Imagine that you are the best tennis player of your time, perhaps the best tennis player of all time. You’ve been number one in the world for an unprecedented 228 consecutive weeks. You’ve reached the semifinals or better of the last sixteen Grand Slams. You’ve won three slams in a year three times, two of those in consecutive years, and in those consecutive years you were in all eight Grand Slam finals. Unlike other historic greats with prodigious talent and great success on grass, you’re excellent on clay and have been improving on that surface. Only one Slam trophy is missing from your cabinet: the French. As possibly the greatest player of all time, what could stop you from winning it?
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I was surprised by the news that Bertie Ahern, the Teflon Taoiseach, is resigning. Fittingly, I received this news via a text from a friend.
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I didn’t really take part, but apparently today was Run Some Old Web Browsers Day. I think my first exposure to a Web browser would have been around 1994, although the first time I could really play around with one was in a Humboldt University computer lab, I think, and that would have been 1995. Before that I was restricted to ftp and gopher, but was never that into either of them. I think I have some email from a little earlier than that.
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From the what-were-they-thinking department: the German supermarket chain Lidl has been caught spying on their employees.
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I came across a distinction in fiction recently that I don’t think I’ve paid much attention to before, and that I don’t know the word(s) (if extant) for: works in which the characters play a part in the major events that occur in their milieu during the narrative, and works in which they play no such part, but are caught up in those larger events.
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Contrary to what you might expect, this post is not a rant against Wal-Mart per se. I was prompted to write it after reading this CNN article about Wal-Mart suing a disabled woman who was an ex-employee. The summary is that she was in a bad accident, was covered by Wal-Mart health insurance for her treatment, then successfully sued the person responsible for the accident—at which point Wal-Mart sued her to recover that money, because her employment contract entitled them to recoup the money they spent on health insurance in that fashion. The CNN article raises some questions about this, but I think they’re the wrong questions.
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I haven’t finished all of it yet, but Clay Shirky’s talk on networking, organization, and the internet is quite good.
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Yeah, I don’t usually like to sound like I’m begging in my blog posts, especially when it’s not clear to entity what my request could be made. But I am, not for the first time, awash in dread that the United States is going to launch an attack on Iran.
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Tom Tomorrow is one of my favorite short-comic artists, and he really nailed it with today’s strip, “Five Years Later, Neocons Discuss Their Regrets”. The attitudes expressed by the characters in the strip are caricatures… but some of them are just stripped-down versions of obfuscatory statements major neoconservative figures have made, and one or two appear to be exactly what they are saying.
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The recent revelations that State Department contractors have been snooping through the passport records of presidential candidates, not to mention the fact that Eliot Spitzer’s purchases of sex were uncovered first by his bank and then the IRS, have highlighted the reach of the surveillance state, particularly the sheer amount of information that the government actively tracks. A recent LA Times editorial points out that purely personal privacy isn’t the real key, but rather the ability to use surveillance for political advantage—which should be pretty obvious, even more obvious given its blatant presence in the not-very-distant past.
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Continuing directly on the theme from the previous entry, author Charles Cumming has written a hypertext work that’s a fiction/Google Maps mashup: The 21 Steps.
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Depending on how well they can deal with spam, and how open they make it, this could be a big deal. Google are letting users edit locations in Google Maps.
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Since I generally side with the “snakes” in that particular conflict, I’m not a huge fan of St. Patrick’s Day… but the following rendition of “Danny Boy” is just too good not to post (even though it was on BoingBoing earlier).
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I finished reading Rohinton Mistry’s A Fine Balance today. It’s an excellent book, covering a broad swathe of life in India during The Emergency, a period of what was essentially dictatorship form 1975 to 1977. It’s also extremely depressing.
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Apparently this is a well-known internet meme at this point, but I had somehow missed the fact that William Shatner covered Pulp’s “Common People”.
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Okay, so it’s not quite “thinking”, but it’s $150K/year to accumulate ‘interesting people’ and summaries of the zeitgeist for Hollywood producer Brian Grazer.
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When I went to see Michael Mann’s 1981 directorial debut, Thief, this evening, I was struck by the two trailers accompanying it, the original trailers for Robocop and The Terminator. (There will be spoilers for those movies in what follows, so if you somehow haven’t seen those movies yet, you probably shouldn’t read on.)
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This is a photo of a swan by Dublin’s Grand Canal that I took last May.
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Earlier this week I decided not to play in the major MTG event Grand Prix “San Francisco”. A Grand Prix is a two-day mixed professional/amateur tournament, open to all attendees (unlike the invitation-only Pro Tour events). I put the location in quotation marks because the GP is actually in San Jose—something that is a factor in my skipping it, and it annoys me quite a lot that Wizards of the Coast wouldn’t either put up the money to host the event in San Francisco or honestly admit that it wasn’t in San Francisco.
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Which is a shame, because I rather like the stuff. Am probably mildly addicted to it, in fact. But this post makes me aware of a bunch of thinsg I’ve been ignoring about it—primarily the true nature of “crystalline fructose”.
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The DMCA is, as discussed two days ago, a piece of legislation with a rather broadly-reaching grasp. Particularly in giving copyright holders a lot of leeway in preventing the dissemination of “circumvention devices”. I suspect that certain approachs could exploit this latitude and make the absurdity of the law even more evident than it already is.
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So the good guys in this movie are the ones who kill off newborn males if they’re “defective” in any way? Hmm…

Despite being a Frank Miller fan, I’ve never read the 300 comic. It just didn’t seem as if it would have enough to hold my interest (plot is rather important to me). Seeing the movie version hasn’t changed my mind.
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