Are either of my readers engaged in home brewing? I left a comment on Weblogsky wondering if the proliferation of “craft beers” and “microbrews” have created a “Long Tail” of beers. It occurred to me that someone - if not a brewpub, a home brewer - should make a short run called “Long Tail Ale” and perhaps a batch of “Blogger Lager.” We could imbibe it at an Austin Bloggers get-together.
I just took a survey about Texas prisons for the Texas State Department of Criminal Justice’s sunset review process. Many of the questions were pretty revealing about the Texas prison system. The first question asked, “Currently, prisoners cannot have food, clothing, jewelry, and toiletries mailed to them by anyone, nor can they receive books, magazines, and newspapers unless mailed by the publisher. What do you feel prisoners should have direct access to through the mail?” While I can certainly understand why prison adminstrators would want to restrict clothing and jewelry deliveries, of course I think prisoners should have free access to media. I wonder how the volunteer project Inside Books is able to fulfill prisoner requests for books; perhaps they have a special exemption.
Another question asked about the accomodations given to prisoners for visitation. One of the options was “Notice to family prior to visitation of potential unavailability of prisoner (e.g.: prisoner is in administrative segregation).” Good lord, the correctional adminstrators don’t inform family member’s their loved ones are in lockup, punishing them by driving out to the pen for no reason? I don’t expect correctional workers to be very cool, but that’s just indecent.
Anyway, the survey is active until June 1, 2006, and I’d encourage any readers interested in Texas justice to take it.
1 Comment The Gmail This bookmarklet is pretty awesome. (Click and drag it up to your toolbar.) When clicked, a Gmail message composition window pops up with the title and URI of the page you’re currently on, making it easy to share pages with your pals. I try to use Gmail for my personal email, saving my UT account for school-related matters, so this is pretty helpful for me. Besides, it requires fewer mouse clicks than the “send link” functionality in Firefox.
Larry Lessig says that Al Gore’s presentation on global warming “is — by far — the most extraordinary lecture I have ever seen anyone give about anything.” That, coming from the good professor, is a pretty ringing endorsement of An Inconvenient Truth.
I was reading this account of Tulsa’s used record stores in the 1970s and came across a passage that I thought would be interesting to non-Tulsans:
It was run by a nice older couple who looked like the last thing they should have been doing was bootlegging music next to an elementary school. While they sold new and used 8-tracks, cassettes, and reel-to-reel tapes, their bread and butter were these jukeboxes that had 8-track recording heads built in (these were not hot-wired garage collages; though I never saw these machines anywhere else, they were beautifully manufactured.) The trick was simple; you go in, find a bunch of hit songs you wanted, then put in your coins and buy a tape that was just the right length and you had your own customized 8-track tape version of a K-Tel album. I had a girlfriend who was hooked on these stupid tapes.
I like the turn of phrase “garage collages,” although I do think “garage bricolage” would roll off the tongue better. More interesting, however, is the memory of commercially produced jukeboxes with embedded tape recorders. Granted, these devices were made before the DMCA or even the Sony Betamax case, but I wonder how what non-infringing uses they could possibly have. The account doesn’t say whether or not this business was in operation before or after the 1976 copyright act - I wonder if there were provisions in the act that addressed these jukeboxes, or, since the 1976 codified Fair Use, these jukeboxes were an effort to take advantage of a perceived loophole in copyright law. (Maybe since the jukebox plays the music aloud in a public place, the user is arguably making a fair-use copy of a personal experience.) It’s not clear, either, if these jukeboxes were manufactured in the United States — maybe they were graymarket Canadian jukeboxes brought to my hometown.
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