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Friday, February 22
I was all set to do my normal weekly news roundup today, but my desire to do so was destroyed by the main news story that greeted me this morning: Daniel Pearl is dead.
An innocent dying is always a tragedy, but as a member, to sound pretentious, of the journalistic community, hearing of an innocent journalist dying hits closer to home. In this case, sorrow over the outcome of the weeks-long ordeal becomes further amplified by the bizarre senselessness of it all.
Usually I can understand why a reporter died – even if that reason is simply "fate.” For most slain war correspondents, death comes from being in the wrong place, at the wrong time, hanging around the wrong people. It’s an accident, basically, the type of thing that the law of averages causes to happen every so often. That doesn’t make their deaths any less tragic or any easier for their loved ones to bear, but it does provide a context: Journalists wandering around war zones will, sometimes, die.
Pearl’s murder seems more heinous because it was more pre-meditated and, at the same time, provides even less of a rational than random wartime violence. Pearl wasn’t killed because he was unlucky, standing where the shrapnel flew. He wasn’t killed because he was a daredevil who was pushing his luck. He wasn’t killed because bad things happen in war.
He was killed because fanatics wanted to make a point – and to heighten the tragedy, they haven’t even done that.
If their goal was to get the Western media out of Pakistan, they’ve failed: reporters, including Pearl’s wife, are still risking their lives on the ground there to get the facts the world needs. If the kidnappers wanted to draw attention to the plight of Pakistan, they’ve failed miserably: Reporters -- especially ones like Pearl, who through his stories and (as demonstrated by the interview he was setting up at the time of his kidnapping) his willingness to talk to those on the outskirts of civilized society – are less likely, and less able, to communicate the message of militants. If they were hoping to provoke the United States into rash movies against their country, they were deluded: The U.S. government isn’t (and shouldn’t) act militarily in retaliation for the death of a reporter.
I’ve never met Daniel Pearl, although when I heard of his kidnapping, I recognized the name from occasional readings of the Wall Street Journal. The fact that he was a dedicated reporter, creative writer and talented journalist makes his death a blow to his newspaper and to the profession of journalism. The fact that he left behind a wife and unborn child, as well as family and friends who loved him, makes this a crime against humanity.
A crime done for nothing.
posted at 8:49 PM by Timothy J. Gibbons | link
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Thursday, February 21
Explain to me again why Macintoshes don't have disk drives?
I've never been an anti-Mac person -- in fact, I used to run a Macintosh network back in college -- but I can't say I ever particularly favored them. The negatives (not having as much software, having higher prices) were things I cared about, while the things they were touted for, like their interface, wasn't as important to me. In fact, being the type of person who grew up on Commodores and moved to PCs when you could still write your own BASIC programs, I actually found the touch-and-feel of the desktop rather irritating; I like a machine where you can get at the guts and, say, mess up the autoexec.bat file all on your own.
Apple's decision to not include disk drives with their machines, though, is now beginning to really piss me off. When the newest Macs came out, and I read that they were disk-drive-less, my thoughts were along the lines of, "Eh. Interesting. Whatever." Now that I'm working on a Mac and can't freaking up- or download anything, I'm somewhat less sanguine.
The thinking, I gather, went something like this: People don't transfer stuff on floppies anymore; everybody's networked, and you can burn stuff to CDs pretty easily, anyway. Well, yeah, in theory -- a theory that would make more sense if the machines were shipped with -- oh, I dunno, maybe a CD burner. As it is now, there's no way to get two machines not connected by a common network to share information. If Apple was in charge of human reproduction, I can see someone saying, "Hey, we'll develop telephathy sometime in the future -- so let's sew up everyone's mouth when they're born!"
All of that's to say that I'm making changes to the site, most of which you won't see for a while, since I can't get them off my laptop. For now, the only new things are the permalinks below each post (enabling you to link directly to an entry you like) and the Tell a Friend feature over on the right. You can use these together, if you so desire, to let everybody else on the Web know about my blatherings. If, of course, you have any desire to.
Damn dirty Macs.
posted at 6:17 PM by Timothy J. Gibbons | link
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Tuesday, February 19
I was attacked by a fish today.
Well, not quite -- but it was a close call. Not to make this another lunch rant, but I go down to the cafeteria to get something to eat, and almost run into a guy carrying a fish on his plate. Notice the article: He didn't have a plate of fish. He had a fish. On a plate. Head, tail, fins, mouth and all. Which, as the guy stops short, leaps at me. I swear the thing had hatred in its eyes, and it possibly cursed me under its breath. (I don't speak fish, only squirrel.)
When I got to the actual food line, trembling slightly from the attack, I was faced with a pot full of buttery water in which a dozen or so aquatic denizens floated. It was like coming back from a long vacation and remembering I hadn't got anybody to tend the aquarium.
I know Hamburg's a port and everything, but if I want to see a a shoal of fish looking like they were trying to remember what Mom said about hooks, I'll go down to the fish market or something. I don't need it in the cafeteria.
posted at 8:12 PM by Timothy J. Gibbons | link
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