Pages

Labels

Monday, August 24, 2009

"Watch These Terrible People Yapping At Each Other."

A Wonkette headline that I tried to read out loud and said: "Watch These Terrible People Lapping At Each Other." Ah, remember the original Wonkette? Everything was sexy somehow. Now... I don't read it enough to know what the point is, other than to make everything sound funny, though in this case the headline has nothing to do with what is supposed to be so hilarious: Al Sharpton is really skinny now.

Rush Limbaugh is skinny now too.
He looks like this:



Ironically, Al Franken is quite fat.

Isn't it sweet that Rush posed in front of a picture of his kitty cat's bowl? Does Al Franken have a cat? Google image search suggests no:

"The best writer in the world is probably not even published."

Wild assertion made for effect just now (by me). Do you think it's true? If it were true, what would be the circumstances?

"Last winter I began stirring peanut butter into oatmeal; weird, maybe, but good."

"I also put it in stewed lentils and vegetables (dal) with curry powder, which may not be traditional, but it felt as if it could be.... [Other ideas include] smearing peanut butter on a wedge of raw white cabbage or a pork burger, roasting peanut-butter-stuffed jalapeños, and whipping up a simple satay-like sauce of peanut butter, soy sauce, orange marmalade and red pepper flakes."

There don't seem to be enough things to do with peanut butter.

Sunday, August 23, 2009

Rock faces.

DSC03695

DSC03722

Faces seen in the quartzite today at Devil's Lake, near Madison, Wisconsin.

What we ate.

DSC03665

Here:

DSC03662

Not here:

DSC03658

"Amazon, WTF."

"Oh my god there are 1,103 reviews of Tuscan Whole Milk, 1 gallon."

"Don't miss the customer image gallery for Tuscan Milk."

"Zubaz. Fuck yeah. Thank you."

The model insisted on outing the blogger who called her a "skank."

And look, it's a woman — a young woman — a pretty young woman.
Speaking out for the first time since a court order forced Google to reveal her identity, blogger Rosemary Port tells the Daily News that model Liskula Cohen should blame herself for the uproar.

"This has become a public spectacle and a circus that is not my doing," said Port, whose "Skanks in NYC" site branded the 37-year-old Cohen an "old hag."

"By going to the press, she defamed herself," Port said.

"Before her suit, there were probably two hits on my Web site: One from me looking at it, and one from her looking at it," Port said. "That was before it became a spectacle. I feel my right to privacy has been violated."
But before you celebrate Port's seemingly wise anti-litigation statement, take note that she's suing Google... for $15 million federal lawsuit against the Web giant.
"When I was being defended by attorneys for Google, I thought my right to privacy was being protected," Port said.

"But that right fell through the cracks. Without any warning, I was put on a silver platter for the press to attack me. I would think that a multi-billion dollar conglomerate would protect the rights of all its users."

In her suit, she'll charge Google "breached its fiduciary duty to protect her expectation of anonymity," said her high-powered attorney Salvatore Strazzullo.

"I'm ready to take this all the way to the Supreme Court," Strazzullo said. "Our Founding Fathers wrote 'The Federalist Papers' under pseudonyms. Inherent in the First Amendment is the right to speak anonymously. Shouldn't that right extend to the new public square of the Internet?"
How hard did Google fight? Surely, there's no absolute right to hide your identity. Why should someone who commits the tort of defamation escape a lawsuit by hiding behind a pseudonym? It's not fair to the people who have the guts to show their names when they libel people. They get stuck being defendants in defamation suits.

The key is for courts to have a high standard in determining whether there really is defamation before they order that the name be revealed. Otherwise, someone who has not actually suffered a legally remediable injury can use a lawsuit for the wrong purpose: to inflict the injury of making a pseudonymous writer's name public.

Note that Liskula Cohen is now dropping her defamation suit against Port. That's good for Port. It's bad to be sued for $3 million. But it suggests that the disclosure of the name was the point of the lawsuit. Courts should not allow themselves to be used for that purpose. And Google's lawyers should fight hard to make courts see it that way.