First Looks category archive

Bing! Bang! Busted!

Amidst the inanity of most social networking comes glimpses of real pain.

Reuters:

When news spread on Saturday of a radiation leak at a nuclear power plant run by Tokyo Electric Power Co (TEPCO), after an explosion at the facility, many messages on social networking sites were panic-stricken.

“Came back home at 8 in the morning after the depressing night…Now, the nuclear power plant has exploded and we might already be exposed to radioactivity,” said a 23-year-old female office worker from Tokyo on a Facebook page.

“I just don’t know what to do, what’s coming next, and will I be alive tomorrow?” she asked.

Read more »

Fog over the beachfront, yesterday, mid-afternoon.

The Atlantic is out there somewhere . . . .

H/T Susan for the pic.

Bergman and Ossman have a podcast.

Glomarization wrote it up so I don’t have to.

It is not unreasonable to call tea partiers “scary.”

Follow the link for her reasoning.

The internet is a public place. The principles of civil discourse apply (if you can afford the lawyer).

The singer (Courtney Love–ed.) has agreed to pay Dawn Simorangkir $430,000, plus interest, to settle a lawsuit the designer filed in March 2009 over comments Love made on Twitter and her MySpace blog.

While the case didn’t go to a jury, First Amendment experts say it highlights the need for celebrities and average people to watch what they say online.

(snip)

“The laws controlling what is and isn’t libelous are the same regardless of the medium in which the statements appear,” (First Amendment Attorney Doug Mirell) said.

In a parallel vein, the local rag has banned anonymous comments on opinion pieces (not on news stories) and considers the experiment a success. From the editor of the editorial page:

Before the switch to verified commenting, we would regularly find it necessary to delete trollish or racist or otherwise inappropriate comments. Since the switch, we’ve had to do almost none of that. That’s all the more impressive because comments at the Opinion channel are posted automatically and are longer than on the rest of PilotOnline.com.

The content of the comments on letters, editorials and columns has been so uniformly better, in fact, that we’ve been running them regularly in our letters column.

There is a difference between being intense and being insulting.

Linus Torvalds:

Intelligence is the ability to avoid doing work, yet getting the work done.

Via Funny or Die.

The calendar says it’s too early for this.

Who cares?

Off to drink liberally.

Date: Saturday, February 26th

Time: 9-11 a. m.

Special Guest Speaker: Louisa Strayhorn, the last African American to serve on the Virginia Beach City Council

Location: Bubba’s Deli & BBQ, 3600 Dam Neck Rd, Virginia Beach (Map).

Cost: Adults $10.00, Under 12 $6.00 for all-you-can-eat buffet (it’s a pretty good buffet, too–plenty of variety).

More information here.

Struggling start-up needs your help.

When: Thursday, February 24, 6 p

Where:

One Fish Two Fish
Long Point Bay Marina
2109 West Great Neck Road
(Four blocks south of Shore Drive)
Virginia Beach, Va. (Map)

Showing up (and paying your own check) is the only qualification for membership.

State of Maryland demands prison guard job applicant’s social networking login information and reads his posts and messages.

This goes beyond being careful, which is wise, to being creepy. The State of Maryland is confusing itself with the TSA.

The ACLU has more details, plus a petition to the Secretary of Public Safety of Maryland for you to sign.

Addendum, the Next Day:

The policy has been suspended for 45 days pending review.

Harry Shearer tells of his encounter with TSA en-pants-ed patdowns on Sunday’s Le Show (the story’s in the first few minutes of the show; you can listen at the link).

He silently put up with it because he wanted to make his plane.

He strikes back:

Break time.