Zwol.org

"In retrospect, ours was a story repeated, not only by myself later in life, but throughout the U.S. untold countless times through the two decades that Baby Boomer 'nerds' were creating what would become the Internet, leaving a carnage of broken relationships, and sometimes families, in its wake. The irony may be a bit thick, but it bears saying with some seriousness that zoo keepers will one-day transfer their knowledge of gibbon breeding to inventors and their mates. It certainly would help technology along because invention becomes less relevant when it is used as an emotional anesthetic rather than growing from a creative dream."

The Title That Wasn't There: The next Coen brothers' movie is "The Man Who Wasn't There" but the linked article won't really shed any light on that. It's worth a read, though, for such gems as this:

They had solicited my advice, they now told me, because they thought that, being British, I might know some "Shakespearean stuff that might work". They propounded the theory that a good title intrigues, is suggestive, allusive, and makes one want to know more. I was going to suggest "The Man with the Gas Hearth" but, mindful that they also wanted something that savoured of pulpy confession, proposed "My Hearth Is Gas". This prompted a few minutes' thought from Ethan at the end of which he asked: "Is that from the sonnets?"

Who's looking for "zol.com"? More importantly- Why?

We're more nuts than you: "You shoot guns into the sky to celebrate victories over enemies, and people are killed by the bullets raining down on them. We not only do this for New Year's Eve in some cities, but we burn houses down, tear up streets, loot and sack our stores, and beat ourselves senseless when our sports teams win championships. Sports teams! We made a sequel to Police Academy 5. We gave an award for singing to two guys who never even sang. We put little sweaters on dogs. We shot John Lennon six times and didn't even aim for Yoko Ono."

Doc on Post-Industrial Journalism: "It's not that I'm sour on the Official Story. Again, I'm not even sure I disagree with it. I just know we miss too many facts by replacing dialog with chant."

Steven Grant says what he thinks: "[Superosity has] more in common with strips like CATHY and DILBERT in that it deals with various social phenomena. Not quite up to the general level of either of those, though, but not bad either." And I'm left thinking Ouch! Not up to the level of CATHY? Wow, man- that's harsh.

(In case you've misplaced your sense of scale recently.)

1984 MIB: Now, I don't know that this is true, but... "Ridge wants the uniforms of this State Political Police division to be modeled on existing state trooper uniforms - except done in black. If you've ever seen New Jersey or Pennsylvania State Police uniforms, they have dark blue pants and lighter blue uniform on top. They also have those old-fashioned pants that bag out like the old German or Gestapo pants. They'll have jet-black jackboots, and black uniforms with lots of gold insignias indicating the Power of the State."

WTC Ground Zero Photos: Thumbnail page with 72 photos, each full-size photo is a rather large jpeg, but the file sizes are reasonable. Amazing stuff, though. Like this one.

Another Amazing Photo: This one an arial view of the site. An even larger version is here. (via Dave Winer's Scripting News)

And speaking of Dave Winer: "Last night's West Wing was worse than a CNN town meeting. What a load of crap. I cringed 18 times and then fell asleep. FWIW, they probably wrote the script two weeks ago. In that context it makes sense. In that sense last night's WW was good art, it was an anachronism, and provides some clue as to how fast things are moving now. Popular culture of two weeks ago is already out of date."

TV is Evil (and resistance is futile): I've now seen two whole episodes of a TV series in a row for the first time since 1999. We'll see how long I can put up with this, but as a long-time trekkie I've decided to give Enterprise a shot. Granted, the pilot was pretty lame, but I see potential.

Kevin Pease has a pretty good reason not to watch it, though, as he points out that there is probably enough Star Trek existing already and the concept is now far from novel. "What's the next series going to be?" He asks, "What's left of time and space? Maybe it will be set entirely in the Q Continuum. That would be interesting. Instead of showing us outer-space metaphors for familiar scenarios, they can show us the familiar scenarios in their original form, and tell us that they are meant to be visual metaphors for something else beyond human comprehension. Naturally, all of the characters would be named Q."

Excerpt:

We were about 5 hours out of Frankfurt flying over the North Atlantic and was in my crew rest seat taking my scheduled rest break. All of a sudden the curtains parted violently and I was told to go to the cockpit, right now, to see the captain. As soon as I got there I noticed that the crew had one of those 'All Business' looks on their faces. The captain handed me a printed message. I quickly read the message and realized the importance of it. The message was from Atlanta, addressed to our flight, and simply said, 'All airways over the Continental US are closed. Land ASAP at the nearest airport, advise your destination.'

Now, when a dispatcher tells you to land immediately without suggesting which airport, one can assume that the dispatcher has reluctantly given up control of the flight to the captain. We knew it was a serious situation and we needed to find terra firma quickly.

And the Town of Gander has related links from some of the passengers.

The Head Lemur Holds Forth on the issue of Piracy and the Internet: "Does every Entertainment Conglomerate CEO who gets a chance to talk about the Internet have no sense? In the past few days a number of entertainment company chief executives have been stepping up to the plate to tell the world how to run the Internet. These folks are primarily in the music and movie business."

True!

Fascinating! The link I pointed to below for Osama's statement (at MSNBC.com) does not include the entire statement! Neither does the New York Times translation! The Washington Post has a slightly longer version. Everybody's got a point of view, right? SmarterTimes.com devotes its energy to correcting the NY Times in matters such as these.

Googling: Checking my referral logs shows quite a few people coming in search of "WTC ground zero" or "ground zero photos." If that's what you're looking for, check for links in a previous news posting. Also referred by Google via a search for my name- "Greg Stephens"- of which Google lists me first. However, simply searching by "Greg" puts me at 152- 5 places ahead of Greg Dean (of Real Life). Now if I can only top that pesky Super Greg...

New online comic: Desiderata by the comic metaphysic, Max Leibman.

Dr. Lobster & Steve's Guide to Making Online Comics: Seems to be reasonably accurate. You'll notice that even though they reiterate that "there are no rules" and I tried to break all the established rules when I started out, Zwol adheres to an astounding number of these guidelines. (Yes, this "guide" is meant to be funny, but like most things in like, we laugh because it's funny, and we laugh because it's true.)

UPN is producing Iron Chef USA with William Shatner as the host.

Doc Points to a Tony Blair speech from last week about which Doc says, "I'm not knocking anything Tony says. It's flat-out brilliant. It's hard, even for a peace-monger like me, to disagree with any of it. I'm simply urging us to think deeply about the stuff that does our thinking for us."

However, I saw Blair's latest address yesterday and I found his justifications to the British people for involving them in this conflict to be tremendously weak. Granted, we're talking about two different things- the first a speech that was probably written far in advance of delivery; the second a statement that would have to have been written with much more haste- but when Mr. Blair's reasons include this, "The airlines, tourism and other industries have been affected, and economic confidence has suffered with all that means for British jobs and business," and this, "Ninety per cent of all heroin sold in Britain originates from Afghanistan. Stopping that trade is, again, directly in our interests," well, it sounds like a little to little, a little too late.

More on Blair: What's-his-name from BlackHoleBrain dissects Blair's 10/2 speech. His conclusion? "It all sounds good. But there will never (ever) be any globally-implemented, man-made political, legislative, technological, or militaristic remedy that actually puts an end to terrorism."

More politics: For comparison, check out G. W. Bush's address where he says, "I'm speaking to you today from the Treaty Room of the White House, a place where American presidents have worked for peace. We're a peaceful nation. Yet as we have learned so suddenly and so tragically, there can be no peace in a world of sudden terror" and a statement from the man of the hour, Osama bin Laden, where he says, "Grace and gratitude to God. America has been filled with horror from north to south and east to west, and thanks be to God that what America is tasting now is only a copy of we have tasted."

Ug. I'm going to go see if I can find anything fun to link to.

That would be this: I am by no means a Pearl Jam fan, but it's exceptionally cool that they're releasing CD recordings of every concert date they've played on their Binaural tour of last year.

Yes! Two days in a row!

In today's comic, Allen's shirt reads "Allah Bless America." Oddly enough, I haven't seen any people wearing these around town.

Doc Searls asks some questions:

Have your entertainment tastes changed since 9/11?
What kind of toys and games are you buying for kids this Christmas?
What kind of movies and shows are you looking for when you go to blockbuster or channel surf on TV?

And (aside from the fact that I can't answer question number two, as I have no children) I'm gonna have to say that my entertainment tastes haven't changed at all. However- as is evident by Zwol's recent topics- my artistic tastes have been hijacked for the moment.

As Slow As Possible: Now when people are making such obviously incorrect statements about September 11th as "On that day, everything changed" or "Nothing's the same anymore," they're obviously speaking without a proper sense of perspective. Hmph. Well, the above linked article talks about a piece of music that commenced on September 11th and is planned to be performed over the next 639 years. It's clearly doubtful that this song will ever be completed, but let's say it makes it through the long haul- What part will the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11th, 2001 play in the lives of the audience members who hear the final chords of this song in the year 2640? Will they think their lives were affected by those events? That that was the day everything changed? Or will it merely be another paragraph in their history books (or history whatevers); Not so much a point of no return as a notable spike in the historical record? The world changes day by day, folks. Not in an instant; Not all at once- but constantly.