The Raven

Monday, February 10, 2003

It's How You Play

If you were in a philosophical mood, you might say that blogging is a kind of game, with players and points, winners and losers. If this is true, then I lost badly this morning—played poorly at best. What was I thinking? What was I trying to prove? I should have known better than to lead off with a lame story about Hans "Pimp-Daddy" Blix. Just looking at that dismal lineup of mind-numbing, drool-inducing dudgery makes me walk up the mirror and give myself the finger. You po' bline fool! And I've been doing this all day, so as to spare you the trouble.

For some good points on how to play the blogging game, see what Dave has to say over at How to Save the World. You might not save the planet, but your blog will thank you.

It's Not a Game

One of these days I'll take a trip to Paris and become a Francophile. Until then, I hate 'em as much as anybody. Always sneering at us, giving us the "poo-poo," because we are "le Americaines moronique." Turns out that French-bashing is becoming our new national sport.

"Cheese-eating surrender monkeys," "the rat that roared," "the petulant prima donna of realpolitik"—the epithets flung at France by the U.S. and British media can easily make a reader forget they're talking about America's oldest ally.

It's unthinkable that our bon amis francais over there are reading some of this in Le Monde and thinking to themselves, "Ah, we must apologize and assuage their ruffled feathers!" But we admire French Prime Minister Jean-Pierre Raffarin for showing some backbone and refusing to play ball with the cowboy set. Last Friday, in response to Bush's "the game is over" gambit, he correctly noted that "It's not a game, it's not over."

Franco-Phones

I've heard of "shotgun dialing," but this is a bit much. French police seized two cell-phone guns on Friday at the home of a robbery and drug-dealing suspect. And this report says "a Croatian gun dealer was caught attempting to smuggle a shipment through Slovenia," while more were found during a drug bust in Amsterdam.

According to the U.S. Customs Service, "hitting the 5, 6, 7 and 8 buttons on the phone gun fires four .22- caliber rounds in quick succession." You load one of these things by twisting it apart at the middle to expose a four-chambered compartment, as shown in the photo, and the bullets shoot out of the antenna. Otherwise they're indentical in every respect to a normal phone. "These would be lethal at 10 meters," said Michel Lavaud, head of a local police brigade.

This is bad news for you and me: remember Richard "Hotfoot" Reid? What he did for footwear, these guns have now done to the cellphone. For example, here's Wolfgang Dicke (love that name) of the German police:

"We find it very, very alarming. It means police will have to draw their weapons whenever a person being checked reaches for their mobile phone."

While these are assumed to be an Eastern European invention, the FBI, the BATF, and U.S. Customs all say they've been briefed, and they too now say that people reaching for their phones in some cases "could be misinterpreted as a threat by authorities." Look out! He's dialing!

GTA III

That's the abbreviation for Grand Theft Auto III, a video game in which players drive around and commit as many crimes as possible. Turns out an Oakland, Calif., gang has been arrested whose members were such devotees of the game that they decided to play for real.

They called themselves the "Nut Cases" and roamed the city in an old Buick, looking for targets at random, police say—robbing dozens and killing five people in the largest single crime wave last year as Oakland reeled from its highest homicide toll since 1997.

The details of this case defy belief, if only due to the heartless nature of the specific acts of murder and violence committed by the group. Along their spree they sprayed bullets into a Christmas party, killing two, including a 14-year-old boy. They also jumped a young father on the street, took his wallet and killed him as he begged for his life. And they're charged with several other murders, nine robberies, and may have committed up to 100 violent muggings.

Police Sgt. Tim Nolan says one of the suspects boasted about Grand Theft Auto, saying, "We play the game by day, we live the game by night." Some of them bragged about driving up Oakland's homicide rate and Nolan adds, "They are a lot more violent and callous than even we are used to." But it wasn't really about a game, as this follow-up article notes. You remember the "drug-ridden '80s era," in which legions of young children growing up in poverty without supervision were expected to become a generation of "Superpredators"? These are they.

6:20:04 PM

The Devil in the Details

Some things deserve a closer look. So you dig down a little, and discover The Hidden. We poked around a bit this morning and came up with this.

Jello

Pudding, actually. After meeting with Hans Blix and Mohamed ElBaradei for a couple of days, the Iraqis handed over "documents on anthrax, VX nerve gas and missile development." So where was this stuff all this time?

Actually, it wasn't the story about "getting more time for U.N. inspectors" that caught my eye, it was this Blix-blub:

Both Blix and ElBaradei avoided saying they were convinced Iraq now was ready to cooperate fully with the inspection program. Blix quipped that the "proof is in the pudding."

That's not the idiom—it's "The proof of the pudding is in the tasting." Sometimes you'll see it as "in the eating," but either way the phrase demands the use of "proof" in the sense of "test," which you see in automobile manufacturers' "proving grounds," for instance.

Pot, Kettle, Black

Here's a disturbing development: "Poll: Germans Believe U.S. a Nation of Warmongers ."

The survey of 1,843 Germans found 93 percent believed Bush was ready to go to war in pursuit of his interests, while 80 percent said the United States wanted war to boost its power.

As the story has it, "The survey found 57 percent agreed with the statement: 'The United States is a nation of warmongers.'" Hey, this is the Germans talking, the people who invented World War II. I find this troubling.

The Sharpton Factor

If you get a chance, take a look at this Howard Kurtz column that analyzes the role of Al Sharpton in the Democratic presidential candidate lineup. As Kurtz points out, nobody really wants this guy around, he's such a pile of gopher guts, but pointing the finger at him is tantamount to suicide.

Sharpton is a smarter politician than most people realize, but he's also a symbol of the kind of divisive racial politics that the Republicans would like to wrap around the neck of the eventual Democratic nominee. So maybe tip-toeing around him isn't the smartest strategy.

On the downside, there's Sharpton's "1987 conviction for defaming a man he accused of raping Tawana Brawley; his 1993 conviction for tax evasion; his 1995 incitement against a Jewish store owner in Harlem, which culminated in the racially motivated murder of seven of the store's employees; and his 2002 eviction from the Empire State Building for failing to pay his rent." On the other hand, bring any of this up and he's going to cry racism. Nobody wants to be tarred with that brush.

10:23:22 AM