The Flyers, For the Record

Just so the rest of the nation knows what kind of materials the republicans are sending people who live in the San Diego district where there's a special election coming up in a week to replace disgraced, convicted, imprisoned republican Randy "Duke" Cunningham, I hereby offer the following two flyers which arrived in my mailbox over the past few weeks.

Exhibit A, Front Page.

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Exhibit A, Center Pages.

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Exhibit A, Back Page.

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Exhibit B, Front Page.

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Exhibit B, Back Page.

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One can just imagine a bunch of republicans in a smoke-filled room strategizing over how to beat Busby. First trick, flood the ballot with a bunch of republican candidates, in a desperate effort to hide Busby's name and prevent her from getting a 50.01% majority on the April 11 election.

They were successful:

From this Wikipedia page

As soon as those results were announced, I remember thinking, oh, now we get to see the republicans try to destroy the character of Busby, try any way possible to get her disgraced. I find it amusing these flyers are all they could come up with. I mean, compared to the criminal activity of Cunningham and his ilk, Busby's a friggin' saint.

So they got Bilbray in the special election which happens on June 6th. Back to the smoke-filled room. Now what? What buzzwords, what fear, should be placed into the minds of voters? Well, the republican playbook says, if you yourself are crooked, scary, dangerous, irresponsible, creepy, untrustworthy, corrupt, and downright unethical, then call the other guy those names -- project. So sure enough, we have the republicans calling Busby "irresponsible with our hard-earned money". Can you fucking believe it? Exactly what Cunningham was, and so apply it to the Democratic candidate, and hey maybe it'll stick! The republicans know they're not trustworthy, so what better than calling their opponent untrustworthy? "If we can't trust Francine Busby in San Diego, then we can't trust her in Congress."

When will people wake up?

RIP, Desmond Dekker

Reggae great Desmond Dekker has passed away. RIP.

First Event Scheduled, from Eventful Demand

Demand works!

Congrats to Wil Wheaton for successfully scheduling an actual event based on his fans demanding him to come to Boston.

Here's to lots more events popping up because of Eventful Demand!

It's Not an Unconference When The "Discussion Leaders" Are Pre-Selected

Gnomedex happens next month. I was excited to hear that it there would be no speakers, no sessions. It was starting to sound interesting: perhaps the attendees would decide what they wanted to talk about, discuss, and debate. I like conferences where the attendees are in charge, and the usual self-promoting (hey there's that phrase again) conference-circuit suspects aren't.

I was disappointed to learn that Gnomedex doesn't appear to actually be following this path at all. Instead, Chris Pirillo is hand-picking "discussion leaders." I mean, come on. You cannot say, "This year, there will be no speakers at Gnomedex" and then in the same paragraph then say, "We've begun to invite a select group of people to be discussion leaders - individuals who will stand on stage, present an idea or two, answer questions, and then generally lead the audience's discussion and participation."

"A select group of people to be discussion leaders?" Who will be up on stage, presenting ideas, answering questions and leading discussion?

Sure sounds like speakers to me.

R.I.P. Grant McLennan

I only discovered the Go-Betweens a few years ago and was very saddened to hear that Grant McLennan, one of the founders of the group, passed away yesterday.

The Distribution of the Future, or, Why I Don't Need BoingBoing As Much Anymore

William Gibson is said to have written, "The future's already here, it's just not evenly distributed yet."

In terms of the future of information -- at least when I personally become aware of a piece of information -- I'm finding more and more that information is reaching me sooner than it used to -- and I'm then turning around and disseminating it faster than the sites that I used to originally get the info from even know about it yet! (Whew, try to diagram that sentence, I dare you.)

For instance, on Feb 5, 2006, I was one of the first people to blog about Chris Bliss and his infamous juggling act (accompanied by music from The Beatles' Abbey Road album). Waxy blogged about it on a month later. BoingBoing picked up on it even later. A week or two ago I saw it on TV.... interesting how that's been propagating in ever-wider waves. But to me it's already at least 10 web-years old.

Same thing happened with the recent San Diego mystery boom (blogged about here, here, and here). San Diego bloggers were, naturally, the first to write about it. Much later it shows up on BoingBoing and for me it's like, eh, whatever.

Today, BoingBoing mentions StarLords, a new video mashup of Lord of the Rings and Star Wars. Bleh. Already knew about it. Not interesting. (And I don't think the video is that great, except for the part with the turning heads -- that is inspired.)

But it made me realize: MOST of what is on BoingBoing and Waxy's links anymore is stuff I have already heard about elsewhere. This is a very interesting shift.

What is causing it?

No question about it: it's my increased usage of Reddit, Digg, and Del.icio.us, and in that order of importance. These sites are helping "distribute the future" far more than BoingBoing or the Waxy Links. (And what's nice, they do so without all the ugly obnoxious meaningless ads and self-promoting clutter that has so nascarized BoingBoing).

I still visit BoingBoing and Waxy Links but I am visiting them less frequently thanks to these other services.

I wonder how many other folks are doing the same?

Fotolog: Ingenius Promo, or Annoying Security Problem?

Every few days I get one or more emails from Fotolog, a photo sharing site that predates Flickr, informing me that I have requested to change my password and would I please click on the link in the email to confirm the password change.

Only problem is, I've never once requested to change my password. These things are coming from evil hackers somewhere in the world, trying to gain unauthorized access to my account. I presume. Could be a runaway bug within Fotolog's servers for all I know. Maybe it's a runaway evil hacker script that the hacker long ago forgot about, but it's still running faithfully, attempting (again I assume) to break into any number of accounts on Fotolog.

Or . . . is it an ingenious scheme by the Fotolog people to remind me about Fotolog and make me think of visiting my account once in a while? I confess, it works very well in that capacity. :-)

But over time it gets old. Considering it's been going on for at least two years, I'd say it's gotten downright ancient.

$50.76

It cost $50.76 to buy 13.874 gallons of gas this morning. That's the most I have ever paid for gas: $3.659 per gallon.