Things that were not immediately obvious to me

Hey, want to get angry? Check this out.

From the article:

That Anthony Graber broke the law in early March is indisputable. He raced his Honda motorcycle down Interstate 95 in Maryland at 80 mph, popping a wheelie, roaring past cars and swerving across traffic lanes

But it wasn’t his daredevil stunt that has the 25-year-old staff sergeant for the Maryland Air National Guard facing the possibility of 16 years in prison. For that, he was issued a speeding ticket. It was the video that Graber posted on YouTube one week later — taken with his helmet camera — of a plainclothes state trooper cutting him off and drawing a gun during the traffic stop near Baltimore.

In early April, state police officers raided Graber’s parents’ home in Abingdon, Md. They confiscated his camera, computers and external hard drives. Graber was indicted for allegedly violating state wiretap laws by recording the trooper without his consent.

Government, in general, is necessary. Police are necessary, and, in some cases, honorable and heroic. But government can be abusive, and cops thuggish. We’re citizens, not subjects, you jackasses. The growth of the surveillance state is bad enough, but the idea that you can’t videotape/record a cop (who’s probably videotaping and recording you) is absolutely bloody intolerable.

This will not be borne.

• Photography is not a crime
• Anthony Graber support page on FB

As of today, I’ve been posting regularly for two years. Yay me.

The lists of anniversary gifts by year are almost always good for a chuckle. The 10th is aluminum, which is cool, but they seem to have overlooked titanium. And I see that the 90th(!) is granite, which … just … wow.

From an interview with William Gibson:

I read an account somewhere — very possibly in Karl Taro Greenfeld’s “Speed Tribes” — of an actual idoru in Japan who had not existed at all. The real idorus, as the Japanese have known them for a while, are little assembly-line girl singers who are just turned out, like 20 a month, I gather, in a way that people here just wouldn’t buy. The Milli Vanilli factor is really high — everybody knows that when you hear the record, it’s probably not the girl actually singing.

So somebody took that one step further and brought out an idoru who didn’t exist at all — there simply wasn’t any girl there. They had the record, and they had the pictures of her, and she became really popular. Possibly because kids knew she didn’t exist.

It’s a point that’s been made before, and a point on which knowledge probably doesn’t get you very far, but I think it’s a point worth making again: People are not well-served by their natural instincts as they move through the modern media environment.

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