Kevin Marks has blogged links to people who have written about why it's important to "separate network transport from application protocols." (Apparently, "The Paradox of the Best Network," a brief piece I wrote with David Isenberg, helped to stimulate Kevin's research.) These are useful links.

The general point Kevin makes is tremendously important: The Internet succeeded because it was deliberately built to encode only the minimal information required to move bits from point A to B. There is nothing in the Internet protocols themselves that encodes what type of bits they are. The Internet doesn't know or care whether you're sending email or video, a bill or pornography, copyrighted material or instructions on building nuclear weapons. It also doesn't include bits that say what person owns, sent or cares about the bits. It is nothing but a bit pump. It's a stupid network, in David Isenberg's phrase.

Because it's so good at moving bits, and because the Net makes no assumptions about the nature of those bits, applications can be written on top of it to do whatever you want with bits. Thus, one and the same Internet is used for email, telephone calls and video on demand. Attempts to make the Internet smarter — for example, by including in the transportation protocol itself information about the copyright status of the bits — will bit by bit erode the Internet as a medium for innovation.

Actually, it's always been The Home of the Googlewhack. Gary Stock invented Googlewhacking and while I've been proud to have helped promote it, it's now time for me to bow out. Why? Because we don't want any forking of the great shining way that is Googlewhacking. And because I'm getting bored. So, in the future, please submit your entries directly to Gary at www.googlewhack.com, or to where that address actually points: Unblinking.com.

One small exception: Gary isn't tracking high scores. He's much more interested in googlewhacking as a creative activity and has introduced what I think of as "semantic googlewhacking" which values the interesting juxtapositions of words. So, if you have a googlewhack that surpasses the current winner, let me know. Otherwise, talk to Gary.

Before claiming a high score, surpassing the 292,698,000,000 of RCassidy's "linux checkerspot," please keep the following rules in mind: Each word must be found in dictionary.com; no proper nouns; no hits on word lists; don't search for the words as a precise phrase (i.e., don't put quotes around the two words when you do the search). And remember the linux constant is 48,300,000.

Now for some updates before closing the topic on this site.

Gavin Quick suggests "keratinous nimrod" (8,035,500,000) which he says is a "scientifically correct addition to John Travolta's opinion of Amanda Plummer's partner (what was his name?) in the restaurant near the end of Pulp Fiction." (It was Tim Roth. That's why the Lord has given us The Internet Movie Database.)

Jacob Schwirtz has found "laud boobytrap" (369,495,000), a googlewhack clearly on the side of the aggressor. (Oddly, google.com doesn't recognize boobytrap as a legit word, although dictionary.com.)

Jeremy Brown likes "snarf dog." So do I, but unfortunately, so do 2,110 pages. (Even "snarf dof" gets 38 hits.)

Andy C has found "pillows silages", "wilderness slaggery", "significance condimenting", "trampy implosions", "hobnobs stereos." In his word: "Joyous."

Dethe Elza, Chief Mad Scientist at Burning Tiger Technologies, writes:

OK, I resisted, but I've been drawn into the "googlewhack vortex" (42130000 Marks, but googlewhack is not recognized by dictionary.com). What are we to do when our whacks point only to word lists, like "inflammable bibliomancy" (a mere 122,016,000 Marks, alas). Do these count or not? And an "andelusian pox" (27324000 Marks) on Matthew Baldwin for making it way too easy to waste time on this. I can feel my productivity being cut into "blepharon sections" (1401700000 Marks).

Wordlists don't count, and if googlewhacking isn't in dictionary.com, it just doesn't count. Nice recursive try, though.

As for Matthew Baldwin, he created an online googlewhacker that checks your word pairs and computes the score. All hail Baldwin.

Gary Stock himself has used googlewhacking to report on Bush's Stake of the Onion Address last night:

pseudonymous cockatiel:
Who was the primary author of the 2002 "State of the Union Address"?

necrophiliac cockatiel:
...obviously the same bird who wrote that address.

miasmic frenulum:
...obviously the technical term for that same bird's hyoid disorder.

cockatiel colonoscopy:
...what Tom Daschle was picturing during the entire State of the Union Address.

macaw colonoscopy:
...I think you get the idea!

bibulous encomiums:
...it's as if every whack refers to that entire speech!!

Jeez, I'm trying to do some time-wasting BS (it being Saturday an' all) but I keep getting really interesting email. Will it never end? (Lord, let's hope not!)

For example, this arrived from Jeff Chamberlain in response to my blog about the nature of religions that claim to be universal:

I don't think that it's as black and white as you say. I would point you to the statement of principles by the Unitarian Universalist Association. There can be universal truths, e.g. "The inherent worth and dignity of every person" that translates to "love thy neighbor as thyself" in the Judeo-Christian heritage or the overarching theme of compassion in Buddhism.

The problems comes in when we attempt to find ways for humans to achieve these universal truths. At this point, the religions diverge and attempt to say that their way is the only way to these truths. Enter the wonderful power of dogma. I believe that humans forget that the power of the universe is still beyond their comprehension and that their "truth" is really just a finger pointing at the real truth; it is a symbol that represents something greater than ourselves.

Don't worship the finger. Instead, revel in the varieties this world offers us to explore. The mysteries of the universe can be found in the multitude of religions people have created just as easily as watching the beauty of a sunrise.

The idea that there is a universal truth expressed by all religions strikes me as, in turn, rather black and white. For one thing, it's self-referential since we will rule out any set of beliefs as not a "real" religion if it doesn't support the purported universal truth.

Second, a statement as innocuous as "The inherent worth and dignity of every person" is so broad as to be meaningless. If my religion believes that the individual ego is an illusion and is the source of pain and needs to be seen through, the sense in which my religion believes in the worth of every individual is vastly different than that of the Judeo-Christian tradition. (Note: Talking about the JudeoChristian tradition denies the radical differences between these two religions. It always bothers me. You hit my button, Jeff!)

Third, even if that universal truth could be unpacked (Inherent? Worth? Dignity? Person?) successfully across all cultures and times, its implications are hardly universal, as you note.

Fourth, the way in which a religion unpacks such statements is central to the nature of the religion, and differs widely from religion to religion: Buddhists meditate in a bunch of ways, Jews argue with one another for millennia, some whacko Christians handle snakes and wait for The Word to strike them. So what good does it say that there are universal truths? Where does it get us? And, in particular, wrt to the Friedman article I was blogging about, I believe that it puts a false unity on the face of real diversity.

There are certainly universal truths. Math is full of them. There may even be universal truths about values and morals. I wouldn't want to try to argue anyone out of a belief in human dignity or the right to worship the way we want. I am not saying that nothing is true, and I'm certainly not saying, along with Dostoyevsky, that "God is dead. Everything is permitted." I am saying, however, that religions that believe they are the only true religion need to knock it off. Finding a universal ground for all religion reduces us to mouthing abstractions so vague as to be meaningless and ignores what is most distinctive and most important about each religion. We've got a whole bunch of religions. They're genuinely different. But we only have one earth. There's yer universal truth for ya.

I blogged about my anxiety about having to give a 3-minute presentation on some new trend, technology or company. I got a few thoughtful replies.

Tony Goodson writes:

Of course this is far from new, but if I look at the Weblogs and the sites I like to read and go to on a daily basis, I realise as I write my own Weblog that to have a paying audience would make a significant difference to time given to my Voice on the Internet. ...

I guess you get my drift. Artists of the world get paid for what you do! Surfers of the world pay for what you like! I don�t have a clear way forward on this, but you did ask.

I think Micropayments and the effect they have on the Internet will be the biggest thing, but then again when did a good idea and good technology ever get implemented. I wrote a project on Magnetic Levitation 20 years ago! Good idea. Good Technology. So what?

Yes, micropayments will be huge. Great point.

Halley Suitt counterblogged on the same topic as my original post: weblogs. Here's a taste: "They are turning a whore back into a virgin, no small task, and preparing the way for a completely new way to work, live, think and prosper." You go, Halley. (BTW, her blog is most excellent.)

Scott Christensen comes at this rather obliquely:

I hope everything worked out ok with the little talk but what I really wanted to comment on was Cheezits. I'm glad it's not just me that can consume a vast quantity of Cheezits when under stress. They're so damn addictive.

You sit and ponder stuff and they seem to fly out of the box into your mouth. It seems that sometimes they have a life of their own and that their only purpose is to be like the moths of the snack food world and leap to their death in your belly.

Of course, the worst thing about the Cheezit eating frenzy is the sudden overwhelming thirst that happens about halfway through the box. A parched desert landscape is better hydrated and I would know because I currently live in Tucson.

We have a new leader in the Googlewhack Sweepstakes. (A Googlewhack is a pair of words that gets only one hit at Google. To score, you multiple the hits for each word individually.) The leader is RCassidy. The phrase is ... well, we'll save that for the end.

Kevin Marks, who gave us the Marks mark system of scoring, now presents us with a tool for automating the scoring of Googlewhacks. You can download it here. Pocket GoogleWhacker is perfect. Enter your words and it comes back with the score. Well worth the $0.50 Kevin asks in return.

Now, news from Googlewhack's inventor, Gary Unblinking Stock. His page devoted to the Art and Science of Googlewhacking has become quite lively. And, he is now the proud owner of www.googlewhack.com. Let's hope that this becomes the new international home of Googlewhackery. Finally, he's been in a colloquoy with the over-stimulated folks at Mornington Crescent. These are serious gamers who aren't happy until they've complicated matters to the point that the rules themselves become the game. Very amusing discussion.

Now, start up your QuickTime engines and imagine a drum roll. RCassidy gives us:

linux: 48,300,000
checkerspot: 6060
Total Marks mark: 292,698,000,000

Note: We use the Linux Constant since Google has a 5,000,000 point swing in its reported hits on "linux."

Dave Rogers, whose blog is full of good stuff, writes in response to our "Free the Broadband" bloggerino:

I agree that great connections for all is a worthy goal that reflects the reasons we fought them Redcoats. "Connect and empower" is my mantra. Yet I'm not sure that the tech industry's approach is the right one.

Did you see this report from MSNBC? It sure makes me—liberal that I am—queasy. Queasy enough that I blogged on it myself right here and even responded (weakly) to your comments here.

My original bloggerino referenced a draft of a site that David Isenberg and I did, called "The Paradox of the Best Network." It has a set of suggestions quite similar to what TechNet has come up with.

The difference between Dave and me on this probably comes down to perceived facts. It seems to me that the current regulated environment props up aging telcos that refuse to allow competition in the broadband market. But we may also disagree on the solution: I think opening the market would bring about an era of innovation that would deliver broadband to the vast majority of houses in the nation (and the government ought to step in where the market lacks intrinsic incentives). I'm not sure if this makes me a liberal, a neo-conservative, or just plain wrong, but that's how it seems to me. There's also a telco meltdown coming that may require government intervention, primarily to let it happen without melting the economy down with it. And let me conclude this proclamation by noting that I don't know what the hell I'm talking about.

Jeneane agrees with what I wrote about weblogs being a way we're writing ourselves into existence. She adds that the self we're transforming isn't simply online:

That is the joy in it for me—not so much the voice, the self I have created through blogging, but how that unleashed voice is transforming me, the person, the flesh and the mind.

100% agreement. In fact, one of the themes of my upcoming book is that the Web is rewriting our real-world concepts. I do find it frustratingly hard, however, to point to real-world examples of effects because they are mainly anecdotal and one never knows what their actual causes are.

Tom Matrullo blogs, beautifully as always, partially in response to my bloggerino about writings as the true avatar. He draws a comparison between blogs and the tradition of the "locus amoenus," the edenic walled garden into which the hero withdraws for "a brief respite from the shocks and artillery fire of everyday life." Tom's tenatively-offered conclusion:

If one attempts to account for the enormous investment of time, energy and other resources that is currently going into blogging, it's worth considering that more may be at stake here than meets the eye (or, I). The marketplace of messages in which we live is a kind of battleground from which we sometimes need to recuse ourselves in order to find again some notion of who we are. Because as Ariosto knew, this recreative entertainment of the self is not found in the clash of steel or the entropy of market dynamics. It comes alive in the folie of play.

That seems to me to be completely right, at least for some category of blogging. (We shouldn't forget the teen-age boys who are blogging in order to impress girls.) And the introduction of play into the heart of the self comes with the Web: "The price of admission: Your selves." But, while I hadn't heard of the locus amoenus and loved learning about it, it seems too walled and private to be a metaphor for blogs. We blog in public. That's in fact where the playfulness enters into it: we try on ideas, moods, figures of speech, and personae in public.

Not only is the Web putting play at the heart of the self, it's also showing us — I hope — that our "real" self is not the self apart from others (taking a pastoral stroll, perhaps, in our walled garden) but is the self engaged with others.

Later... Some email exchanged with Tom and now I am enlightened. He's not claiming that blogging is a private activity like sitting in a garden - I knew that couldn't be what he meant! - but that in contrast to email, discussion lists, etc., blogging lets you carve out a time of your own. You can write about what you want, when you want, and not feel as if you're banging replies back like a shuttlecock in a hyperactive badminton game.

Saltire blogs today about David Dwyer of New Riders, "Publishing Voices that Matter." Saltire praises Dwyer's passion and points to a quote from Dwyer that suggests a really useful criterion: "I care about your opinions as long as they've been formed by reliable sources outside of our building." St. Ken Kesey's idea that you're either on the bus or off the bus has a certain commit-or-be-damned feel going for it, but too much time on the bus can wear away at your evidentiary base (as Kesey certainly wouldn't have put it). And, although Saltire is nice enough to point out that the one book that Dwyer recommended in his presentation to Saltire's students was The Cluetrain Manifesto, the same has to be true of spending too much time on the Cluetrain. Yeah, markets are definitely conversations, and so is the Web and so is much of business. But they're also not conversations, just on the general principle that nothing is only one thing. Mysticism? Nah, the enabling ambiguity of language.

We have a new leader in the race for the ultimate Googlewhack (a game promulgated by Gary Unblinking Stock). And he's only 15. Sam Dionne has come up with "linux hayrack":

linux: 47,300,000
hayrack: 3,110
Total Marks mark: 147,103,000,000

That's seems like it's not enough to beat Matt's "linux anemonefish":

linux: 48,300,000
anemonefish: 3,130
Total Marks mark: 151,179,000,000

But Sam reports a score of 157.6 billion and I'd believe him even if he weren't my nephew. The fact is that Google seems to vary in its count of a word depending on what color socks you're wearing. When Mark, Sam's father, looked up "linux" a couple of days ago, Google reported 45,300,000. Within a few minutes, I checked and it was reporting 50,500,000. Matt and Sam cite different counts for "linux." As a result, we have no choice but to resort to a Linux Constant and declare Sam the current leader ... although with a score several billion lower than yesterday's leader. Such is life in the digital fast lane.

Mark Dionne challenges our blithely writing off zero-hit Googlewhacking as a challenge for simpletons and unelected national leaders:

I'm not convinced that zero hits is easy with common words. Can you give a competitive example, over 1 billion?

Sam got 6 billion with "directory yestermorning"

I've updated the home page of my new book, Small Pieces Loosely Joined. What a pain in the tuchus, especially the part where I had to manually correct my electronic versions of the sample chapters guided by the print-out of the (almost) final version because the printing house now possesses the final final electronic version. (The way the process bounces back and forth between electrons and paper will someday seem quite amusing.)

RageBoy's 'zine, EGR, while touting his marvelous new book The Bombast Transcripts (on which more later), somehow manages to point us at a shrine site devoted to Beaner, a dead dog. After poking around for a while — future anthropologists are going to have to re-evaluate our culture when they unearth this site — I found a related site for Ollie who has joined his dear friend Beaner chewing couch legs in the sky. Ollie's human life companions provide links to let us sign or read a site guestbook where we can record our thoughts of consolation and sympathy, preferably in all caps to vouchsafe our sincerity: "VERY INSPIRATIONAL FOR ALL LOVERS OF WEINIES". The very last message reads in its entirety:

Great site. Just surfed in. Visit our discount vacation site @ www.magicrates.com

Yes, this person has spammed a dead dog's mourners' guestbook.

The search for the Ultimate Googlewhacker continues. (A googlewhack, as you may remember, is a set of two common words that produce one and only one hit in Google. The score is computed by multiplying the number of hits each word returns on its own at Google.)

An entry from Andy Chen for one brief moment took the lead — snatching it from Dave Curley ("Dewpoint Beeped" = 15,982,900,000).

metronome : 115,000
dewpoint : 271,000
Total Marks mark : 31,165,000,000

Kevin Marks, inventor of the Marks Scoring System used in to evaluate Googlewhacks, points us to Mornington Crescent, a site where googlewhacking — invented by Gary Unblinking Stock (All hail Gary!) — is the subject of considerable conversation. There an entry from Matt puts considerable distance between him and the rest of the pack: "linux anemonefish." Check the scoring on this humdinger:

linux: 48,300,000
anemonefish: 3,130
Total Marks mark: 151,179,000,000

Ah, but should "linux" be "Linux," and as a proper noun be prohibited? Not according to dictionary.com that accepts both versions.

Kevin says: "I still claim the prize for having 2 on one page..."

Mark Dionne, p.o.ed about the no proper nouns rule is working on combinations with the word "windows," taking advantage of Google's indifference to case. Interestingly, however, "windows" only returns 39,900,000 hits, almost 10 million fewer than "linux."

The rumor that AOL is negotiating to buy RedHat raises my resting heart rate to 37 beats per minute, a full 2 beats faster than W's. In my fantasy, AOL buys RedHat and comes out with an AOL PC aimed at the end of the market that still finds computers and the Net too complex. The AOL box is an incredibly well-integrated package that plugs into your TV and into the Time-Warner broadband connection that comes bundled with it. (Maybe it doesn't need the broadband. We'll let the marketing folks - and then the Justice Department - figure that out.) Flip a switch and you're on the Net and you're doing the Tivo thing, too. The GUI is designed from the ground up to be so simple that marsupials can use it to browse, write email, do basic word processing and play games. No user knows that it's Linux under the skin, just as Tivo gives no indication (why should it?) that it's a visitor from the planet Linux. But, in my fantasy, this is an expansible system in terms of hardware and software, thus creating enough of a market for Linux desktop apps that Microsoft is given a run for its (= our) money.

Here at Jerry Michalski's "retreat" - about 50 of Jerry's closest friends talking for 2 days in NYC - blogs keep coming up. When setting the ground rules, Jerry asked that the journalists refrain from reporting on what goes on so that people won't feel inhibited. But how about blogs? And what about the journalists at the meeting who have blogs? Free Dan! Blogging feels different; being unable to blog would be akin to being unable to discuss the proceedings with one's friends, turning the retreat from something private into something secret. Jerry quickly came to what I think we all agreed was the right decision: Go ahead and blog but if you're going to get real specific about what people said, check with them first. By the afternoon, Dan had already blogged the morning.

In the afternoon there was a panel discussion about blogging. A "panel discussion" means that a few people - in this case, Dan, Meg, Peterme, and me - stood at the front of the room, talked for a few minutes and then talked with the audience. The conversation seemed to me to center usefully on the odd mix of private and public that is distinctive of the Weblog form, and that is distinctive of individual weblogs that range from the confessional to the quotidian to the demi-professional writings of fully professional authors.

The first Googlewhacking hero on any list must be its inventor, Gary Still No Blog Stock. We who are about to blog salute you.

A Googlewhack is a combination of common words (we seem to be settling on a combination of two words) for which Google returns only one result. As of yesterday, we have adopted the Kevin Marks scoring model that judges "commonness" by how many hits the individual words get. Multiply those numbers and you get your Marks mark.

Cinnamon Brunmier writes:

Ok...by the new Kevin Marks standards, I actually believe that we need to reinstate "schadenfreude" as a common word since it produces 19,700 results on it's own. Further, my revised Googlewhack of: schadenfreude carburetor has a total value of 3,900,600,000.

schadenfreude = 19,700
carburetor = 198,000

This would put Cinnamon's buns in the lead, if Gary Turner hadn't turnered in the following:

plectrum = 14,800
irradiation = 360,000
Total Marks mark = 5,328,000,000

Gary asks: "Do I win something?" The answer would be yes ... if Dave Curley hadn't twisted the following words:

Dewpoint = 277,000
Beeped = 57,700
Total Marks mark = 15,982,900,000

Yes, almost 16 billion points. Dave has set the bar high. But we have confidence that somewhere, someone with too much time on his or her hands will hold high the honor of our species.

Top One Reason Not to Get Stomach Flu:

1. It's not nearly as much fun as it sounds.

Kevin Marks has hit upon the way to quantify Gogglewhack results. (A Googlewhack is a pair of common words that return only one hit when search for in Google.) The great flaw in the Googlewhack competition was the rule requiring words to be "common." (We have had, for example, "schadenfreude" proposed as a common word.) Kevin's brilliantly simple idea is:

make the score for a GoogleWhack the product of the number of hits on the individual words.

Given these values,
groundhog 122,000
epigone 28,500
viridian 53,900
nunberg 5,450
playability 82,500
epeus 629
meandered 34,900

groundhog epigone - 3,477,000,000
epigone playability - 2,351,250,000
viridian nunberg - 293,755,000
epeus meandered - 21,952,100

and the 2 you cite get

lambada (51,000) * opthlamoscopes (734) = 37,434,000 surinam (204,000) * creamchees (3,630) = 740,520,000

Thus is the new scoring system proclaimed throughout the land.

(Oddity: Google supports the OR operator. Shouldn't "groundhog OR epigone" return the same number of hits as adding "groundhog" and "epigone"? Instead, it actually lowers the number of hits to "about 111,000.")

Kevin also has pointed out that once someone blogs a successful Googlewhack, Google will index it and it will no longer be unique. Technically, yes. But we will not count pages about Googlewhacking. In short: "epigone groundhog -Googlewhack"

Kevin also has some entries into the context: "groundhog epigone" and "viridian nunberg." He states (rather disingenuously in our view) that of course proper nouns are acceptable. Not!

Michael O'Connor Clarke suggests "lambada colposcope" and "surinam speculums"

All of these words are to be found at Dictionary.com

Kindly address me as "My Liege" in all future correspondence.

lambada: 50,200
colposcope: 4,700
Total Marks mark: 235,940,000

And Kirk Fleming adds:

inflective logarithms
zygomorphic rubric

You'll note that the hit on the first pair above comes from a site apparently devoted to lists of words of a specified length, so it may be possible to avoid getting a hit on the site by ensuring the words in a pair are of different length (since no two such words will appear on a single wordlist page at that particular site).

inflective: 856
logarithms: 97,200
total Marks mark: 83,203,200

zygomorphic: 2,420
rubric: 337,000
total Marks mark: 815,540,000

So far, "epigone groundhog" is in the lead.

It's one thing to read the following news lead in USAToday:

An Enron financial official raised alarms about the company's precarious finances in August, two months before the energy-trading giant acknowledged publicly that it was in trouble. In a letter to CEO Kenneth Lay, she wrote: "I am incredibly nervous that we will implode in a wave of accounting scandals." The prescient seven-page letter, unearthed by House investigators, showed that Lay was aware of concerns about the company's financial problems at about the same time that he was reassuring employees by e-mail: "I have never felt better about the prospects for the company."

It's another to see an actual scan of the letter itself. Ten times more powerful.

Now we know what they knew and when they knew it.

With reference to the blogging yesterday by Dan Gillmor, Dave and (immodestly) me on the problem of there being more people than unique domain names:

Brits are about to be allowed to register their names as ".me.uk" According to an article from Reuters (in Canada's Globe and Mail) the domain names will be handed out on a first come, first served basis and will initially cost 50 pounds. (For those with self-esteem problems, an alternative punctuation is available for an additional 25 pounds: "Me? Uk!").

Here's a forward (thanks, Chip!) that says that the judge in the Enron proceedings has a serious conflict of interest that has perhaps influenced her decision to hold off on freezing the money Enron executives skimmed before the megacorp flopped. I don't know anything about the apparent author, Brenda Pitts Bennett, but she cites her sources.

From: Brenda Pitts Bennett
Sent: Thursday, January 10, 2002 3:14 PM
Subject: Enron Judge's MAJOR Conflicts of Interest

1) Judge Lee Rosenthal (again, the judge hearing the case filed against Enron by angry shareholders and employees) says she has the right to freeze the funds of Enron executives, to keep them from hiding their ill-gotten gains, but needs further evidence first.

2) Judge Lee Rosenthal has herself held Enron stock until as late as the year 2000. Clearly, her ruling will impact her own financial future if she has to freeze her own funds!

3) Judge Lee Rosenthal was appointed to the bench by GWBush!! AND

4) Judge Lee Rosenthal, until her appointment to the bench by GWBush, practiced in a law firm, Baker & Botts. The "Baker" in Baker & Botts is none other than James Baker! That's right, the same James Baker whose financial records may be frozen, the same James Baker who may receive a subpoena for records on Friday from Congress for his role in Enron. The same James Baker who was on the Enron payroll and who used his political clout for Enron's benefit.The same James Baker who was hired by Enron at the end of Bush Sr.'s administration. The same James Baker that masterminded GWBush's post-election vote-count operations in Florida. The same James Baker whose wife, Susan, has been on the board of bush-supporter James Dobson's Focus on the Family.

Now, doesn't it appear that Judge Lee Rosenthal has just a few catastrophic conflicts of interest going on here? Not only is her own financial future dependent on one of the important rulings facing her court (whether to freeze the funds of Enron stockholders who sold large blocks during the time period that Enron was fraudulently inflating its worth), but her rulings will have a major impact on the powerful man (GWBush) who appointed her to the bench AND the powerful man (James Baker) who was a partner in the law firm where she practiced law before she was appointed to the bench.

Is this how the Enron court cases are going to go? Are the financially ruined Enron employees and stockholders going to be further assaulted again by Bush/Enron-toadying judges?

Judge: Enron Funds Could Be Frozen

Federal Judges' Financial Revelations

Judge Rosenthal appointed by GW Bush

James A. Baker's law firm

Brenda Pitts Bennett
Texas
[email protected]
www.geocities.com/copbrutality

Chris Worth writes:

...on my first visit to your blog I was gratified to note friendsreunited.co.uk. I hereby defy your scornful insight into the banality of British life (since you mention the area where I grew up, Northamptonshire): When I registered at the site, the first two entries of people-I-went-to-school-with went something like this.

'After leaving school I became a drug addict, then entered the porn industry, where I am still.'

'I am no longer known as Tim after undergoing sex reasssignment surgery in 1993.'

I didn't read beyond the first two. Well... my old school DID once make the front page of a national tabloid (religious studies teacher had been holding black magic sex parties in her home - rented from the school governor...)

And some people wonder why I dropped out at 16.

I actually didn't intend the two updates I quoted to be anything more than truly random examples. No scorn intended.

I came across Classmates.com, a site that does something similar for those clever enough to have been born in the US. But the real hook is the large album of celebrity high school photos on their site. I don't hide the fact that I enjoy celebrity gossip (well, except in the sense that I never admit it, deny it when asked, and claim that the copy of The National Star is for my teenage daughter), and this is a good site to feed that particular jones. Here you'll learn that:

• Ronald Reagan and Mr. Rogers have never ever changed their hair styles
• Fidel Castro wasn't born with a beard
• Katy Couric was always perky
• The guy who played Screech on Save by the Bell can see his future face foreshadowed in the young Lyle Lovett
• Frank Zappa looks out of place in his mortaboard
• Elvis was even more Elvisy in high school

While Gary "No Blog" Stock hasn't quite started a blog, despite my incessant whining, he has pseudo-blogged the gogglewhacking fad he's propagating. (Gogglewhacking means finding combinations of ordinary words that bring up the fewest hits on Google.com)

Jacob Shwirtz, creator of the truly odd, upload orgy Gazm.org, has started a blog cleverly named Fuzzy Blogic.

Julian Harley points to FriendsReunited, a site that's apparently a big hit in the UK. You tell it which schools you went to with any comments about your life since being paddled by the upper form boys, and then you can see which of your chums have also registered.

Also from Peter "peterme" Merholz comes a small software company that hasn't gotten so successful that it's lost its sense of humor. Here are the Omni Group's software licenses for three of its products:

1. Once you are addicted, you'll doubtlessly want to spend less than $25 to buy a license. Buying a license enables you to add new items to and edit existing items in documents with more than twenty items. Click here to buy, and in the process help pull America out of this pesky recession. We guarantee we'll turn around and spend the money you give us!

2. OmniWeb 4 for Mac OS X can be used for free, but occasionally you might get little flashes of guilt while you use it. If this overwhelms you, why not buy a license at our web store?

3. Once you've used OmniGraffle for a while, we bet you'll want to edit documents with more than twenty items, and then you can buy a license to fully enable the app, and help get us that much closer to being _feelthy steenking rich_. Well, OK, maybe not rich, but successful enough to write some more apps you'll love. And, hey, right now Graffle's about half the cost of some other visualization tools. Also, we're a small company, like those juice guys, so when you buy an app from us it gives you a warm fuzzy feeling in your tummy, like if you ate some sweaters.

Peter peterme Merholz, noticing a blogthread between me and Jonathan Peterson, in an email points to a rich thread of comments on his site about whether it makes sense to think about the Web (and other "information spaces") as spaces at all. What a bunch of smart people! He suggests starting with the "Stewart's Chagrin" comment. (Peter also linked to my upcoming book's discussion of the Web as a place, which generated some good discussion too ... citing sources I didn't know about when I wrote the book. Ulp.)

Jonathan Peterson has counter-blogged:

Use of physical metaphors for information relationships far pre-dates the web, likely even written speech (memory palaces, etc.). While the creation of navigation metaphors based on real-world spaces is convenient, the "placeness" of much of the web cannot be attributed to navigation. Usenet groups have "place" though their metaphor varies depending on the user's choice of newsreader. Blogspaces are not planned but aggregate through interlinkage of interests. etc.

Good point.

The Obvious? has some comments on my interchange with Jonathan Peters about the nature of the Web as a "place." He ties together walking and stories:

More and more I personally derive a sense of place in the internet through a narrative, a thread, making temporary, contextual sense of a sea of information. This is why, for me, blogging is so powerful. It's what I was getting at in my earlier blog about walking and conversations.

The rest of his entry is just as lovely and insightful.

From Chip comes a link to a transcript of a CNN piece (Paula Zahn interviewing Richard Butler, the former UN weapons inspector) on a French book that claims that, well, here's a portion of the interview:

BUTLER: The most explosive charge, Paula, is that the Bush administration — the present one, just shortly after assuming office slowed down FBI investigations of al Qaeda and terrorism in Afghanistan in order to do a deal with the Taliban on oil — an oil pipeline across Afghanistan.

ZAHN: And this book points out that the FBI's deputy director, John O'Neill, actually resigned because he felt the U.S. administration was obstructing...

BUTLER: A proper...

ZAHN: ... the prosecution of terrorism.

BUTLER: Yes, yes, a proper intelligence investigation of terrorism. Now, you said if, and I affirmed that in responding to you. We have to be careful here. These are allegations. They're worth airing and talking about, because of their gravity. We don't know if they are correct. But I believe they should be investigated, because Central Asian oil, as we were discussing yesterday, is potentially so important. And all prior attempts to have a pipeline had to be done through Russia. It had to be negotiated with Russia.

Now, if there is to be a pipeline through Afghanistan, obviating the need to deal with Russia, it would also cost less than half of what a pipeline through Russia would cost...

Chip also points us to truthout.com where I found an entertaining column by Michael Kinsley resolving to end his post-9/11 self-censorship. (At least he doesn't say that if we censor ourselves, we've let the terrorists win.)

Gary Unblinking Stock forwards a forward that forwards a forward, etc., that ultimately comes from Brooks Talley:

... OK, this is kind of embarassing, but I've gotten addicted to looking for combinations of common words which have the lowest incidence of appearance on web pages, as indexed by google. So far, I have yet to find a set of two common english words which do not appear together on any web pages.

The best I've done with three words is "orangutan popcorn fishwife", which yields only one result. With four and more words it's pretty easy to find combos with no results.

Regarding your habit of googlewhacking (nice triple entendre there):
1: flatness strawberries magnification
1: jeweler parkways pathways
1: florists parkways practiced

This may be too easy: let's decide what the rules are! Options:

limit the number of letters, per word or total?
must be defined at http://www.dictionary.com?
pluralizations of nouns: valid, or excluded?
conjugations of verbs: valid, or excluded?

I'd nominate some categories, along with the elusive doublewhack:

triplewhack that all begin with the same letter;
triplewhack with words all the same length;
multiwhack beginning with sequential letters (1: applet badger catchy dabble)...

Probably not fair to acknowledge word lists (too easy to spoof) such as that last hit.

When a program crashes under XP, you have the option of pressing a button that sends a diagnostic report to Redmond. XP then tantalizes you with the prospect of being told when Microsoft has a fix for the problem. To receive this vital information, however, you are required to sign up for Passport (Tagline: "We called it 'Passport' because we're saving 'Stranglehold' for our next product").

Meanwhile, my book, due out in April, Small Pieces Loosely Joined: A Unified Theory of the Web, has become available for pre-order at Amazon where it currently resides at position #1,956,111, thus edging out such titles as Bryostephane Steereana : A Collection of Bryological Papers Presented to William Campbell Steere on the Occasion of His 80th Birthday (#2,101,446) and Lourdes Gomex-Franca's El Nino de Guano (#2,107,076), but outranked by the popular Burley Packwood's Bird turd peppers and other delights. Yeah, well, if I wanted to sell out like that whore Packwood, my book could be #1,467,919, too.

The blurbs have started to come in for my book, but I find I lack the requisite shamelessness. Aw, fuck it. Here's what Daniel Pink, author of Free Agent Nation, said:

"In the tradition of Marshall McLuhan, David Weinberger has offered a startlingly fresh look at a new medium. But Small Pieces Loosely Joined is more than a work of techno-analysis. At its heart, it is an elegant and ultimately hopeful inquiry into the human condition itself. Once you read this book, you'll see the web - and yourself - in a whole new light."

On the Cluetrain list at Topica, where Eric pointed to our "What is passion?" blogfest, Marek has once again exhibited his tendency to blurt out the truth beautifully. He writes:

passion=love+memory

passion=love+giving up anger+forgiveness

passion=love+loss

Eric Mysterious Norlin counters my counterblog of his metablog about the nature of passion. He writes that I am

trying to enlarge the word *too* much. I would argue that one does NOT feel passion toward their children — unless their children are threatened. They feel love and enthusiasm and joy, but not passion. Passion occurs upon threatening because suddenly anger is thrown into the mix.

By this path, one *does* feel passion toward one's spouse, but this treads onto the always dangerous ground of Senor Freud — passion towards one's spouse does involve mixing anger and love, just as passionate sex *always* (don't lie to yourselves kiddies) involves sublimated violence.

As for compression algorithms, etc: I would argue that those things fall more under "enthusiasm" than "passion".

So, yes, we are using the word differently. Let sleeping semantics lie. I don't know what exactly Eric would count as examples of passion other than the ones he gives — passion towards a spouse, passion upon a threat to one's children — but it seems to me that the word applies wherever feelings are strong and — except in the case of "making passionate love" — persistent; you can have a passion for art, but not if it lasts for thirty minutes. Anger isn't the only strong feeling. Let's hope.

Passion = (Deeply caring about something) + (time)

The mysterious Eric Norlin said in an email that he's cracked the code:

Passion = Love + Anger

he wrote. I asked him to write a bloggerino on this so I could respond, so instead he meta-blogged as follows:

I wrote in an email the other day: Passion = Love + Anger. The good doctor disagreed and asked for a blog so that he might counter-blog....the stage is yours, David.

The small point is that this is obviously wrong. Passion is sometimes love and anger, but there are lots of things we don't need anger to be passionate about, including (in no particular order): our children, our spouses, compression algorithms, and marzipan in the shape of small household objects.

The larger point is: Why does Eric's equation seem plausible? It helps that it's sometimes true. It helps that it's true for some of the most prominent of passions, including for Linux and Open Source which wouldn't be nearly as much fun if Microsoft weren't around. But it is also distressingly true for so much of what passes for passion on the Net. With so many voices clamoring for attention, the Web has a natural inclination towards flaming. And anger adds a moral gravitas to one's outrageousness: you can grab people's attention if you dress in a tie-dyed shirt, a fake boa, and no pants, but if you burn your draft card at the same time, you're a rebel, not just a flamboyant asshole.

That's one reason I so appreciated Gary Turner's "sentimental" blog entry the other day. No histrionics, no hiding behind the protection of a good head of self-righteous indignation.

Don't get me wrong: there's nothing I like better than a bout of sweet, foam-in-your-mouth-not-in-your-hands self-righteous indignation! But this isn't the only form of passion ... and all too often it's merely a self-indulgent, look-at-me fit in the guise of passion.

Gary Turner says some incredibly nice things about RageBoy, Doc, me and some others in his blog today. Way over the top. And it's great. Gary gets a little self-conscious towards the end and writes: "Trying desperately not to over-senitmentalize this posting (too late) ..." No apologies accepted, Gary! As much as I love cynicism, irony and post-modern meta-nihilism, after a while it gets a little predictable. It's a relief to have someone express actual sentiments — other than anger — without guile. Gimme more!

Gary continues his collection of weblog bumperstickers. (My current favorite is "My other blog is a newspaper column.") Here are some suggestions:

• I blogged at the office.
• I'd rather be blogging.
• Blog me, baby. Blog me hard.
• You are what you blog.

Michael Quinlon's weekly emailer, World Wide Words, today summarizes the awards by the American Dialect Society last night in San Francisco:

• Most Outrageous: "assoline", methane used as a fuel.
• Most Euphemistic: "daisy cutter", a bomb used by US Air Forces in Afghanistan (not new, but definitely a distinguishing word of 2001).
• Most Useful: there was a tie between "facial profiling", videotaping a crowd to identify criminals and terrorists, and "second-hand speech", overheard cell-phone conversation.
• Most Creative: "shuicide bomber", a terrorist with a bomb in his shoe.
• Most Unnecessary: "impeachment nostalgia", longing for the superficial news of the Clinton era
• Least Likely to Succeed: "Osamaniac", a woman sexually attracted to Osama bin Laden
• Most Inspirational: "Let's roll!", the words of the late Todd Beamer, who mobilised passengers on Flight 93 on 11 September to overcome the terrorists who had hijacked the plane.

Previous awards are viewable here. Previous Most Likely to Succeed were:

2000: muggle (27). Other candidates: m-commerce (14), buying and selling over a cell phone, and WAP (3), Wireless Application Protocol, a specification that enables wireless devices to connect with one another.

1999: dot-com (31) company doing business on the World-Wide Web. Others: portal (9) entry site to the Web, e-tail (7) retail business conducted on the Web, baby Bills (2) companies that Bill Gates' Microsoft might be broken up into as a result of the government's antitrust lawsuit.

1998: "e-" 25 votes. Others: "rage" as in "road rage," etc. (18); "moment" as in "senior moment," "Kodak moment" (12).

1997: "DVD" (30) Digital Versatile Disk, optical disk technology expected to replace CDs. Others: "handheld" (4) (noun) handheld digital device; "push" (2) automatic delivery of customized Internet content to one's desktop; "be dilberted" (2) to be mistreated or taken advantage of by one's boss.

1996: "drive-by" (25) designating brief visits or hospital stays as in "drive-by labor," "drive-by mastectomy," "drive-by viewing." Runner-up "nail" (7) to accomplish perfectly, as an Olympic feat, election victory, or movie role.

1995: "World Wide Web" and its variants.

1994: No Most Likely to Succeed but Most Promising was Infobahn.

1993: Quotative like with a form of the verb be to indicate speech or thought.

1992: snail mail , s-mail, mail that is physically delivered, as opposed to email.

1991: rollerblade , skate with rollers in a single row.

1990: notebook PC , a portable personal computer weighting 4-8 pounds, and rightsizing , adjusting the size of a staff by laying off employees.

Not a bad record, although choosing a word as most likely to succeed because the technology it denotes is likely to succeed strikes me as a bit craven.

Here are the group's Word of the Year awards:

• 1990: Bushlips (insincere political rhetoric)
• 1991: Mother of All
• 1992: Not!
• 1993: Information Superhighway
• 1994: Cyber, Morph
• 1995: Web, Newt
• 1996: Mom
• 1997: Millennium Bug
• 1998: E-
• 1999: Y2K
• 2000: chad

In 2000, the group widened its scope for its awards:

Word of the Year 1999 was Y2K.
Word of the 1990s Decade was web.
Word of the Twentieth Century was jazz.
Word of the Past Millennium was she.

Yes, she, the feminine pronoun. Before the year 1000, there was no she in English; just heo, which singular females had to share with plurals of all genders because it meant they as well. In the twelfth century, however, she appeared, and she has been with us ever since. She may derive from the Old English feminine demonstrative pronoun seo or sio, or from Viking invasions.

So, before 1000, there was no direct way to differentiate between a reference to a woman and a reference to a group of indeterminate sex? That is very weird.

In response to my challenge to come up with neologisms, Ken Meltsner writes:

I came up with (I believe) ""netstalgia"" — musings on how the Internet used to be.

Joe Murphy writes:

There's a thread on Plastic.com about this very topic. Do you Plastic?

My favorite so far is:

Neolojism:

A combination of neologism and jism meaning the end result of this particular type of linguistic masturbation.

Oh. My other favorite is:

For Canadians only: A friend of mine refers to our far-right newspaper as the Notional Past.

As mentioned in yesterday's blog, the folks behind Media Grok have reemerged with Media Unspun. This is from their FAQ:

What is Media Unspun?

It's a new newsletter published by the team that produced Media Grok for the Industry Standard. Now, as then, our goal is to keep our readers up to date on the most important business news, show how different news outlets interpret the same information in different ways, and, if we're lucky, entertain you.

The same team? Really?

Yes, 100 percent. Deborah Asbrand, Michaela Cavallaro, Keith Dawson, Jen Muehlbauer, and David Sims are still the writers. Jim Duffy is still the copyeditor. I'm still the editor. I appear to be the publisher, too, since no one else has volunteered.

The first two articles in this daily send are about the Democratic probe of Enron and the media's sudden enthusiasm for Nasdaq.

Jack Vinson writes:

So, I was listening to our local college radio, where they talk too much and play good music. The particular duo I enjoy are Michael Stephen and Producer Nick. Michael has his own cheesy website, and they were joking that Producer Nick doesn't have his own site. As it turns out, there is a producernick.com. He is apparently a Berklee music student who really likes Britney Spears. Check out his "hit song": "I Want to Be Britney Spears' Boyfriend."

A former boss of mine came into work one day in 1987 or so, jubilant. He had done a lot of research about how he could contest a speeding ticket he felt he didn't deserve. At the hearing, the judge asked him for his story. My boss took out the giant law volume he'd been studying, and began: "Well, Judge, according to..."

"Case dismissed!" said the judge.

It sounds like times have changed, unfortunately. Perhaps the Web has made so many traffic violators into pre-jailhouse lawyers that a show of expertise doesn't have the effect it once did.

(The National Motorists Association apparently has a helpful site for the Wrongfully Accused and/or Cheap.)

Chris Pirillo's Lockergnome recommends a compelling download: Anti Mosquitoes v1.10b, a 261K app that causes your sound card to emit a sound mosquitoes find repellant. [Insert your own joke here about whatever musical group you don't like.] Chris hasn't tried it and neither have I; as Chris says, this is "for those of you who've already downloaded everything."

From Jimmy Guterman, formerly with the Media Grok newsletter of fond memory:

Do you miss Media Grok?

The team that produced Media Grok will launch a new newsletter tomorrow.

See you then.

Noted: This explanation in Office XP (Standard) errs on the side of caution, skipping the part where it's actually helpful:

In my weekly column for Darwin Magazine online tomorrow, I'm going to talk about some sites and services that I like beyond their intrinsic merit because they remind me that the Internet will survive our commercial attempts to subdue it ... like an opossum I saw on our suburban sidewalk a couple of years ago that somehow managed to last through our paving of its habitat. The examples I'm pointing to are:

• Google
• UseNet
• Sites where you can get technical help from amateur experts
• Arts & Letters Daily as a straightforward aggregator

Pardon the brief cross post. This was part of my response to an excellent bloggerino from Steve McLaughlin at Gonzo Engaged. He was responding to my response to a Chris Locke rant.

Pardon the rambling. Or better yet, straighten it out and tell me what I'm trying to say...

Before there were books and scribes, there were singers of stories. Every time Homer's tale was told, it was different depending on the voice of the teller. Intonation, tune, rhythm, even content varied with each telling. What counted was the way the story was told that night.

Writing nailed the words to pages; the words became the Platonic form of the story. The words may be rendered differently by each edition — the new edition of a book may be set in a different typeface than the previous one — but the two editions are editions of the same book only if the words are the same. And with the fixing of words on paper, we also get "authors." Authors own their words in a way that the previous generations of story tellers could not. Printing leads to "authorized" editions indeed.

On the Web we have authors and story tellers. But we have something else as well: places. For the first time, a place can constitute the "what-ness" of the discourse, not the story, not the author, not the words. The work can be the place where authors, tellers, stories, voices and words meet. It is the place that has permanence, it is the place that makes the discourse into a work. And the place isn't owned the way authors own words, and it isn't possessed the way a voice possesses a singer or teller. It is public, it is shared, it is ours.

"Ours" isn't a possessive here. Books, embodying Platonic works, exist without us. Stories, on the other hand, need us as listeners to exist; a story untold is like a dance undanced. The Web's new places combine the permanence of books with the needfulness of stories...

Gary Stock, who really should start his own weblog, refers us to the first review at Amazon of the children's classic, The Story of Ping:

"...As good as it is, The Story About Ping is not without its faults. There is no index, and though the ping(8) man pages cover the command line options well enough, some review of them seems to be in order. Likewise, in a book solely about Ping, I would have expected a more detailed overview of the ICMP packet structure..."

Blue Hydrangea

Like the green that cakes in a pot of paint,
these leaves are dry, dull and rough
behind this billow of blooms whose blue
is not their own but reflected from far away
in a mirror dimmed by tears and vague,
as if it wished them to disappear again
the way, in old blue writing paper,
yellow shows, then violet and gray;

a washed-out color as in children's clothes
which, no longer worn, no more can happen to:
how much it makes you feel a small life's brevity.

But suddenly the blue shines quite renewed
within one cluster, and we can see
a touching blue rejoice before the green.

Rainer Maria Rilke
William H. Gass, trans.