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Tuesday, November 29, 2005
From the Fresh Acronym Dept... 
Let that be a liaison to you
| | Andre Durand (among many others) points to Goodbye to America, the latest post by Hoder (Hassein Derakhshan), a leading blogger and Canadian citizen from Iran who was exiled from his New York home because of his own blog. Or by overstaying his visa and making that fact discoverable by border offers on his blog. Also in his suitcase. Anyway, I had no idea googling people at the border had become a routine, he writes. |
A profusion of amateur producers
| | What do you see when you look on Flickr or 23, are you looking at the work of "consumers"? Or of producers? |
| | But he keeps talking about amateur photographers as "consumers" and "the consumer". I'm thinking, whats wrong with "amateur"? |
| | Habit, mostly. Producers are accustomed to talking about their reciprocals as consumers. The problem in the market category we call photography is that the producers are no longer just consuming. They're producing and reproducing like microbes. Since they're not doing it for money in most cases, the term "amateur" is a lot more accurate, and less degrading. |
| | Of course, readers familiar with my writing (and ranting) know that the c-word has been a crab up my butt since long before Cluetrain. I should point out, though, that my issue is with accuracy, not manners. When somebody is performing as a customer, or as a citizen, or as a producer, the term consumer is not a synonym. It is either inaccurate or inadequate. |
| | I wanted to bring this point up before the end of the show, but there was some kind of technical glitch and the show ended a little bit early. |
| | By the way, Riya has a business model, and a variety of uses that are extemely interesting. Check out the show when it comes out. Plus the links above. |
Hunting, fishing and radar experiments.
| | A private email thread has followed Chris Locke's wish for a Christmas firearm (mentioned two posts down). Rather than confine my own contributions to email, I thought I'd just cc it to the world. Here goes... |
| | My father was an infantryman in WWII. Before that he worked on the railroad in Alaska, where an encounter with a grizzly came when he was unarmed and regretting it. |
| | He brought a "30-30" (no idea what that was, excatly) rifle back from the war. It used huge jacketed bullets that weren't available to civilians, so he eventually sold it or gave it away. I remember that he buried his few bullets in the back yard of the old family house on Hoyt Avenue in Fort Lee — property that has since been replaced by a city street. |
| | Pop was also a hunter who used a double-barrell 12-guage Beretta, mostly to blow up birds. He gave me a single-barrell something-or-other to start out with when I was twelve. The first and only thing I killed with it was a groundhog, near my Uncle Archie's garden in South Jersey, which was then very rural (it's still bucolic). My first shot, from about 25 yards away, rolled the groundhog over, but didn't kill it. My second wounded it. When I walked up to it to finish it off, my already minimal enthusiasm had waned to zero, and I missed. So my father finished the job with one shot that produced a large red circle on one side of the animal, which it was then my job to bury. As sporting instruction goes, this was right down there with "you clean your own fish." As aversion training went, it accomplished with gore what fishing accomplished with bore. While I enjoyed Pop's company when we went fishing, staring at water for hours at a time wasn't easy for a hyperactive kid like me. |
| | I don't know what happened to either shotgun. My guess is that they went the way of the old rifle. |
| | Meanwhile, I remember that Pop entered WWII in 1944 at age 36 and the rank of corporal in the 29th Infantry Signal Corps. He was a re-enlistee, having served in the Coastal Artillery in the mid-30s. I just looked up the Coastal Artillery and Sandy Hook, where he served, and found this declassified report on early radar studies done there. Has me wondering if that's why they put him in the Signal Corps. Maybe another family member can fill me in. |
Fed up
| | The spam situation is out of control. After neglecting it for the last several days, I just took about three hours to weed my way through a haystack of spam in search of a few needles of actual mail. |
| | (In the last sentence I first wrote "sperm" instead of spam. Coincidence?) |
| | I have SpamAssassin on my searls.com addresses, and that or something like it at my scc.com address. It helps, but not nearly enough. |
| | Meanwhile friends are telling me spam is a "solved problem". Can't wait. |
| | Meanwhile, if you're not getting through, maybe it's because a bunch of email babies are going out with the spam bathwater. |
(G)locke'd and loaded
There are responses to this message:Glocks & Shotguns, Andrew Leyden, 11/30/05; 2:52:00 PM Consumers and Producers, James Zimmerman, 11/29/05; 9:47:35 PM Radar and WWII, Bruce Fryer, 11/29/05; 9:09:16 PM Re: Fighting Spam, Frank Koehntopp, 11/29/05; 4:49:21 PM Re: Tuesday, November 29, 2005, Joey deVilla, 11/29/05; 4:27:12 PM Re: Tuesday, November 29, 2005, JTH, 11/29/05; 2:16:27 PM
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