The WKRP of Journals: Nobody's Reading It!

Hey all! Didya miss me, like, at all? I been busy, and tired, and busy, and did I mention I've been exhausted?

So, one of the many things I've got on my plate these days is that I've taken over website maintenance for our store's website, lucky me. Our friend, Joe, who used to do this job (he was happy to hand it over to me) just emailed, saying that he tried to check it at work, just to see how I was doing, but he can't get to it. It's there, it just won't download for him on the screen, or something like that:

"I can resolve the IP address, meaning that the server is there, but the website is unreachable."

I checked and found a perfectly fine website, and that's on a computer that's a mile away from the computer I used to put new product up on the website all day yesterday.

Could you guys check the site and let me know if there's a problem, OR that you can see it fine. No sound, but image-heavy. LOTS OF NEAT STUFF, but yeah, it takes a moment to fill in all those pictures.

http://www.legendsofsuperheros.com

I'm hoping it's just being blocked by his work computer (not sure Joe ever used his computer at work to look at the site before!)

The Favorite Thing Ever site just put up an entry on The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, and now I feel like I gotta get a Kindle. I never felt that way before, but I'm sold.

Pan Books published the novel as a paperback in October 1979 after the BBC turned it down, and it sold 250,000 in the first three months.

January of 1980, I was browsing the shelves in the Science Fiction Bookshop in Manhattan after class, looking for some light SciFi, preferably humor--and said as much to the guy who ran the shop. He was at the front desk, cutting open a box. He popped open the top and pulled out a paperback: The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. "How's this?" he said. "The guy from the distributor said it was pretty funny."

I bought that paperback, and yeah, it was "pretty funny." It wasn't easy reading it on the D train back to Brooklyn, people kept giving me looks as I tried to stifle my laughter, completely unsuccessfully. And it occurs to me that, barring tourists who brought it back with them on the plane, there's a slim possibility I'm the first person in the USA who read HHGG. ;)

I have Syfy's Ferocious Planet, starring JFlan, on Tivo. I watched two minutes of it, then realized that when ComicbookMan gets home, I'll be forced to watch the movie all over again, so I stopped. I suspect a nice glass of wine & someone to snark it with should make it quite an enjoyable viewing experience.

( MY REVIEW OF THE FIRST TWO MINUTES, NO SPOILERS! )



When I watch the rest of the movie, I'll do a real review.

I know terrible things are still happening in Japan, but it's also important to remember what's at stake in Wisconsin, too. I hate the idea that there are politicians and corporatists heaving a sigh of relief that the tragedy in Japan is the perfect distraction from their happy dismantling of the US middle class. It's not like attention the striking workers in WI had been getting from the media was anything but scant in the first place.

What it says on the box:

I've been neglecting my flist of late, partly because I can't seem to sit through five minutes of H50 and you guys are all in the first blush of sweet, sweet fannish lurve with it, bless your hearts, but mainly because of what's going on with regard to Wikileaks. I've been reading all things Wikileaks and I cannot stop. It's too complicated for me to cover what's going on if you haven't been keeping up via the internet*, because so damned much is happening all over the planet, but this latest turn of events is so fucking chilling, I just feel like more people desperately need to know about it. I've cribbed info from articles I've found all over the net (with URLs!), and I'll try to keep this simple, but yeah, good luck with that:

In 2010, Wikileaks announced it was going to post major shit about "a corrupt U.S. bank", unnamed, some time in 2011. Bank of America immediately assumed that bank was itself, because even they have to admit the BofA makes Luthorcorp look like a charitable organization run by nuns. BofA immediately went into KILL KILL KILL DIE DIE DIE mode.

Excerpted from Thinkprogress:

According to e-mails obtained by ThinkProgress, the (US Chamber of Commerce) hired the lobbying firm Hunton and Williams. Hunton And Williams’ attorney Richard Wyatt was hired by the Chamber in October of last year. To assist the Chamber, Wyatt and his associates solicited a set of private security firms — HBGary Federal, Palantir, and Berico Technologies (collectively called Team Themis**) — to develop tactics for damaging progressive groups and labor unions, in particular ThinkProgress, the labor coalition called Change to Win, the SEIU, US Chamber Watch, and StopTheChamber.com.

Basically these powerful minions of the major corporations as represented by the US Chamber of Commerce were conspiring to start a surreptitious sabotage campaign against anyone who might try to take power from Big Business and give it back to the people. And how did we, the people, find out about it? This is where it gets good:

From here: Poking a bear with a sharp stick is smarter than this!>

Aaron Barr, the head of the security services firm mentioned above, HBGary Federal, bragged in an interview with The Financial Times that, via Facebook and other online sources, he had identified key members of Anonymous in the U.S., Germany, Netherlands, Italy, and Australia.

If you know who Anonymous is, you know that Barr might as well have tattooed "Kick Me" on his own ass. They're the hacktivists who went after Scientology a few years ago and more recently did an internet slow down of service for Amazon, Paypal, and several credit card companies to protest when those companies refusing to service Wikileaks. (Please note that you can donate cash to the KKK via any and all of those financial service companies, just not Wikileaks.)

In less than 24 hours, Anonymous mocked Barr in a deadpan post sarcastically entitled "Anonymous admits defeat", then they hacked HBGary's emails and Barr's own private emails and posted them (50,000 emails!) on the internet. Anonymous also posted a slide presentation they'd found, the point of which was a plot detailing how to destroy Wikileaks that included threatening specific liberal-leaning journalists by name (there are actual pictures of the journalists to be attacked right there on the slides!) The emails indicated the presentation was part of a proposal to be submitted to Bank of America. That was Sunday, Feb. 5.

See also: More Fallout from Anonymous

Bank of America is doing their best Sgt. Schultz imitation -- they know "NOTHING! NOTHING!" about this dastardly and somewhat illegal plot to sow dissent, threaten journalists, and plant false documents to discredit Wikileaks. Palantir and Berico Technologies immediately distanced themselves from HBGary, and personally apologized to Glenn Greenwald, one of the journalists mentioned by name and face on the slide deck. A respected journalist, Greenwald has been writing about and supporting Wikileaks and whistle-blowers in general since the beginning at Salon.com. At first he shrugged off HBGary's intent as laughable, but as the reality of the situation set in, he got angry.

An excerpt from Greenwald's article:

But the real issue highlighted by this episode is just how lawless and unrestrained is the unified axis of government and corporate power. I've written many times about this issue -- the full-scale merger between public and private spheres -- because it's easily one of the most critical yet under-discussed political topics. Especially (though by no means only) in the worlds of the Surveillance and National Security State, the powers of the state have become largely privatized. There is very little separation between government power and corporate power. Those who wield the latter intrinsically wield the former. The revolving door between the highest levels of government and corporate offices rotates so fast and continuously that it has basically flown off its track and no longer provides even the minimal barrier it once did. It's not merely that corporate power is unrestrained; it's worse than that: corporations actively exploit the power of the state to further entrench and enhance their power.

A comment by Salon's Editor in Chief: read it here!



Aaron Barr is having a bad day... but not as bad as America is having. Actually, we've been having a few bad decades. I wonder if America will one day go the way of Egypt and Tunisia, with rioting in the streets to protest corruption. I do not think the Tea Party is up to this task, as they are, themselves, a puppet organization funded by the Koch brothers of Koch Industries, Inc.


See also my main reading site: Greg Mitchell's blog called The WIKILEAKS NEWS & VIEWS BLOG. Every day he posts links to commentary and articles about what's being leaked and what the response is in the general public. It's fascinating to refresh the page and have more links and snark pop up! Go to http://www.thenation.com/ and click on their link to their blogs, you'll find a link to his blog there.


*And you would have to be reading about this on the internet because hardly anybody on TV or cable news is bothering to cover this due the overwhelming importance of reporting what Lindsey Lohan was wearing to her court date instead.

**Themis means "divine law" rather than human ordinance, literally "that which is put in place by the gods" -- which sounds pretty fucking arrogant to me.

Once upon a time, there was a Doctor Who episode called "The Five Doctors", wherein Peter Davison's Doctor checks out a room with all kinds of "of Rassilon" objects in it as he wanders through the Gallifreyan capital city. The "of Rassilon" joke had become a mild running gag on the show (and in the fandom) at this point, that there were a multitude of objets Rassilon had left behind that had become venerated objects in Time Lord culture. Surely there must be a list somewhere of the many "of Rassilon" objects have made an appearance on the show over the years*!

In this instance, the object was "The Harp of Rassilon". The Doctor is a bit taken aback when he sees it, he reads the sign then says archly, "I didn't even know he was musical!" There's a beat, the scene ends and we cut to another scene. My reaction then was "Ha!" and "cute!", but I've long since suspected there was a joke I wasn't getting, and now I've cracked it!

Craig Ferguson (admitted pervy Dr. Who fancier and host of The Late Late Show") just revealed to a young British comic that, back in the day, "Is he musical?" was a socially-euphemistic coded phrase for "Is he gay?" (The answer being, "You should see him play the piano!" with an eyebrow quirk.) Given that the show-runner was JNT, who was certainly Out if not proud, there is no way that wasn't a double-entendre joke for the British public to smirk over.




*Ask the Internets, and ye shall find! From here: http://tardismanual.blogspot.com/2011/01/list-of-rassilon.html

The Black Scrolls of Rassilon
The Tomb of Rassilon
The Game of Rassilon
The Coronet of Rassilon
The Voice of Rassilon
The Mind of Rassilon
The Ring of Rassilon
The Seal of Rassilon
The Domain of Rassilon
The Harp of Rassilon
The Sash of Rassilon
The Crown of Rassilon
The Key of Rassilon
The Great Key of Rassilon (not the same as the apparently not-so-great "Key of Rassilon"

Also from Tardis Manual blogspot: On the DVD easter egg, there's a commentary featuring David Tennant, Helen Raynor and Phil Collinson, and they start to invent new possessions for Rassilon as the story progresses. Here's that list...

The Pisstakes of Rassilon

The Handle of Rassilon
The Coaster of Rassilon
The Curtain of Rassilon
The Clipboard of Rassilon
The Yo-Yo of Rassilon
The Casket of Rassilon
The Death Slide of Rassilon
The Ancient Nursery Rhyme of Rassilon
The Fridge Door of Rassilon
The Sheet Music of Rassilon

I put my second Stargate story up on AOOO...

http://archiveofourown.org/works/154017

...soon to be joined by a third set of Tiny Tales, for a total of 31 ficlets in all. Sooo clooose to finishing! But I have to come up with two more tales! I want to write a ficlet about Daniel Jackson's parents and grandfather and how their being idiots who shouldn't have been trusted with raising a child helped form his character (oh, come on! this is not a reach! Daniel is totally screwed up in delightful ways!), but it's not coming.

Ooh, while I was typing that, I suddenly had an idea to write it from Vala's perspective. She's a fresh viewpoint, with luck, that should yield results.

Not to change the subject, but I used to think the funniest thing that could come out of the Stargate program going public would be John Sheppard giving an interview to Jon Stewart on The Daily Show, but no longer! Much funnier would be John Sheppard being interviewed by Craig Ferguson. I could see poor John being a bit flummoxed about Goeff, the robotic foul-mouthed skeleton who acts as Craig's Ed McMahon. I can see John sort of waving his hand over his head, trying to find the words to ask Dude, I get the suit and the glowing eyes, but what's with the metal mohawk?, prompting Craig into doing five minutes on John's cowlicks. Thanks to Tivo, I've gotten addicted to The Late, Late Show since watching the Matt Smith episode. The show is just so freakishly odd. I've never seen a talk show quite like it, not even on the outer-reaches of cable, and it's on CBS.

From such_heights, who did a freakin' awesome cover!

Go to Wikipedia and hit random. The first random Wikipedia article you get is the name of your band.

Go to quotationspage.com and hit random. The last four or five words of the very last quote of the page is the title of your first album.

Go to flickr and click on explore the last seven days. Third picture, no matter what it is, will be your album cover.

Use photoshop or similar to put it all together. Post it with this text in the caption.

Clicky to embiggen:



I had to do it in PowerPoint, translate it to PDF, then translate that to a JPG online. Yeah, I really have to invest in some sort of photo-manipulation software one of these days. But still, fun!

This morning I woke to find that someone quite evil grabbed my hotmail account's address list and sent out spam (or possibly worse) to the people on it. The email looks like it's from Telzey Amberdon, which is my hotmail name. It bounced to a lot of defunct addresses I still had in there. I can still get into my hotmail account, I wasn't locked out, but I changed the password because, what the hell, why not.

How did these guys get hold of my email address book? Did they actually hack my email account with my password, or did they do it by using the new Facebook-like connectivity Hotmail and Gmail seem to be trying to constantly force on us in new and clever ways? Any suggestions, other than "change your password", which I've done? I went into my account info and zeroed out all the "Isn't it neat how we're sharing all your personal info with your friends!" crap they build in, with friends being able to access all sorts of things on your account. This should not be the default, privacy should be the default!

EDITED TO ADD UPDATE: I got nothin' in my Hotmail "sent emails" folder, so this happened off-Hotmail! The spammers took info and ran and did not use my hotmail account itself to send their spam.

I recently tried to set up an Outlook account on my computer so that Hotmail would drop into it when I hit "send/receive" on my home computer, but was unsuccessful -- and my Hotmail address and password being input into Outlook were part of that attempt. Maybe the bad guys got the info that way? NOT A KLEW.


EDITED AGAINDeleted the second half of my post because I figured out how to get rid of a defunct alternate email address... man, they don't make it easy.