The Raven

Sunday, January 19, 2003

With-it-ness

It gets harder to stay hip every day, and part of the problem is all of the words you have to keep tracking, whether it's just staying up with the current lingo or trying to remember which password to use where. As you'll see.

Give it Up

That's our advice to advertisers and newswriters who inexplicably fail to learn that if anyone over 30 learns some teen slang, like "bitchin'," "rad," or "illin'," that means the word in question has been played out.

A case in point would be the ding-dongs at CNN Headline News:

A memo to their staff said they wanted to help "the homeys and honeys add a new flava" to the program.

Bet you winced just reading it—to me that was like biting into a raw persimmon. Consider, though, that by 2010 it's predicted there will be "34.9 million teens in America." That's a market they'll be trying to reach by any means possible, and language is going to be a major line of attack. Here's a follow-up story on the same subject, spotting AOL's ad that touts its broadband service as having "phat sounds to fat pipes."

AOL missed the boat, since the pipes in question would have been better described as "butter," "gravy," slammin'," or "tight," if this source is credible. Anybody with a teen out there might want to check this out and let me know. Until then, I'll be stayin' crunked up.

Linguistic Security

There's one word you never say to anybody, and that's your password. It's a key that exists only in your mind and on protected sectors of hard drives spinning out there, somewhere, safe as long as no one figures it out.

But people do crack passwords, and often because you picked a dumb one. According to this story in the Chi Trib, the problem with passwords is that "there are too many of them, and it's too hard for the average person to remember them," so what most of us do sooner or later is settle on one that's easy to remember—like your dog's name. Here's cyber-security expert Jerry Brady:

"All you need is to know a bit about a person—his wife's name, pet's name, car's name," said Brady, who noted that much personal information is readily available on the Internet and in public records. "And knowing what a person cares most about—his wife, his pet or his car—you can guess."

You'll want to watch out for accessing private material via Internet cafes or hotel business centers, which can easily be infected with keystroke logging software. I was surprised to see that one expert interviewed says that he "ranks the Web sites he uses on the need for high, medium or low security." That's what I do, too. You don't want your financial security key to be the same as, say, the one you use for Yahoo Games.

In a related story, it seems that Microsoft, among other companies, is looking into visual password systems that are more secure on average than what's being used right now.

Take a look at this graphic. Designed by the New York firm Passlogix, the idea is that you make a password by mixing a virtual drink for yourself. Hey, that's the kind of security I like! Guessing what kind of drink you'd make using which ingredients in which order is a lot harder for someone who doesn't know you to guess. Still, if more people would just add numbers and punctuation to their passwords we'd probably all be a lot safer.

The Bad Apple

When I think of crooked cops, I think Chicago. Yes, I know that the New Orleans PD is the nation's worst in terms of corruption, but nobody would deny that Joe Miedzianowski has earned the title of "Most Corrupt Cop" in Chicago, which couldn't be easy. Federal prosecutors have put together an amazing case against Miedzianowski, who worked as a gang crimes officer for nearly 15 years.

His wrongdoings staggered the Chicago Police Department—sabotaging investigations by identifying undercover officers to gang leaders, helping a killer flee the state, robbing drug dealers, giving gangbangers guns and honing their marksmanship with field trips to a suburban shooting range.

If convicted on the charges leveled against him, he'll get life behind bars. Consider this scumbag every time the government says we should trust our law enforcement agencies because they'd never abuse their authority.

Our Kind of Guy

In the darkness before dawn today, a man wearing a dark hood continued a 54-year tradition of observing the birthday of Edgar Allen Poe.

We've been aware of this guy for years, and his deal involves showing up in the wee hours at Poe's gravesite, drinking a toast to our hero, then vanishing—leaving a half-empty bottle of Martel and three red roses behind. What we didn't know until yesterday was that the original guy died in 1998 and this is probably one of his sons. I was also surprised to learn that there's a whole industry that's evolved around watching this dude show up.

"It's just this incredible rush of adrenaline when you see that he's made it again," said Anita Gruss, an athletic director at a high school in Centreville who has seen 12 toasts. "Even after all these years, it's a thrill."

In order to sit up in Westminster Church and watch for the mysterious visitor, you have win an essay contest; they only accept a few dozen a year out of thousands of entries.

8:20:01 PM

Death Is a Really Bad Thing Day

Actually, it's National Sanctity of Life Day, we're just celebrating it with different language in order to emphasize the power of words. After all, one man's Terrorist is another guy's Freedom Fighter, and a protester becomes an activist becomes a rebel. Even though the spin is all in the words, the images never lie—or do they?

Remote Control

An adroit correspondent e-mailed me a breaking headline: "Empty warhead discovered in oval office!" That got us laughing at Raven HQ.

This got us thinking about the way the news on that issue has been breaking. First, at CNN we noticed they led off with "White House Finds Iraqi Warheads 'Troubling.'" Not to be outdone, the LA Times followed up with "Warhead Discovery 'Troubling And Serious.'" What's next, we wondered? "Troubling, serious, and unseemly"? Perhaps the President is really a remote-controlled robot, like Gigantor, with Dick Cheney in the Jimmy Sparks role. If you're skeptical, consider the Gigantor theme song: ...his power is in your hand...

Rack and Ruin

During the anti-war rally in San Francisco yesterday, a rogue group of some 200 "black-clad protesters" broke ranks and went on a crazed rampage through the city's downtown financial district.

To be honest, the article called it a "brief romp," which sort of makes it sound like they were playing leapfrog or something, but they did manage to do some damage.

The protest escalated to vandalism as the group turned up Sansome Street, spray-painting anti-war messages on the Citicorp Building.

Demonstrators used news racks and iron bars to smash a glass door at the Immigration and Naturalization Service building. As police rushed forward to protect the entry, the march turned south on Battery, smashing a window in a Starbucks coffee shop.

Here you see one of the rebels expressing his pique with an S.F. Chronicle editorial. The enemy, it appears, are all of those newspaper racks. Bad rack! Bad!

Wise Geysers

It's getting harder and harder to make a joke nowadays. We get all kinds of outraged e-mail from readers who take exception with our corvine contumacy, so we can sympathize with Proctor & Gamble and the National Park Service who are in big trouble over P&G's whimsical ad for Metamucil.

It's hard to see, but in this photo, you can make out part of the commercial in which a ranger pours some of the fibrous additive into Old Faithful in order to keep the landmark righteously regular. It wasn't long before viewers started venting their displeasure.

The park responded to complaints with a letter saying that Procter & Gamble had not filmed the real Old Faithful or an actual park ranger and that the company was within its legal rights. But, the letter added, "This advertisement goes against all of the National Park Service's efforts to encourage people not to put foreign objects into the thermal features."

Y'know, whenever I'm feeling capricious and antsy, I myself get the urge to kick over a few newspaper racks, or insert a foreign object into the nearest thermal feature, and lemme tell ya, it really takes the stress off.

More Raven later today.

2:04:57 PM