I went for a nice bike ride today, and was shadowed for a little bit of the way by a zeppelin (or airship as they would rather it be called.) It's strange to have a fast moving shadow go over you. I got to watch the airship do some rings around the airport area, and was a little surprised how fast it was moving. It was very cool to watch, and made me really want to go on one of their trips. After all, how many people do you really think have been on an airship? I bet the number is less than 2,000 people alive today. That would put you in pretty select company. Plus, the view of San Francisco must be amazing from up there. Super cool, but probably not $500 for one hour cool. At least until I have a job… Pics after the break.

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From the "things I've been meaning to get around to" file comes an outcry in the Beehive State, over Utah's abrogation of the right of victims of trauma, stress, or the vapors to bring "emotional support animals" wherever they wish.

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The job search is in full swing, and I am interviewing quite seriously with a great little non-profit in the City. So that's good. But, I wanted to give a little scene from a job that I didn't get.

I was interviewing with a woman at a conservation organization. The interview was going well, and had a nice light tone. It led to this banter:

Interviewer: So, we are going to give you a little skill test. See what that Bennington education is good for. *laughs*

Me: Well, I was a theatre major. And, I don't really know what a semi-colon actually does.

Interviewer (suddenly quite serious): Oh, the semi-colon is very important.

So, I realize that the joke was probably a bad idea, but still.. How was I to know that semi-colon's killed her grandfather or something? It was just so tonally dissonant from the rest of the interview. I almost laughed when she said it. Needless to say, I did not get the job.

It has already been well established that I am a sentimental fool. I love old & quirky places, and at the top of that list is the Parkway Theatre. On the surface, it was just a run down movie theatre that served mediocre pizza and beer (and root beer on tap!) and showed second run films (along with their penchant for exploitation classics.) But it was so much more. It was an integral part of Oakland's cool, funky, slightly run down, urban scene and it is closing, very suddenly, this weekend.

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As if the Garden State didn't have enough troubles, lawmakers in Trenton are prepared to level one of the foundations of the state economy: the Brazilian.

The state Board of Cosmetology and Hairstyling is moving toward a ban on genital waxing altogether after two women reported being injured in their quest for a smooth bikini line.

Both women were hospitalized for infections following so-called "Brazilian" bikini waxes; one of the women has filed a lawsuit, according to Jeff Lamm, a spokesman for New Jersey's Division of Consumer Affairs, which oversees the cosmetology board.

Technically, genital waxing has never been allowed — only the face, neck, abdomen, legs and arms are permitted — but because bare-it-all "Brazilians" weren't specifically banned, state regulators haven't enforced the law.

"The genital area is not part of the abdomen or legs as some might assume," Lamm said.

Perhaps not, Mr. Lamm, but what do you say to the thousands of cosmetologists who are about to become criminals overnight?  And what do you say to the millions of New Jersey women who will be forced to live with unwanted hair? And what of the state's jobs and economy?  Will New Jersey next ruin pivotal wealth producers like the orange body spray sector,  or neon underbody manufacturers, because of a few industrial accidents?

Perhaps Brazilians from trained cosmetologists pose a slight risk, but what of the dangers of unlicensed waxing, sure to occur when the demand is driven underground?

Spa owner Linda Orsuto, who owns 800 West Salon & Spa in Cherry Hill, estimates that most of 1,800 bikini waxes performed at her business last year were Brazilian-style.

"It's huge," she said, adding that her customers don't think their bikini lines are anyone's business but their own. "It's just not right."

She said many customers would likely travel across state lines to get it and some might even try to wax themselves.

How many more New Jersey women will die when the state returns to the bad old days of back alley waxing?

It could happen anywhere, really. A gang of thugs enters a small grocery store, terrorizes and abuses the proprietors, smashes the video cameras, and makes off with merchandise. The thugs have probably selected this small grocery because its proprietors are recent immigrants, making them more helpless and less likely to seek or find redress for the thuggery.

What makes the situation notable, and not just another crime in another bodega in another bad neighborhood of America?

The thugs had badges.

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Let me preface this by saying that I have absolutely no problem with mocking Harvard. It's my default.

That said, not every story of ivy-league idiocy is true. Case in point: I'm now pretty sure that no Harvard Business School professor has claimed that Twitter wrecked the economy.

I first spotted this rumor over at the Death by Email blog (highly recommended, by the way, despite this particular instance). The blog, linking to facebook postings, quotes Harvard Business School Professor Martin Schmeldon as follows:

"We see the rapid rise of Twitter usage in 2008 correlating very strongly with a tremendous decrease in American productivity," said Schmeldon. "Our regression analysis on the data suggests a causal relationship that may actually be larger than the impact of the much-touted subprime collateral debt refinancing triggers."

The blog also repeats the graph produced by "Prof. Scheldon":

Strange, I thought. This almost sounds like a satirical riff on the well-known connection between pirates and global warming. Is this for real?

I Googled. Several other blogs seemed to treat the story as true — though a few commenters raised questions. Further search revealed that there is no such professor at Harvard Business School, and a Google of Prof. Scheldon's name turned up nothing but this "story."

I prefer to believe that I am the idiot here — that these blogs (and particularly Death by Email, which I really like) are simply playing the joke very straight, and I'm blundering in and ruining it. The alternative is too grim to contemplate.

Edit: Death by Email confirms that I am the idiot to even suspect that they are the idiot. (I should have read the end of their post a little less quickly.) Which, at least, makes me a different type of idiot than the ones who will take this at face value. Betcha this will get reported as true in multiple places.

Obama's official photographer, Pete Souza, claims that Vladimir Putin was one of the KGB plants in a group of tourists that President Reagan just happened to run into in Red Square. Is it him? If so, that is some wig! The weird part is how vigorously Russia is disputing the fact that that is Putin. Maybe he is not studly enough in the picture, or they only admit to topless photos of him?

"Privilege," broken down from its Latin roots, means "private law."  We've heard a lot about privilege in recent months, from politicians and media figures seeking to blame others for their own failings in watching over the economy, but I want to write about a real privilege, an actual private law, that allows John Malloy of Granville County North Carolina to engage in conduct at least as cruel as anything Bernie Madoff ever did.

If you're easily flustered or have deep feelings about animal cruelty, you may not want to keep reading this.

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It takes no particular courage for me to create a link to Wikileaks' list of websites banned in the state of Denmark, but I don't live in Australia.  If I did live in the land of vegemite, it could cost me a fine of $11,000 a day.

The Australian communications regulator says it will fine people who hyperlink to sites on its blacklist, which has been further expanded to include several pages on the anonymous whistleblower site Wikileaks.

Wikileaks was added to the blacklist for publishing a leaked document containing Denmark's list of banned websites.

The move by the Australian Communications and Media Authority comes after it threatened the host of online broadband discussion forum Whirlpool last week with a $11,000-a-day fine over a link published in its forum to another page blacklisted by ACMA – an anti-abortion website.

The ACMA is charged with enforcing Australia's internet and media censorship laws.  Relying on codes promulgated by Australia's Standing Committee of Attorneys General (or "SCAG") and "Censorship Ministers" (I did not make up these titles), the ACMA classifies and rates websites using a system similar to the United States' voluntary G, PG, R, NC-17 classifications for movies.  Only in Australia, those classifications are administered by the government, and have legal teeth.  Now the country's new government, under Prime Minister Kevin Rudd, proposes to block access to sites deemed equivalent to "R" (unless password-protected) or "X," for everyone.

Most of the sites the ACMA currently proposes to outright blacklist (by requiring internet service providers to block access) appear to be child pornography, but not all, for instance the anti-abortion site mentioned above.   While I'm pro-choice, I can see the political value in a frank discussion of abortion and its consequences, which may include images depicting the horrible reality that is an aborted fetus.  One of the sites linked on our blogroll (link is work-safe) in fact did that a few months ago.

As for WikiLeaks, the Australian government is banning links to an explicitly political site which merely shows what sites have been banned by other governments. In effect, the government is banning discussion of censorship, by preventing people from knowing what they can't see.  Which it must, under the censors' logic, or the whole house of cards falls.

Now I haven't clicked a single link within the Danish list above, nor do I plan to.  (I note that WikiLeaks has inserted a "nofollow" tag within its list, preventing search engines from giving weight to the links.)  But the Danish list isn't the only compendium of banned information WikiLeaks possesses.  For instance, it holds a list of sites banned by the government of Thailand, many of which are child porn (who knew that's illegal in Thailand?), but many of which simply run afoul of Thailand's vile "lese majeste" laws.  Will ACMA ban that list as well, on the grounds that because Australians could be subjected to indecent material, they shouldn't have access to a compendium of sites that have been censored for their political content?

Or should Australian adults be treated as adults, rather than as the children the government claims its censorship regime is meant to protect?  And as, in fact, Australian law seems to require:

[A]dults should be able to read, hear and see what they want.

A good rule by which to run a society.  Perhaps Australia will return to it one day.

Thanks to Charon QC (who joins our blogroll in place of Publius Endures, which is no longer published as the authors have left for the League of Ordinary Gentlemen and Rolling Doughnut) for the tip.

Previously I mentioned rumors that Nickolodeon and Mattel, who own Dora's rights, were planning on "updating" the image of Dora the explorer. My five-year-old and two-year-old girls love Dora, and my seven-year-old son used to love her and now sits in the room and pretends (badly) not to watch her whenever she is on. Original Dora is not likely to give my daughters body-image hangups. She looks like this:

Nickolodeon and Mattel have carried through on their threat. The new Dora looks like this:

Now, we've already established that I have grave issues, at least where lithe adult Dora impersonators are concerned. So maybe my take on this is skewed. But I can't help but see this as a continuation of entertainment companies tarting everything up and slowly pushing entertainment barriers down — marketing tween (at best) images to toddlers to make money, in other words. The old Dora has baby fat and looks like a cartoon version of a four- or five-year-old. The new Dora has been relentlessly Hannah-Montanized, with a dash of Bratz for good luck. In a world where people sell fuck-me shoes for infants and my five-year-old picks up trashy songs, I should not be surprised.

Say that I subject someone to teasing and abuse for being fat, despite being fat myself.

Who? I don't know. Say, the Chawner family, a family of four weighing collectively more than a half-ton, who claim that they can't get by on the £22,508 that the British government pays them every year on account of them being too obese to work. They explain:

The family claim to spend £50 a week on food and consume 3,000 calories each a day. The recommended maximum intake is 2,000 for women and 2,500 for men.

"We have cereal for breakfast, bacon butties for lunch and microwave pies with mashed potato or chips for dinner," Mrs Chawner told Closer magazine.

(Bacon butties, in case you are wondering, are bacon sandwiches. I know I'm just an observer, but it's possible that I've spotted the problem.)

Anyway, say I make fun of the Chawner family, ridiculing their weight in the course of making the political point that they are slothful parasites and living, heaving examples of why the welfare state can't work.

Now say that someone rebukes me, saying that not only am I a heartless fascist for suggesting that the "disabled"-by-avocation-and-vocation ought not be coddled by society, but I'm also an asshole on the grounds that I have gratuitously made fun of someone's weight.

Wouldn't you think much less if me if my reply was to whine, "Oh, poor me. Nobody can take a joke. I'm a victim of a conspiracy to brand me as a hate criminal. I'm being silenced." Wouldn't you think such an embarrassing display, whether or not I was an asshole in the first instance, made me a whiny little shit?

Yet that's exactly the mindset I'm seeing recently from professional loudmouths on the right — people who are well-paid to dish it out, but when it comes to taking it, can't without mewling piteously.

Case in point: Meghan McCain and Laura Ingraham.

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How long has it been since I've done a post about computer games? I just haven't been moved to post. Now some tasty crpg news moves me (and if you don't know what a crpg is, this post will bore you to tears).

Jeff Vogel, creator and chief designer of the indie gaming company Spiderweb Software, has a new blog, The Bottom Feeder. Jeff and Spiderweb Software have produced about 20 great indie computer role playing games — low-res-graphics but high-quality-gameplay games that take me back to 1983, when I was playing Ultima III around the clock. They're well-known and respected among gamers who favor classic-style crpgs.

Jeff's new blog promises to give us interesting glimpses of life as an indie game designer. Today he's given us some cold, hard facts by discussing how much it cost to produce the late 2006/early 2007 game Geneforge IV (which, if memory serves, our co-blogger Grandy beta-tested) and then comparing that to revenues on the game. It's an eye-opener. Spiderweb is probably the best known indie developer of crpgs, but he developed an ambitious game (albeit one built on an existing engine) for around $120k, with revenue as of now just under that, and presumably more to come.

So you're not going to get filthy rich as an indie game designer, clearly. In fact, you're going to have to be a stand-out like Vogel just to break even. But if you choose that path (and it's on my list, behind opera singer and masked superhero), Vogel's blog should offer good advice.

In the spirit of "Talula Does The Hula From Hawaii," it's time for Name of the Year's 64 name tournament to decide the weirdest name in the English-speaking world.

Name of the Year was founded in 1983 on an Ivy League campus. Its mission has remained unchanged: to discover, verify, nominate, elect and disseminate great names. All names included here are, to the best of our knowledge, real.

My final four picks: Taco Vandervelde, Nutritious Love, Uranus Golden, and Cherish Frankenstein.

Hat tip: Nancy Friedman.

According to the American Legion, the Obama administration plans to increase the role of private insurance in medicine.  For starters, Obama proposes to backcharge health care costs for veterans' service-connected injuries to their private health insurers.

"The president's avowed purpose in doing this is to, quote, 'make the insurance companies pay their fair share,'" [American Legion media relations manager Craig] Roberts said. But he said it will raise premiums, make insurance unaffordable for veterans and impose a massive hardship on military families. It could also prevent small businesses from hiring veterans who have large health care needs, he said.

"It's not the Blue Cross that puts soldiers in harm's way, it's the federal government," Robert said, adding that the American Legion would like the existing system to remain in place. Service-related injuries currently are treated and paid for by the government.

For those inclined to think of insurance companies merely as evil, without knowing much about the subject, this may sound like a terrific idea, as it transfers the costs of health care for service-connected disabilities away from taxpayers.  But if one examines this from the veteran's perspective, the plan is a bust and a betrayal.

Under the system that's been in place since World War II, the Department of Veterans Affairs assumes the cost of medical care for injuries and disabilities acquired in service for the life of the veteran.  This is fair, as the veteran got his injuries on duty, and it's not far removed from what workers compensation provides for civilians injured on the job.  Of course the costs of such care may be high indeed, but historically America has made a bargain with those who risk life and limb in combat, that they'll be cared for if the risks come to pass.

Non-service connected injuries and diseases, however, are not covered by veterans' benefits, nor should they be.  A retired sailor who falls from a ladder in his backyard, or contracts colon cancer because of a diet high in red meat, is in the same boat as everyone else, and needs to look to private health insurance or other means to pay for medical treatment of those conditions.  Since the risk isn't service-connected, taxpayers shouldn't be asked to assume it.

Under the proposed new rules, the government is pushing much of its risk not onto insurance companies, but onto veterans themselves.  If a soldier returns from Iraq with a disabling and expensive injury, a private insurer is unlikely to provide that soldier insurance if it knows it will be required to pay health costs immediately on writing the policy, or it will charge a high premium indeed.  For many if not most injured veterans, that will mean going without insurance entirely.  For those fortunate enough to get insurance, it will mean that what coverage they have isn't there when they need it, for non-service conditions.  "Sorry Mr. Smith, we can't cover your cancer, because your policy limits were exhausted on physical therapy and surgery for your old leg wound, etc."

This policy will force injured veterans into a choice between paying unreasonable premiums for health insurance that is potentially worthless, as the VA Hospital system consumes it for obligations that were formerly public, or going without insurance entirely, in which case all of their health care costs, eventually, will be public.  As will, of course, their families', since most families obtain their insurance from one policy.

A cynic would say that this is a backdoor to fully socialized medicine, setting the stage for horror stories of uninsured vets bankrupted by health care costs for non-service injuries.  But that would be evil.

I prefer not to think of my government as evil, but as merely, in this case, stupid.  Though he ran against an opponent who is a decorated veteran and understands these issues keenly, Barack Obama obtained many endorsements and votes from veterans based on his promise: "I will not let you down."

The American Legion is calling him on his promise, but so should we all.  As the Legion points out, soldiers don't get injured fighting for Blue Cross.  They do it for the rest of us.