Live from Austin!

What we really need is for an Army Corporal to waterboard a puppy to death and post the videos on YouTube. Then you’d see people’s heads implode from the cognitive dissonance.

Eeyore’s Birthday Party

Yeah, I’ve edited last year’s just in time for this year’s. I had a sudden outbreak of weddings to deal with.

How would you like a digital video camera that records 15fps video in 3GP format (QuickTime-compatible) direct to flash drive, is small enough to fit in a pack of gum, and has 33 hour capacity?

It’s currently $295. In less than 10 years cameras like this will be so cheap anyone will be able to afford one. Phones will be able to upload their video live to the Internet, in case of confiscation.  The future of ubiquitous surveillance is coming, whether you like it or not.

Experience how much Blu-ray sucks, without spending $1,000 to do so.

And that’s after installing the mandatory firmware upgrade to reinforce the DRM.

One of my random Internet pastimes is answering surveys. Partly I do it because I suspect I’m an interesting edge case for their data set, the exception that will prove their rules. Also, at the end they offer some of the statistics they’ve gathered, which can be interesting. And sometimes, the act of answering trivial questions can lead me to odd insights about myself.

Like just now.

It was a survey about motor oil. Since I’ve only been driving for a little under 3 years, and since we’ve always taken the car to the dealer for its oil change, I’ve not had much occasion to learn about oil, or the oil changing process.

In fact, while answering the survey I realized that the sum total of my knowledge about oil changes is what I learned from the ubiquitous Castrol GTX ads on UK television in the early 80s.

Specifically, I know three things: I know that Castrol GTX is a brand of oil. I know that it is viscous and golden in color.  And I know that if you pour it gradually onto a sheet of metal on which a metal spanner is resting, it will cling to the edges of the spanner and flow around it.

And now that I pause to think about it, two of those things might be totally untrue.

But there’s something a little disturbing about the idea that if I had to go buy oil for the car right now, I’d probably buy Castrol GTX, simply because of a TV advert shown 25 years ago (and thousands of miles away); an ad that didn’t really work on any level beyond pure abstract brand awareness.

And even more amazing is that with less than a minute of effort I managed to locate the ad on YouTube.

It’s been a bumper month for Transparent Society demonstrations.

• Michael Richards went into a racist tirade. He played Kramer on Seinfeld, but I’m guessing he won’t be doing any NAACP benefits now. Perhaps they could invite him to the Comedy Central Roast of Whoopi Goldberg.

  Allegedly he had ranted about Jews previously, but nobody had heard about it because nobody had had a camera handy.

• A Muslim student was repeatedly tasered by a campus cop with a history of police brutality and suspensions. The interesting thing about this one was how many assholes on the net tried to defend the cop.

  The facts, according to the dozen or more witnesses, are: The kid had the legal right to be in the library, he just didn’t have his student ID card with him. He was asked to leave, and had packed up his stuff and was already leaving when the cops showed up. He didn’t yell anything at them until one of them grabbed him as he was trying to leave. At that point, they tasered him. He hadn’t attempted to attack anyone, hadn’t threatened anyone, and was totally unarmed.

  Now, I think it’s pretty hard to justify that first tasering, but let’s for a moment entertain the remote possibility that the cops were in the right there. The problem is that as he was lying screaming on the floor, they tasered him again. They ordered him to get up, and (perhaps because all his muscles were in spasm) he didn’t get up, so they tasered him some more, and so on.

• Some US troops in Iraq videoed themselves tormenting Iraqi kids by making them chase their truck in the hope of getting some fresh water. Inevitably, the video hit YouTube.

• UK police are to get helmet-mounted video cameras which record up to 12 hours of video. This is a great idea, the only caveat I have is that the police should be required to keep the camera on when they’re working.

Of course, not so positive is the news that the UK police are setting up a precrime department called the Homicide Prevention Unit. I’m not sure whether precognitive mutants are involved.