At last!

I managed to hack around long enough and deep enough to finally (FINALLY!) get the permalink thingies working.

Still some fine-tuning to do on the template, but at least the main annoyance has now been sorted.

So...

Er...

Well, apart from that, there's really not much else to say. And it's late. And I'm knacked. So go check this out instead.

Aye thengk ewe.

56 is an interesting number.

It's the magic number behind Joe DiMaggio’s best year - his legendary 56-game hitting streak in 1941.

It's a popular Indian card game.

It's a small community (of approx 156 inhabitants) 85 miles from Little Rock in Arkansas.

It's the number of signatories to the American Declaration of Independence, the "Fifty-Six Brave Souls"

It's the reported number of discrete ethnic groups in China.

It's the number of short Sherlock Holmes stories (not counting the major novels) written by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.

And it's the age that Doc Searls - Blogfather to so many of us, and just plain all round good bloke - turns today.



Happy birthday, Doc - hope you have a wonderful day.

Noted social Annthropologist, Professor A. Craig, has concluded after exhaustive and wide-ranging research that I am 'likely' one of a 'a not-new but heretofore uncatergorized category of MAN': the StraightGayMan, male equivalent of the fag hag.

It's nice to know I fit in somewhere.

The funny thing about this, which Ann could not possibly have known, is that one of the prevalent rumours about me in Canadian PR circles is that I play for the home team (wife and three children notwithstanding).

Probably goes without saying that the people who sustain this particular rumour are the same kind of people who think Jeffrey Kofman deserved the treatment he recently received at the hands of the White House comms staff.

Again: what-evah.

Stuff it. No matter what I do, I can't figure out what's wrong with my permalinks since I moved to the new server (and switched templates).

Sorry.

If anyone has any idea what the heck I'm doing wrong, I'd be really grateful for the help. Drop me an email or a comment and I'll explain the full symptoms...

*groan*

Meanwhile, David Akin - friend and convergence journalist extraordinaire - has dropped a terrific comment into the foot of my "First they ignore you. Then they laugh at you" post, below. This requires some thought and deserves a proper, considered response, soon as I get the time. Meanwhile, page down a little and open up the comments to see him giving me a well-deserved reality check.

Or even better, read David's longer version of the comment at his own blog. Good stuff, from someone who is well qualified to comment - as both a tenured, important journalist and a capable and interesting blogger.

FWIW, one of the things David says that I would absolutely agree with is the comment that: "The output of a blog and the output of a journalist may, indeed, be similar but they are not the same thing..." That much is clear.

But I think I may have misrepresented my own opinions in this area, and inadvertently misled David, by casually referring to the "ongoing journalism vs. blogging debate.

I've said before - I don't actually think there is a valid debate here - or at least not one that's worth the pixels. The "vs." is wrong.

It's AND logic at work again, not OR.

And that's one of the several reasons why David is right to take my sloppy observations to task.

More on this later...

Hmmm...

»Self-consciousness exists in itself and for itself, in that, and by the fact that it exists for another self-consciousness; that is to say, it is only by being acknowledged or "recognized".«

-- Hegel's "The Phenomenology of Mind"

What-evah.

All the more enjoyable given that the subject is Eldred vs. Ashcroft, an egregious and quite spectacular travesty of lawmaking that is near and dear to the hearts of many in the blogosphere.

First - go read James Grimmelmann's comprehensive, methodical, and utterly delicious deconstruction over at LawMeme:

''How Artists and Creators Finally Got Their Due'' Gets Its Due

An excerpt:

"There's a lot of silliness going around in technology law these days. So much, in fact, that responding individually to every logical fallacy or faulty analogy would be a recipe for an early ulcer. But every so often, something comes in over the transom that's so profoundly wrongheaded that it can't be left alone. Today, while poring through the last few months of articles in tech law journals, I came across a case comment in need of a thorough deconstruction.

"Our text today is Shalisha Francis, iBRIEF: Eldred v. Ashcroft: How Artists and Creators Finally Got Their Due, 2003 Duke L. & Tech. Rev. 0014, a chipper little student note advancing the thesis that Eldred v. Ashcroft was rightly decided. Now, this is not, by itself, an absurd statement. The seven justices who decided Eldred certainly think it was rightly decided. Rather, what distinguishes this piece is its dedication to the proposition that the public domain is openly dangerous. Since the purpose of articles is to spur discussion on the issues they raise, let the discussion commence..."

Read it.

Go ahead...I'll wait here for you.

You're back? Good. Then pray join me in a rousing chorus of the only rational response a sane person can possibly offer:

Mwah ha ha hah hoo ha ha haaa hah ha ha bu wu wooooo wah ha heee hee hee heeheeheeheehee wooo huh buhuh wah ha hah ha ha ha ha hoo... gasp...oh god...I'm sorry, I ha ha HA HA HA HA HAAA HAAAH AA HO HO HEE HEEEEEEEEE HUH HA HA HO HE AHA AHO UHUH heh eh heee heeheeheeheehee SNORT fu...ya bu.. yu bas... fu...uh ah...pffftt...

oooof. phweef. I'm so sorry, I just can't HA HA HAA HAAA HAR HAARRRR HU HO HOOO heheehehheeheheheeheheee...

*pant* *gasp* Oh fuck...

Look - I'll try and post some more later or someth...FAH HAHA HAHAHAHAHAHAH HOOOO HEEH HEE HEE HEE ARRRRGH huh uh hu.........HAAAAAAAAAAAAAAARRRRRRRRRRR O HOH HO HO HU HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA heeeeeeeee...

It hurts because it's so damn funny. And it's only funny because it hurts.

[with thanks to Blake Winton for the link]

Jeff Jarvis, a self-confessed "journalism gray-beard", describes an unpleasant run-in with a clueless editor and comments incidentally on the ongoing journalism vs. blogging debate.

If the intersection of blogging and journalism interests you at all, then the whole piece is well worth a read, including some of Jeff's readers' comments (from whence I lifted the Gandhi quotation, above), but this paragraph in particular leapt out at me:

"She [the editor] also wanted me to address the issue of weblog news coming from often anonymous, sometimes unreliable sources and that's also a fair question. My answer is that the audience -- especially after the last cablecast war -- is becoming accustomed to judging news, even news from the big boys, with a grain of salt. They now know that the first news out of the box is unconfirmed; they know to wait until time has passed and confirmation and reporting have come in. They know that they need to look at what CNN says live through a filter just as they look at what webloggers say through a filter. It's all about trusting the intelligence of the audience."

Indeed. We know to look at what all of them say through a filter. CNN, Fox, the BBC, the NYT, the WSJ, the FT, the CBC, the Guardian - all of them and many more of that ilk.

Therein lies some of the power and importance of blogs. Trusting the intelligence of the audience, and including blogs as one of the many sources of information available to us, we can filter the feeds to arrive at our own balanced, informed POV.

For every Aaron Brown, there's a Joshua Marshall

For every Geraldo, there's a Salam Pax.

The important thing is to keep your filters on regardless of what you're reading and regardless of the purported credibility of the source. It's a sad thing to have to acknowledge, but these days a New York Times report is not necessarily any more reliable than a Slashdot post.

The really sad thing, though, is that while most people fully expect to run anything they read on Slashdot through a credibility filter, they'll still take the New York Times as gospel (or The Globe & Mail, The National Post, The Telegraph, The Australian, BBC, CTV, whatever).

That's dangerous. Worse - it's slack-jawed, sheep-like acquiesence.

Think. In the name of God. Read everything, then think.

If we don't filter for ourselves, we're letting others do the filtering for us. And that's just scary.

Transcript of the Democratic National Committee's new TV ad:

In his State of the Union address, George W. Bush told us of an imminent threat.

PRESIDENT BUSH: "Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa." [2003 State of the Union]

America took him at his word.

But now we find out that it wasn't true.

Far worse, the Administration knew it wasn't true.

HEADLINE: White House Says Iraq Claim was Flawed [New York Times, 7/8/03]

A year earlier, that claim was already proven to be false.

The CIA knew it. [New York Times, 7/6/03]
The State Department knew it. [New York Times, 7/6/03]
The White House knew it. [NBC News, 6/26/03]

But he told us anyway.

PRESIDENT BUSH: "Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa." [2003 State of the Union]

It's time to tell the truth.

Help hold George W. Bush accountable by calling for an independent, bipartisan investigation.

Go to www.democrats.org/truth to sign the petition and make your voice heard.

Because America deserves the truth.

Watch the video of this ad online:

Real Video
Modem | Broadband

Windows Media
Modem | Broadband

QuickTime
Modem | Broadband

"We remain totally committed to the Hussein regime never returning to power and tormenting the Iraqi people."
-- U.S. Lieutenant-General Ricardo Sanchez quoted in The Globe & Mail

"We gave him a chance to allow the inspectors in, and he wouldn't let them in."
-- U.S. President George W. Bush quoted in The Washington Post

"A matter of words perhaps, but words are important. Why are words important? If you cannot say what you mean, your Majesty, you will never mean what you say. And a gentleman should always mean what he says."
-- Peter O'Toole as Reginald Fleming Johnston in Bertolucci's The Last Emperor.

Links piling up like firewood in my 'Favorites' folder, patiently queueing to be blogged.

Here's a few recent items of interest:

1. Neoblogism du jour: Geeplogs via this post at Roland Piquepaille's blog:

Quoting Kurt Cagle's TechRepublic article: "[These geeplogs will contain] public GPS contexts that can be queried about a given area. [They] will be the GPS equivalents to blogs, in which a person could narrate a specific tour with his or her relevant commentary, possibly with photographs or video feeds."

Cool. To travel blogfully is a better thing than to arrive...

2. John Robb lives!

Interesting to note that his new home is still driven by Radio, even though his departure from the top job at the company that created this product was a little sudden and mysterious (and according to this page he's still running the place). Either way - good to have you back, John. It was only 10 days or so, but we missed you.

3. Lance Arthur's Glassdog

I first stumbled into this place by mistake about five years ago. Check in every now and then, just to top up my personal crazy meter. The Web Toyz in particular are a work of twisted beauty. And if you've an hour or so to spend, make sure you check out the Storytime section. Lovely. I get the feeling Meg would like this site.

4. In case you missed it, here's Gollum's acceptance speech at the MTV video awards (requires QuickTime). Definitely NOT a worksafe link. Fantastic - even gets in a nice little Michael Moore dig.

Permalinks still not working. Hmmm... Not sure why. More twiddling required.

Meanwhile, just noticed my fellow co-op member, long lost twin sister and BlogGodmother to all three of the original BlogSprogs, Jeneane Sessum also has a brand new look. Or two, in fact - both her blog and Jeneane herself have undergone a wonderful transformation. Looking great!

(Thinks: not spoken to or written to Jeneane in a long, long time. Bad, bad Michael. Must fix this.)

So here it is.

After six or seven sessions of footling around, squeezed in between general work and home stuff, we're almost, almost there...

This will be my blog's new permanent home. I've had the domain name for ages, but only just getting around to actually using it. Please update your blogrolls and bookmarks to point here.

This is all thanks to the wonderful Shelley Powers and her altruistic vision for what is surely the World's first bloggers' co-operative: The Wayward Webloggers Co-Op.

With Shelley's generosity and assistance (and a little extra setup help from fellow co-op member Kafkaesquí) I'm all moved in with only a little touching up to do here and there.

A new blog server deserves a new design. Hope you like it. The base code is a BlogSkins template, originally designed by Chewbecca. I've tweaked to add titles and a few other styling changes of my own.

Please note: the template's not quite complete and some things probably won't work, but I figure I'll iron out the remaining wrinkles in the coming days. In particular, permalinks are broken, but comments seem to be working fine. I'm working on it...

For now, consider this blog a microcosm of the entire Web and revel in its fundamental brokenness.

Normal service will be resumed whenever.

About to do a trial run on moving this blog into its new home. If things go squirrelly for you, try over here.

If that still doesn't work, check back in a day or so...

Home again.

Dog tired, slightly sunburned, nicely refreshed after our mini-vacation up on Baptiste Lake. Four blissful days - great food, fine wine, terrific company, and the simple summer pleasures to be had in cottage country with the kids - canoeing, swimming, soccer, fishing, more swimming...

Crashing now - got to catch up on Zzzzz's for a new biz pitch first thing in the morning, but had to pop in to post this one shot.

First thing this morning, watching the mist burning off the lake as the sun baked through. An early morning visitor dropped in on the floating dock. I grabbed the camera and just had time to shoot this one pic before he sailed off across the lake.



Wow.

Robert Scoble posts a great, common sense list of tips for handling yourself in a press interview.

Simple. Easy to remember. Right.

Good job. Anyone would think he used to be a journalist, or something ;-)

He also asks: "Anyone else have good ideas for dealing with the press?"

Sure. Here’s a few of the things I usually tell clients, starting with what I think is the number one cardinal rule of media relations:

Nobody can control the outcome of a media interview. But you can influence the outcome by knowing what to do and what not to do.

The one thing that you can and should control: your mouth.

(Been quoted saying something you’re not comfortable with? Well you probably shouldn’t have said it then...)

This is harder than it sounds, I know – but Robert’s 5th point helps: "Speak slowly and thoughtfully and with short sentences."

Beyond that, here’s some more of my favourite tips, in no particular order:

1. Always call reporters back promptly
– Their lives are ruled by deadlines - help them out.
– Whether it’s good or bad – always return the call.
– Every interaction is a data point – if you don’t call back, what does that say about your company?
– You don’t need to engage in the full dialogue until you are ready.
– Gather information, show respect for deadlines, buy time.
– Never duck a call – you forfeit the opportunity to influence the story.

2. Always be prepared
– Do your research
– Find out about the journalist, the publication, any skeletons recently tumbled out of corporate cupboards...
– Prepare and review some key points you want to make.
– Anticipate questions (negatives & positives).

3. Set the tone at the outset
– Remember it’s your story - there's no one better able to tell it than you: so be the storyteller.
– Tell them your story, the whole of your story (and nothing but your story).
– Don’t wait for that one right question to come along – get your point over.

4. Deliver your key points with conviction
– Cherry-pick on trigger words in the question, then figure out what you really want to say.
– Try not to sound like a robot parroting sterilized corporate speak.
– Dialogue is interesting. Rote monologue isn’t.

5. Don’t EVER repeat a negative from a reporter’s question
– Return to your key points.
– Listen carefully and don’t get baited.
– If you don’t like what you just heard – imagine reading yourself saying it.

6. Scale your responses
– Compress your first answer into a single sentence.
– Pause. Then elaborate if needed.
– Know when to shut up. If you’re in a hole: stop digging!

7. Be aware of body language
– If you’re on the phone, and think it could be a tough one: stand up.
– Get comfortable, but don’t slouch.
– Keep your energy up.

8. Always assume you are being recorded
– It’s a good thing. Trust me. Don’t expect to be asked.

9. There is no such thing as "off the record"
– Every moment is on the record – from the reception desk to the farewell handshake.
– Every interaction is a data point, remember?
– Even if your name isn’t used, your comments will still colour the story.
– If you can't or don't want to say it on the record - don't say it.

10. If you don’t know - don’t try to answer
– Don’t be afraid to admit what you don’t know rather than faking it.
– Don’t get drawn into speculation – but offer to find out the answer.
– Never lie. Never bluff.

Still not comfortable? Book some media training. Apparently there's some double-barrelled Irish fella in Toronto who can help you out with this bit :-)

Here's an interesting opportunity for one of my colleagues in the blogosphere.

A reporter for "Hi Magazine" is: "...looking for experts who can assess blogging as a transforming phenomenon on the Internet, the current state of blogs and the possibilities. I'm also looking for opinions that view blogs as a passing fad..."

What's most interesting about this, in case you've missed it, is the nature and purpose of "Hi Magazine".

Take a look at the mocked-up cover shot on the magazine's home page. It shows a vaguely Middle Eastern-looking hottie, staring sassily out of the page, dressed in generic Gap/U.S. college chick top and jeans. In the background are a couple of cheery Colgate-smiling archetypal J Crew models.

It's that "vaguely Middle Eastern" part that's the giveaway - and the Arabic script on the page. (You can get a close-enough translation of the text by punching the URL into the free service available at Ajeeb).

This new glossy is an "American Culture = Good" vehicle, being produced by the U.S. State Department (and funded by U.S. tax dollars). The target audience of the Arabic-language production will be teens and tweens throughout the Middle East.

In other words: it's essentially state-funded propaganda.

Here's Jon Carroll's take on it.

Unfortunately, I'm not really qualified to respond to the journalist's request (not being an American or American resident), but I'm sure someone out there might be keen to comment. Leave a note in the Comments, below, or drop me an email (michaelocc AT sympatico.ca), and I'll flip you the contact info.

I'll leave the intensity of the counter spin up to you ;-)

Once in a blue moon, a muse with training wheels wobbles past and accidentally drops something almost fully formed into the back of my head. This last happened more than two years ago, resulting in this piece.

It happened again on the subway ride home last night. Without further apology or explanation, here's the result:

Dub Poem

Our soldiers are dying,
Our leaders are lying,
All in the name of the Dubya.

Economy's crawling
As the C-in-C's drawling:
Hail the all powerful Dubya!

Homelessness growing,
House-building slowing,
Deficit owing: thank Dubya.

Poverty rising,
Super-rich thriving;
Tax breaks for buddies of Dubya.

Media collusion
When Rumsfeld pursues 'em -
Fawning and bowing to Dubya.

Corruption on NASDAQ,
Fudged books and kickbacks,
MBAs mentored by Dubya.

Democracy gasping,
Voters left asking -
Which of you voted for Dubya?

But online our voices
Can still express choices -
Thank dubya, dubya, dubya.

--##--

Yes. I know. I'm deeply sorry.

About an hour ago I was happily typing away, putting together a typical Michaelish overlong post.

I accidentally hit some bizarre chord of keys, which prompted Blogger to throw up a new and very helpful looking error message - something along the lines of: "Are you sure you want to crap out in the middle of this monster screed? Hit OK to save your post, Cancel to blow away your magnum opus anyway".

"Oh poop," I thought, clicking on that OK button pretty darn sharpish.

I found myself back at the Blogger front screen, flipped back into the blog editor and...

Er...where is it then?

Not in Drafts. Not in Current or even Future posts.

So where the flippy neck is it? What sort of rotten sodding mind game is that?

We've all lost long posts through system crashes or our own stupidity in the past - and not just us Blogger users. But making you think you're not going to lose it, then losing it anyway - that's just mean.

This is a reminder yet again, as if I needed it:

Rule 1: Don't edit in Blogger
Rule 2: Don't edit in Blogger
Rule 3: Don't edit in Blogger
Rule 4: Don't edit in Blogger
Rule 5: Don't edit in Blogger
Rule 6: There is noooo....rule 6
Rule 7: DON'T edit in Blogger
Rule 8: And so on...

I usually write up posts in Word, then C&P them into the Blogger UI. It's a pain in the neck, but saves much tearing of hair, gnashing of teeth, and behaviour of that ilk.

Sometimes I forget. The great thing about the new Blogger is that now I can forget, screw up, be reassured that I'm going to be OK, get screwed anyway, and think seriously about alternative blogging tools yet again.

Nice UI there, guys.

Which reminds me. It's just as easy to blow away your entire draft of the Great American Novel in Word as it is in Blogger - Word only feels more robust. But harking back to a conversation with David Weinberger back at the Jupiter gig - why the hell do we still need to "Save" stuff anyway? What kind of antiquated Disk Operating System tosh is this?

My Palm never needs me to Save stuff: switch on, write, switch off – it’s still all there in the flash memory.

In fact, I’ve even had occasion (unplanned) to run an extreme test on the Palm: switch on, write stuff, drop the fecker in the bog, nicely cracking the screen as it rattles off the porcelain, wait 24 hours for it to dry out, try hot-synching – it’s all still there.

So why does an immensely more powerful and sophisticated piece of kit like my StinkPad still need to Save all the darn time?

I type fast (albeit clumsily), and I’m usually ultra-paranoid about losing stuff. The default auto-save of every 10 minutes or so is just stupid – I can rattle out a couple of pages in 10 minutes, for goodness sake. I have Word set to auto-save every minute. But why is this even necessary?

Hard drives are big enough and fast enough nowadays that this simply isn’t a problem – there's no noticeable performance lag as it saves stuff off in the background. But why isn’t everything just being written away automatically to some honking great stack of flash memory on my laptop even as I create? Or even to the hard drive, if you must - I don't care. Except for the fact that hard drives also seem to be one of the dumber relics of the big iron world we continue to cling to for no good reason.

With the exception of the keyboard, the disk drives (hard, floppy, and DVD) are the only moving parts in this beast and, therefore, presumably more susceptible to wear and tear than things like the screen, parallel port, etc.

This tiny little disk, spinning like a nutter in its rugged little shell, read/write head bobbing nanometers above the surface – it just seems such a delicate, unnecessary anachronism, prone to all sorts of nasty things like 'head slap'.

Head slap. There’s an aptly named phenomenon. Sounds just like what I want to do every time I lose something important in an app that doesn’t have a high frequency of auto saves.

There must be some smart people in labs out there somewhere working to fix this – even for web-based client apps like Blogger. Please?

Of course, this is not a problem the Son of Man ever had to deal with. Because, as we all know, Jesus Saves…

Oh yeah, I was going to bed wasn't I?

Ahem.

Still busy as heck, but loving it.

Lots of real work, for the first time in way too long. Our new best friends at AOL keeping me very busy, plus we're still chest deep in the Air Canada mess; working closely with the ALPA union representing the AC Jazz pilots.

New biz, RFPs and referrals coming in like crazy - a welcome flood after so long a drought. Some terrific early discussions with these guys - who deserve to be very, very big in the not too distant future. And we've just put to bed a really worthy pro bono project, working with Globalegacy (nothing quite so powerful as an idea whose time has come...)

Oh, and today marked the official launch of McD Wireless in Canada - a very cool extension of McDonald's existing WiFi initiative in the U.S. Only involved on the fringes of this - it's running through our core McD's team - but I'm hugely excited about it all the same. Nicely written up in the Globe by Jack Kapica earlier today. (Jack, btw, edited the terrific "Shocked and Appalled: a Century of Letters to the Globe and Mail" - an excellent night table standby. Out of print, alas, but available here).

One part of my excitement over the McD's news is knowing that they're working with my blog buddy Brent Ashley on the implementation. Brent (also known as co-author of the world's first in-blog chat client, BlogChat) is a great, safe pair of hands for them to have chosen. You can be sure it will work, and work well.

So much going on. And tomorrow will be even busier, I know.

All this adds up to my almost inappropriate level of excitement about our first trip up north this year. We're going deep into the land of the quarter million lakes this weekend (really - "Ontario" is Iroquois for "beautiful, shining waters" and there genuinely are something like 250,000 lakes, that's not a typo).

We're heading off for a much-needed break, enjoying the kind hospitality of friends, up on Baptiste Lake, near Bancroft, somewhere around here:



Which, while I'm in synaptic-chaining, word-association-football mode, has me thinking about how I ended up in this strange PR game in the first place...

That shot shows the narrows out of the main Baptiste Lake leading into Lavallee Bay. Which immediately reminds me of my old friend Wendy Lavallee, co-founder of LNS Communications in Boston.

Wendy was our lead PR advisor way back in '96-'97, when we lifted our little 10-man company off the City Road in London, relocated and relaunched in Canada as LAVA Systems, and set off on the path to IPO insanity and all that.

Wendy was also my main inspiration when I decided to move across into the agency world (even though she tried to talk me out of it). Simply one of the best PR pros I've ever come across. Looks like she's no longer at LNS. Wonder where she went off to...

Enough. To bed.

This is funky - a nifty little printer, no bigger than some older cell phones - that uses an innovative system of "Random Movement Printing Technology" to print fairly complex info as you swish your hand across the page.

I've no idea what I'd use it for, but I want one.

Barry White R.I.P.



His sweetness still my weakness after all this...

Just for the record: Elvis Costello at the Hummingbird Centre last night was just utterly astonishing.

Always one of the finer songwriters of his generation, Costello has matured into one of the most accomplished musicians and performers to come out of the whole punk thing...

The material was flawless, great choice of ballads (‘Almost Blue’, ‘Living in Toledo’, etc.) mixed in with higher energy numbers (jaw-dropping version of ‘Detectives’, outstanding new treatment of ‘Deep Dark Truthful Mirror’, etc.), and excellent sound quality (even for the Hummingbird).

Great rabble-rousing second encore, closing with ‘Peace, Love & Understanding’ at hard-edged, angry full volume.

Elvis was charming, engaging, funny and in great voice. Plus the godlike Steve Nieve of the original Attractions on keyboards, and Kyp Harness opening the night.

I floated home 3 feet off the floor.

Coming down to earth today, I have to acknowledge that one thing the Costello gig confirmed for me is that I am indeed an old fart.

Sitting there last night in air-conditioned comfort, supping my latte, surrounded by hosts of other married, greying 40-somethings – politely applauding at the end of ‘Pump it Up’, fercrissakes.

It's like punk rock goes to the symphony.

The Hummingbird is no place for a rock act. I mean – where are you supposed to dance?!

Still. At least (and this is very, very significant) he was wearing red shoes.

Meanwhile, seems my personal clambake (below) is stirring up an interesting little discussion over at alt.religion.scientology.

Yikes again.

The ever interesting Inquirer has the scoop on a great "gotcha" story, showing how Tony Blair's office just got busted by a little known feature in Microsoft Word.

The UK Government's infamous Iraq WMD dossier, heavily plagiarized from academic papers, was originally posted to the 10 Downing Street website as a Word file (don't bother looking for it now - they've taken down the original link and replaced the file with a PDF).

As you'll probably recall - when it was revealed that the dossier was a work of creative cut & paste, the response of the PM's office was to feign ignorance of the source, bluster, obfuscate, blame the spooks, and generally wash their hands of the whole thing.

Well thanks to some smart forensic work by Richard Smith of computerbytesman.com, we now know the identity of at least four of the contributors to this particular fiasco. Their user names were captured by Word as their edits to the document were tracked.

You see - Word handily stores all the deltas between iterations of a document in a set of unencrypted headers. If you know how this stuff works, you can piece together not just what was changed, but who changed it.

And as Richard's excellent digging reveals - far from being the spooks, it was people very, very close to the PM who pulled this thing together. Check out the full report over at Richard's site.

Consider your right honourable selves well and truly busted.

This may be a “grab yer ankles” post.

If the conspiracy theories hold true - seconds after I hit “Publish” on this sucker, the entire blog will go dark and sallow men in bad sunglasses will show up at my door.

But what the hell...

Back at the beginning of June, I came across a post at Jim Flanagan's blog about a particular example of impenetrable web weirdness going on over at yuppiechat.com.

Some kind of deep, many-layered cyphertext, it seems, which Jim suggested might be the work of a Markov babbler. I blogged about it at the time, here.

Wandering through Google yesterday, in search of a certain obscure literary quotation, I stumbled into another very similar site – one that also looks a lot like some kind of covert channel or something. The site URL is: http://psychoflubber.com

(Update: apologies for not linking directly. This post seems to be drawing a lot of traffic since it went up last night, and I'm not sure how I feel about my blog popping up high in their referrer logs).

This second site has the same sort of layout, same recursive links, just as much weirdness...

Then I decided to dig a little deeper. Checking the Whois record for this site revealed nothing useful:

Domain Name: PSYCHOFLUBBER.COM
Registrar: TUCOWS, INC.
Whois Server: whois.opensrs.net
Referral URL: http://www.opensrs.org
Name Server: NS1.ZONEEDIT.COM
Name Server: NS5.ZONEEDIT.COM
Status: REGISTRAR-LOCK
Updated Date: 09-jun-2003
Creation Date: 21-aug-2001
Expiration Date: 21-aug-2004

In fact, it’s more than a little puzzling that the record in Whois is so vague. Is that normal? No address, no name, no nothing...

So I Googled again, and came across this UseNet thread.

Oh crap. It looks like it might be some kind of Scientology thing. These guys scare me.

The registrant’s address listed within this original UseNet post (now, as noted, curiously missing from the database) is the same address as that of the L. Ron Hubbard Life Exhibition in LA. So whatever it is, it appears to be owned by, or at least clearly linked to the Church of Scientology.

As if this wasn’t puzzling enough – there’s even more curious stuff going on in here.

For example the registered domain owner, according to that post, shares the same name as an infamous Pentecostal Evangelist: Aimee Semple McPherson (lots to be found on Google, including this), founder of the Foursquare Gospel Church. Perhaps this is the Church of Scientology's idea of a joke...?

Which fact then starts me off wondering whether there’s any kind of a link between this legendary Ms. McPherson and another McPherson linked to Scientology (and not in a good way).

I would have dug a little deeper than this, but I started hearing the X-Files theme music in the background, so I figured it’s time to grab a coffee and a think.

Going back to Google today, I've found two other very similar sites - same layout, same crypto-babble. Recognizable selections from various obscure works of literature - some Sinclair Lewis, some E. Phillips Oppenheim, the odd snatch of Lewis & Clark - and the occasional better-known pieces.

Yikes.

I’m sure the dark underbelly of the Net is thickly lined with stuff like this, but it’s not often that it pops so close to the surface. There must be fissures appearing in the Matrix.

Whatever the hell is going on here, it's a little worrying to note that the sheer volume of semi-random text buried deep into these sites is causing them to float fairly high up in (admittedly somewhat obscure) Google searches. It was a hunt for a certain half-remembered line of Shakespeare that first led me to the "psychoflubber" site ("The fresh and yet unbruised Greeks do pitch Their brave pavilions" from Troilus & Cressida)

I see the fnords!

(Oh, and Happy Canada Day, btw).