Saturday, July 18, 2009

Two things to point to, one for funny and one for serious

The funny is here, speaking of the attitudes of(in this case one particular) 'Republican pundit' who lost her brain over Sarah Palin:
You're Peggy Noonan and you're jealous. But it's not the normal kind of jealous, the kind reserved for girlfriends who can squeeze into size 2 jeans. No, it's the kind of jealous that hurts, that grabs your gut and twists, that has you howling with rage into your pillow in the middle of the night, screaming "It's not fair" like a two-year-old denied another piece of cake. It is Sarah Palin jealous...and it is consuming you.
...
And, what's worse, everyone continues to talk about her. You've tried everything, using your mainstream media platforms, your Wall Street Journal columns, and powerful friends -- so many of them -- to savage her, to give her a rhetorical beating so fierce that it would bring a smile to the face of Vince McMahon -- if you knew who he is, and if you had ever watched a WWE wrestling match, which he heads. "She is a complete elite confection. She might as well have been a bonbon," you wrote, your $300 manicured fingers shaking on the keyboard.
...
You're Peggy Noonan and you're jealous. You don't understand it. Sure, maybe she has accomplished a few things (like the $26 billion dollar natural gas pipeline deal, restructuring Alaskan government, and taking an ice pick to corrupt politicians). But she has no style, no pizzazz -- she just does stuff. But so do you -- and you can't understand why you don't get the same adoration. After all, didn't you go before the New York Landmarks Preservation Commission and not just protest, but elegantly protest -- so said The New York Times -- a 16-story tower a developer wanted to build in your ritzy Upper East Side Manhattan neighborhood? Sarah Palin wouldn't have done that; she's not brilliant enough to understand preservation. She probably would have looked at the jobs the construction would create and given it a déclassé "Hell yeah!"

Well worth reading, and I hope Noonan hears about it, reads it, and shrieks so high only the dog knows she did it. And runs away.


The serious is that Amazon deleted books from peoples' Kindle readers. No notice, just did it. And what books were they? Nineteen Eighty-Four, Animal Farm and Atlas Shrugged.

I had no idea Amazon could do that, let alone without bothering to tell you "We're going to delete the book you paid for. We'll refund your money, but you can't keep it." And with all the books out there, that it would be these three that are the only faulty file and that book will no longer be available, or the books in question were being sold by Amazon despite being unauthorized copies. In the link at Insty we have
It appears as though Amazon’s purchasing system does this automatically. The company told Ars that they are “changing [Amazon's] systems so that in the future we will not remove books from customers’ devices in these circumstances.”

Bravo to that, but it would have been better for Amazon to tell customers of this planned change directly, in the first place. And why was the system designed to reach out and remove books, anyway?

Good question. I'd thought about one of these before, but this pretty much kills it; I don't want some possible censor being able to delete or edit books I've bought.

2 comments:

MauserMedic said...

How appropriately Orwellian...

Anonymous said...

So much for that whole "Fahrenheit 451" thing; in the future, censors won't need to resort to firemen; just some IT guy logging on, typing in a Web address and hitting the delete key.

Make mine hardcopy, please.

--Wes S.