WTF?

Hi, I’m President Mahmoud Ahmedinejad. Either I’m trying to get the world really really pissed off at me, or I’m just being an idiotic asshole. You decide. BBC: “If European countries claim that they have killed Jews in World War II… why don’t they provide the Zionist regime with a piece of Europe,” Mahmoud Ahmadinejad told Iranian television. “Germany and Austria can provide the… regime with two or three provinces for this regime to establish itself, and the issue will…

Today I got a response from Councilwoman Maio: Dear Cyrus, I felt as you did until I heard the program. Since you haven’t, as you said, maybe it would be helpful to you to track down the Tuesday “Our Healh and Fitness” program and get a sense of what was presented. You might even be able to get a transcript. Linda After spending some time online, I responded with the following: Dear Linda, I’ve found and listened to the program…

Dear Councilwoman Maio, My name is Cyrus Farivar and I am a technology journalist who learned my trade while a student at UC Berkeley. I wrote for The Daily Californian and watched the City Council take stands against various issues. Sometimes those decisions are made with conviction and well-thought out reasoning, and sometimes those decisions are made with half-baked ideas that come from somewhere else. When I found out that the Berkeley City Council was considering building a citywide WiFi…

BBC: “We will always be Muslims, Serbs or Croats,” said Veselin Gatalo of the youth group Urban Movement Mostar. “But one thing we all have in common is Bruce Lee.”

The FOURTH NYT article about podcasting, almost to the day of the first one that I wrote? What is going on with the NYT’s tech coverage? (Previous post on this from May 11, 2005.)

I was sitting next to a guy reading the January 2003 issue of American Window Cleaner magazine, formerly published out of Point Richmond, CA. (Now published out of Bedford, N.Y.). Who knew? During my 17 hour stint in Paris I managed to buy three of the four Marjane Satrapi Persepolis comics in French from a bookstore in the Parisian suburb of Issy, where my aunt lives, for a total of 45 euros. (Shipping to the US would cost me 15+…

Most likely communism can’t be established. But impotency can be treated!

WashPost: [NASA atmospheric scientist] David Rind compared the warming trend to what happens when a major league baseball team owner spends lavishly on players’ salaries. Pumping heat-trapping gases into the atmosphere, he said, produces the same kind of predictable results as boosting a team’s payroll. “When they get into the playoffs, should we be surprised?” he asked. “We’re putting a lot more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, and we’re getting a lot higher temperatures.”

But I do know that it’s true that if you wanted to reduce crime, you could — if that were your sole purpose, you could abort every black baby in this country, and your crime rate would go down. That would be an impossible, ridiculous, and morally reprehensible thing to do, but your crime rate would go down. So these far-out, these far-reaching, extensive extrapolations are, I think, tricky. — Bill Bennett, Former Sect. of Education under the Reagan Administration,…

InfoWeek: Q: Will there be an acquisition in the security space? ELLISON: Sure, it’s possible. ARGH! I hate the use of the word “space” in business/technology journalism. It’s so meaningless. What’s wrong with these other possibilities? Will there be a security acquisition? Will there be an acquisition in the security sector? Will there be acquisition in security? I’m reading John Battelle‘s The Search right now and he’s as guilty of it as anyone. I swear, if I hear about it…