Totally topless: Buck Paxton points out that the Worcester city ordinances prohibit bar employees from displaying their aureolae (haloes) but not their areolae (nipples).
Adam Villani points out that Kern County regulates the sale of breast-shaped pillows on the highway.
Award: P&C friend Cha-Cha Connor will receive Special Recognition as a Person of Courage next month from Safe Homes, “a program supporting gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender youth.”
An Inconvenient Truth: You know the movie about climate change and Al Gore is out now, right? Alex Steffen says: “This movie will change the American debate on climate, if people get a chance to see it.”
Looks like it’s in Boston, Brookline, and Cambridge next weekend. Doesn’t make it closer to Worcester (West Boylston) for another three weeks.
Animals: Last week Adam Durand got six months for trespassing. He went to this egg farm, filmed the conditions, and took some dying hens with him. He was acquitted of burglary and petit larceny charges, but they got him on trespassing. If you do the crime, you should be ready to do the time, but is six months a reasonable sentence for this? Is this how we want to use society’s resources, on this guy’s jail time? The least I can do is encourage you to watch his footage. (It starts with a neat backwards movie.)
Digital Restrictions Management: The Free Software Foundation and Electronic Frontier Foundation got a bunch of people in yellow and green hazmat suits to swarm the Windows Hardware Engineering Conference (with Bill Gates in attendance) to protest DRM.
Quotes:
Warren Buffett, via Dan Gillmor:
If anything, the decline is accelerating. Newspaper readers are heading into the cemetery, while newspaper non-readers are just getting out of college. The old virtuous circle, where big readership draws a lot of ads, which in turn draw more readers, has broken down.
There are two working assumptions for the global fragmentation we are seeing. One is that we are involved in a clash of civilizations (Huntington) and the other is that disconnectedness is driving discontent (Barnett). Neither survives a review of the facts.
Peter Singer interviewed in Mother Jones:
I think we have to work with the tools we have. In the United States the market is probably the best tool that we have to produce change. If I were writing in Europe, I might think that the political system is more useful as a way of bringing about change. But in this country, the political system has not shown itself to be responsive to consumer demand when it challenges major businesses like agribusiness.
This is the way the debate ends: not with a bang but a press availability. President Bush today in a backhand way admitted that climate change is here, but said we shouldn’t get caught up in discussion about what is causing it and instead focus on solutions….
Bruce Sterling, from a UK talk last week:
“Better for you” is something public relations people say to consumers. And I don’t think there are very many consumers left. I mean, there’s not a single consumer in this room. I mean everybody in here is some kind of activist. You’ve all got an angle, you’ve all got an interest, you’re all web-connecting, you know, you’re all pulling one another’s levers and strings. There’s not a single passive person whose idea of a good time is to go down to Wal-Mart, and pull something off the shelf and pay and take it home. I mean, that’s just kinda over.
Edward Tufte, as recalled by Martin Hardee:
Dr Spock’s Baby Care is a best-selling owner’s manual for the most complicated ‘product’ imaginable — and it only has two levels of headings. You people have 8 levels of hierarchy and I haven’t even stopped counting yet. No wonder you think it’s complicated.
Bob Waldrop responds to a dustup with some Republican candidates for Congress:
The Bible teaches clearly and without any ambiguity that the rich and powerful who oppress the poor are going to hell. The Bible says “Blessed are the poor†and it also says “Woe to the rich.†If people (such as the Republican party candidates for Congress) don’t like that message, they should take it up with God. I’m sure He will be impressed by their opposition.
Motivation: I used the Motivator to combine a picture of my favorite Worcester person, Bruce Russell, with my favorite Bruce quote on Worcester.
I expect to see t-shirts and posters of this around town very soon.
What universe is Bruce Sterling living in? Was he speaking to a bunch of monks or hermits? I suppose the traditional department store is in decline, but people all over the country and all over the world continue to spend, spend, spend. They do it online, they do it at Wal-Mart, they do it at the Mall, they do it at the corner shop, they do it at the grocery store, they do it on vacation, etc.
In this episode of Rocketboom I found Sterling overstating his case and disregarding major clear evidence against his claim.
Re: Rocketboom. Which claim do you take issue with?