The BBC WWWebsite has a story with the headline Dutch bill to ban magic mushrooms. My first-pass parsing of that headline took magic as a noun and mushrooms as a third-person singular active indicative verb.

Some days ago, the subject of machine guns came-up in conversation with the Woman of Interest, and I noted to her that fully-automatic firearms had first come under tight regulation as part of a war on a drug — the drug in question being alcohol. Synchronistically, within a day or so I received and watched the original Scarface (1932).

The film is prefaced by text that declares that it's essentially doing no more than presenting events that have really happened, that the government is not doing enough to protect the citizenry, and that the citizenry must act to get the government to act. Part-way through the film there's a moralizing scene in which community leaders confront a newspaper publisher, claiming that he's glorifying gangsters. He responds essentially with the same message that had prefaced the film — that he is reporting the facts, that the government is not doing enough, and that the citizenry must act to get the government to do more. Then we learn what he thinks ought to be done: outlaw machine guns, effect martial law, and accept the offer of the National Commander of the American Legion to act as a militia against the gangsters. As part of the case for martial law, the publisher notes that the governor of Oklahoma had effected martial law to regulate oil production and claims that surely then we should use martial law against guns. (At some point, the publisher stops qualifying the attack as against any particular sort of gun.)

Many people might not know about that business of martial law in Oklahoma. What specifically happened is that, on 4 August 1931, Governor Alfalfa Bill Murray had 3000 oil wells forceably shut-down to reduce production and thereby drive-up price.

And let's talk about the leadership of the American Legion in that era. Here are the words of American Legion National Commander Alvin Mansfield Owsley, in January 1923:

Do not forget, that the Fascisti are to Italy what the American Legion is to the United States.

In 1931, the Executive Committee passed a resolution praising Mussolini as a great leader, and the National Commander of that year, Ralph O’Neill, presented a copy of the resolution to Mussolini’s Ambassador to the United States. In 1935, during a trip to Italy, National Vice-Commander William Edward Easterwood pinned a Legion pin on the lapel of Benito Mussolini.

What the character of the publisher is preaching is the displacement of individual liberty and of procedural rights with command-and-control fascism.

The problem of that era wasn't alcohol per se, nor was it fully-automatic firearms per sese. The problem was Prohibition, that war on a drug. We didn't need even less freedom and even more government, we needed more of the former and less of the latter.

Most of the moralizing in Scarface is not well integrated into the film. One could discard the prefacing text and the publisher's speech without any apparent gap in the story-telling. What would remain would be what seems to be an objection to writs of habeas corpus being used to free gangsters before the truth can be beaten out of them, and perhaps just a hint of the notion that fully-automatic firearms are evil. That overt moralizing seems, then, an after-thought intended to mute or vitiate criticism of what was, by the standards of 1932, a very violent film, depicting fairly ruthless characters.

The 1983 remake was likewise violent for its era, and also controversial for what many took it to say about the Cuban immigrants of the Mariel Boatlift. The remake had its own bizarre moralizing, mostly effected around the film, as in proclamations by director Brian De Palma and in the advertising campaign for the film. The conceit was that this Scarface was an indictment of the profit motive. Of course, the profit motive shouldn't be indicted — objecting to the profit motive is no more or less than objecting to purposeful action. At best, one might object to how someone conceptualized profit. (As, for example, in For what is a man profited, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?)

It is interesting to note what elements within the story were preserved in producing the remake, and how things were transformed. Antonio (Tony) Camonte is a distinctly less appealing character than is Tony Montana. Paul Muni looks like one of Joe Kirby's sloppy drawings for Timely. Camonte plainly likes violent extortion, and he dies like a panicked rat. Montana isn't vicious, his downfall is precipitated by a refusal to allow children to be killed, and he dies a berserker. But, because the dialogue in the original is vastly better, it is easier to understand Poppy being drawn to Camonte than Elvira Hancock becoming Montana's mistress. (Poppy's choice may not be more laudable, but it is more plausible.) On the other hand, while the visual device carrying the message The World Is Yours in the original has more potential than those in the remake, that potential is largely wasted in the original whereäs the the remake makes very effective use of its devices. There is the barest suggestion of incestuous desire in the original, and that's probably almost optimal; the crude references in the remake cause the characters to be both more disgusting and less interesting. On the other hand, the original treats Antonio as falling apart in the wake of killing Guino, but it isn't clear why Antonio falls apart; he expresses no regret for what he has done, and he has hurt 'Cesca in the past without apology or collapse. Further, Guino seems to chose to let Antonio kill him, without good reason for doing so. In the remake, Manny is simply an idiot, and didn't appreciate that, even if he and Gina were married, Tony might still reäct violently. Tony doesn't appear to regret killing Manny, and Tony's collapse is a result of other things (problems with his business associates, a lack of anticipated gratification from material success, and drug use).

Someone ought to assemble and market a Fay Wray collection, including

• Doctor X
• The Most Dangerous Game
• The Vampire Bat
• Mystery of the Wax Museum
• King Kong

In fact, it ought to have been done while she was still alive.

Having come upon this article

as translated thus I am now wondering about various sorts of assaults (some homicidal or sexual) alleged to have been perpetrated against non-combatants by American soldiers in Iraq, and about what share of these are associated with soldiers coming from backgrounds in domestic criminal gangs, and more specifically with soldiers who are considered to be present members in such gangs. I think that an active investigation is warranted.

I have to wonder whether the BBC was having a laugh when they wrote that sentence. (Of course, here in America, Congressional Democrats once held a special hearing so that Jane Fonda, Jessica Lange, and Sissy Spacek could testify on US farming policy.)

Ordinarily, I'd see no urgency in deposing the Australian monarch. As with Canada, the powers of the head-of-state are virtually ceremonial except under extraordinary circumstances, the de facto head of state is a Governor General, and the Governor General is in practice a countryman chosen by the Prime Minister.

However, the present Queen is almost 82 years old, and the heir apparent is, uhm, Charles. (Canada is perhaps stuck with Charles. Canada became distinctively defined in terms of a rejection of independence for the British North American colonies. Little remains of that rejection beyond having the same monarch as does the United Kingdom.) Then again, have the republics really done respectable jobs of selecting heads of state? There have been and are greater fools than Charles occupying Presidential offices.

I wonder how this sounds when played backwards.

I've been pondering the problems of creäting decentralized equivalents to social network sites such as LiveJournal.

A 'blog per se comes fairly cheap. At the low end, one could form or join a syndicate, jointly register a second-level domain name (eg, oursyndicate.com) with GoDaddy for about $10 per year, jointly lease 500 GB of housing from AN Hosting for about $85 per year, distribute third-level domains (eg, winky.oursyndicate.com) amongst as many syndicate members as you might have, and install WordPress for free. Give everybody a whole gigabyte, and we're still talking just 20¢ per person per year. (Let everyone have his-or-her own second-level domain, and 25 GB, and we're talking about $14.25 per person per year.)

The challenge is in giving such 'blogs — across second- and third-level domains — the connectivity of Friendships, and of Interests.

As a first-pass approximation, imagine each 'blog as having a link that will deliver two data: an OpenID associated with the 'blog, and a reference (pointer) to an RSS feed for the 'blog. These data allow one to distinguish the 'blog owner, and in some sense beFriend him or her.

The next stage is to support a Friends page. A question is of whether to just deliver a set of references (presumably URIs) for the 'blogs of one's Friends, and leave aggregation to the visitor's software, or to assemble a Friends page at one's own site. The advantage of the latter is that the visitor needn't have aggregation software; the disadvantage is that either the page will have to be aggregated on-the-fly, or it must always exclude protected entries. I'm inclined to opt for aggregation on one's own site and for aggregation on-the-fly. However, a standard could support all of these options, leaving it to a given 'blog to decide whether to deliver just references, just Friends pages, or both, an whether any Friends page were aggregated on-the-fly. The next piece is Interests. A perfect decentralization of these is possible but (as I think) not reasonable; it would involve shipping copies of a large dB repeatedly to each 'blog. My thinking is that, instead, we should accept there being Interests servers, at which 'blog owners could register their 'blogs as corresponding to given Interests. However, no 'blog need be dependent upon just one particular Interests server; it should be possible to register with multiple servers, so that any Interest-search censorship on the part of one server could be overcome by merely additionally registering with another server that did not censor that Interest. It might be possible for these servers to be supported charitably; but, frankly, I imagine them supported by advertising or by registration fees.

My LiveJournal account has effectively been purged. As of yester-day morning, I can no longer log-in with it. The diagnostic says

The database is temporarily in read-only mode, so creating new login sessions is temporarily down. Please try again later.

and the account is not yet explicitly declared as purged; but it has been removed from the Friends lists of accounts that had beFriended it, and I deleted the account on the morning of 16 February, which would be 61 days before I was unable to log-in. (Though one is warned that the account will be purged after 30 days, present practice is that it will be purged after 60 days.)

When last I looked, the user-name had not been listed as again available.

A big box o' books was left for me in the apartment complex office yester-day; I took possession of it this morning. It only contained 6 books, but some of the books themselves were large. And heavy.

The box was open and ruptured when I got it. I don't know just where that happened, though I suspect it was after it had left the local post office. The books themselves were all in fine shape (suggesting that the box had not long been compromised), and there had been an attempt to reseal the box with a few strips of ordinary cellophane adhesive tape. But the complex manager was on the phone when I got the package.

Anyway, the books themselves were concerned with comic strips, electrical circuit analysis, polymer clay, and photographing objets d'art, so the manager probably won't think less of me for her having caught a glimpse of my purchasing habits.

One of the books had been reported by the vendor (Edward R. Hamilton) as shop-worn, but was not. I take it that the shipment that he'd received contained shop-worn copies, but that I got a lucky draw.

While I was apparently distracted by shiny objects, Verizon Communications, Inc., spun-off its landline operations in Maine, New Hamsphire, and Vermont as Northern New England Spinco Inc., which was on the same day merged with FairPoint Communications, a firm previously noted for holding various small, rural local telephone operating companies.

I have received a tiny amount of stock, and a tiny check in lieu of a fractional share. They have suggested that I might sell them the shares. Previously, Verizon spun-off Idearc Media Corp., and likewise sent a small check and a tiny number of shares. They actively encouraged me to sell-back the shares, but I decided to be difficult. I don't plan to sell-back the FairPoint shares either.

It is interesting to see Verizon, which once aggressively absorbed other telephone companies, now spinning-off its landline operations in three states. When SBC Communications bought the remains of AT&T, and then took the name AT&T for itself, the media and others creäted the impression that the original AT&T, broken apart in the '80s, had been reässembled. (The Wikipedia article on the new AT&T uses a diagram designed as if to foster this misimpression.) In fact, some of the original RBOCs were not absorbed by SBC / AT&T, being instead held by Verizon and by Qwest Communications International, Inc. And now this consolidation into three parts has become a division into four parts.