The Sound of Young America: A Chat with Stephen Colbert
The Sound of Young America: A Chat with Stephen Colbert
Tim Goodman of the San Francisco Chronicle sat down with Stephen Colbert for San Francisco’s City Arts & Lectures.
Making Light: Absolute Write is gone
Making Light: Absolute Write is gone
Absolute Write is gone
Posted by Teresa at 09:19 AMAs of last night, Absolute Write was gone. It was one of the leading sites for information on writing and publishing, especially the scam versions thereof. Their ISP pulled the plug on them one hour’s notice. Now, where there should be a broad, deep online community with an enormous message base going back years, there’s this.
Among other things, AW was the main collection point for information about PublishAmerica.
How this happened: remember Barbara Bauer, that horrible old harridan and scam agent who tried to get me fired because I reproduced the Twenty Worst Agents list and she was on it?
Apparently Barbara Bauer made a screaming, abusive phone call to one Stephanie, the person who owned the web host. Bauer claimed that having AW’s scamhunters post her email address at AW was illegal under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), and that doing so had caused Bauer to get spam, which meant that AW was a spammer, and that this would get the web host put on every blacklist in the world.
Mind, the message that quoted Bauer’s e-mail address had some time ago been amended to remove that address. Furthermore, Barbara Bauer posts that exact same email address on her own website.
Stephanie had no more sense than to panic and shut down AW on an hour’s notice. I’m given to understand that some of AW’s message base was lost. For the record, AW was hosted at:
JC-Hosting
TotalWeb International Net Consulting
4037 Navaho Trail
Nashville TN 37211Toll Free: (877) 411-7891
Phone: (615) 469-7533
Fax: (615) 250-2430Stephanie’s been known to post as “Moonshadow” at Absolute Write. The wonderful fact, for certain values of wonderful, is that Stephanie is one of PublishAmerica’s authors. Some people are just not smart enough to be allowed to run loose on the Internet.
Here’s what I’m told AW requires of a new host: 100-150 Gigabytes per month in traffic, plus 2 Gigabytes more of space, plus running a very active webboard based on MySql and a bunch of scripts.
Meanwhile, I have frantic email from a friend who posts to AW and is trying to figure out how to find versions of the texts of her messages there so she can save them. Any suggestions will be gratefully appreciated.
As of right now, Absolute Write is being recompiled and should be up by tomorrow. But I think it’s important to document and spread the word on what Bauer is up to, in attempt to hide the scam she runs.
For those who don’t read Making Light, the list of the Twenty Worst can be found here. If you’re going to try to publish, it’s worth reading.
If You’ve Got a Pulse, You’re Sick – New York Times
If You’ve Got a Pulse, You’re Sick – New York Times
For a nation that spends more than any other on health, the United States certainly doesn’t seem very healthy.
Many cancers are on the rise ”” prostate, breast, skin, thyroid. We’re fatter than ever. As for diabetes, the number of people who say they have it has doubled in the last 10 years. Now a report says that the English ”” those smoking, candy-eating, fish-and-chips lovers ”” are actually healthier than Americans. And they spend half as much on health care.
The American-English comparison, published this month in The Journal of the American Medical Association, analyzed data from people’s own reports of their health and also used some objective measures: a blood test for diabetes, using hemoglobin A1c, and blood tests for proteins associated with heart disease risk, fibrinogen and C-reactive.
Their blunt conclusion?
“Americans are much sicker than the English,” wrote the investigators, led by Dr. Michael Marmot of University College Medical School in London.
…But the lesson for Americans is clear. These days, and especially in the United States, with its screening and testing, “we are labeled,” said Dr. Hadler of North Carolina.
“I call that medicalized,” he added. “And one of my creeds is that you don’t medicalize people unless it is to their advantage. When you medicalize people, they think they’re sick, and in our culture it’s, ‘Do something, Doc. Don’t just stand there.’ ”
Dr. Hadler has written a book about the problems of medicalization, calling it “The Last Well Person: How to Stay Well Despite the Health Care System” (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2004). The title refers to a story told by Dr. Clifton K. Meador, director of the Meharry-Vanderbilt Alliance, a cooperative program between the medical schools in Nashville.
One day, as Dr. Meador tells it, a doctor-in-training was asked by his professor to define a well person. The resident thought for a moment. A well person, he said, is “someone who has not been completely worked up.”
The medicalization of life is a very interesting concept, and one coming more into play in the philosophy of medicine and bioethics. It’s well worth thinking about how we define illness and health, and whether or not there is ever a perfect state of health one can reach.
Wired 14.06: The Myth of Superman
Wired 14.06: The Myth of Superman
A thoguht provoking article in Wired, by Neil Gaiman and Adam Rogers that contains a quote from Brian Singer that made me smile, and is something I suspect few people think about today: “Given the nature of the US, it was only natural in the 1930s for our new hero to be the ultimate immigrant.”
Regardless of the immigration thing, this is an article well worth reading. It neatly sums up why Superman is such a timeless appeal for the American public, in ways I’ve never heard voiced before.
The Seattle Times: State may drop HIV encoding
The Seattle Times: Health: State may drop HIV encoding
Next month, state health officials likely will finalize a temporary rule that will no longer allow the names of some HIV patients to be encoded for extra security.
Though the change has been protested by advocacy groups, if the state Board of Health does not pass it by June 14, the state will lose as much as $5 million in federal money for a range of services for about 2,000 low-income AIDS patients, including drugs, food, housing and transportation.
Officials at the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) said last summer that states must keep all HIV patients’ names to allow better tracking of the epidemic.
Mmm. I don’t know how I feel about this. On the one hand, it makes sense, and falls in line with the other new guidelines the CDC is attempting to put in place, testing all people having bloodwork done who’re between the ages of 13-64. And it’s not like Washington would be the only state not encoding the data.
On the other hand, it seems like it’s a gross violation of the privacy patients were guaranteed. Perhaps if the rule were that no new codings were allowed, I would feel comfortable with this, but at the moment, it seems like Washington is being forced by the CDC to engage in a giant game of backsies.