August 16, 2006

Simple is good...

I came across this person's blog when I was madly clicking away trying to "solve" the widget puzzle that they had created. He/she created something called "RouteWord" - a kind of simple network of letters jumbled that you have to figure out what their connection is (tracing only the available paths) after given a clue.






I, apparently like others, had figured the answer but somehow we were "incomplete" without the picture changing, it giving us feedback, or otherwise saying "CONGRATULATIONS!" (perhaps we were looking for some kind of reward?) Well, Andrew explained his reasoning on his entry "Confusingly Simple". He says:

"We've come to so expect that everything -- online and off -- demand our attention with squawking, dancing, popping, zapping, clicking, shrieking, streaking, bleating, yammering, clamoring, or beeping that the idea of "You just look at it" seems from another era."

My own mashing actions (and even weirder the unsettled feeling of "not being done yet" that pushed me even to search more about this "broken game" and Andrew's explanation of why he made it they way he did (read his blog, I'm not telling) say more about us as slave-animals to 21st Century technology age rather than evolved masters. Andrew makes this rather profound observation with something incredibly facile, once again proving less can be more. Pavlov himself would salivate no doubt.

August 13, 2006

When a pending truce means "kill while you can"

Israel's wanton disregard for the safety of civilians in their dispute with Hezbollah is one thing. Their thumbed noses at international organizations, like the Red Cross, the UN outpost they bombed etc. is now history. But now, on the eve of a U.S. and France-brokered truce what does Israel do? They escalate their attacks as if to say "We're running out of time before the truce happens lets kick the shit out of Hezbollah before the international community says we shouldn't be (since we agreed ourselves)".

Since the altercation escalated - and I am hardly alone to think Israel's reaction was more than out of scale with the kidnappings that launched their offensive into southern Lebanon in the first place - Israel has consistently acted out what I expect are its desires - to crush and terminate the Lebanese state.

The argument could be made that it is about ridding the world of terrorists but no one attempted to deal with the sour reality that was Lebanon's democratically elected government - dominated by Hezbollah members. And here Israel took a page from the U.S.'s foreign policy of late - "If it moves, toward you, kill it" - and especially because such a policy itself defines what a move towards one's state is, or can be - no matter how obliquely seen, construed, or, in the case of Iraq and more recently Iran, politically motivated rather than truly about a state's safety and sovereignty.

Hezbollah is not to be excused in this mess, to be clear. However Israel's actions are is simply out of line - they don't even hold support at home as polling in their own country shows. The staggering scope of their actions speaks volumes of what they believe to their own self-imposed superiority. Monday morning at 8 am EST will tell the world where their minds truly lie.

And one it not an anti-Semite to speak out over Israel's actions. Here, in the U.S., I've learned it's fine to blaspheme every other religion except "the Christians" (read "neo-con Christian) and the Jewish faith. Islamic? Sure! Call 'em fascist! Haitian? Sure! Call 'em weird and creepy voodoo ritualists! But whenever anyone says anything critical about Israel they are anti-Semites. What a crock. If I said something about Canada being bad does that instantly make me "anti-French"? Or about France - does that make me "anti-Catholic"? Israel uses the charge of "anti-semitism" as it's own shield, as Teflon to any criticisms levied towards them for their (often) precarious actions, land grabbing in the West Bank etc.

It has become such a "natural" state of affairs that the international community operates in a knee-jerk mentality now when it comes to dealing with Israel and the mid-east - First, see how Israel wants it, Second, Identify the threats to that, Third, construct them as threats to a Judaic state, Four, identify any other responses as rantings of "Islamic" or "Muslim" radicals - in need of obliteration.

And so its gone this round. Recently, Prime Minister "I want a vote from the Jews because I won't win the next election without them" Steven Harper, of Canada, jumped on board defending Israel - after a long and careful history of neutrality that has meant Canada could speak objectively about the mid-east it was dashed in a moment of self-absorbed politicking. It was NOT about Jewish persons or Israel - it was about getting elected. And Bush is just as bad. So Israel perhaps ought look beyond its own doorstep to see how nations are using their plight as the window dressing of support when in actuality it's about self-serving politics. But then again maybe it's monkey see, monkey do...

August 08, 2006

Dead people were bad people too...

OK... This will seem a little random to people but as a genealogy researcher I found it interesting enough to share...

Over the past few years I've been intensely researching my family's roots and branches (that's my great great grandmother and her kids, left). There more and more sites that help one accomplish for example FamilySearch.org (brought to you by those busy Mormons who collect church members for their pews long after they've shuffled off this mortal coil) and RootsWeb (a free service that permits members to share lineage databases and info). All of this has in fact become big business as the Wall Street Journal reported in July of this year. But the business aspects I leave for another day. What about those old, lost souls?

Well if there is one thing that became apparent to me in my searching is that people are wont to see their own histories, no matter how pedantic and dull, as anything ... so long as it's positive and uplifting. Gleaned from the annals of collected lore and in many cases written texts (both professional and familial) they bristle with words like "achieved", "overcame", "survived", "settled", "founded", "built" and more superlatives for growth and augmentation then one can shake a stick at. But where though is the tragedy in those lives then? Why bury it with their best clothes in a box in the ground?

The software programs that help people collect the information on one's relatives, like Family Tree Maker, contain all the usual "slots" for personal particulars, like birth, marriage, and death, and then other "milestone" headings like "christening/baptism/Bar Mitzvah, Bat Mitzvah", "military", "political" etc. True, you can enter any other title in this field area as a label but it sure doesn't come with... "Criminality", "Faithfulness" or "Lunatic". This might sound stupid but the fact of the matter is, is that our families are made up of all these things.

A couple of "cases in point"...

One of our relatives "went missing" in the censuses and we eventually found her living with, oh, some 60 other people. Scanning to the top of the census page we see it was a large building - the asylum in London, ON (see picture). Now one wouldn't go looking for one's relatives in the loony bin though would one? And then there's my great-great grandfather who recently showed up in a Library and Archives Canada search as being convicted and held at Kingston Penitentiary in 1847 - hell it had only been open for a few years and he'd already found a room?

But what's missing here is why either of these relatives were in these places. Were they crazy? Murderers? Don't we disservice their past by ignoring these things by pretending they don't matter? It seems to me that we want to sanitize our lives - a micro version of what we do to all but the largest and most heinous events in "world history" perhaps. No husband in our genealogies ever hit a wife. No great aunt never raised a bottle too often until it put her in a grave. All of their business and land transactions were scrupulous and for the greater good - never selfish or self-serving. What a crock. What in fact might be important too is to recognize, in the case of my great aunt for instance, is that she may not have been crazy but "put away" because she was "old" - not crazy, but just old. Seeing history as a fabrication and not just what it seems to be is important as well then.

Our romanticized view of our pasts has cauterized our ability to see our families as entities, warts and all. Instead of reveling in the sometimes questionable, but more often than not forgiven, or at least empathized-with, sadder sides of them we are missing out on our own strengths. The strength to be compassionate, to help, to hold up when all is lost. Sometimes the bleakest moments of lives tell the most about the mettle of those living them. Not the awards and accolades. And certainly not the Disneyified pasts many of us have created as foundations for our own greatness.

My family (this is my great, great, great grandfather in Manitoba, c. 1880-1890, his first house there), I've learned, were mostly farmers. And then some farmers. And for good measure... more f-ing farmers. I was shocked at the banality of it. In some 3000 relatives over 300 years almost 90% were farmers, 5% were preachers of some sort and the rest a mixed bag (counting males because of course what women did wasn't important - ugh!). The closest to greatness we came was 2 mayors of two dinky towns. But so what? I like the fact (now I've digested it) that we were, well, "just people". These people lived, loved, cried, fought, hated, killed (probably at least a few), despaired, hoped, you name - the whole spectrum of human lived emotion made up complete lives - not patch-worked database lives. We need to remember them for all that they were and hope when we shuffle off that some one will pay us that same honor.

August 07, 2006

Update "Faked News is Not News"

From the REUTERS News Room (and they did respond to me directly):

"There is no graver breach of Reuters standards for our photographers than the deliberate manipulation of an image", said Tom Szlukovenyi, Reuters Global Picture Editor. "Reuters has zero tolerance for any doctoring of pictures and constantly reminds its photographers, both staff and freelance, of this strict and unalterable policy".

Reuters terminated its relationship with Hajj on Sunday after a review of a photograph he had taken of the aftermath of an Israeli air strike on suburban Beirut the previous day found it had been manipulated using Photoshop software to show more and darker smoke rising from buildings."

It turns out that this photographer had in fact doctored not one, but two photos (the other to show an Israeli jet dropping not one flare, but three, and then mislabelling those as "missiles"). See also Reuters drops Lebanese photographer over doctored image

I still think it's pretty damn egregious that one photo got by, never mind a second...

Faked News is not news

On Aug. 6th I was purusing the news du moment when the Yahoo! headline of bombing in Beruit caught my eye. Actually what caught my eye more was the photo. Now I play with macs and do Photoshop from time to time and what I saw, even at about 120 x 120 pixels, was some of the worst photo manipulation ever seen. Here's the pic:



It doesn't take a particle physics major to understand and recognize the duplicate smoke plume patterns - stamped four times over, from left to right. If you look closely at the bottom of the pic you'll also see apartment buildings that are duplicated, along the bottom edge. This is wholly intentional. It's not an artifact of sending the photo in bits and bytes across the ether - otherwise the whole photo would be equally scrambled.

But what was more distressing is that I found it incredibly hard to report this to anyone. Not hard, like "Should I?", but hard like "Where the hell do I find a person to take this up and investigate? Where is CNN's contact info?" etc. In the end I sent a comment to REUTERS (who published it), CNN (as a news tip) and flickr (so I could at least get it "public"). Haven't heard a peep from anyone. So faking news isn't news anymore.

News has gotten so bad, so sensationalistic that even it outdoes itself in its own moribund blindness, its manipulation of fact as fiction - "Hey Adam, What do you think? Is this bombing picture really not showing enough violence? Let's amp up that smoke!!!" (click, click, click...) Ta da! But what does this mean when looking at the news then? News as product only? Does the backstory mean so little that dead Lebanese don't matter so much as how dead they might look or how violently they died. And it seems we are so immune to the idea of peace in the world that in order for us to care we have to take something as horrific as war and ENHANCE its horrors just to get our attention. There's something Baudriallardian going on here but I'll leave that "uber blah blah" for another day. I think I'll puke in an envelope and send it to REUTERS to make it more clear how disgusted I am with them.

Hot time, summer in the city... Life and Death in B-more

Photo credit: Jefferson Jackson Steele, Citypaper, Baltimore, 2000

There has been much bruhaha about the "crime spree " in Washington D.C. lately with 14 dead in 13 days and now a curfew for teens and older has been put in place. But what continues to floor me is the relative lack of attention given to Baltimore which has roughly the same stats and about 100,000 less population. As of July 11th Baltimore had 10 murders in seven days - roughly double the "crime spree" rate that D.C. is so worried about - for a 6 month total of 147. At this rate Baltimore, according to Baltimore police homicide statistics, is on its way to surpassing 290 murders for the year - it's worst record since 1999 when 305 were tallied. The only crime stat lower on national averages is rape (2004) - maybe it's because we're all killing one another first?

But why does no one seem to care about this? Baltimore remains one of the top tourist draws in the country - so D.C. can't take that as the express reason for the attention - so why is there no "crime emergency"?

Well the most obvious reason is demographics probably - which I'll leave for a future post. D.C. and Baltimore share some interesting aspects about racial divisions and poverty, loss of jobs due to deindustrialization etc. but, more and more it seems to me that Baltimore is basically D.C.'s "bitch" (pardon the misogynist term - it carries the meaning more completely I think). It can remain home to the thousands of people that can't afford to live in D.C. but who have to work there because there's no jobs here in B-more. Again, more on that another day.

Here in Baltimore it's not that different either when it comes to race and class dividing a city already reeling from losses....Suffice to say when the rich, white, Federal Hill area of town was upset it was getting surveillance cameras installed in their rich-ass area of south Baltimore neighborhood they got plenty of press time for their rants - on television in particular - the same could hardly be said about the cameras installed say in my neighborhood in Waverly/Greenmount , a predominantly black and poor neighborhood, far flung from the snooty harbor condo-castles of Baltimore. If it works for O'Malley's plan to develop the city's white neighborhoods - oops, rich white neighborhoods, then concerns about crime get vetted publicly. In shitty hoods... nah uh.