandon this space (I did update the header after last week’s dispicable attacks on London), but if you’re thinking about dumping me from your RSS reader, please don’t just yet! If I ever close up shop here I will be sure to make an appropriate announcement, so as not to leave people (all 2 or 3 of you) hanging.

…because right now, my favorite RSS feed is my SlickDeals.net feed.