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Saturday, December 20, 2003  

Another crack in time.  The beginning of the fissure in the Episcopal Church was started on Wednesday when 13 of its bishops recorded their oppositon to the American church's approval of Rt Rev V. Gene Robinson as the openly gay bishop in New Hampshire by forming a wide Network of Anglican Communion Dioceses and Parishes. The new "network" includes the dioceses of Albany; Pittsburgh; San Joaquin, CA; South Carolina; Florida, Central Florida, Southwest Florida; Dallas; Fort Worth; Quincy and Springfield, IL; Western Kansas; and Rio Grande (TX and NM). The strategy of the dissident bishops is not to secede from the Episcopal Church USA, but rather to "win recognition as the authentic Episcopal Church." [Source: New York Times, December 17, 2003]

posted by Merle Harton Jr. | 3:17 AM |
 

Bad prophecy is a lot like rotten fruit.  "I have traveled the length and breadth of this country and talked with the best people, and I can assure you that data processing is a fad that won't last out the year." So affirmed the editor in charge of business books for Prentice Hall in 1957. [Source: Community College Journal, October/November 2003]

posted by Merle Harton Jr. | 2:43 AM |
 

I just finished watching the Neistat brothers' amusing revenge movie against Apple's iPod battery policy. Called iPod's Dirty Secret, the movie is a QuickTime piece about Apple's failure to permit any replacement for the rechargeable lithium-ion battery in its pricey iPod and the Neistat brothers' efforts to get another battery when Casey Neistat's iPod stops dead after 18 months of use.  According the the Washington Post ("Battery and Assault," December 19, 2003), the movie has already been around the world—as the URL was passed from one iPod owner to another—and it so alarmed iPod owners that Apple added a $99 battery-replacement mail-in program and made changes to its warranty policy. Apple denies that the movie had anything to do with its corporate policy decisions.

Casey's interaction with Apple tech support is so eerily close to my own many sour experiences with Apple's support staff that I am torn between calling this creative license or cinema verite. Its well worth watching as Casey dashes around Manhattan spray painting "iPod's Unreplaceable Battery Lasts Only 18 Months" on Apple's billboard ads for the iPod.

posted by Merle Harton Jr. | 2:05 AM |


Monday, December 15, 2003  

It doesn't get any badder than this: Iraq's new freedom.   $1.50 for fifteen minutes with a whore; 70¢ buys an all-day ticket at a porn theater; booze sold from the trunks of cars contributes to public drunkenness; no prescriptions needed for these prescription drugs. And these are just a few of the many the new business ventures underway with enthusiasm as the new Iraq discovers that everything is permissible under American occupation. [Source: Newsweek, December 22, 2003]

And we wonder why there is resistance to our presence there? The problem began, of course, when the US totally removed the governing infrastructure but replaced it with—well, nothing at all. Iraq as a nation will manage to restructure itself and recover a sense of decorum and civility, but in the wake of this change there will remain the sour aftertaste of a foreign presence that transfigured its country into America's small ugly twin.

posted by Merle Harton Jr. | 6:37 AM |


Sunday, December 14, 2003  

The trumping of Saddam Husayn Al-Tikriti (aka Saddam Hussein).  The tyrant of Iraq has been captured—not in a blaze of gunfire, as in the violent, defiant end of his two sons, but simply by being removed from a dirt hole in a farmhouse cellar where he had been hiding, with a pistol, $750,000 in US cash, and a full graying beard. DNA tests confirmed his identity.

I am no fan of Saddam Hussein, anymore than of any other brutal tyrant but I am not convinced that his capture makes the US any safer than before he was pulled, like a tired rat, from his narrow hole. We will find, I think, that this pathetic, defeated man has been neither inspiring nor leading the "guerrilla-style insurgency that has left more than 190 American soldiers dead since President Bush declared an end to major combat operations on May 1," as some senior Bush administration officials had suspected. [New York Times, December 14, 2003] Everything else is going to be spin, so let's not get dizzy and lose perspective.

posted by Merle Harton Jr. | 2:38 PM |
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