Judge: Google's message not too small for the medium
 The popularity of cellphones, iPods, and other small-screened devices resulted in a ruling unfavorable to Google in a case against it by the website Perfect10.com.
That Google's image search function displayed thumbnail photos from Perfect 10 was found by U.S. District Court Judge Howard Matz to impede Perfect 10 from capitalizing on thumbnail-size downloads of its "most beautiful natural women in the world".
In other words, Google is providing for free what Perfect 10 seeks to make money from.
I find this fascinating in a Marshall McLuhan kind of way. There wouldn't be a lawsuit if the medium didn't exist for the viewing of tiny images, and that medium didn't exist a few years ago.
"Thumbnail images" used to be synonymous with "Impossible to be used for prurient interests" but now that people are willing to buy thumbnail-sized content for their tinier and tinier screens, that argument is out the window.
It's like flipping to a channel you haven't paid for and watching the scrambled footage. To most people, those images are useless. Imagine a subscription-based device then being created for non-stop viewing of scrambled footage, thus making everything picked up (and discarded) by accident a copyright infringement.
Google lawyer Michael Kwun predicts that the injunction the two companies are now supposed to hammer out will only affect image searches related to Perfect 10, and that the court ruling will not have any effect on the other thumbnail results from paysites.
See also: Google infringed copyright by posting thumbnail porn photos
 I have had this on for about six days.
After awhile I began seeing through the walls. It's eternity in there.
Sometimes, at night, I can hear them screaming.
They're already inside you.
The end is near.
Much ado about mutton
 Last weekend a group of us ventured to the city of Buena Park, having paid $47.50 each for tickets to a place called Medieval Times. It was one of those things I'm glad I did but hope to never have to do again, like World War II.
That area in Orange County is called "Mini Vegas" because it has a lot of theme and chain restaurants (a Pirate-themed place was the next parking lot over, and Knott's Berry Farm was down the street). We waited in line with OC bachelorette parties and families much younger but bigger than ours.
We had been told to arrive at 6:45. As usual, we were late. Everyone was actually seated at about 8:30 but was encouraged/made to stand around a bar area where two Black-and-Tans cost $29, photographs with high school kids in jerkins cost $10, and a visit to the Torture Museum could be had for two bucks. The object was to make people buy more stupid stuff, and the whole "Be Here Early" procedure served only this purpose.
Once all thousand or so of us were seated in a huge arena with a dirt enclosure in the middle, things got a little better. Each of us was served chicken, a potato, a rib, and some soup. People who drank beer were given two free refills, as were those of us who drank Pepsi. Cocktails were, of course, extra. In this way Medieval Times was like commercial air travel.
The enclosure filled with dry ice and what followed was a 90-minute show featuring several jousts on real horses, well-choreographed fights, a real raven, and a story involving treachery. Each section of the crowd was represented by a knight who had his own theme music and who was supposed to telegraph certain virtues. I think that as the show has evolved over its 30-year history and several locations, extra knights have been added so their personalities have been diluted.
When I was 18 and lived in Boston, I was hired for a very short time by this place called the Medieval Manor (they let me go when they realized I was too young at that time to serve alcohol). This was a small place with a very campy theme. There was a king who would hold court and make the guests do outrageous things. There were bawdie wenches with lots of cleavage. I was to be Sir Loin. All the staff were Boston actors and I think each of us would have made $70 a night, which would have been big money for me at that time.
Anyway, that's the sort of place I thought I would be attending. When I heard there were to be horses at Medieval Times, I thought the show was going to be the same, but with horses.
But it wasn't. Since there was no humor in the script, I settled in for what I thought might be something accurate. But it was irresponsible. A wizard mentioned consulting the Oracle. No one died of plague. No one lived in fear of the Roman Catholic Church. There was no mutton and no mead. Grendel's mom was not there. The show wasn't funny.
As we filed out, a DJ spun karaoke songs for a bunch of Asian girls and their dates on the dance floor. We realized that this was probably a cheaper-than-most club night for the area. I couldn't help but think of "The Da Vinci Code", another artless and inaccurate consumer product.
Disneyland or the Magic Castle: that's the way to go.
When you open it to speak
 A while ago I came across a factoid stating that divorce rates are highest for people who married on February 14. I have not been able to check that, but it sounds reasonable.
I overheard a man and woman talking tonight while on a walk.
He said, "I married my first wife seven years ago today."
She said, "You'd be suffering from the seven year itch if you'd married a real person."
 "The great fish moved silently through the night water, propelled by short sweeps of its crescent tail. The mouth was open just enough to permit a rush of water over the gills."
When I read that I thought, "He's speaking directly to me."
Peter Benchley died yesterday, very young. He was the grandson of humorist Robert Benchley and the son of Nathaniel Benchley (who wrote the book that would be adapted into the Norman Jewison film The Russians Are Coming, The Russians Are Coming). The Benchleys had strong ties to Nantucket Island, just across the water from Martha's Vineyard, where Jaws was filmed.
Jaws is my and many of my friends' favorite movie, but in many ways it is different from the book. The book is worth reading, though it does not transcend its pulpy genre the way the movie does. Benchley played a bit part as a TV reporter in the movie. I wonder what he thought about the tremendous thematic differences between his book and the movie adapted from it.
My friend Brian and I are writing a musical called All that Jaws which will debut this year. Here is a demo version of "Show Me the Way to Indianapolis".
Previously: To Kill Carcaridan Carcarias, It's A Wonderful Shark, My Jaws re-enactment
See also: Peter Benchley's website, All that Jaws official website, "Jaws" creator loved sharks
Instead of pheasant, Cheney pulls Burr
Quarters up
 I assume this is a Photoshopped picture but, like James Frey's A Million Little Pieces, it illustrates a larger truth.
(I don't believe that about A Million Little Pieces, actually, but I think a great way to defend a lie is to say "it illustrates a larger truth". For example:
Q. Did you run over my dog?
A. No.
Q. Yes you did.
A. The reason I initially denied it was because I also ran over your cat.)
But back to our President. When I worked at McDonald's when I was 15 (forged working papers - they illustrated the larger truth that I had to get out of the house), the crew was instructed to scrape the Quarter Pounders and buns off the grill heel first, because the bottom piece of bread was flat and the special sauce could be applied on the underside of the meat rather than on top, so that the burgers were originally presented upside down.
I continue eating hamburgers upside down to this day.
Also, my daughter talks on her Fisher Price phone in a similar way to this picture, and I completely trust her with our country's nuclear arsenal.
Pac Man: the decline
 Frank Meyer and Carol Binion, co-workers from previous jobs, and Scott Chernoff, a comedian with whom I did shows with The F**cking B*stards, have produced a series of programs for G4TV called Videogame Theater that examines the backstories of classic videogames done with puppets.
The story in the Pac Man episode is that he and Ms. Pac Man's honeymoon is over, and Pac Man Jr. is gay. Pretty on the nose so far (just like Brokeback to the Future - I didn't know that was done by some Emerson College kids) but Pac Man's pill-popping freakout is inspired.
You're not the only one with mixed emotions
 I know some people choose to spend the Super Bowl serving food to the homeless (wait, that's Thanksgiving) but for the past three years I have watched it on the steadily expanding televisions of my pals the Wachtels, who throw a lavish catered soiree.
More and more of this year's attendees brought young children, ourselves included, and for the second time in a month I felt a justifiable wave of resentment from childless people trying to watch a game while the entotted among them chased children around (the first time was when ACI cried on a plane a few weeks ago).
Luckily no one in the room really cared about either team playing, but if it was the Raiders or the Patriots I think there would have been trouble (rather than the occasional testy "down in front!" yelled when a towhead would make a little hemisphere at the bottom of the plasma screen).
In another part of my life I knew people who were militantly anti-Super Bowl. One would start ramping up around the AFC championship and begin terrorizing her boyfriend about how she was going to make him volunteer at a women's shelter. Another would begin making proclamations about how she would stage anti-Super Bowl theatre pieces on that day as a form of protest.
I am glad those days are over.
Me, I think maybe we should get a babysitter next year so we are not Part of the Problem. But I look forward to the time when I can watch the commercials with my daughter, saying "those are all assholes Daddy knows."
In other news, during the halftime show I realized that the Rolling Stones' Ron Wood looks a lot like my godmother.
 The National Bullies Initiative convened an emergency symposium in response to this CNN story about a young girl who suffers from congenital insensitivity to pain with anhidrosis (CIPA).
Breakout sessions included 24a: Modes of Inflicting Pain on the Insensate Child and a roundtable on whether CIPA sufferers taint statistics of taunting quotas.
Bully adjutant Jeff Nobrega was concerned that the revelation would be a blow to bullies' morale, despite the comparative rarity of CIPA cases to other bully inhibitors, such as kids who fight back or who have older siblings hiding nearby.
"This changes our perception of pain," Nobrega said. "Does pain exist if they don't cry?"
The mood was lightened by Bully Poet Vapo "Teep" Ramirez, who recited limericks from his Pinkbelly series.
The symposium concluded upbeat.
"I guess what we consider pain has always been spiritual, no matter how we choose to perpetrate it," Nobrega said. "We've sent word to Bullies everywhere that they should make physical pain just one color on an eclectic palette that includes mental, financial, and wedgie-based pain."
You go back and revise
 A friend of mine gave me a bunch of little-heard Bob Dylan recordings that I guess will be part of yet another upcoming documentary. Among the tracks is a spoken-word eulogy to Woody Guthrie and an early version of "Tangled Up in Blue".
What is different about the new/old recording is several sets of lyrics and the place of certain pronouns. Whereas the later version of the song has everything in the first person, this one mixes it up so it's a little clearer what's happening to whom.
There are also little differences in location. In the later song I headed out to the west coast and drifted down to New Orleans. In this one I headed out to the old east coast and he "drifted down to L.A., hoping to try his luck, working for a while in an airplane plant loading cargo onto a truck."
In what became the paragraph featuring "he started into dealing with slaves", the early version is less cryptic:
"He was always in a hurry
Too busy or too stoned
And everything she had planned just had to be postponed
He thought they were successful
She thought they were blessed
With objects and material things
But I never was impressed."
I like the early version better. It's more immediate, less electric, and easier to follow. I'm not sure why he changed it.
One of my favorite Jack Kerouac quotes (seen here being counseled by William S. Burroughs) is, "Once God moves the hand - you go back and revise? - it's a sin!"
I don't really believe that (because I am a sociopath and think that personal accountability is a quaint anachronism after the last few elections) but I have to say that there are a lot of first drafts I like better than the finished product.
On the other hand, I agreed with what George Lucas said when he was being attacked for making amendments to the original "Star Wars" movies. In a nutshell, he said they were his goddamn movies and he would do whatever he wanted with them.
"Do I please myself and [finally] make the movie that I wanted," he asked in a 2004 Entertainmen Weekly interview, "or do I allow the audience to see the half-finished version that they fell in love with?"
It's one thing to endlessly revise something no one will ever look at. Does something change ownership the more people see it?
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