Famous People Born in 1908

[Update January 6, 2009: I've posted a list of Famous People born in 1909. The new list has pictures and short descriptions of each person.]

As we move into 2008 it seems useful to look back to get some perspective. Doing that I found on brainyhistory.com a day-by-day list of events for 1908. You can click the link to see it. The page included people born in 1908. [If you're looking for events or people born on specific days in 1908, that's how the brainyhistory list them.] I thought the people list more interesting. This list of people seems to be US centric, though I spotted some European born people and at least three African Americans.

Of all the people on the list only two appear to be possibly still alive. Deadoralive.com says that Claude Levi-Strauss is still alive. But it didn't have George Kimble, a famous geographer, listed, so I couldn't tell. I have not double checked all the dates that I got from brainyhistory.com. However, for all the people who did not have death dates, I googled and got added the death dates with and *, mainly from Wikipedia.

Abraham H. Maslow 1908 - 1970 Alistair Cooke 1908 - 2004 Amy Vanderbilt 1908 - 1974 Arthur J. Goldberg 1908 - 1990 Bette Davis 1908 - 1989 Cesare Pavese 1908 - 1950 Claude Levi-Strauss 1908 - Edward R. Murrow 1908 - 1965 Edward Teller 1908 - 2003 Estee Lauder 1908 - 2004 Frank Leahy 1908 - 1973 George Kimble 1908 - ?? Harry A. Blackmun 1908 - 1999* Jacob Bronowski 1908 - 1974 Jimmy Stewart 1908 - 1997 John Kenneth Galbraith 1908 - 2006* Joshua Logan 1908 - 1988* Lawrence Welk 1908 - 1992 Lyndon B. Johnson 1908 - 1973 Leo Rosten 1908 - 1997 Louis L'Amour 1908 - 1988 Milton Berle 1908 - 2002 Quentin Crisp 1908 - 1999 Rex Harrison 1908 - 1990

Richard Wright 1908 - 1960 Robert Morley 1908 - 1992 Rosalind Russell 1908 - 1976 Simone de Beauvoir 1908 - 1986 Theodore Roethke 1908 - 1963 Thurgood Marshall 1908 - 1993 William Randolph Hearst, Jr. 1908 - 1993* William Saroyan 1908 - 1981 Yousuf Karsh 1908 - 2002 Mary Hemingway 1908 - 1984* Eddie Albert 1908 - 2005* Lefty Gomez 1908 - 1989* Paul Brown 1908 - 1991 Ethel Merman 1908 - 1984 Carl Albert 1908 - 2000* Rene Daumal 1908 - 1944 Greer Garson 1908 - 1996 Henri Cartier-Bresson 1908 -2004 Pauline Frederick 1908 - 1990 Carole Lombard 1908 - 1942 John Holt 1908 - 1967 Osbert Lancaster 1908 - 1980

Who are they all? I don't know them all, but there are at least three US Supreme Court justices, lots of actors, a great photographer, newsman, comedian, a US president, an economist and ambassador to India, the psychologist who authored the Hierarchy of Needs, a baseball player, a congressman, a key architect of the atom bomb, several writers...

I thought it would be interesting to see how many people born in 1908 are still alive. That is a fairly complicated question to ask it appears. The best I can find is the number of centarians, but that is everyone over 100. Actually as of today, most people born in 2008 would still be 99. Here's the Google-answer for the question: Number of 100 year old U.S. citizens per 100,000 population for various dates.

In 2000, there were 50,454 centenarians in the United States, or 1 per
5,578 people, or roughly 18 per 100,000
In 1990, there were 37,306 centenarians in the United States. or 1 per
6,667 people, or roughly 15 per 100,000

Apparently the numbers before these are less accurate. But the researcher did provide this as well:

In 1900, there were 46 centenarians per million people in the US, or
4.6 per 100,000
In 1930, there were approximately 35 centenarians per million people
or 3.5 per 100,000

So, there are a lot more today (18/100,000 rather than 4.6/100,000 in 1900). I'm guessing the drop between 1900 and 1930 might reflect the 1918-20 flu epidemic.

Who born in 2008 will be on this list in 2108? Among all those babies born will be a host of people who will go on to be world famous. So treat them with respect. You never know what the will achieve.

[November 2008 Update: I'm posting writings by and/or about Claude Levi-Strauss in honor of his 100th birthday at the end of November.]

Hosting Files - scribd.com

Nathan, commenting on the Lebow post, said he'd try to get a better copy of the article posted on scribd.com. I've been looking for a place to host pdf files for this blog so I can actually put up good links to texts. So thanks Nathan.

AIFF - Orange Revolution

OK, one more, then that's it.

Orange Revolution has particular relevance for paranoid leftist Americans. Are the powers that lie behind the Bush administration going to accept defeat in the 2008 presidential election [I'm not predicting defeat necessarily, just a scenario] and allow for a peaceful transition to a Democratic president? They didn't in 2000, and there's been suggestion that they election manipulation in Ohio gave them the election in 2004. So, if you believe that they are capable of anything from tampering with votes, voters, voting machines, etc. or even declaring a national security emergency and postponing the elections indefinitely, this is a movie you need to watch.

The ruling party, despite dictating to the media what they can say about the election and the candidates, is still losing to opposition candidate Yushchenko going into the 2004 Ukrainian presidential election. Yushchenko even survives a poisoning that knocks him out of the campaign for a month and leaves his face disfigured. It's clear the government is manipulating the elections and the polling. According to the DVD blurb when Yushchenko is delcared the loser:

They come into the streets by the hundreds of thousands, from every part of the country. Their election has been stolen, and they have come to defend their votes. They march in protest, set up tent cities, and form human barricades around government buildings, paralyzing all state functions.

But this documentary, which has interviews with many people in Yushchenko's campaign, also shows that the campaign had been expecting this result and planning for these mass demonstrations well in advance. They had gotten the tents, had set up procedures for food, bathrooms, music and all the sound and video equipment with it, and on and on, including donations to pay for everything. So when the election results were rigged, the Orange party were ready for the hundreds of thousands who showed up, in a snow storm. And they had contacts in the government to find out what was happening and how to counter.

Americans have a lot to learn from Ukrainians about how to win back a stolen election. In 2000 perhaps Americans were too lulled into the belief that we have fair democratic elections. In 2004 we have less of an excuse. But if the election is stolen in 2008 there will be no turning back and we'll have no excuse for not being prepared. If the Democrats are not watching this film and talking with the participants in preparation for November 2008, then they aren't doing their job.

I would note that at the end of the film it says on the screen that Yushchenko's party fought amongst themselves and things weren't terrific. But it seems to me the point is that the party in power, who were using that power for their own ends rather than for the people's, were not allowed to steal the election and keep in power. Whatever problems Yushchenko had in ruling, were less serious than had the old regime stayed in power.

198 Methods of Nonviolent Protest and Persuasion

This is only the first 34. This is from RANT - A Trainers Collective.


FORMAL STATEMENTS
1. Public speeches
2. Letters of opposition or support
3. Declarations by organizations and institutions
4. Signed public declarations
5. Declarations of indictment and intention
6. Group or mass petitions

COMMUNICATIONS WITH A WIDER AUDIENCE
7. Slogans, caricatures, and symbols
8. Banners, posters, and displayed communications
9. Leaflets, pamphlets, and books
10. Newspapers and journals
11. Records, radio, and television
12. Skywriting and earthwriting

GROUP REPRESENTATIONS
13. Deputations
14. Mock awards
15. Group lobbying
16. Picketing
17. Mock elections

SYMBOLIC PUBLIC ACTS
18. Displays of flags and symbolic colors
19. Wearing of symbols
20. Prayer and worship
21. Delivering symbolic objects
22. Protest disrobings
23. Destruction of own property
24. Symbolic lights
25. Displays of portraits
26. Paint as protest
27. New signs and names
28. Symbolic sounds
29. Symbolic reclamations
30. Rude gestures

PRESSURES ON INDIVIDUALS
31. "Haunting" officials
32. Taunting officials
33. Fraternization
34. Vigils

These are the sections they have under Resources


Action Planning
Affinity Groups and Spokes Councils
Anti-Oppression
Consensus
Direct Action/Civil Disobedience
Health and Safety, Medical
Legal/Jail
Media
Spanish Materials
Strategy

Meetup.com Anchorage Beach Hike

I haven't been on a meetup.com hike since spring - too busy, too lazy, wrong time, wrong hike, lots of excuses. The concept is great - a website where people who want to meetup for some activity. But walking along the beach near Kincaid sounded just right and the time was fine.











We did ok coming down the steep embankment from the Jodphur parking lot. This big piece of driftwood was at the bottom, on the beach.








































We were eight people and eight dogs, all of whom will sleep well tonight.


















The strong tides in Cook Inlet tend to jumble the sea ice and leave a lot on the shore.

















Doug Van Etten, the mastermind behind the meetup.com adventurer group.






















The clouds were heavy, but there was a break on the western horizon all afternoon giving us a peak of the Alaska Range. I think this is Mt. Redoubt.

Baranof Hotel Gets Cheap Oil

While oil field support executives were running their legislative log rolling scheme from Room 604 of the Baranof, the hotel was already starting to wean itself from petroleum and using its own kitchen cooking oil to heat the hotel. There was a short item in the ADN Money section on Thursday, December 27, 2007. I couldn't find it through Google, but found what might be the source - what looks like a copy of a Westmark Hotel press release on a December 17 Reuters report. Baranof general manager Steve Hamilton said they started using cooking oil because the local incinerator no longer took the oil. They now collect oil from other Juneau businesses

The Baranof creates a mix of 1/2 vegetable cooking oil and 1/2 fuel oil
which is then used to heat the hotel.  The hotel can burn up to 2,000 gallons
of oil in one month and typically uses 10,000 gallons of cooking oil over the
course of the year. By using cooking oil, the hotel has reduced the amount of
fuel oil they use by 9,000 gallons a year.

So, with a little thinking we can find better ways to do things. Instead of paying someone to dispose of their waste cooking oil, they now save the cost of 9000 gallons of heating fuel. How many more clever alternatives are out there? It seems like we generally have to be forced to find them when business as usual doesn't work. Sounds like everyone is coming out ahead.

Environmental benefits from using vegetable oil include releasing fewer
pollutants into the air, recycling of carbon already in the system and a
reduction in carbon output. In addition, businesses in Juneau have found a
reliable way to dispose of unwanted cooking oil without running afoul of
environmental regulations. Employees from the Westmark Baranof Hotel pick up
the oil free at their doorstep each week.

Way to go Steve. And by the way, how come the ADN left out the environmental benefits in their version of the story? Or don't they talk about that sort of thing in the Money section?

AIFF and Mental Health - A Summer in the Cage, Autism the Musical, Body/Antibody, Oil on Water

According to the National Institute for Mental Health

An estimated 26.2 percent of Americans ages 18 and older — about one in four adults — suffer from a diagnosable mental disorder in a given year.¹ When applied to the 2004 U.S. Census residential population estimate for ages 18 and older, this figure translates to 57.7 million people.².... In addition, mental disorders are the leading cause of disability in the U.S. and Canada for ages 15-44.³

Despite these statistics, we are, as a nation, dismally ignorant about the specifics of individual mental illnesses and the moral and ethical implications of how they work.

I didn't think I was going to write any more about this year's Anchorage International Film Festival, but I was able to borrow a few from the Festival office, and I just watched a powerful piece of movie making - A Summer in the Cage. It begins as a documentary about making a documentary about the basketball players at the Cage in Greenwich Village. But it turns into a film about one of the few white players, a guy named Sam, who takes over the director's life (and vice versa) and gets him to make the film about Sam, who is manic-depressive, also called bi-polar. It all worked for me - the photography, the story, the characters, the music, the lack of resolution. It had the magic.

And that got me to thinking. This was the fourth mental health themed movie that I saw through the AIFF. I guess if we aren't willing to talk about something, we leave it to the artists deal with it. And these films each did in totally different ways. The others were

• Autism the Musical
• Oil on Water
• Body/Antibody

Autism and the Cage were documentaries. For Autism, the movie making was low tech and succeeded because it didn't get in the way of the story. Cage was a very produced movie - it says "produced in association with the Sundance Channel - and it works well. The editor made good use of even the out of focus footage. Both delve deeply into the world of their mental health disorders to give us an intimate look at how the illness affects the individual and those around the individual. Each use the media of film to convey to outsiders what these conditions are like. Both films followed people with mental illnesses, not knowing where they would end up. Autism the Musical had more structure because it was focused on a musical being produced by a group of autistic kids. A Summer in the Cage was more or less a chance encounter that led the director, through curiosity and a growing sense of obligation (well, he told the story so that's what it looked like) to follow along for five years.


The two features were totally different. Oil on Water was ostensibly a feature film about the romance between an artistic young man and a beautiful model/writer. Only toward the end did it become the story of a schizophrenic. I left the theater with the sense that spreading the message about schizophrenia was the purpose of making the movie, and the interview with the producer Elle Matthews on the Writing Studio website seems to back that up.

On the other hand, Body/Antibody seems like a movie in which a character happens to be obsessive-compulsive. There's nothing preachy about the movie, this is not an 'educational movie,' it's just a good, dramatic comedy, that incidentally gives us a glimpse of what it means to be obsessive-compulsive. The director was at the showing and said he'd been fascinated by the disorder and had wanted one day to make a film that featured it. But it's the character who happens to have the disorder, not the disorder itself, that is the focus. However, the audience learns a lot about the disease. How, for example, can someone obsessed with cleanliness have sex? We find out. In addition to sex, it has that other essential ingredient of a successful 21st century movie - violence. Ultimately, I would expect that this movie will also serve as a greater vehicle for educating the world about mental health because it is basically entertainment whereas all the others are films about a mental health issue and they are troubling. This film could easily be released at the mall cineplex anywhere in the US and do well. The others will have a more difficult time getting that sort of audience. Autism, according to its website, will be shown on HBO and Cage was shown on the Sundance Channel.

For anyone who is teaching about mental health, I would highly recommend all but Oil on Water as excellent vehicles for getting the message across. They are real (including the language) and compelling and the basis for excellent discussion on the specific mental health issues they cover. Oil on Water has a more artsy look. I like artsy, but I had problems with the acting and pace in the beginning. It probably would be of interest to those with schizophrenia and their relatives and close friends.

Understanding about mental illness is critical in the United States and the rest of the world. In the US we have a basic story that says everyone is responsible for how his life turns out. Mental illness doesn't fit in that story. We'd rather believe that people are irresponsible, lazy, or evil when they don't behave appropriately. It's their own fault they don't succeed. What scientists are learning about mental health contradicts that story. One day there must be a showdown between our myths of autonomous man and the reality of mental health and illness.

These movies help show how powerfully, good movies can affect people's basic stories, by giving them an intimate window into the lives of people they otherwise would not know.

For earlier posts that touched on these movies see here and here for Oil on Water (I liked it better after seeing some other films), Autism the Movie and Body/Antibody are briefly mentioned in the first Oil link. Autism also has its own post. Body/Antibody should have had its own post, but I saw it late in the festival, so I hope I've done it justice in this post.

Picking the Right Story to Interpret the 'Facts'

Philip commented on the last post about Charlie Wilson's War:

Back through the 70s, I read a lot about the USSR. Current affairs and history, mostly dealing with musical life there. Between knowledge from that and talking to friends who had worked or studied there, I felt that the USSR was already teetering close to the edge before the mid-70s.

Hedrick Smith's _The Russians_ came out in 1975, four years before the Afghan invasion, during the middle of the short Ford administration. The book fairly clearly describes the already existing structural flaws that led to the collapse of the USSR fourteen years later.

It is possible that by forcing the Soviet government to spend more on defensive and counter-offensive weapons during the 1980s the US sped the inevitable along, but I doubt we'll ever know.

I've discussed in previous posts - particularly this one about "a black-hole bully, punching the nose of a passing galaxy" - how humans interpret facts based on the stories in their heads. Those stories - models, theories, narratives, we use many different words - get into our heads in different ways. Which story gets to be the interpreter of any collection of 'facts' at any point in time in any individual's brain, is a mystery. And I would wager most of us aren't aware of the stories we have that compete to interpret the world around us. Some we can identify - though they may not be the real story - others work in our heads without our ever actually articulating them.

Phil does a good job articulating the basis for his interpretation of the fall of the Soviet Union and he may be right - the Soviets were on the decline and, at best, the defeat in Afghanistan just sped that up. But I'm not so sure. The Soviet Union fell when the people stopped obeying. They simply withdrew their willingness to obey. When individual dissidents did that, the government could deal with that. But when the entire population did it, the government simply dissolved. (OK, this is my story, greatly influence by Vaclav Havel's "The Power of the Powerless". Click on the title for excerpts of the essay and here for a discussion that applies Havel's story to the US today.) The loss of young Soviet lives in Afghanistan and the eventual defeat in Afghanistan brought the people of the Soviet Union to the point of being able to withdraw their cooperation with the government. To simply stop cooperating with the regime. Then the radical capitalist crusaders with their "capitalism as the savior of humankind" ideology rushed into the Soviet Union to spread their Gospel. The initial euphoria dissipated as the pitfalls of unbridled capitalism - greed, inequality of wealth, followed by inequality of justice - resulted in a relative few Russians getting fabulously wealthy and the vast majority seeing their physical standard of living fall. Now, they seem to be sliding back into traditional Russian totalitarianism. So, Afghanistan may have made that moment of change possible. Without Afghanistan, things would have gotten bad, but they could have kept the Soviet infrastructure and more carefully adopted aspects of the market, as has China. The point of this post is not to decide who is 'right' but to illustrate how stories help us (for better or worse) interpret what we accept as 'facts.'


On NPR's Day to Day this morning (you can listen to it here,) the real Charlie Wilson says that the arming of the Mujahideen was his greatest achievement and he repeats the final message of the movie - that all we needed to do was fund the schools and infrastructure of post-war Afghanistan, and it wouldn't have left open for the Taliban to take.

But I can't help but wonder. At the end of the film we see Charlie Wilson half-heartedly, and unsuccessfully, arguing with his committee colleagues that they need to just put $1 million into education for Afghanistan. He worked a lot harder for arms than he did for education. I suspect his story is influenced by his own part in it all and his need to feel good about helping the Afghans defend themselves. But if he'd have fought for schools with 1/10th the zeal he'd fought for stingers, surely he could have raised a few million for schools. This "I did the right thing but Congress didn't follow through with schools" story doesn't quite ring true to me. Bringing the Soviet Union to its knees is a better story for Charlie Wilson, than bringing the Taliban to power in Afghanistan and allowing Bin Laden to train Al Qaeda there.

Charlie Wilson's War leads in part to today's war

George Crile's book, Charlie Wilson's War, gives an in depth picture of how things work in Washington DC, particularly how an unimportant Texas Congressman was able to get $100 billion worth of weapons and aid to the Mujahideen to defeat the Soviets in Afghanistan. The clip gives you as almost as much of the movie as the movie gives you of the book. You only get to hear Julia Roberts on the phone and you don't even get that much of Philip Seymour Hoffman who has the best role in the movie as a not usual CIA agent.



The quote from Congressman Wilson at the end of the movie suggests that it wasn't arming the Mujahideen that led to the Taliban taking over Afghanistan, but rather Congress' unwillingness to fund schools after the Soviets left. Did Wilson significantly speed up the fall of the Soviet Union by spearheading the arming of the Mujahideen? I don't know. I do know that the book should be read by as many people as possible given that the US is once again at war in Afghanistan. The movie also gives a glimpse of a refugee camp, another must see for Americans. The movie is entertaining, but not especially enlightening.

If you're taking a long plane trip, this is a great airplane book. It's really hard to put down. Watching the movie won't spoil the book, anymore than watching my short video will spoil the movie. See also the official Charlie Wilson's War website.

Anchorage in Winter - Downtown and Biker

I went to a meeting at the train depot today. Here's a shot from the third floor looking south towards downtown Anchorage. The big building on the right is the Hilton Hotel.




With the advent of the mountain bike, the availability of studs for bike tires and bright flashing bike lights, and the increasing price of gas, more and more people are discovering that winter biking is doable. Cold isn't the issue - people are outside skiing and snow machining, so why not biking?

The biggest problem is cars. I'm NOT a biker who goes out in the street if a decent sidewalk exists. Claiming your biker's right to use the road is like Timothy Treadwell playing with grizzlies. The cars might miss you most of the time, but all it takes is one to ruin a perfectly good life. (And if you're contemplating suicide, go biking. Maybe it will change your mind.)

But that said, trips where there is a plowed bike path or sidewalk, of less than a mile, are easy to handle. Then start going further. And you can usually find a bike rack or no parking sign to chain it too. And you can always take a bus back - they have room for two bikes in front.

Did I take my bike today? Nooooooo. I don't have studded tires, so don't go out too far, especially on a tight schedule. But I try to use it when I'm going within a mile or two of home and back rather than the car. I never claimed to be perfect.

Retaliation - Will Alaskans Be Required to get Pre-Approval when flying over Canada?

This warning for Alaskans found at Boing Boing while attempting to get follow up information on the Icelandic woman held at JFK.

Many flights from Western Canada to southern Ontario pass over US territory. The US is now making noises that they may require passengers on such flights to be pre-approved by US authorities up to 72 hours in advance. This also applies to Canadian flights to Mexico, Cuba and other points south.

It will be politically impossible for the Canadian government not to impose similar conditions on US flights passing over Canada. This included flights from Alaska to the Eastern US, and most flights from the US to Europe.

It'll be amusing to watch the reaction of some US congressman travelling from Washington to Alaska or Europe, when Canada denies him permission to get on the flight because he didn't book far enough in advance.

I guess the flights to Seattle could veer out over the ocean a bit to avoid this, but will they?

And another reminder that what we do without thinking has long term consequences:

China raised its visa fees for Americans to match what the US charges foreigners. They also require you to come to the embassy or consulate in person as the US does in China. Fortunately, the Chinese did this only symbolically - you can hire someone to take your passport in for you and get a visa if you don't have a local consulate.

Brazil also instituted fingerprinting of Americans coming into Brazil in retaliation for this requirement by American Customs.

Let's hope wiser heads prevail.

Liberty Watch - Reading Lolita in Tehran

Sanaz has missed the last couple of the literary meetings of Azar Nafisi and seven of her best female students. They meet in her apartment to read Western literature. Sanaz comes late into the meeting. Nafisi writes in Chapter 21:

Her story was a familiar one.

I was stunned, after reading her story, to realize that it is a familiar one. I just posted about Eva Ósk Arnardóttir [I've learned it's Erla, not Eva] early Tuesday morning. But first listen to Sanaz' edited story.

A fortnight earlier, Sanaz and five of her girlfriends had gone for a two-day vacation by the Caspian Sea. On their first day, they had decided to visit her friend's fiancé in an adjoining villa. Sanaz kept emphasizing that they were all properly dressed, with their scarves and long robes. They were all sitting outside, in the garden: six girls and one boy. There were no alocoholic beverages in the house, no undesirable tapes or CDs..

And then "they" came with their guns, the morality squads, surprising them by jumping over the low walls. They claimed to have received a report of illegal activities, and wanted to search the premises. Unable to find fault with their appearance, one of the guards sarcastically said that looking at them, with their Western attitudes...What is a Western attitude? Nassrin interrupted. Sanaz looked at her and smiled. I'll ask him next time I run into him... The guards took all of them to a special jail for infractions in matters of morality. There, despite their protests, the girls were kept in a small, dark room, which they shared the first night with several prostitutes and a drug addict. Their jail wardens came into their room two or three times in the middle of the night to wake up those who might have dozed off, and hurled insults at them.

They were held in that room for forty-eight hours. Despite their repeated requests, they were denied the right to call their parents. Apart from brief excursions to the rest room at appointed times, they left the room twice - the first time to be led to a hospital, where they were given virginity tests by a woman gynecologist, who had her students observe the examinations. Not satisfied with her verdict, the guards took them to a private clinic for a second check...

Erla Ósk Arnardóttir, an Icelandic national, purportedly was searched, ask about her last period, not allowed to contact anyone, paraded through JFK airport chained and handcuffed, treated rudely, and eventually held overnight in a jail cell for the minor infraction of having overstayed a visa by 3 weeks, more than ten years earlier.

I had just written that I was reading this book, Reading Lolita in Tehran, but while it was interesting, I was having trouble getting through it. I think I figured out my problems with the book.

1. Each chapter is almost an independent vignette. There is a connection, but one isn't compelled to read the next chapter. Reading it in bed before sleep, I found myself hoping the short chapter would end and I could sleep. This is unlike some books where I had to find out what happened next.

2. The book doesn't challenge what I know. A student once gave me a one-page article and said it helped him understand why he was having trouble in my class. The article said there were two kinds of learning - happy and unhappy learning. Happy learning is when you learn something that reinforces what you already know. Unhappy learning is when you learn something that challenges what you already know. Reading Lolita's author is Iranian, but her perspective is a Western one, and her issues are the ones a Western professor might have teaching under the Ayatollah. They confirm our stereotypes about Iran. That is not to say that I want to read something that says Iran is really a wonderful place to live, but rather I would like to read something that would help me understand the mindset of those who support the regime. How do they think? Are they similar to Americans who blindly support the Bush regime? Or is it a totally different reasoning?

But last night's story gave me a new reason for why Americans should read this book. It illustrates stories of repression, large and small, which we see going on in the US today. That George W. would bring democracy to Iran, let alone Iraq, is ludicrous given that he's already introduced a police state in the no-man's land of airport security - particularly before one gets out of customs - where people have no rights, cannot contact friends or relatives or attorneys, can be held indefinitely without apparent reason. Erla Ósk Arnardóttir's story as well as those mentioned by Naomi Wolf and our own experiences with TSA tell us this. The story was also told in the short film Security that was part of the Anchorage International Film Festival.

A least Nafisi and her students could read Lolita, albeit getting copies was not easy, but it was not illegal as it was in the US not all that long ago. And among some circles in the US the book is still condemned.

Reading Lolita in Tehran is a reminder about those who zealously protest their loyalty to America and condemn as traitors those who would criticize the US government. How are they different from the 'morality squads' or the guards who dealt with Arnardóttir?

I would make it very clear, though, that most of the TSA I have dealt with have not slipped over into the dark side. They've tried to do their task with humor and understanding. They've not been thoughtless automatons. Even Erla writes,

another jail guard took pity on me and removed the leg chains.

And they are restrained by their instructions and the lack of resources and by facing irritable people late for their planes. But for the most part I see this as a terribly expensive - in time, money, and degradation of freedom - facade to make us feel like our government is protecting us from the enemy, an enemy that I believe is a lot less formidable than the current administration would have us believe.


Note: I did try to find more on the Icelandic tourist.

• The site I initially found the information on mispelled her name. It should be Erla, not Eva.
• There isn't a lot on this in mainstream new media. I guess for most surly and inappropriate treatment by TSA is not news. However the International Herald Tribune
  

has an AP story:

REYKJAVIK, Iceland: Iceland's government has asked the U.S. ambassador to explain the treatment of an Icelandic tourist who says she was held in shackles before being deported from the United States.

The woman, Erla Osk Arnardottir Lillendahl, 33, was arrested Sunday when she arrived at JFK airport in New York because she had overstayed a U.S. visa more than 10 years earlier...

She was deported Tuesday, she told reporters and wrote on her Internet blog.

On Thursday, Foreign Minister Ingibjorg Solrun Gisladottir told U.S. Ambassador Carol van Voorst that the treatment of Lillendahl was unacceptable.

"In a case such as this, there can be no reason to use shackles" Gisladottir said. "If a government makes a mistake, I think it is reasonable for it to apologize, like anyone else."

Van Voorst has contacted the officials at JFK airport and asked them to provide a report on Lillendahl's case, Gisladottir said.

• Iceland Review Online reports

12/20/2007 | 12:02

US Authorities Regret Treatment of Icelandic Tourist

Iceland’s Foreign Minister Ingibjörg Sólrún Gísladóttir received a letter from Stewart Baker, Assistant Secretary for Policy for the US Ministry of Homeland Security, yesterday, saying he regretted the treatment of an Icelandic tourist earlier this month.

The letter states that the incident gives the US Ministry of Homeland Security a reason to review work procedures regarding how foreign tourists are being received in the US, Morgunbladid reports.

My First Music Video - Hunting in Winter

I didn't intend to make a music video. I had some pictures from this afternoon's walk at Campbell Creek near Stuckagain. But music sounded like a good idea. Grrrr. Going to have to learn how to use Garage Band so I can make some noises to put on some of the videos. But in the meantime, what can I use without getting into too much trouble? Something winter related.

I found a CD one of my students, Guo Wei, gave me in Beijing. She was an er hu player in the student traditional Chinese orchestra at Renmin University of China. We even got to hear two of their concerts in beautiful concert halls. So I found a piece from the CD

New Melodies of "Si Zhu"
Collection of Traditional Musical Instruments

Conducted by Qin Pengzhang Yang Chunlin

This is part of track 3 - Sketch of Life in the North - fourth movement - Hunting in Winter

Well, we weren't hunting, but it is north and it is winter.






And then, one thing led to another. The pictures had to have some connection to the music. Let's just say, I learned a lot on iMovie today, and I have a long way to go. I really got into the music and wanted to do the whole piece, but I never would have finished that. It's not finished as it is. I hope you enjoy the pictures of Campbell Creek area and the wonderful music.

This is especially for my musician fellow blogger, Phil; Guo Wei; Frank in Beijing; and Des and Lyrica.

Elmore Leonard's 10 Rules of Writing

When I was at the library yesterday, I picked up 10 Rules of Writing at the new books shelf and proceeded to read it, and finish it, in about 30 minutes. This was tremendously satisfying since I have several books I'm sloooooooowwwwly working my way through. Reading Lolita in Tehran is

beautifully written and interesting, but isn't a book I have trouble putting down. I'm also working my way through We're All Journalists Now, a book on bloggers as journalists. Actually, it's not hard and not long, but after reading 30 pages I put it down and I'm having trouble picking it up again. I'm having trouble with books, because the internet panders to short attention span. I must start working more seriously on my to do lists lest surfing prevents me from doing other things I want to do.

So, quickly, the 10 steps:

1. Never open a book with weather
2. Avoid prologues
3. Never use a verb other than 'said' to carry dialogue
4. Never use an adverb to modify 'said'
5. Keep your exclamation points under control
6. Never use the words 'suddenly' or 'all hell broke loose'
7. Use regional dialect, patois, sparingly
8. Avoid detailed descriptions of characters
9. Don't go into great detail describing places and things
10. Try to leave off the parts that readers tend to skip

I'll have to check if I'm following these rules. I'll add some pictures and a few more comments later. Gotta run now.

[Back. Joe Ciardiello's illustrations are fantastic. No exclamation point. Perhaps the main justification for stretching a six year old New York Times article into a book is to share Ciardiello's illustrations. The one on the right illustrates one of the many exceptions to the rules. In this case Rule 5. Elmore writes about exclamation points

If you have the knack of playing with exclaimers the way Tom Wolfe does, you can throw them in by the handful.

The book is so short they had to use the thickest pages I can remember to stretch it into book length.]

Liberty Watch - TSA Guarding the Nation

Here's the beginning of the story of an Icelandic visitor who was chained and handcuffed at JFK held without sleep or food and very delayed phone contact, then taken to a jail in New Jersey. I found a number of other sites carrying the same story, but not futher corroboration of the story. It appears from the story that her crime was having overstayed a visit by three weeks in 1995. So let's withhold judgment at the moment, but put it into our Liberty Watch file as we watch Naomi Wolf's ten steps to dismantling democracy take place. This seems to fit 5. Arbitrarily detain and release citizens. Although this is not a US citizen, would American citizens expect this sort of treatment when visiting other nations? The whole story is at this site.

[Note: Later stories say it is Erla, not Eva]

The story of Eva, [Erla] Ósk Arnardóttir:

During the last twenty-four hours I have probably experienced the greatest humiliation to which I have ever been subjected. During these last twenty-four hours I have been handcuffed and chained, denied the chance to sleep, been without food and drink and been confined to a place without anyone knowing my whereabouts, imprisoned. Now I am beginning to try to understand all this, rest and review the events which began as innocently as possible.

Last Sunday I and a few other girls began our trip to New York. We were going to shop and enjoy the Christmas spirit. We made ourselves comfortable on first class, drank white wine and looked forward to go shopping, eat good food and enjoy life. When we landed at JFK airport the traditional clearance process began.

We were screened and went on to passport control. As I waited for them to finish examining my passport I heard an official say that there was something which needed to be looked at more closely and I was directed to the work station of Homeland Security. There I was told that according to their records I had overstayed my visa by 3 weeks in 1995. For this reason I would not be admitted to the country and would be sent home on the next flight. I looked at the official in disbelief and told him that I had in fact visited New York after the trip in 1995 without encountering any difficulties. A detailed interrogation session ensued.

I was photographed and fingerprinted. I was asked questions which I felt had nothing to do with the issue at hand. I was forbidden to contact anyone to advise of my predicament and although I was invited at the outset to contact the Icelandic consul or embassy, that invitation was later withdrawn. I don't know why.

The rest of the story is at this site.

[12/26/07 See related/follow up story here.]

Victor Lebow's Complete Original 1955 Article

Summary:

• The article is at the end of this post.
  
• The article appears to be in the vein it is quoted - more a prescription of how retailers will have to market things than a critique of capitalism. But the quote itself shows he had a macro perspective as well as a micro perspective
  
• I haven't been able to find much more about Victor Lebow.
• There is the 1972 book titled, Free Market: The Opiate of the American People. Perhaps he got disillusioned about American business and this quote was an early insight he had.
• Are there any students of Lebow? Family? If you ever see this please help fill in the missing links.
  
• Kevin, this post is all your fault. Thanks.

[January 30, 2008 Update: I've just received and posted Lebow's bio from the 1972 book, Free Enterprise: The Opiate of the American People.]

[Update 13 May 2009: Yesterday's NYT article on Story of Stuff seems to have brought more than the regular number visitors here. Hundredgoals has given a link to a much easier to read pdf version of the 1955 article in a comment today.]

In a previous post I raised questions about a quote by Victor Lebow. Was this the serious blueprint for American business to insinuate consumerism into the spiritual center of American life or a critique of modern capitalism?

Most of the links I googled looked like they all linked back to the same source. There was no contemporary discussion of the 1955 article on line. The University library nearby didn't have the Journal of Retailing on line back to 1955, but did have hard copies. But then I found a 1972 book by Victor Lebow called Free Enterprise: The Opium of the American People. It seemed to me that someone writing a book with that title must have have written the above paragraph as a critique, not as a prescription. I decided not to follow up and find the original article.

But I got an email from Kevin in Chicago who was trying to track it down too. So I went to the library today. Got the microfiche and found the article. It looks like a serious retailing article, talks about the 1955 marketing year and what retailers are going to have to do. It's in that context the above quote is written. There is no electronic version available, and the copier connected to the microfiche wasn't working very well, so I ended up taking pictures. I still haven't figured out how to post pdf files on blogger, so I'm going to post the pictures of the microfiche screen. (See below)

In the midst of all this there was a fire alarm in the library and everyone had to evacuate. A staff person, it turned out, had burnt popcorn in the microwave. That all took about 40 minutes.

Googling today I've found a 1944 article:

The Nature of Postwar Retail Competition
Victor Lebow Journal of Marketing, Vol. 9, No. 1 (Jul., 1944), pp. 11-18. [The link gets you page 1]


An OCTOBER 13, 1976 Manas Reprint article "MOTIVES OR METHODS?" that talks about a Victor Lebow book review of Robert Heilbroner's Business Civilization in Decline. Here Lebow appears as a critique of modern business culture, and is qouted writing, for example,

Capitalism is already showing signs that it can no longer generate the social morale so essential to continued existence. It is true that it has freed probably more than half the American people from scarcity and want. But at the heart of this business civilization is a "hollowness"—everything is evaluated in money terms. "Or consider advertising, perhaps the most value-destroying activity of a business civilization." That hollowness is further emphasized by the low estimation business places on the value of work, which it sees as a means to an end—not the true end in itself for that is profit, income, economic growth. Nor is industrial socialism immune to this outlook, for its roots lie "in machine process and worship of efficiency." Under a business culture [civilization as Heilbroner puts it sharply]. Stuffed into the dustbin of history would be[the values] of output are celebrated and those of input merely calculated."

Then there is a totally different sort of reference to a Victor Lebow. This is about a 1942 Wichita Kansas East High graduate who was part of a fantasy Martian Empire that was created in 1937, by the website owner's older brother.

My brother James was 13, and in the eighth grade at Robinson Junior High School in Wichita, Kansas. And in his mind he was fashioning a cosmic empire filled with strange and wonderful creatures and races — in which a stalwart group of Exiles from the planet Mars were the chief actors and heroes.

This Empire, the Martian Empire, eventually spread over most of the known Universe before it finally faded around 1948. During the eleven years it flourished, however, the Martian Epic became very elaborate — covering some 15 billion years of Martian history — and Martian technology, manners and morals, art, music, religion, language and literature. And it generated a narrative Epic that encompassed many galaxies.

Among the members of this empire he identifies Victor Lebow and includes a picture.

Victor Lebow: At East High: he was usually on the Honor Roll, was a member of the Nationally Honor Society, and a semi-finalist for the Summerfield Scholarship. At WU: he belonged to the Independent Students’ Association and Aesculapius.

I emailed Lee Streiff, the website owner, but the email came back undeliverable. [later: I guess that's because of this:

Thornton Lee Streiff, 72, died Sunday, August 1, 2004 in Wichita, KS. No service was held.]

This Victor Lebow graduated high school in 1942 and it is unlikely he would have authored an article in a business journal in 1944. He could be the author of the 1972 book on Free Enterprise. And the Lebow quoted in the Manas article above. But the Manas quote echoes thoughts from the original quote. It's probably a different Victor Lebow.

Meanwhile here are the bad copies of the original 1955 article that the quote comes from. The famous quotation comes from page 7, right column. There is a chunk that was skipped over, but it really doesn't change the tenor of the quote. But I saved these as high res photos so you should be able to click them and get them in readable = not good, but readable - size.

[Jan. 7, 2008 - Thanks to Nathan, one of the commenters on this post, I now have an account at scribn.com where you can park word, pdf., and other files. So I cleaned up these photos and saved them as a pdf. file. You can enlarge the document in the window or even download it. This should make reading it easier. I'll leave one or two of the old pages up so you can see the difference. It's on p. 5-10 in the journal, then skips to 42, then a part of page 44. The oft quoted part is on p. 7.]

p.5 of the journal / (p.1 of the article)above

"It's like a bully, a black hole bully punching the nose of a passing galaxy"

This blog's name is "What Do I Know" because I'm interested in how people 'know' what they know. How is it that Christians of one denomination 'know' their truth while those of another know a different truth? And Muslims yet another truth. Hindus and Sikhs still others.

How is it one voter 'knows' that Ron Paul is exactly what American needs, while another thinks he would be a disaster?

I don't know the answers to these questions, but the explanation that makes most sense to me is that humans come to 'know' things through a complex mix of ways.

• genetics provide us with instincts and predisposed tendencies
• experiences with the world that provide us with mostly unconscious knowledge of the physical world (visually interpreting depth and movement) and the social world (interpreting the intent of other people)
• instructions from authorities such as parents, the media, teachers which is why Chinese babies end up speaking Chinese, unless they get adopted by, say, an American, in which case they end up learning English; and why Muslim kids usually have Muslim parents
• logic and reason provide us with ways to examine what we know, test it, change it

All of these ways are essential, none is best for everything, some are better for some things. How they play out in our brains is different from individual to individual, and even within a single individual from one time to another.

So I found Seth Borenstein's AP story on a black hole the other day interesting. He writes:

"It's like a bully, a black-hole bully, punching the nose of a passing galaxy," said astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson, director of the Hayden Planetarium in New York, who wasn't involved in the research.

But ultimately, this could be a deadly punch.

What in Neil deGrasse Tyson's life causes him to see, in these images, a bully punching someone in the nose? Why does he put human intent in them? Poets use images to convey abstract ideas. If Tyson is trying to make this astronomical event understandable to us non-astronomers, why that image? Watch the NASA video and see if that is what you see.





Actually the description in the video is far less based on human emotions.

This made me think of Rohrschach tests. Those inkblots psychologists give patients to interpret. From the same ink splotches, different people see totally different things. I only have a layperson's understanding of such tests and the Rorschah.com site said very little

The test itself, as well as the book, are too well known to require any detailed commentary here,

Rohrschach.org was full of typos that didn't give me much confidence in that site. (revealing one of the ways I 'know' what I think I can trust on the internet.)

uk.tickle.com had what they purport to be an actual Rohrschach test. I went through the eleven inkblots, but at the end I had to 'skip' eight or nine ads to get to a page where I could pay £8.95 to get my results. But if you just go through the test pages, you'll get the point I'm making here about interpreting what you see. The questions they ask give a sense of the different things people see. Here's one of their inkblots.




I think the inkblots - and the space activity - are good examples of seeing how people take their own knowledge, experiences, and emotions to interpret the identifical 'facts'.

One part of improving public discourse is for people to become more aware of how they know things - the stories in their heads with which they interpret the 'facts' of the world. Also, explicitly seeing how different people 'see' different things in the same set of 'facts' is also instructive.

Attending the corruption trials also emphasized the way people take in evidence and determine guilt or innocence. Clearly the jurors saw things differently than the defendants.

And, of course, some people's interpretations of facts, are a closer match to reality. My basic test for good interpretation is how successful one is in using that interpretation to predict outcomes. Sometimes this can be done - which fishing hole is most likely to yield fish? - sometimes it can't be done - which is the most beautiful painting?

Winter Solstice Yet Again - Thank You Jean Meeus

So, when exactly is the solstice? I felt a little dumb cause I couldn't remember if it was Dec. 21 or 22. Turns out it changes. This year, the solstice was today at 1:07am.

Hermetic Systems Offers a way to calculate the solstice:

To calculate the date and approximate time of the vernal and autumnal equinoxes and of the summer and winter solstices you can use this online calculator. This is based upon the formulas given by Jean Meeus in his Astronomical Algorithms but without corrections for perturbations, so that the times may differ from the true times by up to 20 minutes.

So who is Jean Meeus? Wikipedia says:

Jean Meeus (born 1928) is a Belgian astronomer specializing in celestial mechanics. He is sometimes known as Jan Meeus. The asteroid 2213 Meeus is named after him.

Jean Meeus studied mathematics at the University of Leuven in Belgium, where he received the Degree of Licentiate in 1953 . From then until his retirement in 1993 , he was a meteorologist at Brussels Airport.

His area of interest is spherical and mathematical astronomy.

In 1986 he won the Amateur Achievement Award of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific.

The Willmann Bell Publisher site has this on Meeus' book Astronomical Algorithms:

Meeus, 6.00" by 9.00", 477 pages, hardbound, 2nd Edition published 1999, 2 Lbs. 6 Ozs. ship wt., $29.95..

Errata: 1st Edition
Errata: 2nd Edition

Note: We are currently shipping the June 2005 printing which incorporates all know corrections to that date.

In the field of celestial calculations, Jean Meeus has enjoyed wide acclaim and respect since long before microcomputers and pocket calculators appeared on the market. When he brought out his Astronomical Formulae for Calculators in 1979, it was practically the only book of its genre. It quickly became the "source among sources," even for other writers in the field. Many of them have warmly acknowledged their debt (or should have), citing the unparalleled clarity of his instructions and the rigor of his methods.

Start year and End year specify the range of years you're interested in. Only years in the range -100 CE through 4000 CE can be used with this calculator. (c) 2001-2007 Sunlit Design www.sunlit-design.com Sat, 22 Dec 2007 03:20:22 PM +700 gives UT You can click the publisher link above for the rest of this.



And Sunlit Designs a site for Understanding and Designing Sundials writes:

Jean Meeus has provided a bridge text for dedicated amateurs interested in astronomical and solar event calculations.

Programming the calculations provided by Meeus is possible using any modern programming language. Meeus covers a wide range of astronomical areas.

If your interest is in the motion of the sun, you do not need to program his algorithms yourself ... it has already been done in The Sun API.

Someone named Raoul posted to habitiblezone.com 12/10/2007 9:09:17 AM

A very well known mathematician (I once spent some time at his home) Jean (for John) Meeus calculated when did that happen before and when in the future: 1612, 1615, 1632, 1668, 2007, 2022, 2059, 2078, 2191. [I would think John is for Jean myself]

I mention this only because there is a John F. Meeus who is the Belgian Consul to Liverpool, England. Is this the same man? I don't know how common a name Meeus is and I don't think it is worth it emailing him.

The point of all this is: We can thank, apparently, Jean Meuss for knowing exactly when the solstice is.

Last year I put up some pictures that showed the winter and summer solstices - here's a link to that post

Sweeny Todd

Sweeny is a dark, dark movie. They must have depleted the blood bank filming it. But the music and lyrics carry us through this evilly brilliant film And Johnny can sing. Not like Rex Harrison talks his way through the songs in My Fair Lady. There's one bright sunny vignette when Mrs. Lovett sings By The Sea, but Sweeny is grimfaced throughout.




After completing the video, I read the A.O. Scott's NYT review. As Scott wrote,

It may seem strange that I am praising a work of such unremitting savagery. I confess that I’m a little startled myself...

Stephen Sondheim - the man behind Sweeney Todd

After seeing Sweeney Todd in Anchorage, probably in 1990-1, I decided I needed to know more about the musical's creator. I was surprised to learn that he had written the lyrics to West Side Story and Gypsy. West Side Story had always been, in my mind, connected to Leonard Bernstein.

Stephen Sondheim was born on 22 March 1930, the son of a wealthy New York dress manufacturer. But, when his parents divorced, his mother moved to Bucks County, Pennsylvania and young Stephen found himself in the right place at the right time. A neighbour of his mother's, Oscar Hammerstein II, was working on a new musical called Oklahoma! and it didn't take long for the adolescent boy to realise that he, too, was intrigued by musical theatre.(from A Guide to Musical Theater)

A list of his musicals from The Stephen Sondheim Reference Guide

* Anyone Can Whistle
* Assassins
* Bounce
* Candide
* Company
* Do I Hear a Waltz?
* Evening Primrose
* Follies
* The Frogs
* A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum
* Gypsy
* Into the Woods

* A Little Night Music
* Marry Me a Little
* Merrily We Roll Along
* Pacific Overtures
* Passion
* Putting It Together
* Saturday Night
* Side By Side By Sondheim
* Sunday in the Park With George
* Sweeney Todd
* West Side Story
* You're Gonna Love Tomorrow

I realize that the American musical - especially those of the 1950's and 1960's - doesn't mean that much to younger Americans, but there were many great ones, and Sondheim was involved with many of them. And he has pushed the medium harder than anyone else to discover what it could be.

His initial success came as a somewhat reluctant lyricist to Leonard Bernstein on West Side Story (1957) and Jule Styne on Gypsy (1959). Exciting and adventurous as those shows were in their day, and for all their enduring popularity, Sondheim's philosophy since is encapsulated in one of his song titles: "I Never Do Anything Twice". His first score as composer-lyricist was A Funny Thing Happened On The Way To The Forum (1962) - a show so funny few people spotted how experimental it was: it's still the only successful musical farce. In the following three decades, critics detected a Sondheim style - a fondness for the harmonic language of Ravel and Debussy; a reliance on vamps and skewed harmonies to destabilise the melody; a tendency to densely literate lyrics. But, all that said, it's the versatility that still impresses: you couldn't swap a song from the exuberantly explosive pit-band score of Anyone Can Whistle (1964) with one of the Orientally influenced musical scenes in Pacific Overtures (1976); you couldn't mistake the neurotic pop score of Company (1970) for the elegantly ever-waltzing A Little Night Music (1973).(Again: A Guide to Musical Theater)

But Sweeny Todd has to be the masterpiece of masterpeices.

With Sweeney Todd (1979), the Prince/Sondheim collaboration reached its apogee, blurring the distinctions between lyrics and dialogue, songs and underscoring, and combining a complex plot with operatic emotions to create a unique musical thriller(.A Guide to Musical Theater)

So tonight we go see Johnny Depp as Sweeny Todd in the new movie. The preview we saw a while back doesn't even mention this is a musical/opera. It only emphasized the macabre story of the the man coming back with revenge on his mind. It will be interesting to see how audiences react when they find out. And we will also hear the debut of Johnny Depp the singer, in an extremely complex musical role.

Here's a link to Sondheim on the Charlie Rose show.

Oh yes, there are a bunch of other movies that rolled into town that look good, including Charlie Wilson's War and Atonement. The Secret of Raon Inish and Stephanie Daley. Both also got four stars in the Daily News. The Kite Runner, another great book, only got three stars.

[For video and short review go to Sweeny Todd]

10,000th Visitor Prize

The prize for the 10,000th visitor to the site since I set up sitemeter has been received by the closest person I could identify (#9,998). Her blogging name is Tea N. Crumpet and she embroiders. So she got a tin of Chinese Tea and an embroidered Chinese handkerchief.
Fortunately, I remembered to take a picture before I sent it. Our runner up, KS (I think that's who it is,) gets a dinner at the Thai Kitchen next time she's in Anchorage.

Car Wash at 0 degrees - Before and After

I sometimes get stuck on how I have to do something. Like washing the car. Either I take it to one of the places where you put the quarters in and you can blast it with hot soapy water, or I use the carwash attachment I bought for the hose and wash it in the driveway. But I don't do that in the winter when the hose is safely in the garage.

Yesterday it was hovering around 0° F outside. My wife, after months of driving a typical Alaskan car around - see first picture - suddenly decided she needed a clean car to take some friends to the airport. I didn't relish driving to a car wash place and then taking the wet car out of the washing bay into 0° weather.


So I got two buckets of warm water and some old dishtowels and in 20 minutes we had the worst of the dirt gone just by hand washing in our own garage. It still looks pretty streaky, but at least you won't get all dirty if you lean against it. When it warms up I'll take it in for a soapy soak spray job.

I just needed to think differently about how to solve the problem. Faster, cheaper, and good enough for now.

$8 Billion in Unredeemed Gift Cards - More than Double Credit and Debit Card Fraud

That's not the headline of Tuesday's ADN article in the money section. Instead they have "With gift cards, easy buy becomes personal." It's a story, by Detroit Free Press reporter Greta Guest about how

Holiday gift card sales have soared 44% from $17.2 billion sold in 2003 to $24.8 billion sold during the 2006 holiday season, according to the National Retail Federation.

[I've linked to the Detroit Free Press article because it doesn't show up on the ADN website. I'm guessing that's because it was a syndicated article. The Freep article is a little longer than the ADN article.]

Everything in the article is about how convenient gift cards are as presents. My skeptical mind began thinking about the gift cards my daughter got for graduation that she found five years later. How many people never use their gift cards, because they fall behind the desk, or get left in a pocket of pants that are no longer worn? And why didn't anyone at the ADN Money section ask that question? This was just a fluff piece promoting gift cards.

I'm thinking, 1% of $24 billion is, quick, can you figure it? 24+ seven zeros. $240,000,000. If just 1% of the people who got gift cards lost their cards it would come $240 million - a quarter of a billion dollars. OK, ok, people who got $100 cards are less likely to lose them than people who got $10 cards, or are they? And what about the people who use up only $22 of a $25 card? And besides, what if it's two percent or even five who lose their cards? The companies get free money. Maybe I can sell gift cards to my garage.

So I emailed Greta Guest, the reporter, and asked if she had gotten information on unredeemed cards too, because it wasn't in the ADN story. She said she had and sent me to the Free Press online story. In fairness to the ADN, it wasn't in the Free Press story either. Well, she emailed back, she'd written an earlier story on the topic which had all that.

That story is "Gift cards are popular, but many sit unused" published November 14, 2007. If the ADN published that one I don't recall seeing it and I can't find it on their site. That article says,

Consumer Reports, which started a public education campaign Tuesday, warns shoppers that when unredeemed, gift cards can turn into a windfall for retailers. When a gift card goes unused, retailers in many states can take the card value as income.

But they do have to report it as income. However, in some states, including Michigan,

the value of unused gift cards is collected from companies by the state after five years

In the fourth quarter of 2006 after last year's holiday season, Nordstrom recorded $8 million in income from unclaimed gift cards unused for five years or more. Massachusetts-based research service TowerGroup estimates that nearly $8 billion was lost last year because of unredeemed, expired or lost gift cards.

Did you catch that? $8 Billion unredeemed. The National Retail Federation says there was $24.8 billion in gift cards sold in 2006. That's just under 1/3 that's unredeemed. But it isn't quite that neat. The articles said most cards are void after five years, so this may be five years worth of sales. But the start of the article was that there was a 44% increase in the last three years.

The Consumers Union says

Consumer Reports is also releasing its latest survey, which finds that 27 percent of gift card recipients have not used one or more of these cards, up from 19 percent at the same time last year. And among consumers with unredeemed cards from last season, 51 percent have 2 or more.

Among the reasons that gift cards have not been redeemed:

• Over half (58%) of consumers indicated not having the time; followed by not finding anything they wanted (35%).
• Nearly one-third (32%) of respondents who have unused cards from last holiday season did not use their gift card because they forgot about it.
• A good proportion of consumers (7%) will never redeem their gift cards from last season because the card is lost (3%) or expired (4%).

And it gets more complicated. TowerGroup who made the $8 billion estimate based that on much more than retail gift cards.

Research and advisory firm, TowerGroup, expects gift cards to be a major hit again this holiday season. Combined gift card sales in the U.S. will exceed US$80 billion in 2006 - a more than 20% increase over their 2005 level - with breakdown by segment as follows:

* Retail: $29 billion [$4+billion more than NRF estimate]
* Restaurant / Fast Food: $18 billion
* Miscellaneous (gas, services, etc.): $12 billion
* Universally accepted (i.e., bank-issued): $23 billion

Despite the popularity of gift cards with consumers, the space continues to be a source of controversy in terms of fee-structures and redemption rules. While retailers do not generate revenue until a card is either used or permitted to be declared as dormant, they do receive a "free float" on unused cards. One large retailer recently showed a $42 million benefit to its income statement for unused gift cards more than two years old.

In any case, instead of a fluff piece on how great gift cards are, the ADN at least should have told us that (from the TowerGroup again)

the unused value on these cards, often referred to as "breakage" in the payments industry, has a bigger impact on consumers than the combined total of both debit and credit card fraud. While debit and credit card fraud in the U.S. totals $3.5 billion annually,

But we all know that the ADN, like most media, have a rabid liberal bias, so they always put an anti-business slant on their stories.

And while you're at it ADN Money folks, what happens to the unredeemed amount in Alaska? Do the retailers keep it or does it go to the state like unclaimed money in banks? Or is it all collected where the companies have their headquarters?

Anchorage Daily News Blogging Policy - 2

In an earlier post, I mentioned that the ADN is recruiting community bloggers. This resulted in a comment by a community council member who had received a copy of the terms of agreement that ADN was asking community bloggers to sign. I discussed the terms of agreement and posted them in the ADN Blogging Policy 1. Their terms of agreement suggest to me that they haven’t thought this out very carefully. So in this post I’m going to discuss

1. What's the difference between a blogger and the kind of contributor this Agreement was originally written for?
2. Why might a blogger sign the agreement?
   

I would first distinguish between 1) the reporters and staff who are working with the website and the blogs at the ADN. They obviously understand the potential and have done a great job in posting important and timely material, and 2) the higher ups who are responsible for the Terms of Agreement.

The Terms of Agreement document- and Kathleen McCoy, who’s coordinating this effort, and who appears to be in the “reporters and staff” group, corroborated this - is basically a version of the old agreement the ADN has used for independent contributors to the ADN with a few cosmetic changes to make it address blogs. (I should also say that this is McClatchy boiler plate rather than ADN, since it even leaves the name of the newspaper blank.) But bloggers are a far different animal than contributors of old.

Bloggers and traditional writers are significantly different

Writers needed a publisher, bloggers do not. The biggest difference by far, the difference that makes all the difference, is that before the web and blogs, writers were dependent on some medium to publish their writing. Websites (and blogs are a type of website) have changed this completely. Bloggers don’t need a publisher. They need access to the internet (most libraries provide this) and knowledge of how to set up a blog. They don’t even need to know how to read or write. My MacBook allows me to push a button and the computer’s built in webcam will record my picture and whatever I want to say.


This said, why would I, a blogger, sign up with the ADN? Here’s what the ADN says it offers to bloggers:

[When I went back to get the specifics of what the ADN would provide, I couldn’t find it in the Terms of Agreement. I guess I got that from the Key Terms in the email Kathleen McCoy sent the Federation of Community Councils, which I didn't post anywhere. I’ll post the whole list at the bottom of this post.]

• ADN wishes to host community bloggers on our site.*

Blogspot hosts my blog and everyone else's free already. This is no big deal.

• We will use our print and web platforms to inform readers of the online blogs we host and that they can participate in, to help grow audience. *

This is the only benefit I see from cooperating with the ADN. And it is important. When Kyle linked to my blog during the corruption trials, he did it because he felt the blog had something worthwhile to add to the coverage. With in-house blogs, will he be told he can't link to other local blogs that are better than the ones ADN carries? (Obviously I have a personal interest in this issue.)

• No money is involved*

I get the same great benefit from my Blogspot blog. Google (who owns Blogspot) pays me nada. But they have adsense if I want to sign up. They will put content related ads on my site and I would get some tiny amount of money from the hits on the ads. With ADN, any ad revenue goes only to ADN.

• Readers will be able to comment on blog entries, and subscribe to an rss feed from the blog.*

These features come with my Blogspot blog and I have more control over comments if I need to than the ADN seems to have.

• Blog writers will be able to link, post photos, and even post video on their blog if the spirit moves them.*

Yeah, yeah, yeah, every blog can do this too.

• Standing content on the righthand side of the blog page can be built in and stay on the blog for use by readers. This could be useful Websites, good books or articles you like your blog readers to know about, PDF documents you think they might want to read,etc.*

Again, standard on all the main blogsites.


[* the lines with * at the end were taken from the McCoy Key Points mentioned above and posted at the end of this post]

What does it cost bloggers?

1. More legal exposure than they probably would have as an independent blogger. From the Terms of Agreement:

You warrant and represent that all written entries and all other materials posted to the Blog is your original work, free from plagiarism, and that it has not been published anywhere else, that it has not been assigned, licensed or otherwise encumbered anywhere else, that it is not libelous or defamatory, that it will not violate or infringe the copyright, patent, trademark, trade secret, right of privacy or publicity, or any other proprietary right of any third party. You also agree to refuse any compensation from any third party for placing any content on the Blog, to not use the Blog posts as a vehicle for advertising or promoting goods or services, and to not knowingly link to any downloadable applications or other content which may be harmful to a user’s computer.
[Did Dan Fagan sign one of these?]

Bloggers should avoid much of this anyway, except that

• by being on the ADN site, new bloggers have a larger audience. Upset readers are more likely to go after the ADN than a lone blogger. But then they will find out that the ADN has dumped all the liability onto the blogger. So the blogger, who would have been fine as an independent blogger, has attracted, because of the connection to the ADN, a legal action.
  
• now you can get in trouble from the ADN as well as someone reading your blog
  
• A private blogger might want to take payments from someone to post things. And may want to take ads.
  

You agree to defend, indemnify and hold harmless NEWSPAPER and its affiliates, employees, successors and assigns, against and from any and all third party claims, liabilities, damages, fines, penalties and/or costs of whatsoever nature arising out of or in any way connected to a breach of your representations and warranties under this agreement.

You open yourself up to all sorts of potential liability.

2. Loss of control over your blog

NEWSPAPER shall own all right, title, and interest in and to the ___________________.com web site, and all intellectual property rights relating thereto. All rights not expressly granted under this agreement are expressly reserved.

It isn’t clear what this means because it seems to be contradicted later in the Agreement, but if you get tired of the ADN you own the content, but here it says they own the blog.

...you grant NEWSPAPER an irrevocable, worldwide, royalty-free, paid-up, transferable license, in perpetuity, to reproduce, distribute, publicly display, perform, and publish your Blog, including a license to redistribute, reproduce, republish, and to authorize republication, reproduction, and syndication of all or part of the Blog in any database, in any other media or platform or by any other method (computer, electronic, magnetic, online, optical, video, CD-ROM or otherwise), now or hereafter invented.

While most bloggers aren’t going to do any of these things, and while the ADN gives you the copyright, they also have taken the right to make money from your work with nothing in here that says you even get a share of any profit they make off your work.

NEWSPAPER shall have the right to modify the Blog content in order to make it compatible with the technical requirements and the “look and feel” of it’s web site. You grant us the right to use the Blog name, your name, likeness, photograph and biographical material to advertise, promote and publicize you and your Blog for the purposes of promoting and introducing new users to the Blog….NEWSPAPER shall have the right to remove any content from the Blog or it’s web site that NEWSPAPER believes, in its sole discretion may violate the rights of any third party, violates any law, or is otherwise objectionable.

WHAT?!!! You’re going to edit me without my having any say? Are you going to correct my possessive pronouns too? And reproduce it with my name on it? Even if I don’t like what you did to it? NFW. (Would that be found “otherwise objectionable” by the ADN?)

3. Banishment from the ADN's realm if you terminate your agreement.

in the event that this agreement ends, NEWSPAPER will stop within 30 days any advertising, promotion or publicizing of the Blog from any Web sites owned or affiliated with NEWSPAPER

.

If you change your mind and get out of the agreement, you get blackballed by the ADN. Even if this isn't what they intended, it doesn't sound very welcoming.


What should the ADN do?

Recognize that this is new and ever changing territory. The only certain old rule is “go with quality.” Quality, in the blog age, means authenticity, immediacy, transparency, and honesty. Good bloggers looking at the Terms of Agreement will see them as: inauthentic, warmed over old contracts, with the real meaning hidden in legalese.

The attorneys should lighten up. Go for quality and things will work out the best they can. There’s no guarantee. The Terms of Agreement are the kind of document you take to the other party’s attorney and you work out the details to both parties’ satisfaction. But in this case, the bloggers don’t have an attorney. It’s take it or leave it. So, if you want bloggers to believe in your good faith, you need to offer the kind of Agreement they would get if a) you really wanted the bloggers on your website, and b) they had an attorney to negotiate a contract that fairly met the bloggers' needs as well as newspaper's.

I’d recommend you consider what the ADN has to offer the bloggers. What do they want? I can’t speak for them all, but here are things I’d like:

• Recognition that you value my participation. The newspaper is going to bloggers as part of the ADN's survival strategy, but the Terms of Agreement makes it seem like the higher ups are doing this completely against their will. Show you appreciate the bloggers with
• a token honorarium,
• free tickets to events bloggers might cover or other in-kind benefits,
• a share in any future profits from syndication or whatever ways you might leverage a blog into future earnings (odds aren't high this will happen anyway)
  
• a payment for every 1000 page hits.
• awards for best blog, best blog stories, best blog coverage of a major event, most prolific blogger, etc.
• any combination of the above and this is just off the top of my head
  

• Very limited and transparent editorial guidelines with a blogger advisory board to ensure fair application of the guidelines. Yes, the ADN needs to protect itself from copyright violations, defamation, and bad journalism. And sometimes there may need to be format changes. But any changes in content or style should be made with the agreement of the blogger and the newspaper, and failing that, with an appeal to the advisory board. The advisory board could be used to work out a new Agreement after a year or two of testing the first one. And pay them. It doesn't have to be the $400/hour you pay your attorneys, but if you do it right, you'll save a lot of that money too.

• Balanced protection against legal action. This means that the newspaper shouldn’t abandon bloggers if a lawsuit arises that is not due to negligence or carelessness on the part of the blogger. The newspaper should help protect bloggers' press rights such as getting access to events and information as it helped its reporters get access to trial documents and tapes this year.

You should also check out the NYU study of the best blogging newspapers in the US. They came up with eight factors to evaluate newspapers' blogging quality:

• Ease-of-use and clear navigation.
• Currency
• Quality of writing, thinking and linking.
• Voice
• Comments and reader participation.
• Range and originality.
• Explain what blogging is on your blogs page.
• Show commitment!
  (Details for each factor at the best blogging link above.)
  

The ADN line staff is doing what it can to meet these standards, but the ADN management need to convince the corporate attorneys that business as usual, legally, will be just as fatal as business as usual, journalistically. [Note: the survey looked at the biggest 100 newspapers, so the ADN wasn't in the running, but I think now - after a great summer of improvements - the ADN would score high with its web coverage and inhouse blogs.[



***Kathleen McCoy's Key Points to Community Councils

Key points:

* ADN wishes to host community bloggers on our site.
* We will use our print and web platforms to inform readers of the online blogs we host and that they can participate in, to help grow audience.
* No money is involved on our end or the bloggers' end. This is a community service, aimed at turning the ADN website into a place for conversations and information sharing, beyond what our own reporters produce.
* Readers will be able to comment on blog entries, and subscribe to an rss feed from the blog.
* Blog writers will be able to link, post photos, and even post video on their blog if the spirit moves them.
* Standing content on the righthand side of the blog page can be built in and stay on the blog for use by readers. This could be useful Websites, good books or articles you like your blog readers to know about, PDF documents you think they might want to read,etc.
* The blogger (cor bloggers, one blog can be shared among a tightknit group of people) will get a unique username and password that will give them access to their blog. They can blog from home or work, or the coffee shop down the street.


* I am your resource here at the News for questions, standing content you need posted to the right side, help getting that video up.
* This is new for us. We'll all be learning together, but we are confident it can make a contribution to the public dialogue in Anchorage.
* If you have an idea for a blog you'd like to see, call me and I'll follow up.
* I've enclosed the blogger agreement and the terms of use to this email

So, let's talk. I'm working on setting up as many community blogs as I can. I have three I am working on now -- and will be happy to start working on community council blogs if members so choose.

My best!/ Kathleen]

Anchorage Daily News Blogging Policy - 1

I'm calling this ADN Blogging Policy 1 even though I mentioned this in a previous post. There will be a Part II and there I will talk about how the ADN might address blogging. Here I will focus on the Agreement the ADN has sent to the community council seeking bloggers.

CCSecretary from a community council left a comment in my previous post objecting to the legal documents that the ADN wants these community bloggers to sign. Kathleen McCoy, the ADN person in charge of all this, from whom I first learned about this, called me about the post and the comments and has also posted a comment there.

CCSecretary later sent me a copy of the material the community council folks were sent and asked to sign. I’m posting them at the bottom of this post.

My abbreviated thoughts

• The whole newspaper industry is dealing with the changing news landscape and trying to figure out what the newspaper of tomorrow is going to look like and if they can even survive at all. The prevailing wisdom seems to be: get on line. Some understand what this means better than others.

• The ADN staffers, well some of them, have embraced this and are running with it. The management and owners, if they understand concept, don’t seem to understand how to implement it.

• The agreement shows that whoever wrote it up, either doesn't understand this at all, or simply just didn't spend any time on it. It is essentially the agreement that was used for independent writers with a couple of word changes.
  
  
• But no one has thought out the difference between independent writers and bloggers and how that changes what you would want in an agreement. I'll address that in a separate post.
  

Some Highlights of the Agreement

• Pay - while there is a blank where pay can be filled in, Kathleen told me over the phone, that for bloggers, she fills in $0.
• Bloggers get all the rights to the posts, while the ADN keeps the rights to the blog itself. (I'm not sure how that works, and another part implies the blog goes when the blogger goes.)
  
• The newspaper will stop advertising, promoting, publicizing blogs that terminate their agreement. Does that mean they won't link to them either? What about independent blogs? Is this the ADN trying to take over the blog space of Anchorage? Even if that isn't their intention, might it be the result?
  

Quick Overview of the Agreement

Below are a few highlights of the agreement that caught my eye. I’m not an attorney, so if I’m misreading something, or missing something, any attorney reading this, please is invited to point it out in the comments. I would also add that Kathleen says that she’s asked for feedback on this and they are willing to make changes. I could just send this to her rather than posting it. But I told her, that since this is an evolving idea, in the interest of people in Anchorage and elsewhere being able to see how the process unfolds, that I would make my comments online. Afterall, others may offer much more productive comments than mine.

Section 1 says the blogger isn’t supposed to steal his material or reveal trade secrets etc. That is reasonable, though I wonder if the blogger does this unintentionally whether this shifts all the liability away from the newspaper and onto the blogger. (Again, for actual language, see the whole agreement below.)

2. Ownership. As an author of the Blog, you own and will continue to own all rights, titles and interest in and to your Blog posts, including all copyrights and other intellectual property rights therein and all renewals and extensions thereof, in all formats and media, whether not known or hereafter developed, throughout the world in perpetuity. NEWSPAPER shall own all right, title, and interest in and to the ___________________.com web site, and all intellectual property rights relating thereto. All rights not expressly granted under this agreement are expressly reserved.

This seems to say that the blogger will own all the rights to the content, but the newspaper owns all the rights to the blog name. But what does “and all intellectual property rights relating thereto” mean? OK, there’s the blog name and the site itself, but if the blogger owns all the posts, is the ADN claiming some overlapping rights? Plus, this seems to contradict language below where it says if the agreement is terminated, the ADN won't publicize the blog anymore.

3. Licenses. For the duration of this agreement you grant NEWSPAPER an irrevocable, worldwide, royalty-free, paid-up, transferable license, in perpetuity, to reproduce, distribute, publicly display, perform, and publish your Blog, including a license to redistribute, reproduce, republish, and to authorize republication, reproduction, and syndication of all or part of the Blog in any database, in any other media or platform or by any other method (computer, electronic, magnetic, online, optical, video, CD-ROM or otherwise), now or hereafter invented. NEWSPAPER shall have the right to modify the Blog content in order to make it compatible with the technical requirements and the “look and feel” of it’s web site. You grant us the right to use the Blog name, your name, likeness, photograph and biographical material to advertise, promote and publicize you and your Blog for the purposes of promoting and introducing new users to the Blog. You also grant us the right to link to the Blog from one or more Web sites owned or managed by NEWSPAPER. NEWSPAPER shall have the right to remove any content from the Blog or it’s [sic] web site that NEWSPAPER believes, in its sole discretion may violate the rights of any third party, violates any law, or is otherwise objectionable.

Here’s where the legalese gets silly. “For the duration of this agreement you grant NEWSPAPER an irrevocable….license in perpetuity…” Does that mean in perpetuity for the duration of the agreement? If it does, what does that mean? Or did someone forget to drop the in perpetuity when they copied it from another agreement?

And then, either for the duration of the agreement or in perpetuity, the newspaper can use the blog to make money in all sorts of different ways. And the newspaper can change the content of the blog anyway it wants if it decides - I assume that in its sole discretion means the blogger has no say - if it deems it, among more reasonable reasons, “otherwise objectionable.” Is there any chance a blogger who makes lots of money for the ADN would share in that?

4. Fees. NEWSPAPER will pay you a fee of $__________ per week to support your blogging and will host, maintain and operate your Blog service free of charge.

Kathleen says she will fill these in with $0. She also says that eliminates the need to ask for the social security number (which CCsecretary objected to also).

5. Term and termination. This agreement begins on _______________, 2007 and shall continue in effect until ___________________, 2008 (the “Term”). Either party may terminate this agreement for any reason upon thirty (30) days prior written notice. Upon expiration or termination of this agreement for any reason, you shall promptly remove any of NEWSPAPER’S brands or trademarks from the Blog. Also, in the event that this agreement ends, NEWSPAPER will stop within 30 days any advertising, promotion or publicizing of the Blog from any Web sites owned or affiliated with NEWSPAPER. NEWSPAPER will then make a final remittance to you of any outstanding fee payments.

If the newspaper owns the title of the blog and the blog itself, why would it require the blogger to stop using ADN brands or trademarks? and why would the ADN stop advertising the blog? They just need to get another blogger to do the work. But maybe this means the earlier stuff about the newspaper owning the blog title was a mistake. It’s confusing.

This section also raises a concern for non-ADN blogs. Does this mean that once ADN has its own affiliated blogs it will stop linking to blogs like mine? The ADN links to my blog during the trials this year, significantly increased my blog traffic. Those links brought my blog to the attention of many people who otherwise would not have seen it. This policy seems to says, “if you leave us, we’re never going to link to you and no one affiliated with us will link to you.” But maybe I'm reading too much into "publicize." Since it is talking about blogs that terminate their agreement, that leaves room for them to link to blogs like mine that have never had a written agreement, but will they? Are they now trying to corner the blog market in Anchorage? I strongly doubt that is Kathleen’s intention, but is it corporate’s intention?


The Whole Agreement (this is a draft as I understand it, but they did send it out to Community Councils)

[The Agreement itself is posted in its entirety. They also sent along the Terms of Use for people commenting on the ADN Blogs. Click on the link to see those.]


Date: ________________

Dear __________:

This letter confirms the agreement between you and ____________________ (“NEWSPAPER”) concerning the Blog that you will write titled _____________________, which will be published and promoted by NEWSPAPER on its web site ____________________.com in accordance with the terms hereof.

This letter is effective during the Term (as defined in Section 5 below) or until it is terminated by either of us in writing, and is applicable to all blogging during the Term. Our agreement includes the following:

Description of contribution. You are the author of the Blog, which focuses on __________________________________________________________________, as well as other topics of your choosing. The general focus of your Blog will continue as described above unless you provide NEWSPAPER with thirty (30) days prior notice that it is substantially changing. During the Term of this Agreement, you shall update your Blog with new posts a minimum of ____________ times per week. You agree that you will not, during the Term, publish another Blog relating to the above referenced focus, and that this will be your only blog on the topic.

You warrant and represent that all written entries and all other materials posted to the Blog is your original work, free from plagiarism, and that it has not been published anywhere else, that it has not been assigned, licensed or otherwise encumbered anywhere else, that it is not libelous or defamatory, that it will not violate or infringe the copyright, patent, trademark, trade secret, right of privacy or publicity, or any other proprietary right of any third party. You also agree to refuse any compensation from any third party for placing any content on the Blog, to not use the Blog posts as a vehicle for advertising or promoting goods or services, and to not knowingly link to any downloadable applications or other content which may be harmful to a user’s computer.

Ownership. As an author of the Blog, you own and will continue to own all rights, titles and interest in and to your Blog posts, including all copyrights and other intellectual property rights therein and all renewals and extensions thereof, in all formats and media, whether not known or hereafter developed, throughout the world in perpetuity. NEWSPAPER shall own all right, title, and interest in and to the ___________________.com web site, and all intellectual property rights relating thereto. All rights not expressly granted under this agreement are expressly reserved.

Licenses. For the duration of this agreement you grant NEWSPAPER an irrevocable, worldwide, royalty-free, paid-up, transferable license, in perpetuity, to reproduce, distribute, publicly display, perform, and publish your Blog, including a license to redistribute, reproduce, republish, and to authorize republication, reproduction, and syndication of all or part of the Blog in any database, in any other media or platform or by any other method (computer, electronic, magnetic, online, optical, video, CD-ROM or otherwise), now or hereafter invented. NEWSPAPER shall have the right to modify the Blog content in order to make it compatible with the technical requirements and the “look and feel” of it’s web site. You grant us the right to use the Blog name, your name, likeness, photograph and biographical material to advertise, promote and publicize you and your Blog for the purposes of promoting and introducing new users to the Blog. You also grant us the right to link to the Blog from one or more Web sites owned or managed by NEWSPAPER. NEWSPAPER shall have the right to remove any content from the Blog or it’s web site that NEWSPAPER believes, in its sole discretion may violate the rights of any third party, violates any law, or is otherwise objectionable.

Fees. NEWSPAPER will pay you a fee of $__________ per week to support your blogging and will host, maintain and operate your Blog service free of charge. You are providing your works to NEWSPAPER as an independent contributor and will therefore be responsible for the payment of all federal, state and/or local taxes with respect to this fee. NEWSPAPER will not treat you as an employee for any purpose.

Term and termination. This agreement begins on _______________, 2007 and shall continue in effect until ___________________, 2008 (the “Term”). Either party may terminate this agreement for any reason upon thirty (30) days prior written notice. Upon expiration or termination of this agreement for any reason, you shall promptly remove any of NEWSPAPER’S brands or trademarks from the Blog. Also, in the event that this agreement ends, NEWSPAPER will stop within 30 days any advertising, promotion or publicizing of the Blog from any Web sites owned or affiliated with NEWSPAPER. NEWSPAPER will then make a final remittance to you of any outstanding fee payments.

Indemnification. You agree to defend, indemnify and hold harmless NEWSPAPER and its affiliates, employees, successors and assigns, against and from any and all third party claims, liabilities, damages, fines, penalties and/or costs of whatsoever nature arising out of or in any way connected to a breach of your representations and warranties under this agreement.

Miscellaneous. This Agreement shall be governed by and construed under the laws of the State of _________________. No waiver, amendment or modification of any provision hereof or of any right or remedy hereunder will be effective unless made in writing and signed by the party against whom such waiver, amendment or modification is sought to be enforced. Neither this Agreement nor any right or obligation hereunder may be assigned by you, and any attempted assignment will be void. This Agreement constitutes the entire understanding and agreement of the parties hereto with respect to the subject matter hereof and supersedes all prior agreements or understandings, written or oral, between the parties hereto with respect to the subject matter hereof. In the event that any provision of this letter shall be held to be unenforceable by a court of law, the remaining provisions of this letter shall be enforceable to the maximum extent permitted by law consistent with the expressed intent of this letter.

If this agreement is acceptable, please sign and date the enclosed copy of this letter, provide your social security number, and return the signed copy to me.
We look forward to working with you!

Sincerely,



Agreed to by: ________________
__________________________ ______________________________
Signature
__________________________ ______________________________
Printed Name and Social Security No.
__________________________ ______________________________
Date

Visiting the Ainu and Korean Exhibits

After watching the concert for a while at the museum we walked through the Ainu exhibit and the Korean Ceramic exhibits once more. Today was the last day for the Ainu exhibit - breathtaking - but the Modern Korean Ceramics will be around until December 30.

It was something of a cross cultural experience to wander through these Asian exhibits with the Anchorage Concert Chorus singing Christmas music in the background.

Anchorage Concert Chorus at the Museum

After brunch, we went over the the Museum to see the Ainu and Korean Ceramic exhibits once more before they left town. We knew something else was going on because there was no parking near the museum. If it hadn't been around ten degrees, or if we were more warmly dressed, we could have just walked over.

Our timing was perfect, the Anchorage Concert Chorus was four deep up the stairs of the atrium and the director Grant Cochran was just explaining how the chorus traditionally performs in the museum and then walks over to the Performing Arts Center for their concert there. Below is a taste of what we heard.

Brunch at the Sheraton - Great Views of Anchorage

One of the people we've known the longest in Anchorage invited us and some others for Sunday brunch at the Sheraton Hotel. Josephine's is on the 15th floor.

As we get close to solstice, this is about as high as the sun gets
on the southern horizon.The Anchorage Municipal Cemetery is in the foreground.

The table behind the salads is the shrimp, crab legs, and assorted shell fish.

The Alaska Range to the west, gets some morning sun while
downtown Anchorage is still in the shade.

Audubon Christmas Bird Count Tally

The previous post highlights our day riding around counting birds in east Anchorage. Dianne picked us up again at 5ish and we took the new Elmore Road to the Campbell Creek Science Center for the tally of all the groups out counting birds today. 15,248 individual birds and 39 different species were counted. This is down from the last couple of years. But a lot of factors go into this - the weather, the number of people counting, luck....

Two new species (for the Anchorage Christmas Bird Count) were spotted:

• 25 Northern Shovelers
• 1 Brambling [I had "Bramble" but my birder friend Catherine reminded me it's Brambling]
  

The brambling brought the most ooos and aaaahs. Below is a brief video that will give you a general sense of the evening.

Christmas Bird Count - How many canaries are left?

Our birder friend, Dianne, (well, she does other things besides birding) emailed to invite us to the Christmas Bird Count today. The Audubon website explains:

The Christmas Bird Count (CBC) is an organized continent-wide survey that documents every bird seen on a given day from sunrise to sunset. Since the turn of the 20th century, the Christmas Bird Count has contributed to the knowledge base of wintering birds in North America. This information is also important to allow scientists to detect fluctuations and trends of birds over a period of years.

1986: Coal mine canaries made redundant

More than 200 canary birds are being phased out of Britain's mining pits, according to new plans by the government.

Modern technology is being favoured over the long-serving yellow feathered friend of the miner in detecting harmful gases which may be present underground.

The Downey Woodpecker was clear in the binoculars, but not so clear in the camera.




This moose was one of four we saw. If you click on the moose to enlarge it, you can see a white horizontal bar just to the right of her nose. That was part of the wing feather a magpie using the moose as a trampoline.


We do see birds all winter, particularly ravens and magpies which are big and plentiful all winter and their black plumage stands out against the snow. But the little birds flit around so quickly that they are hard to see. But when you ride around for four hours specifically looking for birds, you see a lot more.






When we were in China, I was watching all the birds on campus - an oasis of trees in the increasingly concrete city. Most of my students were surprised when I talked about the birds. First that I was interested in them, second that there were any on campus - they just didn't 'see' them. But coal miners used to take canaries down into the mines because they were affected much faster than people if the air went bad. The canaries were introduced into the mines in 1911 and were phased out in Britain in 1986 according to a BBC story.

Birds and other animals serve as environmental canaries on earth. The counts give at least a rough count of the number and location of birds in the United States. The changes from year to year help identify trends. For instance, today Dianne was upset with the 20 European Starlings we saw, bird not natural to Anchorage, that have been increasing in number steadily, and harmfully to other birds whose nests in tree holes they invade.

Dianne had a regular route for this part of east Anchorage and we saw quite a few birds. I was able to get some pictures of the larger birds (eagles and ravens) and this one unrecognizable picture of the downey woodpecker.



We also got some more exotic birds. Dianne wouldn't let us put them in the official count list, but she stopped long enough for me to take pictures of the flamingos, penguins (we saw one more before these) and the robin.

Outscourced and No Country for Old Men

You'd think after the film festival, I'd be ready for a movie break. But there was a movie about India at the Bear Tooth Monday night and Joan wanted to see a movie today so we went to the one with the most stars in the newspaper.

Outsourced


[I'm still have mixed feelings about videotaping films in the movies. When the Film Festival folks emailed me, I was wondering if they were going to complain about that, but not at all. Since movie reviewers on tv and the radio use clips from the movies they review, I should be able to do the same. I only use a tiny percentage, I don't give away anything that would spoil the movie, etc. But I also don't want my camera to disturb people around me. So if I don't get a seat away from others or I'm not surrounded by friends, I also tend not to take out my camera. Or if I get so absorbed in the movie I forget. Anyway, these two movies I took no pictures. So I'm using the Outsourced trailer. You can see more clips from the movie including the first 8 minutes of the movie at the official site.]

India is another universe. While I enjoyed 'being' in India watching Darjeeling Express, that movie was more focused on the three American brothers who used India as the backdrop for their reunion and bonding. Outsourced gives a more balanced view of both how the American call center guy from Seattle who is dropped suddenly into India feels, but also gives more of an India viewpoint as well. This is not a heavy film, but it gave a good sense of how it feels to be embraced by the world that is India - the smells, the huge crowds, the different rules for doing most everything - in a don't take yourself too seriously way. This guy made far more progress than I think possible in only three weeks, but that aside, it pulled me in that my critic hat fell off and I just enjoyed the movie.

No Country for Old Men

I don't like violent movies, but I was hearing more and more good buzz for this movie, and it was at a convenient time and place, so we went. I am drawn to psychopaths - because they are out there and we need to understand that and them - but this movie didn't give us any real clues about them. We saw one in action, but nothing that helps us understand why. Overall it was a very well made and gripping movie. Again, I was totally pulled into it. And I liked the fact that there was no Hollywood ending, in fact it was left open enough there could be a sequel.

I would note there are long blog discussions about some of the scenes in the movie and apparently a lot of head scratching about what actually happened in the movie. I didn't have that reaction. Not everything was perfectly clear, but neither is life. It wasn't unclear in that the Coen brothers did a poor job of making the movie. A good movie, like a good book, deserves a second look. But Nora Ephraim did write a funny review in the New Yorker, but I'd see the movie before I read the review.

Blog, Blog, Blog

Blogging stuff keeps piling up in my life. Here's two posts in one, first on ADN blogs and then on Quarterlife and Marshall Herskovitz.

Anchorage Daily News (ADN) wants bloggers
At the Alaska Apple Users Group meeting last night, Kathleen McCoy from the Anchorage Daily News announced the paper was soliciting local bloggers who cover a specialized topic - community council news, local horse news, etc. They already have 13 blogs that I counted here tonight from gardening and barhopping to hockey. I got to talk to her a little during the break. Seems as the print version - and the employee base - shrinks, the ADN is trying to fill the void by using the free labor of local bloggers. On the one hand, that's good in a number of ways. It means

• ordinary people are writing about what they're passionate about
• we'll get coverage with different perspectives
• there won't be anyone to force a certain look or perspective
• there will be more room for comments - and maybe individual bloggers can do a better job of monitoring the nastiness of some of the current ADN blogs
• featured blogs will get more attention than they might otherwise
  

But on the negative side it means:

• the inconsistent quality we see online in general
• corporate exploitation of community public citizens - they aren't likely to share any ad revenue and they are cutting staff and replacing it with unpaid bloggers
• hit and miss coverage as unpaid bloggers have to earn a living and miss their posts, decide they don't need to subsidize the ADN with their blogs, and otherwise skip posts and/or drop out

I think the ADN has no choice but to figure out ways to create an electronic presence. Kathleen has been around the ADN many years and I think she's trying to make this work. So far their stance on monitoring the nastiness of some of the regular blog posters seems short sighted to me. I can't find the posts I was looking for, but here is a little after Andrew Halcro quit his ADN blog.I'll hold judgment, though I'm on the wrong side of neutral in my expectations at this point.


Quarterlife

One of the best television programs I ever saw was "My So-Called Life." One of the producers, Marshall Herskovitz, was on Fresh Air this morning, talking about the television industry (the effects of corporate consolitdation and the end of the ban on networks owning the programing) and his new effort - an internet tv program called Quarterlife that has been bought by NBC. Quarterlife has been on the periphery of my consciousness, but the interview brought it front and center. I watched the first two shows today. (You can watch it online at Quarterlife.com- there are 11 episodes so far, all available.)

The show is about a young woman who... you guessed it, has a blog named....did you figure it out yet? Quarterlife. It is very real, very unlike most television. And no commercials. And you won't have any late fees.

I suspect blogs are a transitional genre, and maybe corporate World will end up buying up or otherwise coopting the best - or at least most profitable - but something is happening here. Stay tuned.

[More recent posts at ADN Blogging Policy - 1 and ADN Blogging Policy - 2.]

Infamous Lake Otis and Tudor and the Moon

Worst intersection
in the city. Moon sliver
makes traffic ok.

Warm Anchorage Winter

The sun came out this afternoon, but it's cooler. Still, as you can see from the week's temperature chart, our daily lows have been above the normal average daily highs most of the week. And it's been like that most of the winter. [OK, I know for most of you winter starts Dec. 21. But here it begins when the snow starts to fall, usually some time in October. For us the solstice means it's starting to get lighter each day. That's all good.]











[Temp trend from ADN]

Blogger Law 101

Through the serendipity of the internet, I just found a site called Tubetorial, which has a series of videos on blogger law, or "What every blogger needs to know about the law." I've only looked at the first five minute video, which is just an overview. It says the series will cover:

• Trademark
• Copyright
• Defamation
• Marketing and Advertising
• Miscellaneous

This sounds a little ominous. Will you be sued? Does someone already own your domain name? My sense of the blogosphere is that it is pretty wide open and most of us little guys probably aren't in much danger - if our domain name gets taken away, well, we can make up a new one. But it also seems fairly smart to at least be aware of the law and not do unnecessarily stupid things that might make you liable.

So how did I find this site? I've been noticing in the last week that I'm getting a lot more hits from Google image search. But in sitemeter, unlike the regular Google searches which give you the search terms people put into Google, image searches don't do that. So I was looking around to see if someone knew why and if there was a way to get that. That got me to Pearsonified.com
where there was a post about how to write the code on your pictures so that Google search would find them easier. In the comments there were some other links to interesting sites - getting me further away from what I was looking for, but to things I didn't know I needed to know. Including the Tubetorial site that has the Blogging Law videos.

There were some interesting suggestions about how to put tag words into the code for the pictures. I looked at the code that blogspot automatically sets up for one of my pictures and in the alt section it just has a long number, but I put the name of the picture into the .jpg. [I really have no idea what the alt section is, but I could find it in the oode.] Since blogspot is owned - as I understand it - by Google, you'd think they would do the right thing for us blogspot users. Anyway, I am starting to see the image traffic pick up noticeably.

Oh, I learned a new acronym in all of this: SEO - Search Engine Optimization.

The Ethics and Rules of Surveillance

I started this post almost a month ago, but it didn’t feel right, so I’ve left it simmering. I picked it up about two weeks ago. I think I’ve finally got a way to talk about this, and why this undercover stuff feels wrong, but seems logically justified.

Private Life Values in Conflict with Public Life Values

When human society began changing from premodern to modern (as social scientists label these things,) we changed from societies in which family loyalty, group loyalty, fealty were the most important measure of a person. The modern world - the world in which scientific rationality replaced traditional authority - made merit the main measure of a person, and logic and rationality the path to truth and justice.

The point is that today we live in world with two major systems of rules. (Yes I know there are more than two, but for this situation, bear with me and accept two.) In our private lives, loyalty to family (and close friends and associates) is one of the most important standards. We accept parents standing up for their children even when the children did something terrible. We think that is normal and natural. In our public lives, rationality and merit are supposed to be the standard. The United States is a country based on the rule of law, not the rule of men. Everyone is supposed to be equal before the law.

But we can’t shut down our private value system when we go to work everyday. We make friendships with people at work and our relationships with them are both professional and personal. So these two value systems overlap in our lives. We have laws against nepotism because we recognize that it would be hard to use objective, rule of law, standards when a family member is involved. We have conflict of interest laws and require people recuse themselves when these two systems overlap.

As much as we like to believe in this separation, except for androids like Data, the separation doesn’t really exist. For most people when emotion and reason are in conflict, emotion wins. Professors Jules Lobel and George Loewenstein write,

Intense emotions can undermine a person's capacity for rational decision-making, even when the individual is aware of the need to make careful decisions.

Rule of Law versus Personal Loyalty

Where’s all this headed? Patience, I’m almost there. In our public world, we talk nobly about obeying the law, but in our private world we may go over the speed limit, we may pad our charitable contributions in our tax returns, and we may give preferential treatment to good friends when we deal with them professionally. We live with an inherent conflict between the rule of law and the rule of me and my friends.

I think this is hardwired into most of us. We learn about this early on. Telling the teacher about another student who broke a rule, makes us a tattletale. We have lots of other negative terms for being disloyal to the group. Should you ‘rat’ on your friend who cheats on his exam? College honor codes place students in a moral dilemma. Should you ‘betray’ your friend? Blowing the whistle is the positive term for someone who ‘squeals’ on his organization when it hides its illegal actions. A study for the International Association of Chiefs of Police found that

· 79% of respondents said that a law enforcement Code of Silence exists and is fairly common throughout the nation.
· 46% said they would not tell on another officer for having sex on duty.
· 23% said they wouldn’t tell on another cop for regularly smoking marijuana off duty.

I wonder what the response would be for FBI agents.


So when the FBI and the federal prosecutors offer (bribe) witnesses a chance to reduce their sentences if they do undercover work, if they rat on their partners, there is an inherent conflict of the personal and public systems of ethics. The part that I think has bothered me, but I haven’t been able to articulate until now, is that in the court of law, the private value system of loyalty is treated as if it didn’t exist. Only the rule of law matters. Yes, the legal code of the United States as an extension of the US Constitution is the backbone of our democracy. The Constitution is like a legal contract that the people of the United States agree to live by and it is the legal blueprint

... to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity...

But the government that is formed based on the rule of law is merely a means to an end that is addressed more specifically in the Declaration of Independence. There we find that "Governments are instituted among Men" to secure "certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness."

For most people I've ever met "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness" includes the bonds of loyalty of family and friends. So, yes, the rule of law is important, but the value of loyalty is probably a more basic human characteristic. It is the reason we need the laws. And so when in court, the rule of law is the only important value, and humans are pressured into violating their loyalty to close friends with no acknowledgment that this is also an important value, we naturally feel uncomfortable, even violated and betrayed.


Use of Undercover agents

There's no question that in the Alaska political corruption trials of 2007 the surveillance tapes made all the difference with the juries and the public.

• Hearing a politician say in his own words he knew what was happening
• Listening to another politician slurring his four letter words and joking about getting a job from the drunk lobbyist
  FBI tape of Pete Kott 01 uploaded by AKRaven
  
  
• Seeing the money handed over from the lobbyist’s pocket to the politician's, followed by profuse thanks and promises to help in any way (the hand off is toward the end of the tape, first he's trying to get help for a $17,000 credit card problem.)
  

Without the tapes, it would be one person's word against another's.


The Pros and Cons of Surveillance Work

There are powerful arguments FOR doing the undercover work but also troubling arguments against.

Reasons For Undercover Surveillance:

• There's no other way to get the information. These are things not meant to be heard by others. There are no written contracts, just people verbally agreeing to break the law, often using code words (prison warden in Barbados for Kott.) Anchorage Daily News editor and reporter Rich Mauer told PBS:
  

  Journalists don't get to tap phones. Journalists don't get to—to place secret cameras. So, the FBI is listening in on conversations that we thought maybe were happening. But lo and behold they really were, and we're getting to—to hear these things.

• The victim often is 'the general public,' not a specific person who can file a complaint. So without the intervention of an investigatory agency with extraordinary powers, no one would be in a position to file a complaint.
  
• Without this sort of evidence, it is difficult for juries to determine where the truth lies. They hear different witnesses, but which one should they believe? Simply because one is a better actor doesn't mean that one is telling the truth.
  
• Hearing it directly from the person's mouth on tape allows the jury to hear the exact intonation - whether it is said in jest or in anger, whether one word is stressed or another. Reading the transcript allows the reader to interpret the words in many different ways. Prosecutor Nick Marsh, in his closing argument in the Kott trial, said that this case had unique evidence, that because of the hours of electronic surveillance
  
• 
  
• you the members of the jury have been able to sit in a ringside seat as they committed the crimes in the indictment.
• Playing the tapes can get the criminal to plead guilty and cooperate with the FBI and prosecutors. This certainly worked for Bill Allen and Rick Smith..
  

Reasons Against Undercover Surveillance

• Entrapment - would these people have committed a crime independent of this? The basis for Tom Anderson's conviction was the cooperating witness' offer to pay Anderson for helping out in ways consistent with Anderson's ideological beliefs.
  
• Motives of the cooperators - To get their own sentences reduced. There is a powerful incentive to paint the picture the prosecutor wants to hear in court, even if it isn't true.
  
• Invasion of privacy
• Surveillance involves listening to personal conversations. The hour or less of actual surveillance tape played at each of the three trials was a tiny fraction of the many hours of actual taping. Much, if not most of what was heard had nothing nothing to do with the investigation
• The FBI has a word - minimization - for deciding what they should not listen to and guidelines for turning off the recording device. At the end of this post I have my notes from court when one of the FBI agents discussed the procedures for surveillance tapes.
  
• The tapes also pick up the conversations of people who have nothing to do with the investigation
• Betrayal of associates - We live with overlapping values systems. As citizens we value the law. As members of families and of groups of friends, we value our loyalty to each other. In these cases, people who described their relationships as "like family" were now required to betray those relationships in order to save their own skin. The easy response is that "they were criminals," "they were breaking the law." But how easy would it be to turn in your child, your best friend? We have powerful social norms against betraying our friends and colleagues.
  

Tentative Conclusion includuing the need for better oversight

Just because some people drive badly when drunk, others shoot people with guns, and still others do a lousy job teaching third grade, doesn’t mean we should ban alcohol, guns, and third grade teachers. FBI surveillance can be abused too. Because some people do these things badly doesn't mean the activity itself is bad. Some things are more prone to abuse than others and thus we have restrictions, special oversight, and other measures to prevent abuse. Yet, FBI (and other) surveillance, by necessity is done in the shadows. Abuse is harder to discover. Therefore, I think it is necessary to design better oversight processes including more representive parties involved. Yes, I understand, the more who know, the harder to protect the investigation. But if they can trust the criminals who wear the wires, they can trust carefully, but representatively chosen monitors of the process.



Power

One other observation. At the trials, I was alarmed by the power of the US Government - represented by the FBI and the US Department of Justice - and the potential to abuse that power. The FBI and DOJ (Department of Justice) generally had, in court, close to a ten to one advantage over the number of defense people. When Kott’s attorney insisted that each tape introduced as evidence be verified by the agent who monitored it, the government had the budget to bring about 18 agents into court - most from outside Alaska. This doesn't count the thousands of hours of spent on the investigations and trial preparation. While the DOJ may complain about limited funding, their campaign chest is much bigger than any of the defendant's, and probably than all of them rolled together - including the $500,000 each that Allen and Smith got for legal defense as part of the sale of VECO.

I was alive when J. Edgar Hoover was the head of the FBI and used it as his own private investigation unit:

The committee staffs report shows that Hoover willingly complied with improper requests from Presidents Franklin Roosevelt, John Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon. He gratuitously offered political intelligence to Presidents Dwight Eisenhower and Harry Truman, but both seemed unimpressed.

While everything I saw in court suggested a high level of integrity and professionalism on the part of the FBI and the DOJ, I have no idea of what went on outside of court. And if the Code of Silence cited above for police is part of the culture of the FBI, it would be hard to know when something did happen.

At this point, I don't have any strong recommendations one way or the other, but I wanted to record my observations based on the trials before I forget this all.

The Rules of Surveillance

Finally, a fair amount came out at the trials about the steps the FBI must go through before, during, and after the wiretaps and the use of the surveillance video recordings. Below are my notes from October 23, 2007 when Prosecutor Joe Bottini was interrogating FBI special agent Steve J. Dunphy, from Cincinnati Ohio about what it takes to get orders for a wire tap or video surveillance and then restrictions they have when taping. These are spell-checked notes that might be considered merely a sketch of what was all said. It gives you the basic outline, but some of the detail is lost.


First they have to get an application, then an order from a judge.

Bottini: All this in secret?
Dunphy: yes,
Bottini: purpose?
Dunphy: if it became known we were listening in it wouldn’t be fruitful
Bottini: Do phone company factor in this?
Dunphy: Yes, they are served with order and they would assist in getting it technically set up.
Bottini: Order cut to the phone company?
Dunphy: Redacted order
Bottini: Ordered not to disclose?
Dunphy: yeah
Bottini: How actually recorded?
Dunphy: When I started reel to reel. Now digitally onto portable hard drive then to other media, cd.
Bottini: Perfect or tech flaws?
Dunphy: You can bet on it [technical flaws]
Bottini: You have served as a monitor. Someone has to actually be listening real time?
Dunphy: yes/
Bottini: Purpose?
Dunphy: If only can record pertinent information, not about going back and listening.
Bottini: Required for minimization?
Dunphy: yes. if conversation not pertinent, personal, not related. the monitor will stop recording and stop listening. Back in a minute or whatever is reasonable to see if it changed.
Bottini: Is there a general rule of thumb on what you described? about how long go down ?
Dunphy: Generally told to go down a minute , but you learn what is appropriate as you go along. A learning curve as you learn the voices of the people. Minimization becomes more efficient as time goes on.
Bottini: Other kinds you can’t listen to?
Dunphy: Privileged, A lawyer. Those would be minimized right away and not turned on. Spouse, priest. Attorney client is the big one.
Bottini: If you are the monitor, is there a process to familiarize your self?
Dunphy: Have to read the affidavit with the case, meeting with one of the Asst US attorneys to brief on the case and minimization requirements
Bottini: Does monitor sit and take notes while calls intercepted?
Dunphy: Yes, record times, parties speaking, brief synopsis..
Bottini: Today’s tech also record date and time? [I think this means the tech for the recordings to be listened to in court that day.]
Dunphy: yes
Bottini: End of 30 day period what happens to original recordings intercepted. Dunphy: Original sealed and given to the court.
Bottini: Other types of electronic surveillance. You know about bug?
Dunphy: Yes, open type mic in a room.
Bottini: Video too?
Dunphy: yes.
Bottini: Authorization the same for intercepting phone conversation?
Dunphy: Yes, application process the same,
Bottini: application to court with affidavit. probably cause, all that?
When sought, G also has to request authorization to install?
Dunphy: Yes, sometimes to get mic into location, need to surreptitiously enter, then have to apply for that authority too.
Bottini: Same process with bug same as with phone, real time monitors?
Dunphy: Yes
Bottini: Same minimization with bug? Dunphy: yes
Same with privileged conversations? Dunphy: yes
Bottini: [Ever?] Just record it all and look later?
Dunphy: No, listen, if not pertinent stop it and on and on we go.
Bottini: Telephone intercept, Monitors real time take notes. Same with bugged monitor?
Dunphy: Yes, A little more because listening and watching, a little more awkward.
Bottini: Interception orders good for 30 days. Possible might not go the whole 30-days?
Dunphy: yes. Bottini: Examples?
Dunphy: Not getting any worthwhile activity, might change phone number, or something happens where you have to take down case, life in jeopardy.
Bottini: Were you asked to come to Alaska to assist?
Dunphy: Yes, March 2006.
Bottini: Specifically asked to do?
Dunphy: Monitor bug in hotel room in Juneau
Suite 604 in Baranof? Yes

Bottini: When installed? Dunphy: Jan
Bottini: Did you familiarize yourself with investigation. Dunphy: Yes, best I could

What did you do? REad the affidavit, with the agents monitoring before us, the agent, etc.
Aware or made aware that wire taps had been authorized? yes
What did you know? Yes Cell phone in SEpt for RS, couple months later November on BA’s cell, home phone.
While served as monitor, what is your day like?
…..
Two months, over time familiar with voices of people in suite.
BA? yes
RS? He lived here, so, obviously
VK? one time - March 30, 2006.
VK here today? Yes he is seated there in the red tie.
Original portable hard drive recorded to is sealed.
But recorded video and audio. yes. when we thought activity ceased, dubbed from hard drive to dvd, and could make multiple dvd’s from that. original sealed.
While monitoring bug, are you able to see and hear what is going on? Yes, within the camera view of the camera.

Ask.com Privacy Eraser

The NY Times today has a story saying that ask.com is adding a privacy eraser to its search engine. You can just click it on with each search.

Ask.com and other major search engines like Google, Yahoo and Microsoft typically keep track of search terms typed by users and link them to a computer’s Internet address, and sometimes to the user. However, when AskEraser is turned on, Ask.com discards all that information, the company said.

So I checked out Ask.com. And there's the privacy eraser button in the corner and when I clicked it I got this window:



(You can click on it to enlarge it.)


But is ask.com good enough to find what you are looking for? I searched for:

what do I know Alaska blog steve

And this blog didn't show up until the second page.

When I did the same with google, What Do I Know? showed up in the first four spots. Of course, this is a blogspot blog closely tied to Google.

Anyway, I'd suggest people start trying ask.com so that the other big browswers realize that people do want privacy options. Even if that means when I check out the hits on my blog, I'll get less information about the visitors from sitemeter.

Here's what ask.com's FAQ's say about what will be erased:

What is search activity data?
Search activity data includes information about the pages you visit on Ask.com, including the terms you search for, the links you click, your IP address, and any user or session identifier. When AskEraser is enabled, Ask.com will delete from our servers all references containing any single element of search activity data; query (what you searched for, clicked on, etc.), IP address (where you searched from), and user/sessions IDs (who you are in relation to previous searches).

Return to Top

Is my search activity deleted immediately?
When AskEraser is enabled, your search activity will be deleted from Ask.com servers within a number of hours. In some instances, it may take a longer period of time for your search activity to be deleted for example when we need to run automated systems to detect and block users or automatic bots that are abusing our site (see Is there any reason Ask.com will stop deleting my search activity?)

If Yahoo had this policy in China, the government there couldn't track down who visited what sites. And this may become more important in the US too.

Not Consuming isn't just about Being Cheap

Our first VW van lasted 24+ years. We still have the TV my mom gave us when our son was a year old. And you may have read my post about replacing our Maytag washer this year, which we got when he was born. (Now he's older than I was when his little sister was born.) My mother was certainly an influence on this sort of behavior. She grew up in Germany where, even today in many places, you have to turn on the lights in the stairwell and they go off in two minutes. I was raised with a no wasting household, lights out when you leave the room, don't leave the water running while you're brushing your teeth, etc. - well at least that was the dominant mantra if not always practiced.

Living for two years in rural Thailand added to that earlier training. I lived in a house up on stilts. There was electricity and I could fill my large earthen jug with water with a hose from a tap outside. But basically I saw that life without all the things I took for granted was quite possible, even enjoyable. No telephone, no tv, no car. (This was the late 60s, everyone with a decent job has a cell phone in Thailand now.) I learned that most of the stuff just isn't necessary. That doesn't mean I don't use technology today, but I use the stuff that I need to do what I want to do. So I have my macbook and my Canon digital camera, but no cell phone.

The whole logic of capitalism has seemed to me to be a giant ponzi scheme. It works as long as you keep people buying and using up stuff. So you have to develop planned obsolescence, products that will break down so you have to keep buying new ones. So when I saw this video, I realized it voiced my reasoning pretty well. The whole video is at storyofstuff.com




I know there are people who will scream and yell things like socialism, communism, radical freak, etc. But their ancestors were the last to give up the flat earth theory, argued Hitler was Germany's future, and still think global warming is an environmentalist plot.

Here's a quote from the film attributed to Victor Lebow, The Journal of Retailing, Spring 1955, p. 7, as quoted in Michael Jacobson Marketing Madness,1995, pg."191. I can't find the article right now to confirm it because the UAA library on line data bases don't go back that far. But they do have copies - probably microfiche (awufl stuff) - going back to 1955. And just because he wrote it, did anyone read it before this Michael Jacobson found it? Was it an important influence on American business? I just don't know. But it sure sounds like the philosophy that has been followed.


Maybe this quote sounded too good to be true. And the only people quoting it on the internet were anti-consumption people. Well, it was a 1955 reference, but something wasn't right. I looked up Vicor Lebow again. He wrote a book in 1972 called "Free Enterprise: The Opium of the American People." Did this man go through some great conversion between 1955 and 1972? Or was the original quote a critique rather than a prescription? I'll try to read the original article tomorrow. It doesn't change the point being made, but if this was a critique, it is hard to argue as they do in the film that this was the blueprint for planned obsolescence.

[follow up post with the complete original 1955 article posted here.]

AIFF - Their Picks for Best Films, My Criteria

From the AIFF official blog:
Best Feature
The Clown and the Fuhrer

Best Short
Its a tie for first: Anonymous and Demain la Veille
Runner up: Dear Lemon Lima

Best Documentary
The Prize of the Pole

Best Short Documentary
Labeled


We were pretty close. My picks were

Clown and Führer
Anonymous
Taxi to the Dark Side (It wasn't clear, except for the shorts, which films were and weren't actually in competition for awards. If Taxi wasn't in competition, then the Prize or maybe Autism the Musical would have been my pick)
Labeled
I Have Seen the Future was my pick for animated, but that seems to have been rolled into shorts.


[December 28 - I just saw "A summer in the cage" and it would challenge the Prize of the Pole for the documentary award. It turns out that Taxi to the Dark Side was in the competition. I don't see how Prize beat it, and I think Summer in the Cage was a strong contender. Taxi wins on current political currency, but I think Cage was - cinematically a more interesting movie. Also, there were two other winners -

• Joseph Henry - Best Super Short

• La Flor Mas Grande Del Mundo - Best Animation

I haven't seen Joseph Henry, but I have since seen the La Flor. I still prefer I Have Seen the Future just for its technical innovativeness, though Flor does have more appealing content.
Based on Summer in the Cage I've added a new AIFF post.]

So what were my criteria? There are several factors.

• Technical Quality A continuum from.. shaky...no problems..very good..innovative. Some might have a combination of more than one of these which makes it harder to judge. Clearly Anonymous and I Have Seen the Future impressed me with their innovative technical styles.
  

• Content - There's a vague continuum from:
• Negative/disrespectful ...Boring...good story....originality...currency...impact
• I gave my only really negative review to The Dalai Lama's Cat because I thought it was a very negative and disrespectful portrayal. That doesn't mean a film can't be critical - I gave Taxi to the Dark Side lots of credit for being critical of the Defense Department's use of torture. But they provided lots of evidence. The Cat filmmakers began with what appears to be a bogus story about a cat, knew apparently little or nothing about the Dalai Lama or the Tibetan people, and then used Tibet, its people, and its holy shrines as the props for their ethnocentric humor. They used the Dalai Lama's name to sell their picture. It was simply rude and disrespectful to get a laugh and sell their movie. This is not about being politically correct. If you drop a kid on his head for laughs (which they did in the movie) that's not acceptable in my value system. Most depressing was how many people did laugh.
• Content is probably the most variable issue, since what interests me may not interest you. I thought Prize of the Pole and Taxi to the Dark Side both covered important social/political issues well, but that Taxi's was focused on a more current issue and had potentially more impact.
• Friends thought No Place Like Home was awful. I thought it had some editing problems, but there were a lot of things in there that I enjoyed.

• Use of Medium. Movies combine sight and sound and movement. The best movies are those that take advantage of the medium and tell their stories in ways that you couldn't tell it orally, in a book, etc.

• Whole Package. Even with weaknesses here and there, a film could pull it off by doing some things so well that the problems don't really matter. Autism the Musical seemed to use pretty basic video technology, but the story it told and how it told that story made it an excellent film. Just like parts of a face, individually, might be a little off, all together the face can be beautiful. So the same is true for the movie.

Anyway, those are the things, roughly, that go into my assessment of a good movie.

AIFF - Labeled

We saw the first two minutes or so of this film the other night. I learned today it was supposed to be the intro for "Crossing Alaska with Horses." But it was so crowded there and the [Horses] filmmaker was there to speak afterward, they pulled it to have more time for the Q&A.

But in those first couple of minutes I fell in love with the movie. The visuals of the paint being poured into the tray, cleaning the brushes, painting the rooms were just exquisite. And tonight after seeing the rest of the ten minute movie it was even better. Elaine Riddick was sterilized at age 14 after giving birth after being raped. Now a house painter, she tells her story against the beauty of the images of the paint, painting, and peeling wall paper. She says the painting has helped with her anger. Dan Currier, the film maker, has a great eye, and through the visuals turned a compelling story into an extraordinary short documentary.

And it won the best short documentary award at the festival. You can see the whole video at his website.

The video below shows a few seconds near the beginning of the movie and a bit of the film maker Q&A after the movie was shown tonight.

AIFF - My Picks [Final Version]

The Festival awards were given out last night, but let me identify my own picks first and then official award winners. I saw four more tonight and have added them into the revised documentary table. It was interesting putting these tables together and seeing what all I've seen. Here's my first go at this. I'll do a final version after tonight's movies. I heard it said there were about 175 films at the conference (many shorts) and you can see that I only saw a small percentage of that. But I had to make lists of the films I saw to figure out which ones I liked best. And that led to the tables below so you can see what my choices were from. There are still a couple I want to see and I'm hoping I can this week before all the dvd's go back. Those are: Henchmen, by the filmmaker I met last week and Horn OK Please. (I just saw that the second one is 90 minutes. I'd thought it was a short animation. Maybe I should put others on my list.)

The tables for each category show the films I've seen in that category and how I rated them. Many I have mentioned already on the blog. You can put the name in the search blog window at the top left if you want more on that film.

Feature films:


Animated (I wasn't that impressed with most. They were technically good, but empty.)

Short features:
[Before Dawn got left off this chart, I'd put it in the "Go Out of Your Way to See It" Column]


Documentaries: (It turns out I didn't see many short documentaries - both tonight - so I'm making one documentary category.)


I'll do more on the four documentaries we saw tonight. And, making these tables, I realize I should discuss the criteria that I used. Actually, the first step is my gut reaction. Then I go looking for reasons I responded that way. More on that later.

AIFF - Film Makers Forum 2

Today's the last day of the Festival and I got to Ship Creek Mall for the filmmaker forum only to find the doors locked, but there was a note - moved to Starbucks at 5th & F. There I found 11 folks around the table talking about making films.

A majority were local people and talk got around to how to improve the film making environment in Alaska itself - ways for people to keep in touch with like minded others, equipment rental possibilities, etc. People talked about projects and passed out their cards. There was even someone from Bristol Bay Alliance looking to connect to local film makers so they can make a film about Bristol Bay and the potential impacts of mining. He made it clear they want an all Alaskan project - funding, film makers, everything. And they want it something that talks to people in the middle, not the extremes. Here's a glimpse at the meeting.

AIFF - Shorts in Competition Catch Up

This evening we saw Body/Antibody at the museum and then back to the Fireweed for Cthulhu.

But I need to catch up with all the great shorts we saw at the Shorts in Competition showing Friday night. Was that only yesterday? This was a very strong field of good shorts.

I'll give you the Festival website blurb and my comments.

The Wine Bar
When blue-collar Henry orders a beer in a snooty wine bar he offends everyone and has to defend himself and the woman sitting next to him.
In Short Competition

This one I already liked the best last Saturday and did a short comment then. This one is just a very well made, funny, insightful, and you feel good at the end.

Dear Lemon Lima,
A lonely girl with a vivid imagination struggles to plant seeds of love after her narcissistic sweetheart breaks her heart.

Posted about this one already.

Boletos Por Favor
(Tickets Please)
A train, a pursuit, only one way to escape.

It's hard to write about shorts without telling too much. This one was like walking into a highly charged situation and getting to watch it close up. The ending wasn't as satisfying as it could have been.

Anonymous
New fresh kind of independent cinema.

This one blew me away. It had a quirky style, every now and then it got jerky, like stuttering visually, along with the sound of the turntable scratching back and forth. And it was just right for this strange little story of a writer, his typewriter, the woman in the apartment next door, and an elevator. This was my favorite. Though it might not be everyone's taste.

Security
Dark humor veers into tragedy in Security, a drama about an American Immigration agent at Newark International Airport whose private fears spill into his professional life when he confronts an Iranian mother and her son. Starring Chris Messina (Six Feet Under). Based on the play by Israel Horovitz.

This one had me so pulled in that I totally forgot about my camera. Powerful. Homeland Security is NOT the hero of this film.

La Parabolica
(The Parabolic Dish)
During the broadcast of the Pope's visit, Vicente’s television is broken. Desperate, he decides to make a homemade parabolic dish.

This was the weakest of the bunch. It was fine, but not up to the quality of the others.

Demain la Veille
(Waiting for Yesterday) (See the trailer)
Bob is a 30 year old man like all others: he walks backwards, looses his memory, his skills, like a good citizen. But one night, he wakes up in sweat realizing that the world that he lives in is not “normal”. As he starts behaving differently, he finds himself chased by mercenaries, trying to put him back on track. Little does he know what he is in for: fighting the abstract power that has taken mankind backwards.

This one was also amazing. Seeing the world go backwards - wine pouring out of the mouth into the glass, ink disappearing off the page into the pen - is a nice brain stretcher. Making the film go backward isn't that hard, but at times I thought the storm troopers might actually have been running backward. I'd like a copy of this to play over and over again. Not sure if this was that good or it was simply the novelty of everything going backwards. Definitely worth seeing.

AIFF - Your Beautiful Cul De Sac Home

Waiting at the Fireweed to get in.






Getting to talk to the director of this film, Cameron Kirkwood was an extra bonus after watching this film. There was excellent acting, complicated story lines, and hard issues - how to live in a compromised world. Bringing all of it together wasn't easy, and I still had questions about how Trevor connected with Ben. Cameron pointed to events in the film that did tie them together, but I just didn't know enough at that point in the film. He mentioned that an earlier version was even more vague and they'd debated about how much to make it all clear. I think leaving some things unspelled out can be a good idea. I was making the connections here, and I think in a second viewing things would all fall into place. As I ponder this issue, I think that the basics of the story line should be fairly clear at the end. There shouldn't be questions like, but how did that guy get in there? With the basic story line in place, there should be as many layers of story as you can get in for the viewer to discover in multiple viewings. There was also a 'lecture" toward the end. An older name sits Ben down and tells him what's what. The actor was very good and it worked. But it was on the edge of heavy handed and I'm sure for people who reject the message it would have seemed to have crossed the line.

The movie also did a good job of integrating the issue of domestic violence into script, and issue I have an interest in. We've gotten to see some really fine films showing peeks into different people's worlds in non-standard film languages. Thanks to all the volunteers who have put this all together.

AIFF - Most Likely To

I saw two very good Canadian films - both about young men at early career stage trying to figure out how to live in the world. They were both well made and had stories to tell.

The blurb for Most Likely To says:

The film was shot in a Danish style imploying many techniques found in Dogme 95 practice but specifically was inspired by murdered filmmaker Theo van Gogh. 1) The film was shot with a rule of three - Shot in 3 days, with 3 camera's, 3 takes per scene, for 3 grand. 2) Without any rehearsal, the dialouge in the film is completely improvised.

Tony Sheppard, the Festival founder, said they did it for $5000. Five high school friends meet as they are at early stages of their careers, or should be. They are staying for the weekend at the home of the boss of the young attorney in the group. And he is worried that the party they are planning is going to cost him his job. Movie parties can be bad, but this one was filmed well - including split screen stuff. But things kick into high gear after the party. As they discuss whether to call the cops or not, I thought, this is the film that Alaskans should watch. So many people ask how Juneau got so corrupt. How is it Kott Kohring might not get that they did wrong. Here are five young men making a major decision based on the potential consequences to their lives. And they don't think about it twice. Good movie!

AIFF - Playing Cats and Moose

We were a little late to Out North so we had to sit on the floor to watch these two films.

The crowd, or at least parts of the crowd, loved the first movie - The Dalai Lama's Cat. The film festival's program blurb isn't too far off:

'Lonely Planet' meets 'The Office' at a dizzying 5000 metres.

But I had several other reactions, none positive.

1. This is another self promotion travel film. Last night we had Crossing Alaska with Horses, and earlier this year we had Asiemut. You go on a trip, take a video camera (and crew in the case of Horses), and pay for your trip by making a movie. Asiemut worked for me. The two from the festival didn't. This one not at all.
2. The movie has nothing to do with the Dalai Lama or cats. The title is premised on a story one of the travelers heard about the Dalai Lama's cats and reincarnation. They could find nothing about it this story - in the book stores of Kathmandu or in Tibet.
3. The use of the Dalai Lama's name in the title is nothing but blatant exploitation of his name. People regard the Dalai Lama highly. This film while criticizing the Chinese in Tibet for disappearing any evidence of the Dalai Lama in Tibet, don't show any understanding of the Dalai Lama themselves. I'm sure though, the Dalai Lama would just offer a mysterious smile if he saw this, but I think he deserves a cut of any profit they make.
   
4. These 40 or 50 somethings acting like drunk frat boys, making fun of everyone and everything. I feel a little like a grump here, but when you visit the holy place of several religions, leaving your girlfriends fluffy pink slippers and underwear as an offering isn't humorous for me. Acting like this at home is one thing, but when you do it elsewhere, it's just rude. Try this line: "He made friends with the locals by dropping a little kid on his head" and then the audience laughs at him playing with a little kid and dropping him (accidentally, I'm sure) on his head. I guess what gets me aroused is that this is rich white privilege at work. The Nepalese and Tibetans put up with stupid tourists for the same reason they put up with the Chinese - they have no choice. But if one of these Tibetans were to come to Britain or Australia (they said they were Brits living in Australia) or to the US and acted like they did, they'd probably run into serious problems, as we saw in a short film later in the evening called "Security" about an Iranian woman and her son who get special interrogation in a US airport on the way to visit her husband teaching at a US university.
   
5. They told us after the showing that they lied about their film making intentions because they wouldn't have gotten permission to enter Tibet and their guides could have gotten into trouble. Nevertheless, the were willing to risk their guides livelihood and possible freedom for their own lark. Exposing others to such risks to document human rights abuses for the world is one thing, to have a laugh and possibly make some money that the risk takers never consent to is quite another. I understand self centered 13 and 14 year olds doing this, but I expect more from adults.
   

Look, if I met these guys in a pub in Australia or in Anchorage, I'm sure we'd tell good stories and get on fine. But my overseas experiences have been attempts to learn the language where I was and learn about people from their perspectives, not to make fun of the people I visited. Many of the films in this festival have given us glimpses into the culture and inner worlds of people we would never otherwise meet. This film did give us insight into Mike and Peter's world, one that enjoys privileges the people they meet will never have. And they use those privileges not to learn, not to share what they've learned, or not even to be introspective, but to clown around with the backdrop a people in poverty. They don't laugh with the people of Tibet, but at them. This is a far different movie than, say Asiemut, where two film makers biked through Mongolia to India. They used the 'exoticness' of the people of Tibet and the cache of the Dalai Lama's name to pay for their trip to Tibet. They said they sent five copies of the movie to the Dalai Lama, but they didn't say if they make a profit they would share any of it with the people of Tibet.


Below the film makers talk after the showing.



Oh yeah, the title mentioned moose too. The second film was about local heroes Rick Sinnott and Jessy Coltrane, the wildlife biologists who help keep humans and moose (and bears and other critters) coexisting in Anchorage. This film was fun. Rick is well known and generally well liked in Anchorage and I even went out with him once to band magpies. Not an easy task. We like our moose walking the streets and his work helps to keep the moose and the people safe so that this can continue. That's what this film made for the BBC is about.

AIFF -El Pallasso i el Führer (The Clown and the Führer)

The Clown and the Führer is the best feature I've seen at the Festival. I wrote about it last night a bit. Here are some clips from the showing.

Kott Trial - Kott's Statement

Kott's statement to the court was brief and while he apologized for what he said "away from the floor" [on the tapes?], he didn't seem to think he'd done anything wrong as a legislator. My notes (again, typing not as fast he as was talking, but it will give you an idea of the statement)

I want people of AK to know I’m deeply sorry for my actions and words. All my actions [in the legislature], I truly felt I did in the best interests of the State of Alaska. My statements away from the floor of the legislature, I deeply regret and apologize. I hope that the opinion of me will soften over the years. Always been my goal to bring out the potential of the state. To the court I apologize for being here and taking up your time.

I'm sure the Anchorage Daily News will have it more accurate. They and APRN and others may already have the audio up.

Kott Trial - Calculation of Amount Kott Received Correction

In the previous post I raised a question about the math for figuring out the total amount of money Kott received for the sentencing guidelines. I talked to Lisa Demer (ADN reporter) and she corrected my number for the poll. I'd written down $15,000 and figured that was not right. She said it was $2750 [I think I heard two@750 got $1500 and added a zero to boot.] which now I remember is what it was calculated during the trial. That gets the judge's total of $29, 743. But I also have in my notes: [WARNING: This was typing as fast as I could while he was talking. There are missing pieces and maybe even incorrect pieces.]

Judge: Both agree on $5000. I think the evidence that it was a bribe is insufficient. Allen and Kott were close friends and Allen admired Kott’s work ethic. To Allen, $5000 is not very much money, so he literally probably didn’t care if he didn’t get it back. To Kott, it was fairly significant. Probably he did think of it as a loan. This explanation is just as persuasive as the argument it’s a bribe. But I will keep the $5000 in the calculation of the value.

Lisa didn't hear that and thought the $5000 would be excluded. She has the audio from today and she'll check on that. She's younger and her ears are better, so I probably got that wrong.

If the $5000 were included, it would bump it up to a higher bracket. Right now it is in the $10,000 - $30,000 bracket. That would add points to the sentencing formula. But they already went a little above the formula so it probably wouldn't matter at this point.

[Lisa emailed that the judge said $5000 would NOT be included.]

Kott Trial - Kott Sentenced to 72 Months

Peter Kott was sentenced today to

• 72 months in Federal Prison. All terms to run concurrently.
• 3 years supervised release
• $10,000 fine

The government requested that he be remanded immediately because of minor infractions on his recent trip to Las Vegas (they mentioned that he didn't give his itinerary or phone numbers) The judge rejected this saying the issues were minor, he was not a flight risk, and that he will be in prison a long time and the holidays are coming up.

The judge had ordered Kott to surrender in Anchorage, but the defense argued that this would require him to probably spend time in the local jail. The government nothing to say on this and the judge agreed to let him self report to federal prison, but he would have to pay his own fare and there was no guarantee it would be at Sheridan, the nearest federal prison.

The judge rejected the defense request for the judge to ask for alcohol treatment in prison. The government argued this was a ruse to get a lowered sentence (participation in such programs count toward lowering a sentence).

Court adjourned about 10:20am after starting at 8:30am.



I'll spell check my messy and incomplete 'transcripts' then add them to this post. Probably 30 minutes more.

[11:43am It's taken me more than the 30 minutes. Here are my 'transcripts' - they are NOT accurate, but just a sketch of what was said. I'll add more comments in a second post]

December 7, 2007 Kott Trial
8:33am Judge seems to still have a cold, but sounds almost ok

Judge Sedwick: US objects to pre-sentence report - based on prop there were multiple bribes
Total value of benefits
Lack of two level upward adjustment
Implicit objections to others

Par. 100 description of when he wasn’t drinking
He has ability to pay a fine
That his lawyer didn’t make any suggestions to ??
Implicitly to 77 and 148 about upward adjustments

Additional, Mr. Wendt?
Court mention par 67

Par. 167 irrelevant - don’t have impact on sentencing.
Others - all statements of fact are supported and adopt them
Objections in order

[US Senate candidate Ray Metcalfe, Anchorage Assemblyperson Allen Tesche in the courtroom]

Mr. Wendt has laid out concerns:
Goeke: Mr. Kott asking for job from Allen - before jury, Allen in tape: ‘What do you really want to be?’ Kott: ‘A lobbyist for Veco.’ Allen: ‘You have it.’

Wendt: [defense attorney] This conversation very late in the recordings. Even this late, Allen didn’t know what Kott wanted. He simply answered honestly. He didn’t ask for help. Record complete with joke about Barbados.

Judge: I do find evidence in the record about seeking a job. - Discusses back and forth. Passage of PPT suggests that Kott failed to deliver and lost primary, reasonable that he not ask for job.

Payment of $5000 as a bribe. Fair to begin that defendant doesn’t dispute the $5K. Need to determine proper characterization of the $5K

Goeke: [Prosecutor] Testimony by Kott - he tried to characterize it as a loan, which is flatly contradicted by his testimony. He called it a loan, but made no attempt to pay it back even though he had the cash. Solicited more funds while had this loan. Based on the facts that Mr. Kott has established, it was clearly a bribe.

Wendt: I believe mr. Goeke is incorrect. He didn’t receive $5000 [?] while he was working for Veco. They have burden of proof to produce evidence or proof. No evidence provided at trial. They can’t come in with arms folded and say this is so. The only evidence is Kott’s saying it was a loan. There doesn’t have to be a written contract between friends. Burden on the government.

Judge: Both agree on $5000. I think the evidence that it was a bribe is insufficient. Allen and Kott were close friends and Allen admired Kott’s work ethic. To Allen, $5000 is not very much money, so he literally probably didn’t care if he didn’t get it back. To Kott, it was fairly significant. Probably he did think of it as a loan. This explanation is just as persuasive as the argument it’s a bribe. But I will keep the $5000 in the calculation of the value.

Ample room to argue about other matters.

Wendt: Multiple bribes issue - my argument would be - a person is expected to act in a certain way, then they receive a bribe, then they carry out what they are supposed to do. Then it turns out to be more difficult, so requests more. That would be multiple bribes. These are all instances after the PPT legislation. Wasn’t situation where we will keep giving you money so you will carry out what you are supposed to do. A bribe can be a payment to do something or a reward for something done. The argument then is he didn’t receive one reward, but multiple rewards over time. But wasn’t …. Fact that rewards came at different times. They aren’t separate instances … These are gratuities, not bribes. The $1000 should not be considered a bribe. That was payback for making $1000 donation.
Gifts because he liked PKott. Not bribes, gifts.

Goeke: I heard Mr. Wendt say that Mr. K was not guilty. The jury found these were bribes. Wendt wants to tether it back to PPT as a whole. But trial showed there were multiple events, amendments, in the course of that legislation. Tried to adjourn legislature, lobby other legislators, etc. These were all separate acts. Allen’s testimony about 519 in prior sessions. “We introduced that through Mr. K”.
Benefits in different ways - poll, money in fraudulent polling bill, cash for campaign contribution to Murkowski. It was a benefit - $1000 in his pocket he didn’t have before. These were motivation to keep Kott going toward the goal. They kept up until the very last moment. He was there till the very end. Helping in different ways at different times. The jury heard all this.

J. Sedwick - While I do agree the most relevant case is 9th circuit 3 factors to determine multiple
1. Whether all payments for single action
2. Installments
3. Method

Three distinct actions, thus multiple bribes

Goeke says different acts and different bribes - I disagree - but all of this was done because of Veco’s interest to have PPT at certain level. Room to argue that solicitation for job is separated in time and so should be considered differently. I think with respect to even that, continuing vitality was attributed to VECO wanting to have PPT passed at certain level. Don’t look like installments, but still related to single purpose.
Method: Whether same different or same payee.
Conclusion there were not multiple bribes. True, diverse ways and multiple forms, but disguised in different ways. Not multiple bribes, but hiding.
So, not multiple bribes.

Total value calculation. In pre-sentence report four levels in sentencing.

Wendt: Thank you your honor. Unable to find court precedent. Best I had was net value. If the court considers the job offer, only fair way is to say, how much is the job worth in money - net value. Examples of net value of contract. Here net value of job.
If a person is a lobbyist, don’t understand why the court feels the lobbyist would work 12 months out of the year.

J: Don’t have to argue that, I agree.

Wendt: Aren’t many special sessions, not all for oil and gas issues. Amount lobbyist gets paid is public record, available at APOC, on line. I’ve obtained record for lobbyist - Paul Richards - received $3000 per month in 2007. Even if we take Bill Allen’s testimony of $6000 month, for three months, we get $18,000. You make money by getting other clients, not just one. If he took this job, he would have to give up his hardwood flooring job. Net value has to subtract what he would have made in his hardwood flooring job. I would argue it wouldn’t make him more money, just he liked the job better.
Popular belief that lobbyists get hundreds of thousands isn’t true. Compared to Mr. Richards who would get $9000 minus $6000 for hardwood flooring = $3000. Difference is not getting hands dirty and get paid.

Marsh: [Prosecutor]
1. Evidence used: Best evidence the court can get. Not evidence about another lobbyist, but testimony at trial, under oath, subject to cross exam, about how much Allen intended to pay kott. That was $6K. It would be a multi year arrangement. The probation office was far from aggressive. They could have picked a higher amount for a number of years.
2. Limits of job. Legislature going to 3 months wasn’t even contemplated at that time.

J: Legislator can’t become a lobbyist for 3 years?

M: At the time it was 1 year. Not just lobbyist, but also consultant. Kott said, “I’m gonna be a consultant, like Knauss.”

J: The individual named - used both terms.

M: He did both. Maybe a deferred payment. Nothing suggests a deferred payment is not a bribe. “The value of the benefit received or to be received.” Mr. Allen told us under oath what he believed those figures to be. There is nothing to prevent the court from ruling this. One other thing. Net value. It seemed plain from the testimony, that Kott wanted this job to stop doing the hardwood flooring. The whole point was to change his job. Mr. Allen understood and believed, that if Mr. Kott did lobby for Veco, it would give Kott the cache to solicit other clients.
$6K/month
Not limited to session Many things a legislator can do outside of the session.

J: Difficult topics, both argued well. I couldn’t find case law either.

1. Undisputed $7,993 should be included. $1000 should also be included. Wendt’s argument didn’t hold water. Got benefit of contributing to Gov M’s campaign. Jones contribution to Brown’s campaign - worth $1000 to Jones. Allen’s $1000 was on top of that.
2. Same kind of problem several times, but in different context. Difficulty in calculating value in drug cases. Meth lab case about how much meth could this lab have produced. Very difficult. But one theme that also applies here. Appeal Courts have said, when you are estimating you have to err on the side of the defendant, after all, these are just estimates. We don’t know how long he would have been a lobbyist if he continued on that career. Wendt makes a point, but Marsh does too. If you had one good client, you could attract other clients.
Mr. Allen’s testimony does support $6000 prop, but not necessarily 12 months a year. Also consider a job, no matter how much people expect it to go well at the outset, may not. Kott had serious alcohol problem. Evidence lobbyists and legislators, maybe he would have overcome his dependency on alcohol, but could also have gotten worse. Multiple years is speculation. I find the lobbying job worth
$18,000 -
$29, 743 which - $7,500 each for 2 polls
Between $10 and 30K - four levels. Even if I hadn’t included the lobbying job, it would be the same. The $18K for lobbying
[Note: I missed something here because the math doesn’t add up for me. My notes explicitly include from the judge:
$1000 for campaign contribution reimbursement I’ve got
$15,000 (two polls) [I only remember one poll for $7500]
$18,000 (value of future job)
$5000 (for truck loan)
$7.993 (for flooring bill padding)
That comes to $46,000. But the judge said the total was $29,743. For the sentencing guidelines that falls within the $10,000 - $30,000 level in the guidelines. If there were only one poll and we deduct $7500, we’re well above $30,000. I’m confused by what the judge did and did not count in calculating the total amount received.]
3. Upward adjustment. First from Government.

Marsh: Organizer leader, manager, supervisor of criminal activity. While true that push from Allen and Smith predominantly, and Kott tasked to Lt if not more, by Allen and smith, but also to go out to make sure other people would do things. LeDoux confirmed that she did speak several times. Also Weyhrauch, when he moved to adjourn it was because Kott asked W to do so. Another example of Kott taking orders, sometimes on his own, went out to get others to do their bidding.
Wendt: This relates to leaders, managers, and supervisors ….. In this case Allen was leader, Smith a manager, STevens might have a roll, but wasn’t taking orders from Kott. LeDoux said he wasn’t doing anything different from other legislators. That’s what we do. I look at this as borderline frivolous. Bit was Allen and Smith. Kott wasn’t leading or organizing anyone. I just don’t see it.

J: I don’t characterize the argument as frivolous. But I don’t buy it. He did it because he was corporal or sergeant, not Lt. Or captain. Overruled.

4. Last guideline issue 9:25am whether he committed perjury
Wendt: Little to say more than I have written. He was on the stand for hours. He never denied that payments were made. He said they were - payback for contribution to M campaign. You can find it was a bribe, but it’s not perjury. The only thing is about whether future flooring work could have been done. Jury could have found them guilty. He was willing to do it fro free. Mr. Allen agreed to that. He does flooring for others for free or to pay back other favors. No perjury. He may have been looking at the facts through his own interpretation. Never said black was white. Grey area here of what is right and wrong. Clearly jury found against us, but that is not perjury. He testified truthfully about many things. Who can doubt he would do future flooring work for more money. HE didn’t testify the poll wasn’t done, just that he didn’t care about it. Mr. K’s position was, if you are doing a poll, thanks very much. He merely said, he didn’t receive the poll himself.

[Kott’s family - son (I think), daughter, Debora Stovern in court]

Goeke: He did commit perjury and got others to. Flooring, concocted story about what it was for, for work at Smiths and Allens house in future. The jury rejected it in the verdict. Smith said he knew nothing about it. Ms. Stovern said they made the invoice after the fact. That is …….. Perjury.

To the last day, about how he voted, that’s why he said he voted no. Mr. Kott talked about Mr. Moses. He would have voted to reopen the session. Directly ,,,,, told jury he came to decision of conscience. Couldn’t explain why voted no and only changed it after the final vote. Jury didn’t buy it. That’s the perjury.
But also lied to tribunal. Less a material matter, but cash bond at end of the trial. Kott said he didn’t have the money for that. Mr. Stovern, subordination of perjury. Kott’s comments about invoices, contradicted by Allen and Smith, plainly false. And jury had to find it so.

J. 1. False statement under oath in court
2. Material matter
3. Willfully, not by mistake,

I find it easy to conclude perjury for $7,993 and wouldn’t be surprised if Goeke said it was frivolous, but Wendt made it in good faith. I am completely convinced Mr. K made false testimony, willfully, under oath. Carefully crafted to deceive the jury.

24 and not 28

Any victims who wish to speak? NO

Wendt: Nature of offense and character of the defendant. Offense, unusual compared to others. Usually, receive money or benefits for themselves. Here
Poll he didn’t want
$7,793 went to son
$1000 check he’d written
Vague talk about a job

Not the same as finding $90K in his freezer. Nature of this offense makes it different. Not doing something for someone that directly harmed someone else. Normally, someone is paid for getting a contract. If ABC gets contract, other construction company doesn’t get the contract. He was a pro development person. He was just supporting the governor's proposal, that would have, we would hope, get a gas pipeline.
As it turns out there is harm because of the criminal investigation, but no direct harm because of what he did.

Has subtle characteristics that should stand out. From letters.
Gone out of his way to help people with no power fairly.
Flooring for free to people with power
Treated aides well. Treats garbage man and governor fairly.

He deserves a bit a break under 3553: apply penalty sufficient but not greater than necessary. Mr. Kott was a thoroughly decent man, doesn’t need to go to jail for ???months. Public service in politics doesn’t differentiate him. Air force does. Father worked in GM and he did very well. Then he met Mr. Allen. Genuine friendship. Mr. A has some bad points to personality - pays people to get things and doesn’t follow the rules. Also very seductive. Also worked up from poverty. Two individuals from same political philosophy. Formed friendship. Lived with Allen for three months. With someone in excess of $100 million. Still getting up early to do hardwood flooring. Didn’t ask for a dime. He was almost embarrassed to ask for a job. He knows that Allen gave others a job - Stevens and Anderson. Defendant who was almost seduced into this. I know he was an adult man and that’s no excuse. In some ways Allen is very charming, and he wanted the same things allen wanted. I would argue to the court, nature of the offense, nothing for himself and characteristics and value system, should result in sentence that is lower than guideline the court has found. Finally Kott is not a young man - 58 - he’ll be past 60 when he gets out. No need to to protect public. Five years would be enormous for him. Please, this is not a bad man.

Fine issue? Now that level 24, minimum is less, from $10-100K. We would argue for no fine. Yes, Mr. K has saved up some money. Still married to his wife. She has some interest in. He won’t be putting in hardwood floors at 60. He could certainly pay the fine, it would leave him very little when he gets out.

Marsh: I find it interesting when discussing the value of the Veco job that they ask you to consider net worth of hardwood flooring job, but now say he couldn’t do hardwood flooring in two years.

Any public corruption case strikes a blow about faith in political system. Those are normal cases. But when prominent and powerful member, when that person is caught on tape soliciting bribes that affects billions of dollars of taxpayer money. We agree that it is unusual, extraordinary, egregious behavior. Corrupted the views of the public that had to watch what was really going on with that bill.

Many defendants ask for leniency based on circumstances or nature of crime. In neither of those can he take advantage of arguments. He’d made something of himself - former officer in the military. Classifying secure documents. Had profession. Job. Former career. Family. Ten years in legislator. Not a victim of extenuating circumstances, He did it himself.

These were multiple bribes, obvious steps at concealing, and perjury, purpose to gerrymander tax rate of money coming off the north slope. We all know the oil is increasing and revenue is significant. Purpose was to keep the tax rate lower. Second, we submit that facts and way it came about makes it extraordinary.

Brazen - beg, borrow, steal, sold my sole to the devil. Bragged about lengths to which he would go to make good for bribes.

Most disturbing, statements he made about his constituents. When he didn’t know people were looking - tape - I’d vote for 30% tax if it weren’t this man here. He could tell constituents whatever I want, I use them, I abuse them. What is the impact of former speaker of the house saying I use them I abuse them? There is no way to quantify that harm. This does take this out of the sentencing guidelines. We disagree this was not all because of Bill Allen’s seductiveness.

Mr. K’s sentence has already been compounded because of his perjury at trial. And to deter and punish - his own and son’s testimony ….. I’ll try to contain myself on the idea there is no direct harm. Unbelievable to think there was no harm by those who tried, thru bribes to affect the PPT. That that is less criminal than sending $30,000. It didn’t go to contractors, it went to state of alaska. Billions.

Kott had enough money to pay his son $8K, but he didn’t. He asked for money from allen.

3553a6 - unwanted sentence disparity between different defendants. When you compare the conduct - Mr. Anderson’s conduct pales in comparison to Mr. Kott’s. He did all sorts of things - detailed - shut down whole House to shut down for Allen. This deserves a much more significant sentence than what Anderson received.

This is a bout choices. Unlike many here. Mr. Kott didn’t have to be here. He wasn’t forced into legislature because he didn’t have enough money. He chose this. He sought it multiple times. Weyhrauch offered things of value in exchange for doing their bidding, that it was his choice. We submit that sentencing range set for in the level 28 is the bottom level and ask the court to depart upward at the high end of 28 - 97 months. ????

Mr. Kott:

I want people of AK to know I’m deeply sorry for my actions and words. All my actions, I truly felt I did in the best interests of the State of Alaska. My statements away from the floor of the legislature, I deeply regret and apologize. I hope that the opinion of me will soften over years. Always been my goal to bring out the potential of the state. To the court I apologize for being here and taking up your time.

J: Thank you Mr. Kott. This court directed by congress to consider:

1. Nature and circumstances of the offense - Mr. Marsh has the better argument. This Offense has cause people to questions the whole political system of Alaska. Causes us all to wonder what really goes on in Juneau. Maybe Kott in his heart of heart really believes. Whether right or not, but needs to be decided in legislature free of the influence of allen and smith. Whether their view is correct or not, it is driven by greed. He knew he need to do the bidding of his customers rather than the publics. I don’t know if 20/20 was the best legislation. I have no way to know. But it should have been decided on its merits free of Allen’s influence. Money involved was indeed hundreds of millions if not billions of dollars. Of interest to everyone in the state of Alaska. Every PFD recipient.

2. Surprising that Kott convicted with the crime he was convicted. Given his background and air force. Such service is so we can live in society that is free and democratic. So all the time he spent to defend that political process, came to naught because he joined those who would corrupt it. History would support modest sentence, but the nature of the offense os substantial that his own previous history is much outweighed.

3. Promote respect for justice and crime committed
At sentencing level or even higher justified. Defer others in the future. Allen may be seduced Kott, but Kott has considerable experience. There are always people, often with money, who can overcome people. Need to stiffen some backbones. Need to put priorities in order, public first over close friends.

4. Special needs - medical care, education. No specific. Can’t describe him as middle age, but no particular needs. Can be provided in institutional setting

4. Protect community from Kott. I’m convinced Kott isn’t going to indulge in criminal conduct in future. Only possibility is alcohol abuse. Not significant risk

6. Range 51-6? Months - Disparity. Guideline is usually the best way to do that. But here we have related cases. Mr. Anderson’s sentence has to be acknowledged and Marsh is correct that although Anderson’s conduct bad, Kott’s was even worth. Kott has some stature. Anderson was basically a lightweight. Kott was a leader among our elected officials. So I think significantly above Anderson's and guidelines is warranted.

7. Restitution not relevant here

Looking back at the trial and everything and consider to apply a sentence sufficient but no more than necessary 72 months is sufficient. Gov’s 97 is more than sufficient.

72 months all terms to run concurrently
3 years supervised release concurrently
No firearm, controlled substances - waive drug testing. Only substance abuse problem is alcohol.
Participate in treatment program. Testing for alcohol use.
Cooperate in collection of DNA
Assist on financial information
Not possess
I find he does have ability to pay fine - $10,000 immediately - installments ok. Interest not waived. And special assessment of $300.

I don’t believe Govt. Is seek remand at this time.

Goeke: We are. Have notified Wendt prior. Aware that he made trips to Las Vegas. He is not being compliant

J: Didn’t give itinerary or phone numbers. Agree not compliant. Not right, but not as serious that usually makes remand.

Goeke: We agree we didn’t ask for remand before sentencing. But - not danger to the community..

J. Your real concern is flight

G: Appropriate, some concern with flight. Be truthful. Not only time secretive about whereabouts, about funds.

W: For the record, I’m the one who said he didn’t have funds, and he didn’t. Regarding the memo….I just saw this today, didn’t know about this. I would like to listen to the tape. Mr. Kott says he gave them his cell phone number.

J: That isn’t enough, but there are further allegations

W: Anderson wasn’t remanded. No issue here

J: I agree. If no danger of flight. Especially at holiday season. He’s going away for a long time. Government’s request for remand is denied. But, if there are any violations of stipulations, you will be. Do you understand Mr. Kott. You need to surrender here in Anchorage. Until facility designated. Any recommendations.

W: We would suggest Sheridan.

J. I do recommend Sheridan because that is the closest to his family.

G: Count one has ????? OK will be served concurrently.

W: We would request that he self report to Sheridan. If he reports here he will be in the jail here.

G: no problem

J. I will amend that. Mr. Kott that means you have to pay your own way there. And it may not be Sheridan. I’ll recommend it.

W: Court has recommended for alcohol treatment. We ask that the J ask for that from the BOP.

J: Govt. Have a position on that?

G: I believe that is based on attempt to lower the sentence. I have yet to hear Mr. Kott talk about that.

J: I agree Mr. K won’t have alcohol while incarcerated and he’s a smart man and can deal with that problem when he gets out.

AIFF - Thursday Night Random Thoughts

Random Thoughts was a collection of short films. I wrote a little about them in the previous post. But I didn't write about "The Grass Grows Green" which you can see is well filmed. It's the story of two Marine recruiters on the day they learn one of the men they recruited had been killed in Iraq. While I liked most everything about this, the recruiters didn't ring true for me. Was it the acting? The script? Not sure. Besides, how many Marine recruiters do I know? Something didn't seem right about their roles for me. There was one more film in this showing - The Worlds Most Fabulous Object - but we came in partway after Crossing Alaska with Horses from the Fireweed.

AIFF - Thursday, A Good Day at the Movies

El Pallasso i el Führer
(The Clown and the Führer)

A first rate movie. From a play, presumably based on a true story (they did tell us at the end what happened to the main characters) from Spain (in Catalan I believe). So, I'm going to guess the clown was from Spain. 1944, invited, as the greatest clown in the world, to perform for Adolf Hitler's birthday. This was a film with many layers that somehow managed to tell a rich, complete story in movie time. Its theater provenance, I'm sure, made this much easier than had it been adapted from a book. I'd say this was the best film I've seen at the festival. Funny - in deeply ironic humor, not sitcom funny - layers of intrigue, subtlety, good acting. My favorite so far.

A Cheval à Travers l'Alaska
(Crossing Alaska with Horses)

I have a vision of a giant cross superimposed on a map of Alaska - the cross entirely made up fo horses. But while crossing Alaska from Valdez to Prudhoe Bay by horse was a fantastic adventure for the two Frenchmen and the Korean-American in the film, the film was not so fantastic. This is of the "let's make a movie about our adventure so we can pay for our travel" genre. Asiemut's story of biking from Mongolia to Calcutta was the same sort of thing, but they made as good a movie, if not better, without a film crew following them around. Perhaps this is because when you live in Alaska, Alaska is not exotic. And Alaskan love to see movies about Alaska and love to catch all the errors. Watching the DVD version may also have diminished the film. There was lots of (in French) "Gee, wow, magnificent, natural wonderland, traveling in the wilderness" gushing about Alaska. At least the travelers realized and told us that once they got here they realized that maybe traveling with horses across Alaska wasn't such a smart idea. Perhaps one of the more ironic scenes was when they met with a couple of the Pilgrim family sons in McCarthy and went with them to see the glacier. Last week in Anchorage the Pilgrim children testified in court how Papa Pilgrim beat them and raped the oldest daughter and he was convicted to 14 years in prison. In the movie the sons talk about the idyllic life living in the wilderness. Not everything is what it seems to be.

This movie was sold out. People came into the theater and had to leave because it was totally full, with even some people sitting on the floor. They've added a showing Saturday at 5:30 (check the AIFF website for sure) as well as the scheduled Sunday showing, or so they said.

The director came all the way from Paris and answered questions after the film. But no one turned the lights up and we had to get to the museum.

Then we rushed down to the museum to catch the shorts there. We figured that there would be at least one really good one - but the feature movie at the Bear Tooth and the one at the Fireweek, if either wasn't great, we were stuck. The shorts turned out to outstanding. I particularly liked

Il était une fois ... Sasha et Désiré
(Once upon a time ... Sasha and Desire) which took us to the day the daughter of Russian (Jewish it appeared) immigrants to Paris, met the cafe-au-lait descendant of African slaves and French colonists in Martinique. A beautiful film.

To Spiti me tis Elies
(House of the Olive Trees) another, very different young couple, in Greece. Interesting people in real situations. While we've previewed her stubborness in the opening shot of her baptism, we don't know anything about him. This felt like a excerpt from a feature film, but it had a sobering ending that left many possibilities.

Dear Lemon Lima, was another snipped, it seemed, from a future feature length film. Beautifully shot with good acting, it had lots of potential. Though I think the mother was a bit exaggerated. (I'm sure the writer will say 'not at all, I know her well'.) The director - I think that was her role - was there after the film to talk. She also talked about a feature to be filmed next summer that is set in Fairbanks. To her credit, she's been to Fairbanks - after writing several chapters of the screen play - but it will be filmed in Seattle (did she really say Seattle? How can you do Fairbanks in Seattle?) because, you know, it's really expensive to do it in Fairbanks. You know, I think that people in Fairbanks and Anchorage would put the whole crew up in their houses to help you keep the costs down. If those other guys could walk their horses across Alaska, you can surely shoot your film that takes place in Fairbanks, in Alaska. Imagine a movie, "Crossing Alaska with Horses" filmed in the Alps, because, you know, going to Alaska would be so expensive.

I've got some video, but it's going on 1am and tomorrow morning is the Kott sentencing. I'll get some up tomorrow.

I'll put this up now and check maybe do some editing tomorrow if it's terrible.

AIFF - I Have Seen the Future going to Sundance

Cam Christiansen, the director of "I Have Seen the Future's," email address was on the AIFF link to the movie, so I emailed Cam to say how much I enjoyed the short animation. I got back this email.


"Hey thanks.. thats great.. We just got accepted to sundance so.. very pleased"


Assuming it was "I Have Seen the Future" [it was] and not another film that got into Sundance, we can say we saw it first at the Anchorage International Film Festival.

AIFF Martini Matinee - it didn't work for me

The phone call lasted longer than I expected so I decided rather than rush around, I'd take my time and just go to the Martini Matinee. I'd never been to the Anchor Pub before. According to someone there, it used to be a bank. It's very NOT Anchorage. Lots of little leather couches and low coffee tables. Lots of martinis. Three or four flat screens on different walls. It had a nice atmosphere for a fancy bar, but I had to sit at a bad angle to see the screen. It was like being in a bar with music, but people are talking during the sets. Only the movies were the sets. A friend - who turned out to be the designated MC for the night - said there were seats under the big screen further 'inside' the place. I moved to a more comfortable seat, but the opening to the kitchen was there and looking toward the screen I also looked toward this brightly lit hallway.

All in all it was not a great venue and I left at intermission while they were having a movie trivia contest. But there were a couple shorts I'd like to mention.



I Have Seen the Future was a very classy animated tennis game in shades of green and yellow. The camera swept around, the tennis court warped, the main tennis player had an interesting face - not some standard look - and it all worked well with the song by the Canadian singer Chris Demeanor. (Who could forget a name like that?) An original look for the whole film(at least for me) and it all fit together nicely.

Before Dawn is a haunting, beautifully made Hungarian film [Did you read this far Ropi?] in early morning black and white. The only sound, besides all the people talking and the rattle of dishes in the Anchor Pub, was a large truck driving on a one lane work road in the middle of wheat? fields. The fields were beautiful abstract patterns in the predawn light. It stops. Quiet again. Even the room was quiet now. The horn is blasted. Rustling in the fields as bodies slip out and into the truck. Engine starts. Drives away. Then flashing lights and helicopters as the people sneaking into the country are rounded up by Hungarian(?) version of INS. It all worked well together - the darkness, patterns of wheat and roads, the story. Probably the best film of the night - at least the ones before I left. (There were others on the schedule I'd seen earlier at the animation night. I haven't written about that. All were technically well done, but few had content to match the technique. My favorite from that night was Process Enacted. which I can't quite describe. Each frame becomes like a polaroid picture in the pile of pictures that make up the movie, all very cleverly done.)

Shuteye Hotel (you can even see a snippet at the link) is a slick little dark mystery animation in seven minutes. As I write this I realize that shut eye may have more than one meaning. Was that an eye? Maybe not.

It was an attempt to have a different kind of venue - smaller and cozier - but for me it didn't work. Too much distraction from the main attraction - the films. Oh, and when I hit the power button on my digital camera I realized the battery was still in the charger at home.

Blogging the AIFF

Blogging the film festival is totally different from blogging the trials. There are way too many movies for me to see them all. The venues are scattered around town - probably about five miles at the greatest distance (Out North to Bear Tooth) - which is ok with a car, but the schedule makes it a little tight if you want to go to another venue.

But what should one blog? Movie reviews? Sometimes I don't have that much to say, or it takes time to sort through. I thought showing preview like bits of the films, but it's hard to get the good parts and I have limited space on my camera's memory card. Show the people milling around and talking? In a lot of cases that wasn't happening that much, it was very dark, or I got into the conversation and forgot. I've tried to get people to talk about the films they saw, and that worked ok for some. You just have to get people who are comfortable talking to the camera.

So tonight is the Martini Matinee. This is for all events pass holders and $10 for others. You can see the list of shorts at the link. Maybe there will be lots of minglers and people willing to give their impressions of the festival and the films they've seen. I'll use a lower resolution so I'll have more space. I'm also restrained by a 5pm conference call I have. So I'll miss the 5:30 showing of Fat Stupid Rabbitwhich looks better than the title suggests. That leaves Taxi to the Dark Side, at 6pm, which I saw and which everyone should see, and Greetings from the Shore at 6:30 whose title sounds better than the description and would have me late for the Matinee. (I thought matinees were in the afternoon.) Depending on how long the call takes, maybe I'll just go late to the Rabbit and if it's good, try to see the beginning at the Vault - the film headquarters where all pass holders can watch all the films on their dvd players. Well you could if they were open more during the week.

But considering this is put together mainly by volunteers working off their love for movies, I'm not complaining. Just observing. So thanks for making all this happen here in the far north.

King Bhumibol's Birthday

I got the above picture in an email from Kamphaengphet, Thailand, where they celebrated King Bhumibol's 80th birthday yesterday. I taught English there long ago. This is the continuation of the ceremonies that began last year celebrating his 60 years as King and the yellow polo shirts that are seen all over Thailand honoring the King. Below is part of a Fox News report:

Devoted But Worried Nation Honors Thai King on His 80th Birthday

BANGKOK, Thailand — Thailand's 65 million people celebrated King Bhumibol Adulyadej's 80th birthday Wednesday, honoring the world's longest-reigning monarch with countrywide festivities amid concerns about his health and political instability.

Bhumibol, also the world's only U.S.-born monarch, last year celebrated 60 years on the throne, an achievement marked by an outpouring of public devotion in which hundreds of thousands of people gathered to glimpse him waving from a distant balcony at Bangkok's Royal Plaza.

AIFF - The Metrosexual

I had class tonight so we went to the 10pm movie at the Fireweed. This was the first real Hollywood type film I've seen at the festival. It was slick, it was funny at times, the acting was good, and it was a lot less interesting that most of the others. Even Oil on Water last night took me into world I'm not normally in - and despite the poor acting, it was genuine in a way this movie wasn't. The characters in Oil were all people I'd never seen before, and I had no idea what was going to happen next until the very end.

The Metrosexual is in the "we need to get out buddy [a girl, laid, married, you fill it in]..." genre. Our buddy in this case isn't a 40 year old virgin, but a 33 year old anal retentive. The movie is full of the cranked out jokes we see on television any night and there's always a movie like in the theaters. If you like that genre, it was well done. But Metrosexual? Even in Anchorage the title is two years late.

But I did run into someone I needed to see, so that was good.

Tom's First Night

If everything went as scheduled, Tom Anderson checked into Sheridan yesterday about noon and spent his first night in prison last night. And is today doing what prisoners do. Something to think about as you go about your day. (No, I'm not feeling sorry for him, just trying to give some perspective.)

To get a better sense of Tom's experience here's what Bill Bailey blogged about his arriving at prison last April:

The cabbie knew exactly where to go, having delivered 5 or 6 other inmates over the last year who were either returning from furlough or transferring from another prison. Twenty minutes and $30 later I arrived.

The time to enter the rabbit hole had arrived.

After checking my driver's license, the guard directed me to the control center.

Just inside the entrance of the main building hangs a sign: "Through these portals walk some of the finest correctional officers in the world." The clock read 11:58a.

A man sat behind the reception window. I introduced myself and he instructed me to take a seat and announced over the loudspeaker: "New commit self-reporting at the control center."

I knew my life was about to change but I was having a hard time getting worked up over it. The place was totally non-threatening. I felt like a freshman registering for college or perhaps entering a military prep school.

As I write this it is Sunday afternoon, April 1. I have actually written over 20 pages of notes on a variety of subjects and am going back over them to write the final drafts before mailing them to my wife.

I have had 48 hours to assimilate what is going on around me (and to me). It would take forever to recap it in one long narrative. Instead, I will simply recount different experiences as separate posts.

For more of Bailey's first days in federal prison you can go to Bailey's April posts.

AIFF - No Place Like Home

Steve and Johanna called out to me as I walked into the Bear Tooth theater and I invited myself into their booth. Afterward Steve told me this film was made in 1975 and then was lost for 30 years and recently completed. The program says it's the sequel to The Harder they Fall.

Actually there are a number of stories that get crunched into one movie

• The making of a shampoo commercial at a Jamaican beach and waterfall
• A New York woman film maker staying an extra few days and getting her groove on as she learns about the friendly, laid back, community life or rural Jamaica, but also about
• The capitalist pressures to buy up the beach front and kick out the villagers who live there and the Jamaican mafia working this process.

The shampoo commercial took way too much time as the excuse to get the film maker to Jamaica. What I liked about the movie was its unhollywood pace and makeup. The sky was generally overcast, the jungle was green, but not hollywood GREEN!!!! We spent time driving along the back roads, rocking in a hammock next to the beach, meeting various locals that you wouldn't meet on a tour. This was similar to the experiencing of a different world that we had Sunday night in Vida de Ciro's (Circus Life), portrayal of the everyday life at an Argentine circus as they set up the tents, fed the animals and the people, talked about their sexual conquests, and performed their dancing and acrobatic acts. Saturday night's Joe Strummer movie also pulled us into a different world. But these two were documentaries, where No Place Like Home, was a feature.

There was one magical scene - a thunderstorm explodes and the night rain becomes an abstract animation in perfect sync with the Jamaican music. And I can't forget the great music throughout. The video I've posted below is lame. I was running out of battery and didn't get much footage, but I do like the way you can see, barely, the seats and tables in this theater where every other row of seats was replaced with tables and your dinner is delivered to your table.

AIFF - Oil on Water

I don't know anything about the people who made this film, Oil and Water. Visually, it had beautiful people and beautiful settings. The beginning conversations - the students talking about the meaning of art - sounded totally scripted and unnatural. Additionally there is nothing profound about listening to amateur philosophizing. Anna's narrating sounded like a high schooler's pretentious philosophical nothings. Either I got used to it or the acting got closer to normal sounding. And eventually we realize this is someone's project to tell the world about the problems of schizophrenia. And then you fell a little guilty about having all those nasty thoughts about the movie. We spent a lot of time trying to figure out where it was taking place. We had it down to either Australia or South Africa - the speech patterns weren't as pronounced as people I know from either of those places. It turned out to be South Africa. If this was a professionally made movie, I'm unimpressed. I would say the woman who played the old family friend of Max stood out as a competent actress. If this was someone with a story who made her own movie, it's more understandable. But Autism the Musical was a much better way to tell the story of a mental health problem. [And Body/Anti-Body was an even better way - it told us about obsessive-compulsive disorder, not by telling us, but by making it part of the main character's behavior in a totally absorbing movie.]

AIFF - Autism the Musical

The power went back on yesterday in time for the showing of at Out North. (The paper this morning says a car took down a power pole nearby.)

The video shows just a snippet of this documentary. I was very impressed. If you haven't been with autistic children at all, this movie will give you a lot more understanding of what the challenges that society unnecessarily adds to the challenges the kids and their families already have. There's no sugar coating here. While there are triumphs now and then, nothing looks easy. Like all the showings I've been to, this one was about 80% full.

AIFF: A Taxi to the Dark Side

[March 2, 2008: Taxi didn't win the best doc at the Anchorage International Film Festival, but it did win the Academy Award. Gibney sold the broadcast rights to the Discovery Channel, but they decided not to show it. But they did sell it to HBO which plans to show it in September.]

I began this about 2pm Sunday but I didn’t have wifi access.

I still need to post on last night’s showing of Joe Strummer. I’m at OutNorth now where the power went out during a showing of Taxi to the Dark Side. We’d seen about 85 minutes of it so we had enough to be pretty incensed (about the content of the movie, not the power outage.)

"Taxi" discusses an Afghan villager who manages to save enough to buy a taxi. He hasn't had the taxi long when he disappears. It turns out he was arrested and imprisoned at American run Baghran prison. A reporter manages to find his family and is shown the documentation they were given with the body. Cause of death, marked by the American doctor, was "homicide."


The power has just come back on so Autism the Musical should be starting.



Many films (there were a bunch in the animation show) later:

The movie interviews guards who were at Baghran at the time of the death as well as senior military officials, journalists, and military attorneys. I try to be objective and even handed. I said to myself, “Well they could be taking things out of context, they could be slanting this” and they could. But they have interviewed enough people intimately involved in the Baghran and Abu Ghraib prisons and senior military personnel - people who would normally be thought of as pro-Bush Republicans - and what they say is consistent with other disturbing things I’m hearing.

The movie was disturbing in many ways, but I was totally sucked into it. Those who continue to deny that the Cheney administration has authorized - unofficially if not officially - torture have to be basing their beliefs on various ideological and/or emotional bases, not logic or reason. In any case, every American voter should see this movie. If it has serious holes, then go at it. But see the evidence that's out there and make your own conclusions.

The video includes the response to the film of audience member JM. I managed to get him in a shaft of sunlight in the powerless Out North.

Jonathan and Steve Talk about Movies

I caught Jonathan McIntire (I hope the spelling is close) at the Super Shorts at the Museum. He'd been at the film maker's forum this morning. I got Steve Heimel at the Bear Tooth before Joe Strummer: The Future is Unwritten. I'm using YouTube today because Viddler doesn't seem to be working. And it was pretty dark in both venues so I experimented with iMovie's video fx.

Anchorage International Film Festival - Super Shorts

We were supposed to watch the Shorts in Competition, but the DVD had been mislabeled so we saw the Super Shorts instead. They were good - I liked Wine Bar the best. A slick, funny movie, with great acting, and a delightful story about couples communication. Or maybe Quincy & Althea a much looser, but more genuine film of long married couple who can't find anyone to divorce them in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.

[Picture from AIFF website]


Love is Love looked at the plight of heterosexuals in a world where they made up only a small percentage of the population. Saddest Little Boy in the World had all the technical stuff right, but the contrast between the intimacy the story implied and the lack of intimacy of the set and telling of the story didn't work for me - even if that contrast was intended.

I was not in a seat where I could unobtrusively use my camera, but I did get this one picture from Auto Bank where the character on the screen practices his customer greeting until that first customer drives up.

OK, I need to mention the One Minute Guides - we saw four - Mexico, Honduras, US, and Canada. Complete country guides ina minute. There were a lot of chuckles in the audience. I would say to the film makers that the ponging globe at the beginning of each guide should stop on or above the name of the country coming next. Two of us were disturbed by the fact that it didn't.

So we went to the Museum rather than see Christian's Henchmen at Out North, because the Henchmen was going to play again, but the Shorts in Competition weren't. But since they didn't show them tonight, we can see them next Friday at Out North.

We've seen a lot of shorts anthology. This was a very strong group of films.

The Artichoke

My first memory of artichokes was a story a family friend - Helen Michaelis - told when I was very little. It was a scene in a movie when Louis IV or some other French king of the time was served an artichoke. He looked at it and said, "I don't eat cactus." But it didn't take long for me to love the ritual of peeling off leaves and dipping them into the mayonnaise and yogurt sauce. And then, when the leaves were gone, cutting the heart in half, and then eating it. We leave the mayonnaise out of the sauce now, but it's still delicious. Go here for recipes.

Anchorage International Film Festival Sat AM

Here's a bit of this morning's film makers forum. Lots of films all week.



[12/6/07 Christian called and asked if I'd make a minor edit, which I've done. This time I posted it on Viddler which was working again.]

Phil Tells the Jeremy Lansman Story - Part I

All I can say is thanks Phil for writing this for me. I'll just add that Jeremy is this eccentric genius whose garage is full of electronic equipment and who cobbles together antennas from parts he scavanges or if necessary buys at plumbing stores. He's got a wicked sense of humor and a highly evolved sense of right and wrong. I should have written this probably, but I'm glad Phil did. Here, from Progressive Alaska, is an excerpt. Click the title for the rest:

Jeremy Lansman - Part I

I first encountered Jeremy Lansman in 1961. I first spoke with him yesterday evening.

In the intervening 46 years, Lansman has become a legendary hero, a creator of urban legends, iconoclast extraordinaire, and an historic figure in Alaska broadcasting. He created the first digital broadcasting outlet in Alaska with second-hand equipment bought on e-Bay.