Saturday, December 29

:
FAMOUS FROM THE TRAIN -
Spotlighting a Movie Classic -

Two of my alltime favorite characters from the Movies are a pair of Englishmen appearing in The Lady Vanishes from Alfred Hitchcock. I was delighted to discover today that someone else appreciates them, too.

Matthew Sweet writes about Charters and Caldicott:

"the film was being colonised
by two minor characters. Two
Englishmen with a cricket fixation."

A wonderful essay, especially for leisurely weekend perusal. If you like The Lady Vanishes, and I certainly do, you can't go wrong with this piece.

:: Guardian Review ::

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Friday, December 28

:
LOOK, MA, NO RUBBER CEMENT - (2#) -

As predicted here, the Delhiami Herald has been born.

Starting in January, some copyediting and design will be outsourced to ink-stained wretches in New Delhi, India.

And there is a rumour that this new iteration of the Herald will incorporate a Drunken Elephant Watch into the Traffic Department.

But seriously... I do have some reservations about them trying to moderate comments. I am not entirely convinced that someone from a different society could do that. Other than that, I wouldn't anticipate major problems.

By the way, it turns out, that Indian journalists are familiar with Miami Herald columnist Dave Barry and are already quoting him.

...
:
HAZARD LIGHTS
AHEAD FOR SOTP's "Rick" -

Cyber Stalker May Be Lurking -

It appears that trouble may not yet be over for Rick, who ended the Stuck on the Palmetto Blog recently, because he may have picked up a cyber-stalker along the way.

If you've been reading this blog for any length of time, you know that I have blogged several Cyber Stalker cases here; for example: a young woman attached herself to blogger Rachel North in England.

What I am concerned about is the phenomenon of Spiral Thinking. Once the situation develops thusly, it seems impossible to mollify the stalker. And it is my impression, accumulated over the course of time, that stalking cases, including the cyber variety, do not usually end felicitously; most seem to end tragically.

Remember the case of the woman who was stalking TV star David Letterman? She came to believe that she had a personal relationship with him and then actually moved into his home. She ended up dead. Rachel North's cyber stalker was, I believe, sent to prison.

Rick's cyber stalker does not live in South Florida. He claims to live in New Jersey. There is no evident reason why he would ever come into contact with Rick in the ordinary course of events. But since Rick ended SotP, the cyber stalker has industriously busied himself in his attempts to sow discord between Rick and Alex, as well as among the other bloggers in South Florida.

Once the SotP blog ended, that should have been the end of whatever gripe he had about Rick. Instead, he has only stepped up his enmity by menacing Rick and taunting him. And he's a control freak, too.

"it contains the seed of his anti-Cuban obsession"

I never noticed that Rick had an "obsession" with Cubans. This reminds me of the woman who was stalking Letterman who believed she had a personal relationship with him. Most of the entries posted on SotP were about diverse topics, as I recall.

This is getting creepier and creepier as time goes on. Perhaps you naively believe that if you just ignore someone like this, he will drop his prosecution and forget about it. But they usually don't.

I can only hope the cyber stalker is still in sufficient control of his faculties to stop what he's doing and walk away from further engagement before this situation ends badly.

...
:
~~ Al Qaeda Alert ~~

SKIPPY SPEAKS! - (3#) -
New Skippy bin Ladin Tape Coming Soon...

# The SITE terrorism monitoring group
said Thursday that As Sahab will be
releasing a new Internet message soon.

# Andrew Cochran posts more
information about the new tape.

# And he points to a report from Reuters.

The 56-minute address will be about the Islamic State in Iraq, a spectral al Qaeda affiliate whose spokesman is a computer-generated Max Headroom-type cyber avatar.

It is unknown whether the tape will be in audio or video format, but it is supposedly about "the way to foil plots
in Iraq."

...
:
PAKISTAN / BHUTTO updates (3#) -

# "Karachi burns for beloved BB"
and other reports at the PK Daily Times.

# Contributing bloggers at:
Metroblogging Karachi report
what it's been like in that city.

# "The question is whether the Musharraf regime has the authority to restore order. The very real worry is that any attempt by it to clamp down on the violence will simply beget more violence throwing a nuclear armed state into potentially revolutionary chaos."

:: From James Forsyth at
-- The UK Spectator's Coffee House Blog.

...

Thursday, December 27

:
THEY'RE THE TOPS -

Readers at Florida Today get to
vote for what they think are the

:: Top Brevard County stories of 2007.

...
:
SoFlo: SURFACED -

Fifteen years ago, Barry Fish, 42 years old, left his parents' suburban Boca Raton home one day, got into his silver Mercedes coupe, and vanished.

He showed up again recently - at the bottom of one of the many canals in South Florida.

His brother, a forensic dentist, identified his remains via his dental records.

:: Story by Michael LaForgia, PBPost.

...
:
PAKISTAN IN TURMOIL (3#) -

Benazir Bhutto Assassinated in Rawalpindi.

In the wake of her assassination,
civil disorder has erupted, especially in Karachi.

Dawn is keeping a running log of updates.

A Pakistani Blog has posted an entry
with an open comment thread about it.

...

Wednesday, December 26

:
Bookish: BEST READS of 2007 -

January Magazine presents their
selections for Best Books of 2007.

This list covers Mystery, Detective and
Crime Fiction, including some Offbeat picks.
There is a paragraph or so describing them.

:: BEST LIST ::

...

Tuesday, December 25

:
ONE-EYED JACKS - (2#) -

An interesting article in the UK Guardian reveals what happens when a newspaper's left hand doesn't know what its right hand is doing - or is that just a pretense?

Not in our newspapers: ads that claim to be for massage services - but really advertise brothels... The ads were bringing in approximately £600,000 a year ($1 million) for Media Wales, which, to Neagle's eyes, made the group "the richest pimps in south Wales."

While, closer to home, but on much the same theme -

Stacey & Friends: Stacy Honowitz is "the second-in-command at the Broward State Attorney's Office sex
crimes unit."

"Does it really matter that she's lost her most highly publicized cases? Should I care that someone paid by taxpayers' dollars to protect children seems to spend an inordinate amount of time researching and talking about cases half a world away?"

+ Someone may grow hair on the palms of
his hands if he continues in this direction...

...
:
WHERE WE LIVE - (3#) -

It's been somewhat quiet over the holiday here in the Broward Combat Zone. Just a quick spin around to tide
you over.

# Dead in the Water: One of the biggest recent stories in the Palm Beach area swirls around the drowning death of a local tycoon, Seth Tobias. It's already made some New York City publications up North.

* * * * *
One of the hottest issues in Florida these days, especially South Florida is the issue of runaway development gone amok and perceived by many residents to be out of control. Here are two takes related to it:

# "When developers and local
officials get cozy, residents take control."

..... and Broken Windows:
"Candidates are flush with cash."

...

Sunday, December 23

:
TRACKING: FLORIDA BABY JESUS -

OMG, just what South Florida needs:
more publicity about Crime here.

Just before I dashed out to the supermarket to pick up some last minute groceries, I spotted this article featured on the BBC Front Page:

Front: "Baby Jesus statue
in Florida getting GPS to deter thieves"

Inside: "US infant Jesus statue to get GPS - A statue of the infant Jesus on display near Miami in Florida is being fitted with a Global Positioning System device after the original figurine was stolen."

God is watching you! And so is the BBC ;-)

And maybe a couple of Blackbirds...
or even a Black Triangle or two...
or even... uh... a flying saucer...

...
:
WHERE ARE THE BLOGS? - (4#) -
Networking From England to SoFlo -

England is an older society than ours; and the English seem to have a talent for organizing themselves, as this article in a recent edition of the UK Guardian illustrates:

"Mapping Britain's blogosphere: As blogging becomes a national pastime, Guy Clapperton takes a look at some of the writers who have embraced the medium to promote the cities they live in."

Closer to home, in the aftermath of Stuck on the Palmetto (SOTP) closing down, there has been some speculation that Critical Miami might be its successor, but I don't think that prospect looks very good. SOTP was at least nominally located in Pembroke Pines which is just over the Dade line in Broward County, forming a sort of bridge between Dade and Broward. And, although the Miami bloggers are noisy, the SoFlo blogging scene actually stretches from south of Miami in the Florida Keys up to Palm Beach. The problem is: South Florida is a lot more than just Miami.

Like a now-phantom amputated limb, SOTP continues to reverberate in the SoFlo Blogosphere. Perhaps that's because it still constitutes some sort of focal point even while defunct.

Carlos Miller continues to churn out pulplike Apocrypha about it, some of which is quite entertaining, including the spinoff parodies discussing the issue. His latest chapter is: Stripped of the Palmetto - Episode IV.

Doesn't noisy Miami have its own aggregator? Isn't anyone keeping tabs on the SoFlo Blogging Scene?

A Communications professor at the University of Miami keeps tabs on it. And Prof Alex recently partitioned his virtual machinery to establish a new blog called Stone Soup. Somehow, he manages to keep up with the latest developments using RSS, I believe, to stay current.

I don't know of any aggregator for Miami; SOTP was the closest to it. Their sidebar links were set to float blogs with new entries to the top of the list.

That leaves the South Florida Blogging Scene still in disarray. Unlike our English cousins who seem to have an amazing ability to organize for High Tea in the jungle or to organize blogging networks even in obscure neighborhoods we've never heard of.

As one SoFlo Blogger recently put it: the end of SOTP mean that the rest of us need to step up our game. And maybe more readers of blogs need to become bloggers themselves...

+ typos corrected: mon/dec24/1:20pm/xxx.

...