i’d rather be in haena   

The only thing that’s been stopping a lot of people from using gadgets like these is their cost. Oh yeah, they’ve been kind of illegal, too. If you want an overheated dialog online, just engage in debate about cellphone jammers.

…so we can more easily study their habits.
And perhaps we can tax their lack of wits by way of exorbitant insurance premiums?

Thesuperficial came up with another no-nonsense headline this morning. It reminded me of one of my favorite columns in The Onion from a few years back.
Larry distinguishes himself daily as one of the most annoying, cloying and downright unwatchable personalities on televison. And that’s coming from the network that also brings you Nancy Grace and Richard Quest.
“Next up on Larry King Live: an exclusive interview with Terry Schiavo’s chiropractor!”

Words fail me, but obviously didn’t in the case of this [scroll about halfway down the page] detail-minded cub reporter. If you never knew Lizzie Jagger before, now you do.
The meat of the gist, verbatim stylee, after the bump. Suffice it to say that this person will probably have their own Denton blog before Spring…
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[Ed: We’re going to print the following in its entirety, because we love you and want to make you cry.]

(more…)

Rebecca MacKinnon reports on Google’s restrictions on searches originating from China.
Google may be taking the high road in resisting US Government lawsuits regarding domestic search results, but their capitulations in China make everything ring hollow.
Google joins Microsoft, Yahoo! and Cisco in their campaigns to quietly set aside traditional American values (First Amendment rights, to be exact) when in pursuit of the Chinese market.

Social networking sites are finding large audiences via cultural niches; music is becoming one of the most popular categories by which folks like to connect. Fred Wilson illuminates some differences between two of the more popular sites, Pandora and Last.fm, and explains why he prefers the latter.
When my laptop drank too much wine a couple weeks back, I lugged an old G4 desktop of mine from cold storage and set it up in the corner of my kitchen. When the laptop dried out, I kept the desktop setup and added an external 250 gig hard drive to play music via iTunes all day, submitting the tracks to Last.fm. My user profile is here. It lists all the artists and songs that have been played over the past couple weeks.
There’s also a private internet audio stream available of the songs I’m sending to Last.fm on Nicecast; email me if you’d like the streaming URL.

If you live in New York and are even semi-famous, there’s a price to pay: the risk your puny daily movements may show up in the Gawker Stalker section of the column. In this installment, Six Feet Under‘s Claire, Lauren Ambrose, has a drunken-fratboy run-in at a karaoke bar. He can expect a foot in his locker on Monday for his trouble. In other news, Kirsten Dunst is witnessed [in possibly post-showered condition] sharing an ambiguous embrace with that Gyllenhaal guy, Paulina Porizkova cleans her plate like a good ex-supermodel, and Shalom Harlow is very tall and attends new-agey lectures. Fascinating.

Especially after this escalation.

George Galloway and Dead Or Alive’s Pete Burns (apparently Boy George and Richard Simmons found the prospect humiliating).
[link courtesy the redesigned Andrew Sullivan].
In an apparently related piece, Christopher Hitchens kicks the cat while it’s down.

“Bein’ the President, I provide my guys, buddies I grew up with from Texas [with tours] to the White House. It’s really neat to see how they react to the majesty of the White House, ‘n’ the Oval Office, the South Lawns, just the beauty of Washington.
Most of ‘em, after they get over the initial shock of seein’ the White House, then come to the shock of wonderin’ how the heck I got there.”
– George Bush, Manhattan, Kansas 1/23/06