What a great name!

Which brings me to Shaun of the Dead.

This is a wonderfully funny little movie and a great twist on the typical zombie fare. There are some unexpectedly touching moments and I loved seeing Lucy Davis from The Office. (Martin Freeman also had a non-speaking cameo.)

Turns out that it's a variation on a quote by Confucius.

found via Boing Boing by way of WFMU's Beware of the Blog.

Archived copy here.

"If the Earth Were a Sandwich"
"The Show" with ze frank

The Value of Privacy

Last week, revelation of yet another NSA surveillance effort against the American people has rekindled the privacy debate. Those in favor of these programs have trotted out the same rhetorical question we hear every time privacy advocates oppose ID checks, video cameras, massive databases, data mining, and other wholesale surveillance measures: "If you aren't doing anything wrong, what do you have to hide?"

Some clever answers: "If I'm not doing anything wrong, then you have no cause to watch me." "Because the government gets to define what's wrong, and they keep changing the definition." "Because you might do something wrong with my information." My problem with quips like these -- as right as they are -- is that they accept the premise that privacy is about hiding a wrong. It's not. Privacy is an inherent human right, and a requirement for maintaining the human condition with dignity and respect.

]]> Two proverbs say it best: Quis custodiet custodes ipsos? ("Who watches the watchers?") and "Absolute power corrupts absolutely."

Cardinal Richelieu understood the value of surveillance when he famously said, "If one would give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest man, I would find something in them to have him hanged." Watch someone long enough, and you'll find something to arrest -- or just blackmail -- with. Privacy is important because without it, surveillance information will be abused: to peep, to sell to marketers and to spy on political enemies -- whoever they happen to be at the time.

Privacy protects us from abuses by those in power, even if we're doing nothing wrong at the time of surveillance.

We do nothing wrong when we make love or go to the bathroom. We are not deliberately hiding anything when we seek out private places for reflection or conversation. We keep private journals, sing in the privacy of the shower, and write letters to secret lovers and then burn them. Privacy is a basic human need.

A future in which privacy would face constant assault was so alien to the framers of the Constitution that it never occurred to them to call out privacy as an explicit right. Privacy was inherent to the nobility of their being and their cause. Of course being watched in your own home was unreasonable. Watching at all was an act so unseemly as to be inconceivable among gentlemen in their day. You watched convicted criminals, not free citizens. You ruled your own home. It's intrinsic to the concept of liberty.

For if we are observed in all matters, we are constantly under threat of correction, judgment, criticism, even plagiarism of our own uniqueness. We become children, fettered under watchful eyes, constantly fearful that -- either now or in the uncertain future -- patterns we leave behind will be brought back to implicate us, by whatever authority has now become focused upon our once-private and innocent acts. We lose our individuality, because everything we do is observable and recordable.

How many of us have paused during conversation in the past four-and-a-half years, suddenly aware that we might be eavesdropped on? Probably it was a phone conversation, although maybe it was an e-mail or instant-message exchange or a conversation in a public place. Maybe the topic was terrorism, or politics, or Islam. We stop suddenly, momentarily afraid that our words might be taken out of context, then we laugh at our paranoia and go on. But our demeanor has changed, and our words are subtly altered.

This is the loss of freedom we face when our privacy is taken from us. This is life in former East Germany, or life in Saddam Hussein's Iraq. And it's our future as we allow an ever-intrusive eye into our personal, private lives.

Too many wrongly characterize the debate as "security versus privacy." The real choice is liberty versus control. Tyranny, whether it arises under threat of foreign physical attack or under constant domestic authoritative scrutiny, is still tyranny. Liberty requires security without intrusion, security plus privacy. Widespread police surveillance is the very definition of a police state. And that's why we should champion privacy even when we have nothing to hide.

The purple/pink looking flower is a cherry tree that I brought back from Greenville with me over 13 years ago. My roommate Jeff and I were driving back to the apartment one night in the fall of my last year of college and saw these trees at Kmart. They were super reduced in price because of the end of the season, so I bought one and dragged it back to the apartment in the trunk of my Cutlas. The leaves stayed on for about a month or so, then all dropped off. We dutifully watered it every now and then over the winter not because we really thought it was still alive, but because I guess we thought that having a dead tree in the living room was better than having no tree at all.

At some point in the spring we noticed that little buds were starting to pop open. Lo and behold our little dead tree was only sleeping. We had beautiful flowers that spring in the apartment. I almost gave it to my piano teacher when it was time to move back to VA. I'm so glad that I didn't.

(WMV file/5.6MB)

CAMARILLO, CA - We had a chance to visit the classroom of my 2nd cousin Kathy this afternoon. The students had to create these imaginary worlds using common household items. All the kids were given the same things to work with. They also had to write a short paragraph describing what they'd created.

Cute stuff!

The big showpiece of the place is one of the retired Air Force One's. They've done a brilliant job of restoring it.

I'm not sure how I feel about "The Great Communicator" and the legacy he left behind. I remember not liking him when he was in office, and I remember the 80's as being a time of real tension with regards to world affairs. Nuclear oblivion seemed like a real possibility. I wonder what he'd think of the "compassionate conservatism" of the current administration.

Wiggy...

My plan is to keep things here for the time being while I work on the redesign and decide which platform to go with. (It's easier to migrate from MT to Wordpress than vice-versa.) Perhaps if I put it out there publicly that I'm going redesign the site it'll help motivate me to get things moving.

Better to be a work in progess than have no work at all, right?

You have to give it up to the guy for creating such a cool midi version of Bohemian Rhapsody. The creators website is here. Found via Boing Boing.

Way to go guys!

First, unzip the following file to your desktop. (Option click to download / Double click to unzip once it's there).

It'll look like this:

.

Open up a finder window. Make sure that you have it set to "Pane View".

Drag the "_Files_&_Folders" folder from your Desktop into your "Documents" folder on the left hand side of the finder window. It should look like this when you're through:

Drag the "_Files_&_Folders" folder from the "Documents" folder to the left hand pane below the "Music" folder and drop it. (This will create an alias to the original folder.)

Once you've "dropped" the folder it should look something like this:

And that's it. You now have a made to order "Getting Things Done" type A-Z filing system. I've found it so much easier to find things in this virtual filing cabinet. "Receipts" go in the "R" folder. "Serial Numbers" go in the "S" folder. It's pretty easy to get used to dropping things into their appropriate folders as you go.

Simple, right?