{"id":6774,"date":"2011-07-12T12:40:43","date_gmt":"2011-07-12T19:40:43","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/?p=6774"},"modified":"2011-07-12T15:10:36","modified_gmt":"2011-07-12T22:10:36","slug":"light-tuesday-bloggage","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/?p=6774","title":{"rendered":"Light Tuesday Bloggage"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"The scandal du jour<\/em> is how the gathering of tabloid gossip has escalated from eavesdropping on insider chitchat to outright espionage.\u00a0 In Britain, reporters from Rupert Murdoch’s News of the World are accused of trying to get the dirt on royals, politicians, and sports stars<\/a> by bribing bodyguards and household staff, hacking phone lines, and cracking into email accounts.\u00a0 The spying operation apparently extends to the United States, where Murdoch reporters are said to have hacked the families of 9\/11 victims, among others.\u00a0 I’m certain it runs deeper than anyone is saying right now, because once you start getting insider news this way, how do you stop?<\/p>\n

But why haven’t we heard more about Squidgygate and Camillagate<\/a>?\u00a0 Way back in 1989 someone recorded phone calls from Princess Diana and Prince Charles.\u00a0 Transcripts of the calls ended up in the British tabloid press, to the great embarrassment of all involved.\u00a0 There were investigations: I believe it came down to simple gossip-gathering, someone digging up dirt on the royals to sell to the highest bidder.\u00a0 Isn’t what’s going on now, more than 20 years later, just a continuation of that?\u00a0 Hell, reporters were caught trying to break into the missing baby’s upstairs nursery in the wake of the 1932 Lindbergh baby kidnapping<\/a>.\u00a0 Nothing new here.<\/p>\n

I’m thinking what’s different this time around is Murdoch’s boys crossed the wrong person, someone with the power to destroy them.\u00a0 The Lindberghs couldn’t take down the tabloids 80 years ago, the royal family couldn’t do it 20 years ago … but someone’s doing it now.\u00a0 Murdoch owns newspapers all around the world, and no doubt the extent of the spying has only begun to be revealed.\u00a0 I\u00a0 must say I’m glued to this story.<\/p>\n

——————–<\/p>\n

I’m increasingly unglued to NPR, particularly when it comes to news about the debt ceiling standoff here in the USA.\u00a0 NPR aired a long segment this morning absolutely filled with Republican and Tea Party talking points, and nary a word about what 2- to 4-trillion dollar cuts will actually mean to regular people, nor what will happen if the debt ceiling isn’t raised.\u00a0 Are Social Security checks going to keep coming?\u00a0 What about military and federal pensions?\u00a0 Will people on Medicare still be able to see their doctors?\u00a0 Will VA hospitals continue to operate?\u00a0 Will government workers be furloughed?\u00a0 Why isn’t NPR talking about these things?\u00a0 I was so disgusted I changed the station.\u00a0 Liberal media my ass.\u00a0 Propaganda funnel is more like it.<\/p>\n

——————–<\/p>\n

Speaking of fighting city hall, my daughter went to traffic court this morning to contest a parking ticket … and she won!\u00a0 I’m going to remember that next time I get a bogus ticket.\u00a0 You can still fight ’em, and it’s still possible to win.\u00a0 A lesson there for us all.<\/p>\n

——————–<\/p>\n

On the geek front, I’ve been tinkering with the formatting of my book and DVD review posts.\u00a0 What works on a desktop or laptop doesn’t necessarily work on a mobile phone screen.\u00a0 What works in Firefox might not work in Internet Explorer.\u00a0 What works on a screen set to 1024 by 768 pixels works differently at smaller or larger resolutions.\u00a0 The <div> tag is supposed to separate elements on a page, something like a hard paragraph break, except that it doesn’t.\u00a0 So many problems!<\/p>\n

I’m trying different formatting techniques, checking them on Firefox and IE, then checking again with larger and smaller screen resolutions.\u00a0 I’ll probably have to download Chrome and Safari too.\u00a0 Why should it be so damn hard to set up your blog so that it looks the same to every reader?\u00a0 Look, people, just change to Firefox, set your screen resolution to 1024 X 768, and you’ll see what I see.\u00a0 Wouldn’t that be nice?<\/p>\n

Google+<\/a> opened up invitations again, at least for a short time, and I was able to sneak in (I’m listed as Paul Woodford<\/a>, if you’d like to find me there).\u00a0 First impressions: G+ is simple to understand and use, not cluttered with Facebook-style time-wasters like polls, games, and who-befriended-whom notices.\u00a0 I particularly like being able to set up defined circles of friends and acquaintances (friends, family, hash house harriers, etc) so that I can have discussions with people in some circles without being overheard by all.\u00a0 And, as with Twitter, I can follow notable people without being a pest.<\/p>\n

Now to see whether sufficient numbers of my friends and relatives make the move.\u00a0 I hope they’re not all busy playing Farmville.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The scandal du jour is how the gathering of tabloid gossip has escalated from eavesdropping on insider chitchat to outright espionage.\u00a0 In Britain, reporters from Rupert Murdoch’s News of the World are accused of trying to get the dirt on royals, politicians, and sports stars by bribing bodyguards and household staff, hacking phone lines, and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10,16,8,29],"tags":[174,173,41,172],"class_list":["post-6774","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-current-events","category-media","category-politics","category-the-economy","tag-google","tag-news-of-the-world","tag-npr","tag-rupert-murdoch"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6774","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=6774"}],"version-history":[{"count":14,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6774\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6789,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6774\/revisions\/6789"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=6774"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=6774"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=6774"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}