One of the reporters that works for our network in Des Moines (Matt Kelley) was interviewed by the BBC today. A British man was arrested in Fort Madison (Iowa) after flying there from England to rendezvous with a 14-year-old Iowa girl. The two met on the Internet three months ago. The man tried to pay his hotel tab with a check from a bank in England… a dispute arose… the cops were called and he mentioned the name of the girl who was staying with him. The girl had been reported missing by her parents as a runaway the day before. The BBC called the Radio Iowa newsroom and asked Matt Kelley to fill them in on the story. The busted Brit, by the way, is a radio deejay who –if convicted– could get 12 years in prison. I’ll see if Matt recorded the interview from his end. Doubt it.
Dennis Miller on Congress and politics
“Congress is just a place where we send mediocre men to get Earl Scheibed into looking kind of, vaguely, consequential. And politics is just a bullshit world where “my esteemed colleague” means “this prick here.”
“Fat guys are the chirping canaries in the mineshaft of freedom.”
– From Dennis Miller’s sixth HBO special
King of Torts, Pattern Recognition, Altered Carbon
I would have sworn I mentioned these but can’t find any reference. John Grisham’s King of Torts was… predictable. And not very interesting. But I couldn’t put it down. Hmmm. I enjoyed William Gibson’s Pattern Recognition more than any of his recent books. And Richard K. Morgan’s Altered Carbon was pretty damned good, despite similarity to early Gibson novels.
Altered Carbon by Richard K. Morgan
“In the 25th century, it’s difficult to die a final death. Humans are issued a cortical stack, implanted into their bodies, into which consciousness is “digitized” and from which -unless the stack is hopelessly damaged- their consciousness can be downloaded (“resleeved”) with its memory intact, into a new body.”
— Altered Carbon by Richard K. Morgan
Blogging from Baghad?
I have no idea if this is the real deal. But if it is, well, it’s kind of amazing. Or maybe not. If it IS legit –and at least one person has done some research– it’s just such a good example of blogging.
“…half an hour ago the oil filled trenches were put on fire. First watching Al-jazeera they said that these were the places that got hit by bombs from an air raid a few miniutes earlier bit when I went up to the roof to take a look I saw that there were too many of them, we heard only three explosions. I took pictures of the nearest. My cousine came and told me he saw police cars standing by one and setting it on fire. Now you can see the columns of smoke all over the city.”
Assume for the sake of discussion this what it appears to be. No governments. No big news organizations. Just some guy in a city under attack, publishing his thoughts, feelings, whatever… to the entire world. The Internet has changed/is changing the world and blogging is an important part of that change.