wshaffer

The news seems to be a little more full of grotesque horrors lately, but also a bit more full of acts of heroism by "ordinary" people. If I ever stop to help at what I think is a road accident, only to discover that I have, in fact, walked into the middle of a murder scene and am speaking to one of the killers, I hope I have half the presence of mind of Ingrid Loyau-Kennet.

Also, I'm somehow not surprised that she's a former teacher and a Brownie leader.

Okay, I know about the "special relationship", but this Guardian photo sequence is starting to border on Clinton/Miliband RPS. Milinton, anyone? (Seriously, though - when is the British press going to figure out that Americans are just touchy-feelier than Brits? Every time one of our politicians lays a hand on a Brit, it makes the newspaper. Oh, well - I suppose it's more fun than analyzing the precise angle of Obama's bows every time he meets an Eastern head of state.)

The Doctor Who Podcast Alliance appears to be an attempt to aggregate all the Doctor Who related podcasts in one place. Impressive - there are a few I didn't know about, although at the moment, they're missing one of my faves, Cadmium2. (Which is not exclusively Whovian, but then neither are all of the podcasts listed on the linked page.)

I recently discovered the blog, Sociological Images, and have been fascinated by it. Lots of really fascinating stuff over there. I think I originally stumbled across a set of posts analyzing gender portrayals in advertising, but there's lots of interesting media and social analysis over there.

I'm still trying to figure out the latest Amazon.com follies. What seems to have happened, as far as I can make out: Some eagle-eyed Amazon users noticed over the weekend that a suspiciously large number of books with LGBT content had lost their Amazon sales rankings, causing them not to show up in search results. An Amazon customer service representative explained that this was part of a new policy that "adult" material should not show up in searches. There was an internet kerfuffle, and now Amazon is saying that there is no new policy, this is a glitch, and they're working on fixing it.

Riiight.

There's a glitch somewhere, all right. Probably not in the site software.

What I can't figure out is how they thought for a nanosecond that they were going to get away with this. I know what writers are like. Mess with their Amazon sales rank at your peril.

I am rather disappointed with Amazon, not so much for the initial behavior (hey, we all have boneheaded ideas sometimes), but for the less-than-forthright way they seem to be dealing with the fallout.

I wonder if this is the first time Lewis Carroll's "The Hunting of the Snark" has been cited in a ruling.

Will this snark prove to be a boojum, or will we actually see something being done about all these prisoners in Guantanamo? Only time will tell.