infobong.com the absurd courts the vulgar

It’s been a long while since I’ve posted, and it may be a long while before I post again, but I feel it is my duty as the proprietor of infobong.com to voice my disapproval of today’s Supreme Court ruling that the word “bong” does not have First Amendment protection. While David Beaver over at Language Log contends that “bong” is not slang for a particular kind of marijuana paraphenalia, I would contend that the word bong doesn’t necessarily imply marijuana use. A beer bong is a device for consuming large amounts of beer in a short time, a vodka bong is presumably for quickly consuming vodka, and infobong fails in its goal to be a way of consuming information quickly.

Hopefully a new president will take over in 2009 and appoint justices who will reverse this ruling.

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Yesterday, Ars Technica posted a long and interesting article that offers a case study of AT&T rollout of fiber in affluent Chicago suburbs. AT&T, Verizon, and whatever other ILECs might remain want to enter the landline television business, but are hampered by local franchise agreements which were developed for cable systems. In particular, cable franchise agreements generally require system operators to build out to an entire community within a given timeframe, to prevent differents service being offered to wealthy areas and poorer areas. Because of telco network topology, it is difficult to completely cover an area with digital access, so the telcos have been pressuring the FCC to re-classify their digital TV systems to avoid these restrictions and Congress to establish national TV franchises.

In the case Ars describes, AT&T just began rolling out services without the consent of the communities or the FCC. Instead, they simply started installing equipment on public rights-of-way, irking property owners and raising the ire of community activists.

While I encourage you to read the story, I thought it glossed over two issues I think are importanto to this debate. First, national cable franchises or unilateral efforts like AT&T’s will provide no allowance for public access systems. While franchises at the local level often include provisions that require operators to fund local public-access systems. It’s unlikely that media-access activists could pressure telcos and MSOs at the national level, eliminating the sometimes enlightening and sometimes frightening world of public-access TV. Secondly, I do worry about issues of the digital divide and institutional racism. When I lived in West Philly, my largely black neighborhood was one of the last in the area to get DSL access, and if there is not build-out requirement, I could see the telcos never investing in a fiber build-out to the inner-city. The ILECs enjoyed a century-long monopoly, which saw Jim Crow laws and redlinling. Since they were able to profit during this era, telco policy should address the racism of the past.

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I watched a special on CNN earlier tonight that purported to give a behind-the-scenes look at the “Man of the Year” selection process at Time magazine. As a former magazine editor, I found the representations of story meetings fairly interesting, but what caught my attention was the use of one of my least favorite phrases “user-generated content.” The editors were mulling over naming content-generating users “persons of the year,” and the end of the show revealed Time’s Person of the Year is You.

I’ll probably pick up a dead-tree copy of the magazine, but I read the lead story online, and it somehow manages to elevate Web 2.0 to a even greater level of hype. One graf states “Silicon Valley consultants call it Web 2.0, as if it were a new version of some old software. But it’s really a revolution.” A later graf hedges its bets a bit and reminds the reader “Sure, it’s a mistake to romanticize all this any more than is strictly necessary,” but the article maintains that Web 2.0 sites like YouTube are leading to new social formations.

I guess the timing of my Web 2.0 paper was perfect; hopefully more than a handful of people at the Cultural Studies Association conference will have heard of the Web 2.0 concept, thanks to the Time story. I learned this week that my panel is at 9am on the last day of the conference, so I imagine attendance will be light. Maybe the hype will roust people out of bed to hear me talk about Web 2.0.

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I don’t remember which blog post led me to this New York Times story on obesity research, but this passage is so freaky to this non-scientist I had to share:

Of the trillions and trillions of cells in a typical human body… only about 1 in 10 is human. The other 90 percent are microbial. These microbes — a term that encompasses all forms of microscopic organisms, including bacteria, fungi, protozoa and a form of life called archaea — exist everywhere. They are found in the ears, nose, mouth, vagina, anus, as well as every inch of skin, especially the armpits, the groin and between the toes. The vast majority are in the gut, which harbors 10 trillion to 100 trillion of them. “Microbes colonize our body surfaces from the moment of our birth,” Gordon said. “They are with us throughout our lives, and at the moment of our death they consume us.”

Wow, so we’re like giant Kombucha colonies toting around sundry alien life-forms. The point of the story is that scientists are finding that obese people often have microflora in their GI tracts that process foods more efficiently, leading them to suggest that this may be a bigger determining factor for obesity than either genetics or diet and exercize. The article doesn’t suggest we’ll be gulping the human equivalent of Rid-X any time soon, but I imagine that research is on its way.

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The New York Times has a more detailed story about the recent Las Vegas ordinance that prohibits groups from feeding the homeless in parks. After I posted that link, I worried that many cities might have similar policies. While I’ve seen groups distribute food in the streets of Berkeley, I’ve never seen similar efforts in Austin – could Austin have a similar ordinance? Apparently not, it seems. The article says, “the Las Vegas ordinance is believed to be the first to explicitly make it an offense to feed ‘the indigent’.” I guess Las Vegas is leading the way in cracking down on charity. The local ACLU says that the law is unenforceable because it violates the freedom of assembly clause of the Bill of Rights, and, at a practical level, it’s difficult to prove what aid recipients are indeed indigent. Regardless, this does little to improve Las Vegas’ crappy reputation for sprawl and greed.

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