While reading an old Entertainment Weekly magazine earlier today I discovered something I didn't know about that Janet Jackson Superbowl nipple slip debacle.
As you will recall, a couple of years ago MTV was put in charge of the Superbowl halftime show, and they presented some crazy spectacle involving Justin Timberlake and Janet Jackson. In what would later be referred to as a "wardrobe malfunction", Timberlake removed part of Jackson's costume revealing parts that aren't fit for prime time public television.
Whether the incident was planned or accidental isn't material to this topic, although I will say that I'm in the camp of those who are all for nudity on the public airwaves provided that there is some way to determine what shows to avoid watching if your preference is not to be shocked by seeing a half second of exposed female breast. Regardless, CBS, the network that aired the game and halftime show, was fined something like $500,000 by the government for the public’s exposure to indecency.
What’s interesting – or disturbing, depending on how you look at it – is that until I read this small blurb in the legal news column tucked away in the front of the Entertainment Weekly, I did not know that a federal court in Philadelphia had revoked this fine, saying that the network couldn’t be held responsible for this accidental incident on live TV. more
Alex and I have been going back and forth in comments over the areas of our interest that overlap. In his recent post, he asks, "how long can organic communities self-moderate?"
I admit that I haven't read the Starfish and the Spider, although I did just one-click it into my Kindle, so it's doomed to suffer my analysis. Nevertheless, I had some comments about how leaderless organizations can thrive, particularly in open source communities, of which I happen to be a part of a couple.
Obviously, one of my passions is working with Habari and the people that have come together around that common goal. When we started, there were just four of us, each with various levels of ability and availability. I think you can pretty well call that "leaderless", since we all worked in tandem, and any small change any one person made was easily detected and reviewed by the other three. But as the project has grown, I think there is some kind of tragic irony in that the size of the operation inevitably leads toward a need for at least an informal management structure....
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On August 13, Berta, the kids, and I went on a cruise to the Caribbean. We made arrangements for this couple months ago via Carnival's website as our family vacation for this year. Our destination: San Juan in Puerto Rico, St. Thomas, and Grand Turk.
So on that Wednesday, we loaded our luggage into the car and drove to the port in New York City. We were running a little bit late because we had to drop off the house key with our cat sitter, and I was afraid we weren't going to make it, but we did manage to not "miss the boat". Nonetheless, that short delay did manage to affect our whole trip.
After dealing with the registration folks and boarding the boat, we were told that our state room was ready to occupy. So we went directly to our state room. What we should have done, is gone to the Phantom auditorium to watch the embarkation show. The embarkation show was a short show put on by the cruise director giving everyone the information they would need to know what was going on on the ship during the trip. Obviously, this was an essential bit of information that we somehow missed, and is really the only explanation I can see for why we hardly ever ran into any of the thousands of people who were on the ship with us....
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Over the past weekend, we took the usual summer pilgrimage to Johnstown. This time, Berta's sister Therese was in the process of moving, so while they packed up some of their things, I watched the kids. This turned out not too unpleasant. During the time going out and while the kids were entertaining themselves amicably, I was able to do some more reading.
When last Pat as in town, he loaded up my Kindle with a few sample books. I started reading one by Vernor Vinge called "A Fire Upon the Deep". It was both interesting and strange. We also started listening to an audiobook prequel to the Tales of the Otori trilogy, "Heaven's Net is Wide", by Lian Hearn.
A Fire Upon the Deep is, as I said, strange. It's been a while since I've read true space sci-fi, and this certainly qualifies. It will be difficult to explain some of the many layered characteristics of this book, which set to establish axioms by which Vinge's world operates....
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Over the weekend, I visited Columbus, not just to hang out with skippy at ComFest and buy too much crap at Origins, but to attend and lead a session at PodCamp Ohio.
The side dishes to this entrée are actually better than the meat, but the meat was the point of the dinner, so that's what I'll talk about here. I'm all about focus here. Focus.
I showed up right on time for the welcome session on Saturday and checked in. I hadn't been able to show up for the Friday night meetup because of the previously mentioned "side dishes". I checked in and was shown to the "Speaker Lounge", marked off by signs with martini glasses (with olive!). After a brief welcome from another couple of session leaders in the lounge, we all shuffled down to Room A for the introduction.
I'm not going to do a play-by-play of the rest of the day, because that's already feeling tedious. Let me cover briefly a couple of sessions I did attend, and my overall impression of the camp. more
