Asymptomatic

There must be intelligent life down here

Prisoner Abuse
July 21, 2004

I half-heard something startling on the radio the other day. At first I thought they were talking about the Abu Ghraib incident. But I think it was more than that. Other prisons, more incidents. They talked about women and children forced to see their husbands and fathers humiliated in prison, or being imprisoned themselves. The news guy on the radio was talking about potential hearings and proceedings concerning the actions of soldiers stationed at these prisons.

I was struck with the odd realization that this isn’t just the media making a big to do about nothing. There is something bigger going on here. This behavior among the soldiers was too widespread for it to be random acts of evil. Groups of people in different locations don’t just start doing things like this spontaneously. Someone was telling them to do this stuff.

The *bleep* radio
July 21, 2004

On my way to work this morning I was listening to Y-100, waiting through a song for their morning banter. It was “My Own Worst Enemy” by Lit. There are some bad words in the song, which the station had bothered to “bleep” out.

These days, there isn’t a bleep on the radio when you would otherwise hear an expletive. You hear a gap in the vocal audio track, but not the music. Presumably, the recording company has produced a “clean” version of the track where the bad word is simply removed from the full recording. Well, that seems like a great idea, but they never fully remove the word.

MicroWiki
July 20, 2004

I wrote a Wiki yesterday. It’s under 25k in one file. I tried blearily to explain to Berta what a Wiki was this morning, and I don’t think she was impressed by my description.

A Wiki is a way that you can easily create linked pages without using a lot of HTML markup. The appeal is that you don’t have to know the HTML tags, and a lot of the building of the pages is accomplished by knowing a few simple rules.
July 20, 2004

About 5 miles down the road from Coatesville. I’m eating fries in a Burger King on the fringe of this burnt-out suburban steel city.