The Litella Files: TSA dick-swinging edition

December 30th:
TSA: "You bloggers who posted our new screening guidelines are going down! Subpoenas for the both of you!"

December 31st:
TSA: "We're going make you lose your job! And get you declared a security risk! And--uh, what? You told on us? Whaaaa! No fair! And, uh, well--never mind."

Happy New Year

Hey, I just wanted to wish everyone a happy New Year. So: Happy New Year!

Requiescat in Cracked

Over at Cracked.com, in this most celebrity-deathly year of them all, they’ve got a list of some overlooked celebrity passings.

Baby, here’s the best

... of this decade, anyway. The best of everything, including music:

John Mayer started it with this song. And yes, that is an official statement of blame. If you know anybody that wears two-hundred dollar slacks but no shoes, it is John Mayer's fault. If you know anybody that brings a guitar to a coffee shop instead of a laptop, it is John Mayer's fault. If you've ever had a girlfriend who has asked to see your poetry, and been disgusted when you had none to show, it is John Mayer's fault. If you've ever had diarrhea, it is John Mayer's fault (possibly).

Hell yeah.

Precise terminology

From Techdirt:

Lots of folks have sent in various versions of Amazon's hyped up press release about how it sold more ebooks on Christmas than physical books. While this ought to make some publishers reconsider their hatred of ebooks, there are two points that make this rather meaningless. First, how many physical books are usually sold on Amazon on Christmas day? My guess is not very many. Books are purchased before Christmas day. However, I'm sure plenty of people did get new Kindles on Christmas, and quite a few then went and "purchased" an ebook or two to test it out.

But, again, since this is the Kindle we're talking about, shouldn't Amazon make the distinction between purchased and rented?

Yeah, Amazon—what the hell?

Ebook privacy round-up

The EFF has published a privacy-oriented buyers’ guide to ebook readers.

UPDATE: They've published a new version.

Santa Hacked!

From Precision Blogging:

You're probably talking about this terrible security disaster already: the largest database leak ever. Arweena, a spokes-elf for Santa Claus, admitted a few hours ago that the database posted at WikiLeaks yesterday is indeed the comprehensive 2009 list of which kids have been naughty, and which were nice. The source of the leak is unclear. It may have come from a renegade reindeer, or it could be the work of a clever programmer in the Ukraine. Either way, it's a terrible black eye for Santa. Arweena promised that in the future, access to this database would be restricted on a “need to know” basis. And you know who that means!

Via Bruce Schneier.

How badly do you want to get fit?

From Mental Floss: 10 Strange Celebrity Exercise Videos. Estelle Getty FTW!

That’s when I realize it’s over

When Michael Bérubé hears words like genome, that’s when he reaches for his revolver. [Via the Bookslut Blog]

Holiday fear

Over at Mental Floss, they’ve posted a list of 9 holiday characters from around the world. Some are the benevolent gift-givers that we’d expect. Others, however, are not:

Krampus: This terrifying horned monster is part of the Christmas tradition in Austria and other surrounding countries. If children are good, Saint Nicholas brings them toys. If they’re bad, though, they’ve got to face Krampus’ wrath. The clawed, hairy beast is said to punish naughty children by stealing their toys, smacking them with a birch rod, and even tying them in a sack and chucking them into a river. Getting a lump of coal in your stocking doesn’t seem like such a terrible fate in comparison, does it?

That must be a fun Christmas Eve: “If you kids don’t go to sleep right now, I swear that you’ll be drowned in a sack by morning!”

30 years ago today, phony Beatlemania bit the dust

I was delighted to find out this morning that today is the 30th anniversary of the release of the Clash’s London Calling album. There was a time in my life when I used to basically listen to London Calling on endless loop. Or, at least it was the only album I would select whenever I felt like listening to some music. Great, great album. There are some who prefer Sandanista!, but they just like being contrary.

Rules is wha?

Reuters headline: U.S. teens ignore laws against texting while driving.

Wait, let me fix that for you: Everyone ignores laws against texting while driving.

Hold on, I can make it better: Everyone ignores anything that’s inconvenient.

There, all done.

Caloric Expansion

Mental Floss has a post up about the dramatic increase in food portion sizes over the last 20 years. I have to admit that most of the list I found unsurprising—except for the thing about bagels. They only used to be three inches across? Too small!

All or nothing

The new Facebook privacy policies. Choose only one: You can either be invisible or naked.

And I thought Californians were bad

From Francesco Explains It All: “A light snowfall gently dusted the Southeast, delighting children but reversing 10,000 years of human civilization in the process.”

Also, people in Los Angeles are freaking out because it got cold and it rained.

Meanwhile, the Midwest is under a cloud of locusts that have blotted out the Sun, and whose keening drone has the power to drive men mad. A local resident, when reached for comment, said, “Mmm-hmmm.”

They should have called them “moral offsets”

Buying locally grown, organic tomatoes might mean that you’re a jerk. At least, according to some scientists...

[...] virtuous shopping can actually lead to immoral behavior. In their study (described in a paper now in press at Psychological Science), subjects who made simulated eco-friendly purchases ended up less likely to exhibit altruism in a laboratory game and more likely to cheat and steal.

That’s why you often overhear things like, “Hmm... I did get the organic kale today, I guess it would be okay if I robbed that bank.”

Does anybody know?

What the fuck was that thing in the sky above Norway? (Via Fark)

UPDATE: Oh, that's what that was!

All is vanity

This Cracked list of the 7 most pointlessly horrifying plastic surgery procedures is very probably something that I shouldn’t have read this early in the morning. I think I’m going to be ill.

Only crooks want privacy?

Do you value your privacy? Well, you must be a bad person. So implies Google’s CEO. From Slashdot:

In a surprising statement to CNBC, Google CEO Eric Schmidt told reporter Maria Bartiromo, 'If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place.' This will only fuel concerns about Google's behavior as it becomes an ever more powerful gatekeeper of information; though Google says it is aware of these concerns and has taken steps to be transparent to users about the information that is stored.

Looks like someone needs to brush up on their Schneier. This whole “if you’ve done nothing wrong, you’ve nothing to fear” argument is, to put it simply, bunk. I’m not ashamed of the fact that I have to take a shit every now and again, but I still close the bathroom door when I do.

A review of the Nook

Slashdot links to this review of the Barnes & Noble Nook ebook reader, at the Technologizer:

Let’s get one thing out of the way right now: The Nook isn’t a Kindle killer–not in this initial form, at least. For all its pleasing touches, intriguing innovations, and clear advantages over the Kindle, it feels like a less-than-perfectly-polished 1.0 product, just like Amazon’s first e-reader did a couple of years ago. The user interface is surprisingly sluggish, there are some usability gaffes, and I encountered a major bug with the device’s most-touted feature. Even the much-hyped lending feature has a major gotcha: You can lend a book once. Period.

Too bad.

Juarez

From the NY Times:

''Not one person murdered yesterday,'' Ciudad Juarez's leading newspaper proclaimed in a banner headline. It was big news in this border city, ground zero in the drug war -- the first time in 10 months that a day had passed without a killing.

But by the end of that day, Oct. 30, nine more people were riddled with bullets.

Tales from Juarez pop up in the news from time to time, but it never seems to get any better.

Exploratorium at 50 (or is that 40)

I love the Exploratorium. And now it’s 50 years old! (Maybe—read on:)

It was 51 years ago that a former Berkeley physicist named Frank Oppenheimer came back to the Bay Area from his Colorado ranch to transform his dream into a reality he would call the Exploratorium.

It would be a place of wonder, he told a Chronicle reporter, "where human perception and awareness of the natural world" would awaken curious young minds to the phenomena of physics, the structure of chemical molecules, the behavior of living organisms and the workings of the human mind - all manifesting themselves in what we see around us.

Growing up in Sacramento, our school field trips were usually to the Railroad Museum and the Capitol Building. Not bad, but the one year we went to the Exploratorium was a revelation: a museum where you were allowed to touch the exhibits! Don’t know why their website says it’s been 40 years, the Chronicle says 50.

Monoculture musings

The news of Susan Boyle’s debut album’s sales sparks an examination of a cultural phenomenon. Remember when everyone used to listen to the same music?

[...] Boyle's album I Dreamed a Dream sold 701,000 copies in the U.S.! In one week! That gives it the best first-week album sales this year, beating out superstars such as U2 and Eminem. And, most surprisingly, this puts Boyle's numbers on par with Snoop Dogg's 1993 album, Doggystyle, for the best sales of a debut artist ever.

[...]

What interests me, more than it being Susan Boyle who is selling so many albums, is that it's anyone at all. It seems like it's been ages since a bunch of people were all listening to the same band or artist. Remember when that happened all the time? Remember when 24 million people bought Alanis Morissette's Jagged Little Pill? Now, in 2009, more than 47 million people own that album! What does that even mean? For one, it means that the entire population of California owns that album, or that everyone in Wyoming has 85 copies.

A funny comic strip

The Unshelved Blog calls the “Read” poster in this Sheldon strip the best ever – I’m inclined to agree!

Bhopal factory might still be making people sick

In 1984 a Union Carbide chemical in plant Bhopal, India  leaked poisonous gas, which killed thousands of people. (Union Carbide is now owned by Dow.) Twenty-five years later, the factory may still be poisoning people. From Reuters:

A quarter of a century on, the derelict factory stands abandoned, but behind its locked iron gates lies what environmentalists say is "a disaster within a disaster" -- a highly polluted site which, according to a new study, is slowly poisoning the drinking water for thousands of Indians.

Performance/activist group The Yes Men have been among many of the folks out there who are trying to get Dow to do the right thing. You can read about it here.

Editorial/Sales

Is it a good idea for a newspaper’s journalists and sales staff to have the same managers?

John Obeidin points us to the news that The Dallas News has basically wiped away the standard "church" and "state" separation of journalists and ad sales and has reorganized such that editorial and journalism positions now report to ad sales managers (nicely renamed "general managers"). Of course, historically, newspapers have always been clear to separate the two. There's no reason why this needs to be the case, but it can certainly raise questions about the objectivity of the reporting.

Interesting, no?

Writers on ebooks

From the New York Times: Writers on ebooks:

Mr. [Joseph] Finder said he found the screens quite readable, but grumbled about the typography. “Given the importance of typeface in books as signifiers — they tell you a huge amount about the book you’re reading, whether it’s traditional literary, contemporary and so on,” he said. “It surprises me that the fonts on the Kindle are all pasteurized and homogenized.”

“John Updike, who was so enamored of Janson and insisted that all his books be set in that font, would have been appalled to see all of his books set in Caelicia, the same font used in, say, Nora Roberts.”

Well, at least the article defies expectation—usually, exposing writers to technology results in heavy doses of squeamish, effete snobbishness. And it’s true what Finder says about Updike: He once saw a mockup of The Centaur done in Comic Sans, and he threw up for a week.

The price of surveillance

It’s easy to assume that anyone who doesn’t respect our citizens’ privacy is motivated either by ideology or fear; but it pays to remember that some of them are just in it for the money. And they’re a little embarrassed about it:

Want to know how much phone companies and internet service providers charge to funnel your private communications or records to U.S. law enforcement and spy agencies?

That’s the question muckraker and Indiana University graduate student Christopher Soghoian asked all agencies within the Department of Justice, under a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request filed a few months ago. But before the agencies could provide the data, Verizon and Yahoo intervened and filed an objection on grounds that, among other things, they would be ridiculed and publicly shamed were their surveillance price sheets made public.

Yahoo and Verizon are probably right—the data probably would be used to “shame” them. Of course, the fact that they are so unwilling to reveal how much we taxpayers are spending on their surveillance services is pretty darn shameful in itself, isn’t it?

UPDATE: The "price list" was leaked to the Cryptome site, and of course yahoo has issued a takedown.

‘Til death... for reals

You know, it’s not gay marriage that threatens to destroy the sanctity of het marriage: It’s het divorce that does that. So, why not ban it?

In a movement that seems ripped from the pages of Comedy Channel writers, John Marcotte wants to put a measure on the ballot next year to ban divorce in California.

The effort is meant to be a satirical statement after California voters outlawed gay marriage in 2008, largely on the argument that a ban is needed to protect the sanctity of traditional marriage. If that's the case, then Marcotte reasons voters should have no problem banning divorce.

"Since California has decided to protect traditional marriage, I think it would be hypocritical of us not to sacrifice some of our own rights to protect traditional marriage even more," the 38-year-old married father of two said.

But that’s silly! No divorce? What about fornication?!

All the sad World’s Greatest Dads

The wonderful and talented Lizzie Skurnick writes about writers who write about their kids:

On the long road of parenting commentary, where genial postwar humorists Erma Bombeck and Jean Kerr fall back like abandoned Essos while the flag-festooned rest stops of Parenthood and Baby Boom flap wildly in the distance, two vital topics have always predominated: How Not to Kill Baby and Things Baby Did That Are Funny.

Link via the Millions