Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. YES! The decision was 8 - 1 that the 13 year-old girl's rights were violated when she was strip searched for 2 extra-strength Advil. As Justice Stevens wrote:
“...it does not require a constitutional scholar to conclude that a nude search of a 13-year-old child is an invasion of constitutional rights of some magnitude.”
And of course, it was Justice Thomas who dissented. As Gruber so aptly put, Thomas is creep of the week.
This was the creator's senior project at the Savannah College of Art and Design. A smart guy, he figured us geeks would be interested in getting behind the scenes, so he also made a "Making of ..." video. Totally awesome and totally fascinating.
Honestly, I don't know why I'm blogging about this. I shouldn't even waste my time, but it is so typical of Leo Laporte, egomaniac.
You'll need a bit of background. Several months ago, I blogged about the second crash of the TWiT user forums and remarked how Leo Laporte should have taken steps to back things up - knowing that there was a problem. In September, 2008, I called Leo out in the forum for not caring about his contributors enough to spend an hour or so to fix a bunch of on-going problems. Admittedly, my tone was more than a little heated (Leo called it "snide"). I apologized, but in a supposedly private conversation with another forum member, I commented that I was beginning to wonder if my monthly contribution was worth it.
Over the next few days, Leo kept up a string of personal attacks and nasty comments to me, and then revealed that anyone with administrator rights on the forum could see private posts. Frankly, I thought that was completely beyond the pale, and I quit the TWiT forums, cancelled my monthly contribution, and all my podcast subscriptions. Going cold turkey was actually quite easy - I missed the community, but the TWiT products had become so lackluster that I actually did myself a favor by not listening to them anymore.
I must admit, I did pop into the TWiT forums out of curiously a few times earlier this year, and I was a bit startled to find that in early March, Leo announced that he was closing the "contributor" forums, and moving everyone over to Leoville. Why? Because he couldn't stand reading all the nasty criticisms about his shows. (This wasn't the first time he did that - he closed the comments on the show pages when the criticism got too strong, too). I did find it ironic that for three years, there were dozens of threads of varying levels of nastiness about various guests and show regulars (Scott Bourne was a frequent target); however, Leo never stepped in to quell those. Only when the quality of the podcasts themselves were questioned, did Leo feel it necessary to pull the plug.
So, it brings me to this snippet from a TWiT Network live videocast - apparently a discussion of the new Palm Pre (I found this by way of Gruber's Daring Fireball). Michael Arrington called Leo out for not mentioning that he has a review unit. Arrington is certainly a NMDB* and his tone was certainly meant to irritate, but Leo's reaction is really not what a broadcasting professional would do. He's known and worked with Arrington before, and played right into it.
Call Arrington an ass - yes, but walk off the show in a fury - absolutely not.
Weird thing about springtime - I never see some many dead things at any other time of the year. In the past 10 days, I've seen the following in my office or around the office building itself:
1 - A whole mess of pill bugs on the carpet. I discovered them when I swapped my heater for my fan.
2 - Wasp on the windowsill. This one started out alive, banging and banging and banging itself against the window pane, trying to get out. I did try to effectuate a rescue operation, but by time I found a box with a lid, it was dead.
3 - Dead sparrow on the sidewalk. I would have never noticed it, but for the odd flight behaviour of another sparrow, which tried to hover, flew away, came back and flew away again.
But there is life, too. A big fat bumblebee just indulged in an orgy of pollen from the azaleas in front of my window.
Not my azaleas, these are found in Memphis, TN. Image courtesy of the blogger, Southern Heart.
I don't recall how I got onto the subject, but I was talking with Valerie about movies I've walked out of during the showing in a theater. In all the hundreds of movies I've seen, there have been only four that were so bad that I had to leave before the end. It occured to me, when I was talking with Val, that out of those four, three of them featured Robert DeNiro:
1977 - Damnation Alley - The huge scorpions totally grossed me out; 1980 - Raging Bull - The violence and the work "fuck" in every third sentence disgusted me; 1982 - King of Comedy- I was in the mood to see Sophie's Choice, but the gang wanted to see this; 1994 - Mary Shelley's Frankenstein - Again, too violent, too gross, and Kenneth Branagh was just not enough temptation to make me stay through the end.
And it just so happens that one of the movies that I should have walked out of, but didn't was Heat, also starring Mr. DeNiro. Heat wasn't gross, and the gun battle in the early part of the movie was a real thriller, but it just collapsed into a long, boring, talky film.
Well, it seems that the de-ranking of "adult" material that I discussed yesterday finally caught the attention of Amazon personnel. Instead of fobbing off authors with "we don't rank adult material" they actually paid attention and looked into the problem. According to the company, the de-ranking was the result of a system glitch accidently implemented by a worker in France, but it was initiated by comments and tagging of titles with certain search terms. Amazon hasn't provided a full explanation of how this happened, but has "vowed" to correct the problem and minimize the possiblity of it reoccurring.
They did admit that over 57 THOUSAND book titles were de-ranked according to this glitch, and they were restoring the rankings as soon as possible. I don't really trust the explanation, but it does make more sense than the company being infiltrated by right-wing culture police. Someone, or some group (more likely) outside of Amazon has taken advantage of the ranking/tagging loophole to impose their own set of values.
Me, I believe in two things: freedom of expression and free choice. Say what you like, write what you want. That doesn't mean I have to listen to your or I have to read what you wrote.
Amazon clearly has some holes in its search feature, and I do think they need some form of parental controls (like iTunes, maybe). I've searched for juvenalia and have gotten some pretty NSFW results (including one with pictures of jumbo-sized battery operated marital aids). But I don't think that any safety net that results in censorship is acceptable.
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