14. May, 2003 - my expectations are low

• It’s rare that I update twice in a day, but I finally figured out what I thought about the legislators who walked out in Texas.
  D.C. feels reverberations of Texas’ Democrats’ move, but sadly, not the kind of reverberations I’d hoped when I saw the headline. I think that DeLay’s off base in saying he finds no honor in the Dems’ tactics. Heck, they were facing an unwinnable battle, and they ran away to fight another day. In doing so, they’ve shut down the Texas Legislature (shut down means no bad laws will be passed). The Democratic spokesman made noises about how brave the Dems are for insisting that the state House address real concerns like the education and health care. Pshaw. They were going to lose a big political battle and walked out. I just hope they have the guts to stay out until the next elections. Heck, someone who promised If elected, I will not serve. and then proved it would have my vote in a heartbeat. But I also think that having None of the Above on the ballot is a good idea.

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• So Buffy’s almost done as a series, and they’ve started a Buffy Auction to sell off the props. Nothing I’m especially interested in, but there’s some things that harder-core fans would probably appreciate, like a tank-top and jeans costume worn on the show that are already up to thirty-five-hundred dollars. Last night’s episode was a reasonably good one again.
• Spammers, Reveal Thyselves! or face bigger penalties under a new law. See, they’re going to be required to put real email addresses and physical addresses in their spam. Surprisingly enough, it echoes the wording favored by existing legitimate spammers. Legal expert David Sorkin said the bill could legitimize much of what people now view as spam, leading to an increase in unwanted, if not deceptive, e-mail. That wouldn’t surprise me at all.
• In Jayson Blair and lost faith, Kim Ode writes about how she’s more shaken by the fact that people have lost faith in journalists than by Jayson Blair’s lies. Encountering deceit no longer packs the same wallop. Being fatalistic feels the same as being realistic. Speaking up seems hardly worth the effort. We make a big deal about whistleblowers or those who buck the system, which only helps to magnify their rarity. Yeah, we don’t expect much of journalists because we don’t expect much of anybody anymore. [strib]
• Ftrain: My friend the Arb describes how Paul’s going to formalise all the bits that are currently living behind ftrain. It sounds ambitious, but it also sounds pretty cool as a way to organize a site. The organization is one of the things I’ve always liked about F-Train (beyond, the writing, natch), and I’ll be interested to see how it all comes out.
• Dave Winer says he got a note from google PR saying that they’re not removing blogs from their searches, but there’s nothing on the google site about it yet. [scripting]

Copyright 2008, Dave Polaschek. Last updated on Thu, 15 May 2003 06:45:35.