“Waterboarding” is a euphemism for a form of torture older than the United States itself. What makes the term “waterboarding” particularly grotesque is its winking reference to the American pastime of surfing. I’m reminded of the moment when Colonel Walter E. Kurtz (Marlon Brando) orders his soldiers to keep surfing during the onshore invasion of a Vietnamese encampment: Charlie don’t surf!. Kurtz’s ejaculated command captures the ideology underlying the US invasion of Vietnam by characterizing Vietnamese as unable and unwilling to take part in the quintessentially American (by way of Hawaii) sport of surfing.

Still, it’s sometimes good to have things broken down in not-so-cultural-studiesesque analysis. Mark Benjamin does this when he writes

I cannot tell you how angry this makes me, angry that so many Americans were deceived into agreeing that waterboarding is a humane form of torture and angry that the Obama administration is not moving more quickly to close Guantanamo and that the sadists who authorized the use of torture are not being held accountable for their crimes.

I LOLed.

Remember when earthquakes were rare»This question and the premises on which it is based are purely impressionistic, backed by no statistical data whatsoever.«?

I’ve been avoiding news stories regarding the recent earthquake in Chile. I’ve been nervous about being shocked. I don’t like the idea of vulture blogging. I’m saddened more than 300 people died and feel guilty for feeling relief because the toll was not higher.

The pictures below speak for themselves»I never featured pictures from Haiti because I was too scared to look at the pictures.«. I’m curious about the buildings that remain standing in the first two pictures.

The real question is who were those 325 assholes?

I feel like a musky with all the fight gone out of him.»Jackson, Gordon. “Billy’s Girl.” Robert Shapard Ed. Sudden Fiction: American Short-Short Stories. 1st ed. Salt Lake City: G.M. Smith, 1986: 180.« Last night I told one of our front desk clerks/security personnel that they keep me on a short leash, that eight hours a day is most of your life. Aaron replied, Most people don’t realize that and when they do, they’re blown away.

A couple days back an academic commented on Dynamic Anchors using Javascript and Tinderbox, and I (in part) replied

A few pointers on using my “tbx” PERL program.

I really do hope one day to flesh further the skeleton of how I use PERL, Tinderbox, and EndNote to publish to the web. For now, remunerated work isn’t leaving me much room for side research.

Donations welcome!

Asa Watten, the son of my friends Barrett Watten and Carla Harryman, is an advisor for GTECH, a non-profit that works to renew and reclaim blighted urban soil for new development.

Presently, GTECH is 11th in the Pepsi Refresh Project»I know.« which will award $50,000 to the top 10 ideas. I hope you cast a vote for GTECH if you think it a worthwhile project.

This is parenting I can get behind.

This is awful news for everyone, including those not obviously affected, namely families whose household incomes are north of $100,000 per year. The lack of jobs for the nation’s poorest not only strains overextended social programs. It also exacerbates the conditions which produce and sustain poverty. Low service, low education, low outlook.

How can this be made right? This is one of the defining questions of the second decade of the 21st century.

I miss Fall 1989, when I listened to Belladonna and The Wild Heart almost daily.

This video just blew me away. It gets especially sick right at 8:40. Worth every second.

A few days ago I had a conversation with an old friend. He hails from New Jersey and New York City and presently teaches at a small Midwestern liberal arts school. My friend was pretty angry about the current economic and political situation in the United States. His complaints seemed unrelieved, and their tone reminded me of the tone of my own complaints when I was teaching in Ohio.

I think I understood some of what my friend was feeling. I don’t think there are any easy solutions. It’s much easier to observe the fact of social dysfunction than it is to heal it. Mark Morford’s sprawling recitation of the bitterness of disappointment and the acridity of complaint exactly characterizes the U.S.’s ascendant maiaise. Morford finishes

The obvious question is where do such people go next.

Public and pundit opinion is divided on Apple’s iPad. The reaction to Steve Jobs’ portion of the iPad announcement was noticeably tepid. Some are saying the iPad is just a big iPhone, betraying the fact that they understand nothing about user experience. They also overlook the fact that the iPhone is a runaway hit whose adoption rates are increasing.

On the other side, some Mac faithful set their WABAC machines»WABAC machine explained.« to 8 years and 3 months ago and exhumed Rob Malda’s editorial comment regarding the iPod’s debut: No wireless. Less space than a nomad. Lame. Nearly a decade later and they’re still mocking someone for failing to predict the success of a consumer device»which statement is more opinion than forecast.«. Even though the iPod was monumentally successful, the phrase “get over it” comes to mind.

For my part, I do think the iPad will generate computing markets whose vitality will surprise everyone, including the cheerleaders. I think the price points are good to start and suspect they will improve in models to come. But mainly, I’m really looking forward to using Aji Reader PDF on an iPad come May.