This week we talked about midgets, telepathic talking parrots and the great big overhyped DRM threat. Of course that can’t help but bring to mind the thought of midget parrots enforcing DRM by reading your mind. Maybe it’s the overdose of cough syrup but I can’t think that if I’ve thought of it, Bill Gates’ mind has probably gone there too.

Seriously though, the entire premise of DRM is a fundamentally failed position. DRM on music and video reminds me of the copy protection codes games used to commonly have where you had to read the 5th letter in the second paragraph of the fourteenth page in your manual or worse yet puzzle out tiny codes, e.g. Sim City (user friendly games my ass) . Of course if the game was cracked you were saved the effort and got the game for free too. If you paid for the game though, you also had to put up with the hassle of game copy protection and of having to keep your CD’s on hand and insert them one by one whenever the game asked for them. DRM with its multiple incompatible formats (Microsoft Play for Sure won’t play on your Microsoft Zune) is essentially the same thing, to the point that Bill Gates infamously admitted in a conference with some bloggers that it’s easier to just rip a CD. And that’s exactly the point. For as long as DRM is more complicated than piracy, piracy will prevail if not for financial reasons but for convenience. People will pay extra for inconvenience after all.

Take it from someone who’s feeling pretty sick himself right now, when you’re feeling sick you want the best care, you want a professional with experience with a record that speaks of a dedication to both professional achievement and patient care. If you’re in the Alexandria area and your teeth are hurting, the place to go is Hayfield Dental Care and the man to see for that is Charles Brown DDS PC. For over a decade Charles Brown and Hayfield Dental Care has been fixing hurting teeth and setting what ails your gums and cavities to right. Charles Brown isn’t just a highly trained graduate of the Medical College of Virginia or ranked first in his class. He also has a perfect record with zero complaints filed against him. There’s plenty of doctors that have academic honors but academic honors don’t mean much if you mess up when you’ve got the tools in your hands and Charles Brown’s record testifies to stellar achievements in the classroom and more importantly with his patients.

I’ve got a cold so I’ll be happily miserable. Why happy? Because being miserable endows one with moral superiority and is an excuse to waste hours of time wandering around the world of Cyrodil in Oblivion.

Last time before the last I had a bad cold I remember spending huge stretches of time wandering around Morrowind, Oblivion’s predecessor. If you can’t go places in real life because your head is stuffed up, your body aches and you’re coughing up things that look like mutant sewer alligators in miniature, it’s good to have a fantasy world to wander in. A world of breathtaking landscapes, of grassland and swampland, hills and desert and scrub. A world to spread your legs in, while your real ones are thoroughly collapsed under you.

Damn, that Firefly opening. Every time I hear that theme it makes me want to grab a horse and ride till sunset. Firefly didn’t originate the idea of cowboys in space, though it was probably the first non B Movie to do it quite so explicitly, but that’s the whole appeal of it.

The cowboy genre has gone sodden in movies overall, even Kevin Costner’s recent comeback effort (not to mention Wyatt Earp) didn’t catch any fire. Maybe it’s no surprise that Firefly then didn’t make it either, cancelled in less than half a season, just when the story was getting interesting. Shot dead like a varmint after his last bank robbery. But considering the stinkers of unaired episodes Firefly was throwing at us like Heart of Gold and The Message, maybe it was more like a mercy killing.

And in the end the sun always has to set sooner or later.

Kingdoms rise and kingdoms fall and some kingdoms just get too annoying, others too brutal but those are real life kingdoms. Magic kingdoms though are another matter and Disney’s magic kingdom is still magically alive and entertaining a new generation of adults and kids alike. If you’re headed down to Orlando, forget all the other theme parks because they’re just that, theme parks with rides and flashing lights. Disney’s Orlando magic kingdom is a true unique experience like entering a fairy tale. Whether you love fairy tales, wicked pirates, beautiful princesses or dark castles in magic kingdoms (or bright and shiny silver ones) it’s the place to go to reexperience that sense of wonder we all too often forget, bury or give up and give away. But just because you’re getting your Disney tickets to a fun magical experience doesn’t mean there’s any reason to overpay for them. OrlandoFunTickets.com has the lowest princes on Disney tickets. Give them a call or a click and head on out to your magical adventure at cut rate prices.

Okay now last time I read through this run (up to issue 44 I think or maybe 45 at most) Y was stranded in a world without men overrun by various secret societies now staffed by women. I’m not going to comment on the comic reviewers who think this is a realistic scenario (how many women are there in the CIA who even have combat training and women in front line combat are unheard of even in Israel since 1948) but what we basically have here is a guy who functions like a semi-retarded man child having to be chauffered around by a bunch of women who are better at everything than he is. Tell me this isn’t a loser nerd’s fantasy come to life?

Now it’s Friday Night and you’re all alone. Why are you all alone? Because you’re the last man on earth! Now wouldn’t that make a great premise for a TV series. Your average TV series is so busy with government conspiracies and terrorist conspiracies and church conspiracies but picture this, you wake up and you’re all alone. There’s no one in your building. No one in your neighborhood. No one in your whole city. No one on earth for all you know. No TV channel works, the radio stations are off the air. What do you do next? (And no there’s no beautiful daughter of a mad scientist still alive out there, what do you think is, an Alfred Bester parody?)

Everybody knows about the Dallas Cowboys. They’re the team that’s been out there fighting the good fight. They’re the first team to win three super bowls (something only one other team has managed and who takes the Patriots seriously anyway?) It’s a team just as big as Texas itself and just as tough and Never Say Die and Never Give Up. And because America and football fans like winners, the Dallas Cowboys have one hell of a bright future ahead of them. You may not be a Dallas Cowboys fan but then again you just might be and if you aren’t yet, trust me and soon enough you’ll have no choice but to be one. So there’s no point in fighting it, get yourself some Dallas Cowboys tickets and go see yourself a game played by the team as big as big ole Texas itself.

To understand how things have reached they have it is necesarry to understand that the roots of present disasters can be found in the misunderstanding and distortion of history. After the hijackings of September 11th, 9/11 was hijacked yet again when the War on Terror became a vauge dream of bringing democracy to Muslim countries. From a war of self-defense against terrorists who murdered thousands of American citizens, the Bush administration switched to a nebulous campaign to democratize the Middle East.

Where the War in Afghanistan was carefully planned out and allies chosen with a well defined target and succeeded with ease, the War in Iraq was poorly planned out, rushed and ultimately disastrous. Afghanistan was fought as a smart and fast campaign by well motivated troops, Iraq was a messianic campaign premised on the notion that once we overthrew Saddam Hussein, we would quickly inagurate a new era of peace and love in Iraq as joyous Iraqis thrilled that Saddam was gone would soon create a democracy just like us.

And is it the snake oil of Democracy that is at the root of the disaster. As vividly as 19th century Christian missionaries believed in the civilizing effects of Christianity, the neo-conservatives of the Bush administration believed in the civilizing effects of Democracy. What they and Bush failed to understand is that Democracy is not a creed, it is a political system. An adverserial political system in which the popular and the ruthless campaigner thrive.

In a society in which 70 percent of the population supports Cannibalism, the Cannibal party will win. In a society in which 70 percent of the population supports murdering Jews, the Nazi party or Hamas will win. Democracy is only as good as the nation itself. A government cannot be better than the people who vote for it.

The credo of the snake oil salesmen has been that this couldn’t possibly happen because all people are basically good, anywhere in the world and all want the same things. Boiled down this theory can be defined as Original Goodness. It states that all nations are full of good people who are prevented from being good by evil Tyrants. If we rid them of the Tyrants, they will then be good.

With a renewed discussion on the N’Kisi story, an african grey parrot, supposedly capable of intelligent speech and even telepathy, it’s time to revisit a bit of a wrinkle in the story. Dr. Rupert Sheldrake and N’Kisi’s owner, Aimee Morgana, who both seem a little over the bend of kook road, are essentially arguing for both pet telepathy and pet intelligence. This is a fusion that has made the claims about N’Kisi seem wackier than necessary and put off a lot of scientists and researchers… though the magazines and news shows from the BBC on down have been happy to swallow another cutesy talking animal story.

The problem is that pet intelligence may actually be undermined by pet telepathy, and not in the credibility sense. Using language to demonstrate pet intelligence is fine when you presume that the mind of the animal is a self-contained unit that employs language through a process of learning and interacting. By contrast pet telepathy treats the human mind as an open bucket for the pet to draw on. Thus once claims of pet telepathy are introduced the question becomes, is N’Kisi communicating as an intelligent creature or just drawing on leavings from Aimee’s mind.

Once you throw telepathy into the mix, the pet’s mind is then an I-Pod linked to the microprocessor of the human mind. An I-Pod may play songs and store data but it is not a computer, it’s just a flash drive with an interface that can perform some pre-programmed tasks. Advocates for pet intelligence needed to prove that N’Kisi is a computer, instead with their claims of psychic parrot powers, they’ve opened the door to claiming that N’Kisi is nothing more than an I-Pod, a mechanism for drawing on and replaying some material from the human. N’Kisi in other words becomes an echo of Aimee Morgana, which is exactly what most researchers have always said parrots are.

Where parrot linguistic feats could have been demonstrated by having parrots devise new terms thus demonstrating learning, that no longer works once telepathy is postulated. After all there’s no longer any way to experimentally determine what the parrot or may not pick up telepathically. There’s no way to demonstrate whether the bird learned or whether it’s simply imitating something its owner thought.

And that’s why Dr Sheldrake winds up being the worst enemy of his cause.

It’s the rainy city with fish markets, guitar strumming 20 somethings in ripped jeans protesting the nike brands on your clothing and did I mention the rain? When you’re buying a condo though, the fish market and the Kurt Cobain wannabes are definetly not the places to look for good service. CondoCompany.com though. If you’re looking for Seattle condos, a little place in the sky or maybe not in the sky, to call home; Condo Company.com is the place to go. They may not wear ripped jeans and they won’t toss a fish for your amusement (unless you maybe ask them really nicely) but they run a professional site that makes sure when you’re shopping for a roof over your head in the rainy city, you won’t get rained out. When you want to keep the rain off your head and the fish out of your living room, try them and you won’t be sorry.

Okay so we’ve had a bunch of alarmist rhetoric at a bunch of the tech sites like Techdirt and Slashdot and The Register, which are always eager to inform us of the massive DRM conspiracies being leveled against us in tones kooks usually reserve for the ultimate UFO penguin invasion from the skies. What’s their new hobbyhorse? Oh yes, a crippled Windows Vista that will prevent us from watching video in full HDTV. Quick question, who in their right mind watches HDTV on their computer? I mean sure every tech flack is busy predicting a wonderful future that includes super high resolution high definition video broadcast on your shoelace in 100000;1 resolution but seriously, is this the kind of thing to get so worked up about?

Every other day it seems we get a package from the city warning us about the importance of disaster planning, planning for floods, planning for earthquakes, planning for tornadoes (don’t laugh, London was recently hit by a Tornado, no word if Dorothy stopped by Harrods for a brief shopping spree before returning to Oz or Kansas again)

As usual we dump the tax dollars on the government to plan for disasters and the government dumps them back to us in the form of useless packets of bulletins that don’t do us a single bit of good and then obligate us by law to recycle them. In other words we pay the government to send us useless things that make extra work for us. Any chance we can fire the government before Godzilla finally hits London?

Just think about it for a minute. You’ve got finite IT resources and a world full of markets that seem downright infinite or the next thing to it. You need to conserve your resources to maintain your profit margins but how do you prevent your company from bleeding IT resources like a leaky boat in a gale. Acorn Systems’ IT Chargeback is the answer. Acorn’s Activity Based Costing engine more accurately drives your resource outlays based on level of use, rather than on vague projections that all too often wind up having no relevance in the real world. When you’re thinking about cost effectiveness and your supply chain, consider Acorn’s Enterprise Profit System and Activity Based Costing or wind up the loser because the markets don’t stand still and poor calculations will impact your bottom line.

It’s always sad when a manchild grows up. Compare Spielberg’s idealistic childlike movies, whether it’s ET or Goonies or Batteries Not Included to his 21st century work. Grim attempts at social commentary fumbled more often than not. A.I., which should have been a project the old Spielberg could have brought to life, only wound up being painful and awkward to watch. War of the Worlds was a shaky meditation on being a civilian in a time of war, that was also utterly pointless. Spielberg was never built to provide adult commentary on dystopian societies, but to reach for the dream of the child in all of us. It’s sad that in attempting to grow up he’s also wasted his gifts and his birthright.

Everywhere you look someone is calling someone else a Nazi, comparing some policy, tactic or position to Nazism. in the brave post-ideological future, Andy Warhol was almost right… in the future everyone will be considered a Nazi for 15 minutes. And those are the lucky ones.

Everyone gets accused of extremist views because the overall map of people’s views is all over the place and there’s no consistency in between what’s considered a moderate or extremist views. When everyone’s idea of the extreme is a matter of their own location, everyone can be a Nazi to someone else. No matter how moderate your views may be, be sure that to someone, someone out there you’re just like Hitler.

Like a lot of major American urban centers who suffered through blight and recession in the 70’s and 80’s, experienced riots, racial unrest, a declining tax base and all the other malaises of the Carter-Reagan era, Chicago, New York and Boston have made striking comebacks in the Clinton-Bush era thanks to dynamic leadership and a change of pace that has made them exciting places to live again. If you’re in Illinois and looking for that Chicago home, the place to go is the NewCastle Realty Group. They know Chicago real estate better than anyone because they’ve been in the business through the ups and downs and cover a territory of 211 towns, 180 surrounding cities and 77 individual neighborhoods. If you’re keeping score that’s a larger territory than many European countries, and I don’t just mean Lichtenstein or Vatican City. Stop by their website now, because it takes people who know Chicago to sell Chicago.

Why is it you can’t seem to do a good fantasy epic without midgets? Think of Gimli in Lord of the Rings (played by the 6 foot tall John Rhyies Davies) or Warwick Davis in Willow who’s pretty the movie or Acorn in the 10th Kingdom (not a recognized fantasy epic except by me)

It may be politically incorrect to say this but it seems as if giants and midgets are part of the ordinary extraordinary wonder people used to encounter in fairs, circuses and freak shows that are at the root of fantasy. We have no real life goblins (well maybe we do, just read the paper) or orcs or trolls but we have no midget (or little people as apparently they prefer to be called shortage) and the wonder of seeing something ordinary and yet extroardinary reminds us of how strange a place the world can be and isn’t that how all fantasy got started?

Okay so I’m reading that Tony Blair, High Muck-A-Muck of Ye Olde Englande, now rejuvenated with brand new millennium dome and hordes of race riots is praising the Koran.

“To me, the most remarkable thing about the Koran is how progressive it is. I write with great humility as a member of another faith. As an outsider, the Koran strikes me as a reforming book, trying to return Judaism and Christianity to their origins, much as reformers attempted to do with the Christian church centuries later. The Koran is inclusive. It extols science and knowledge and abhors superstition. It is practical and far ahead of its time in attitudes toward marriage, women, and governance.

Under its guidance, the spread of Islam and its dominance over previously Christian or pagan lands were breathtaking. Over centuries, Islam founded an empire and led the world in discovery, art, and culture. The standard-bearers of tolerance in the early Middle Ages were far more likely to be found in Muslim lands than in Christian ones.”

Now that’s a very nice bit of ass kissing and all for a rising national population but you have to wonder as a supposed student of history, how Mr. Blair believes Islam spread exactly. I mean if we read his piece we’d have to assume it spread through tolerance, art and culture, science and liberating women. Kinda like some sorta utopian creed that implemented heaven on earth.

And a region that had been Christian and pagan became converted through hordes of niceness rampaging politely and asking people if they wouldn’t like to reconsider their religion and please become Muslims. Except the Muslim conquest of the Middle East, parts of Africa, Asia and Europe certainly wasn’t done in the manner of door to door missionaries asking if you’d like to take a moment to read their pamphlet and give them 5 pence for it.

They did it by the sword.

Also the spear and ax and whatever came in handy. What followed amounted to ethnic cleansing. Just ask any Assyrian Christian if you can find one. Try a Copt. How about a Greek. Yes they’re around but in far smaller proportions and as persecuted minorities. How about a Zoroastrian. Look for the guys being kicked around in Iran. That’s Islam’s tolerant spread. Like any major religion that conquers a region, it doesn’t go happily ever after for the people conquered. Now Mr. Blair can firmly plant his lips on Mohammed’s backside but it don’t change the fact that Islam didn’t and doesn’t spread peacefully, no matter how much progressive liberals wish it would.

If I’ve got a crazy neighbor throwing fireworks in my yard on new year’s and he refuses to stop. I’ve got two choices. I can beat him senseless or say it’s part of his fireworks throwing culture and feel guilty at even feeling angry at him over it. Most of the Western world has sheepishly chosen the latter path and the fireworks are stinging a bit.

Sure there’s New York and Vegas and L.A. but do any of those places have over 50 theme parks? They sure don’t. There’s only one place in the world that has it. For some it’s to the South. For others it’s to the North. For still others to the West and East. But either way the place to converge on for the holidays is the Florida Panhandle, to Orlando. When it’s cold and snowing outside, unless you’re Santa Claus or Jack Frost you’re in the mood to be someplace warm and Orlando has got more warmth than any place you’re at. And when you’re in Orlando, you need a good hotel, you need a good view of the ocean and a good drink and you’re set to ride out the winter blues in the land of oranges and sandy beaches. Find yourself one of many excellent Orlando hotels and settle down and think of anything but scheduling the next sunset.