Saturday, December 4, 2004

At last

Peter Hirshberg: Denny's Introduces "Red States Cuisine" "God’s Batter" Invades Los Angeles — Moral Value in Chicken Fried Steak? An excerpt:

Says Denny's Chief Food Officer N. J. Marchioli, "For years elite America have dined on seared peppered ahi, or shitake mushrooms or steamed vegetables with unpronounceable French sauces. Terrorists may steam their victims, but you won’t catch us steaming anything!"

This brilliant piece began, I think, when Peter and I were talking on the phone while I was having breakfast at Denny's with my kid.

You heard it here second

It galls the shit out of me that IBM is apparently thinking of dumping the distinctive and original ThinkPad (mine is a T40) along with their generic desktop boxes. I thought out loud about that yesterday in that first link, over at IT Garage. A sample:

So here's a message for every hardware OEM that's shaking in fear of "commoditization": There is enormous room for differentiation for PCs that don't need to run Windows.

There's more down in the comments.

Having a(n eye) ball

Dig this series of photos taken by remote control airplanes. And thanks to Britt for the link. (Unrelated to the below.)

Not speaking of which, while thinking of headlines for this post, I had the idea of making a bowling ball that looks like an eyeball. I wondered, and ... sure enough. Makes me want to go bowling, just to use the Eye Ball. Wish Ebonite (or anybody) still made it.

And the whores you rode in on

In Fuck You! (Strong letter to follow), Britt Blaser embraces and extends what Jeff Jarvis recommends here, in the case of of Sony vs. Blogosphere:

Jeff's hope is to inspire a Blogger's Legal Aid Society to defend bloggers, and it shouldn't take more than six months if everyone works hard at it. I'm not as moderate as Jeff and I'm much less patient. I want to rip these drones a new asshole. Every cohort of our society is exercising power as never before and we—the bloggers who really have the power—have no response to litigation. Wake up bloggers! We hold all the cards. We buy our ink by the TeraByte!

Let's do what bloggers do best. Out the fuckers! There's a list of names hiding behind every one of these pissant actions brought against one of our own. All of their names are easily discoverable. There are corporate officers, listed in 10Q's and 10K's. There are attorneys and partners and judges of record ruling on all these foolish motions. They have work and home street addresses, club affiliations and, if we're lucky, discoverable dalliances. There are a thousand bloggers for every one of these ciphers, a googleplex of data about most of them and more to be gained if someone bothers to hire a PI or dig into it, all of it public knowledge, but unavailable to the public record until we act.

That a lawyer's call would quiet Jason Kottke's voice is an affront to free speech and a violation of something far more powerful—our collective outrage. What do we bloggers do better than anybody? We know how to google and to describe and to crosslink and to hang on to facts like bulldogs. As the N'Yawkers shouted at the Green Goblin as they pelted him from the 59th Street Bridge:

Any action we resent deserves to be exposed. Is our overreaction fair? Of course not! Given the overwhelming weight of our collective attention, it's incredibly unfair to those who, until now, have held all the cards. They have status to defend, reputations to uphold, power to secure.

He goes on to recommend some highly specific action for fisking lawyers and otherwise exposing the selfishness, greed and venality behind the kind of crap Sony is trying to pull on Jason.

He also offers this:

If called by a lawyer, calm your mind and lower your pulse.
Ask politely that they put it in writing.
Take the letter to your city or county's Public Recorder's Office.
File it for the public record for a small fee.<br/>(you may enter anything into the public record, even a movie stub).
Scan the letter and post it online as a GIF and a PDF.
List the official record number.
Let us do the rest.

RTWT.