Governor Sanford Parody Song

This is too funny not to post.



Thanks to my wife who found this and passed it along.

Why It's ALWAYS the Feds Who Do the Corruption Cases in Chicago

This, boys and girls, is why it takes the FBI and the U.S. Justice Department to investigate corruption in Chicago.

A politically connected Cook County state's attorney's office employee threatened to use her position to expose her ex-boyfriend as a federal informant against the Outfit, voice mail messages played in court suggest.

[snip]

[Patti] Simone was once spokeswoman for former State's Atty. Richard Devine but now makes $67,000 a year working in Alvarez's narcotics unit. She has continued to work at the Cook County Criminal Court building since the tapes surfaced.

She is the daughter of Palos Township Democratic Committeeman Sam Simone.

The godfather to her children is Richie "The Cat" Catazone, reputed to run the Chicago Outfit's 26th Street gambling operation, while [Nicky] Rosales' cousin is convicted mob hit man Harry Aleman, Rosales said.

Testifying Friday, Rosales, a former Cook County sheriff's officer who grew up in Bridgeport, said he was "scared" by the messages Simone left.

So a woman who would let an Outfit Guy be her childrens' godfather was the spokeswoman for the Cook County State's Attorney. And her soon-to-be-ex-husband was the cousin of one of the Outift's most notorious hitmen and allowed to work as a Cook County sheriff officer.

Can't say I'm surprised that corruption both political and mob-related are so prominent in Chicago.
[Hat tip: Second City Cop]

The First Lines...

of stories I have yet to write (or might never write),

The woman wearing a white tank top and a gray snakeskin-patterned skirt had a smoldering cigarette dangling out of her mouth.

“Now what?” he asked the woman who was lying in bed naked next to him.

“Phil Van Dyke is wondering how many more ex-girlfriends are going to find him on Facebook,” read his status message.

Mike would have been just fine if he hadn’t been stupid enough to ask the guy why everyone calls him “Animal.”

“You said what! That she was starting to look fat?”

Denise was boiling her butt plugs in a pot on the stove when the doorbell rang.

What came to be known as the “Shit Commencement Address” was delivered on May 12, 2007 at Gavinhurst University by famed IT entrepreneur Ted Upartyski.

"No, you most certainly can not borrow my Mustang again."

Let's just say that getting a full cavity search at the airport before your vacation officially begins is a pretty good indicator that your trip is not going to be filled with rest and relaxation.

Why I Won’t Be Buying an E-Reader Device Anytime Soon

For awhile I was set on acquiring a Sony Reader PRS-505. If you look hard enough, you can find them for as low as $270. But my budget these days won’t allow for an expenditure on something that does only one thing. (There are rooms in the house to be painted and a bathtub to be replaced...ah the pleasures of home ownership.)

E-book readers also still suffer from extremes. You can only get a lot of new content if you submit to one manufacturer’s device or you can get almost no new reasonably-priced content by going with a different device. For example, if you want to buy an e-book from amazon.com, you can only do so if you own one of their Kindles. If you want to buy an e-book from Sony’s store, you don’t need one of their readers, but you won’t be able to read their e-books without one of Sony’s devices. This is akin to only being able to listen to CDs or MP3s from Universal music if you own a device made by Universal music. Sounds ridiculous, doesn’t it?

It is. And you can thank the people who brought you Digital Rights Management (DRM). With DRM you can’t lend an e-book to someone, or resell it, the way you can with a physical book. The other day, I went to Schuler Books here in Okemos and picked up two used books: Elmore Leonard’s Get Shorty (mass-market paperback) and Jane Smiley’s Moo (first edition hardback). Get Shorty was $1.75. Moo was $7.00. When I got home, I didn’t need a device to plug them into in order to access the content between the covers.

There are other readers from other companies such as Astak, but new content, current content, is sparse. Sites like Fictionwise (now owned by Barnes & Noble) provide a lot of new content, but the formats are mostly DRM’d. You can get all the public domain content you want from Project Gutenberg. But the titles are those published before 1923.

I spent a dozen years working as a technical writer before becoming a stay-at-home-dad. Having documented my way through a number of buggy applications and not-quite-working devices, I’m turned off by all the “THIS DEVICE WILL REVOLUTIONIZE XXXX!” garbage that comes from boosters, early adopters with cash to burn, and over-excitable journalists (I’m talking about you, Slate).

For digital reading devices to really take off, prices need to come down and DRM needs to go. All the claims made by digital reader supporters miss one vital fact: printed books are self-contained systems. If you buy a book you can read it. No device is required. For playing MP3s, CDs, or DVDs you've always needed a device (such as a computer or dedicated player) to access the content. So locking people down the way Amazon and Sony do (but Amazon in particular) seems stupid to me. It also annoys me that product boosters neglect to mention this fact.

Here’s what I’m waiting for: PixelQi. It’s a company started by Mary Lou Jepson, who designed the screen for the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project. I first heard of PixelQi from this article in Wired. They’re developing what appears to be a modified version of a color LCD screen that will also be able to shut off its backlight, operating much like e-ink screens do and using less power.

From the looks of things, you’ll be able to buy a netbook with one of PixelQi’s multi-function screens by the end of this year. And that’s what I’m waiting for. Surf the web with a full-color screen, check email, buy an ebook from a site and read it there on my computer in "ebook mode." Sounds more useful to me.

Update: Time has more, including using one of the screens.

Review - Appetite for Self-Destruction

My review of Steve Knopper's Appetite for Self-Destruction: The Spectacular Crash of the Record Industry in the Digital Age is up over at PopMatters.

Through countless interviews with people inside and outside the music industry, he’s able to provide an immense amount of depth and detail. This makes Knopper’s book essential reading if you want to understand exactly how the juggernaut record labels got to their ever-diminishing current state.

Review - Ruins

My review of Ruins by Achy Obejas is up on PopMatters.

When everyone is cheating the system, is it still cheating? From his wife, to his family to his neighbors, everyone Usnavy knows is scheming and scraping for dollars in order to afford the things that make life bearable and functional, like a new pair of shoes, a bicycle, or even real meat.

A Liberal Arts Education

This is the best defense of a liberal arts education I've read in awhile.

But these are Twittery, fragmentary messages. In her first-year composition course, we'll teach her to craft a strong argument, use contemporary research tools and extend her ideas from a couple of lines to many pages. We'll emphasize writing in her first year and stay after her until she graduates. Writing is crucial.

As she continues in her studies, we'll add novels that require her to develop skills in analysis and interpretation (abilities necessary in any business or organization), poems that require her to slow down and pay close attention (a fundamental life skill), and plays or films that ask her to understand how human beings relate to one another, how they are motivated, how they succeed or fail. She'll learn about people -- and about herself.