Day: May 27, 2003

How to Fix Disney

Newsweek has an article on Disney’s financial problems and how management is approaching them, and Cory Doctorow has some intersetig ideas on how Disney could turn things around.

Anywhere, here’s my grand plan on how Disney can stop mismanaging its licensed properties. Everyone at the company should be forced to sit and watch Piglet’s Big Movie. I had to sit through this sugar coated piece of crap with my daughter, so it’s the least the folks at Disney could do. Plus, it is a perfect example of just how badly Disney has mismanaged what should be a killer franchise.

Like everything else, though, they’ve just run Pooh through the corporate meat grinder until the characters are indistinguishable from every other product line geared toward younger kids.

Installing Movable Type

Since I had nothing else to do today (not!), I figured why not go ahead and try to install Movable Type on my laptop.

Why the heck would I want MT on my laptop? Well, because I wanted a weblog I could easily access, post to and search that was only locally available (i.e. for things that I don’t want to risk putting on a publically available server like this). I have Radio Userland installed on my machine, but it didn’t have the features I needed.

I was very impressed at how easy it was to install. First I downloaded and installed Abyss Web Server which has a very small footprint. After making sure I had configured Zone Alarm to prevent anyone from the outside from ever accessing it, I downloaded the MT install package.

The actual process of installing and getting the Perl script to work took about 15 minutes. I actually spent another 15 minutes trying to configure out how to set up an alias with Abyss to hold the static image and CSS files that MT uses.

And then I was up and running with a local install of MT. MT isn’t as powerful as Conversant, but it will do the job for what I plan on using it for. Six Apart did an excellent job on the install documentation.

Mbeki Continues to Adopt the U.N. Approach

Thabo Mbeki has really done an excellent job of adopting the United Nations approach to wars, ethnic conflict and human rights violations in Africa. Just ignore the proble, court dictators, and justify the unjustifiable 90 percent of the time, and then once or twice a year make a pretty speech at an international conference.

Whitewash, rinse, and repeat.

Source:

Mbeki: End conflict in Africa. The Natal Witness (South Africa), May 26, 2003.

Oh, No, Not Another Saddam Statue . . .

The New York Times has an interesting story on the folks who had to make all of those statues of Saddam Hussein that littered the Iraqi landscape.

“Of course we were amazed all the time about the orders for statues,” said Farid Hussein, a supervisor at the factory and no relation of the deposed leader, as he roamed the abandoned grounds. “We would think, `Oh, no, not another statue of Saddam.’ “

Cranking out statues of Saddam — now that sounds like a job that really would have sucked. In the end, though, the joke was on Saddam. Yes, they cranked out 4-5 giant statues of the imperious leader ever year, but according to the Times, “They [the factory workers] also made their own sculpture here, secretly using the foundry’s facilities and storing their own works at home.”

Source:

Giants of Iraqi History Linger in Pieces. Neela Banerjee, The New York Times, May 26, 2003.

When Is PETA Going to Sue the CDFE?

Okay, here’s something I genuinely don’t understand — why hasn’t People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals sued Ron Arnold and the Center for the Defense of Free Enterprise for libel yet? This is hard to understand for two reasons.

First, PETA is hardly afraid to file lawsuits. Just last February, for example, PETA said it would sue the state of New Jersey after PETA activists Dan Shannon and Jay Kelly hit a deer in that state while driving a PETA-owned vehicle. One news organization I wrote an op-ed about PETA for made me go over it with a fine-tooth comb because of PETA’s perceived litigiousness. This is not an organization known for holding their lawyers at bay.

Second, Ron Arnold has said a number of things which PETA and its attorneys say are patently untrue and would thereby be libelous. For example, here’s Arnold describing PETA in no uncertain terms for the New Jersey Herald earlier this month,

We believe the evidence shows that PETA’s leaders and personnel have been involved in criminal activities of such a magnitude for such a length of time that they have no legal right to a tax exemption.

Or how about its filing with the IRS last year where Arnold and CDFE asserted,

PETA openly and actively induces and encourages unlawful acts . . .

Maybe PETA agrees with Arnold that it actively encourages criminal acts. But no, PETA attorney Jeff Kerr tells the New Jersey Herald,

That is completely ludicrous and they’ve known about it for a long time. Everything it [PETA] does is directly related to trying to help end the suffering and exploitation of animals. Everything we do is consistent with the charitable mission of PETA.

Well, if Arnold’s assertions are really that ludicrous, it’s a bit odd that PETA doesn’t seek recourse in the courts through a libel action. Either they really know Arnold’s statement is, in fact, accurate, or they’re too busy suing states when their own activists hit deer to bother.

Source:

Animal rights group attacked; PETA integrity under question. Pat Mindos, New Jersey Herald, May 6, 2003.