Fisherman’s hut window, Menemsha, August 2008.

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August 2008.

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Statue of Swordfish Harpooner, Menemsha, August 2008.

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View from Dutcher Dock, Menemsha, August, 2008.

I can’t believe I was here one week ago. I’ve been working flat out every day since we arrived back last Friday night. But taking a look through some of my holiday pics, though they do the Vineyard no justice at all, gives me a little comfort. It’s easily the most beautiful and relaxing place I have visited in the US. Though that could have been a lot to do with our hosts. More pics to come in the following days.

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[…]economic considerations alone scarcely account for what appears to be an obsession with Georgia. The “color revolutions” that swept across Ukraine, the Balkans and the Caucasus in the first years of the new century plainly unnerved Mr. Putin, who has denounced America’s policy of “democracy promotion” and stifled foreign organizations seeking to promote human rights in Russia. Georgia, with its open embrace of the West, thus represents a threat to the legitimacy of Russia’s authoritarian model. And this challenge is immensely compounded by Georgia’s fervent aspiration to join NATO, one of Russia’s red lines. Russian officials frequently recall that President Bill Clinton promised Boris Yeltsin that NATO would not expand beyond Eastern Europe. Of course NATO is no longer an anti-Soviet alliance, and the fact that Russia views NATO’s eastward expansion as a threat to its security is a vivid sign of the deep-rooted cold war mentality of Mr. Putin and his circle.

Still, they seem to mean it. Both Mr. Putin and his successor as president, Dmitri Medvedev, have reserved their starkest rhetoric for this subject. Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov has threatened that Georgia’s ambition to join NATO “will lead to renewed bloodshed,” adding, as if that weren’t enough, “we will do anything not to allow Georgia and Ukraine to join NATO.”

[…]And yet the crocodile might have been held at bay were it not for Abkhazia and South Ossetia — the first a traditional Black Sea resort area that defined Georgia’s western frontier, and the second an impoverished, sparsely populated region that borders Russia to the north. Georgia is a polygot nation, and views both regions as historically, and inextricably, Georgian. Each, however, had its own language, culture, timeless history and separatist aspirations. When the Soviet Union collapsed, both regions sought to separate themselves from Georgia in bloody conflicts — South Ossetia in 1990-1, Abkhazia in 1992-4. Both wars ended with cease-fires that were negotiated by Russia and policed by peacekeeping forces under the aegis of the recently established Commonwealth of Independent States. Over time, the stalemates hardened into “frozen conflicts,” like that over Cyprus.

But the Georgians are intensely nationalistic, and viewed these de facto states on their border as an intolerable violation of sovereignty. Mr. Saakashvili cashed in on this deep sense of grievance, vowing to restore Georgia’s “territorial integrity.” Soon after taking office, he succeeded in regaining Georgian control over the southwestern province of Ajara. Then, in the summer of 2004, citing growing banditry and chaos, he sent Interior Ministry troops into South Ossetia. After a series of inconclusive clashes, the troops were forced to make a humiliating withdrawal.

Still, this violation of the status quo infuriated the Russians, and Mr. Saakashvili, for once listening to his few dovish advisors, agreed to seek a negotiated settlement in Abkhazia. By late 2005, a Georgian mediator had initialed an agreement: Georgia would not use force, and the Abkhaz would allow the gradual return of 200,000-plus ethnic Georgians who had fled the violence. But the agreement collapsed in early 2006, done in by hardliners on both sides. This chapter has been all but effaced from the history one hears in Georgia.

Traub also has a nice anecdote about a telephone call between Putin and Mikheil Saakashvili earlier this year, when the Georgian president demanded that Russia reverse its recognition of Abkhazia, South Ossetia and another disputed territory, this time in Moldova, called Transnistria:

On April 21, Mr. Saakashvili called the Russian leader to demand that he reverse the decision. He reminded Mr. Putin that the West had taken Georgia’s side in the dispute. And Mr. Putin, according to several of Mr. Saakashvili’s associates, shot back with a suggestion about where they could put their statements. Mr. Saakashvili, prudent for once, shied from uttering the exact wording, but said that Mr. Putin had used “extremely offensive language,” and had repeated the expression several times.

Taunting the Bear (NYT)

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Russia and Georgia went to war. John Edwards lost all his credibility. And my friend Jesse became a YouTube sensation. Over one million views in less than one week for her film 34×25x36. Nice one, Jesse!

Jesse Docs (YouTube)

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One afternoon in the spring of 2006, for reasons unknown to those who knew him, Mitchell Henderson, a seventh grader from Rochester, Minn., took a .22-caliber rifle down from a shelf in his parents’ bedroom closet and shot himself in the head. The next morning, Mitchell’s school assembled in the gym to begin mourning. His classmates created a virtual memorial on MySpace and garlanded it with remembrances. One wrote that Mitchell was “an hero to take that shot, to leave us all behind. God do we wish we could take it back. . . . ” Someone e-mailed a clipping of Mitchell’s newspaper obituary to MyDeathSpace.com, a Web site that links to the MySpace pages of the dead. From MyDeathSpace, Mitchell’s page came to the attention of an Internet message board known as /b/ and the “trolls,” as they have come to be called, who dwell there.

/b/ is the designated “random” board of 4chan.org, a group of message boards that draws more than 200 million page views a month. A post consists of an image and a few lines of text. Almost everyone posts as “anonymous.” In effect, this makes /b/ a panopticon in reverse — nobody can see anybody, and everybody can claim to speak from the center. The anonymous denizens of 4chan’s other boards — devoted to travel, fitness and several genres of pornography — refer to the /b/-dwellers as “/b/tards.”

Measured in terms of depravity, insularity and traffic-driven turnover, the culture of /b/ has little precedent. /b/ reads like the inside of a high-school bathroom stall, or an obscene telephone party line, or a blog with no posts and all comments filled with slang that you are too old to understand.

Something about Mitchell Henderson struck the denizens of /b/ as funny. They were especially amused by a reference on his MySpace page to a lost iPod. Mitchell Henderson, /b/ decided, had killed himself over a lost iPod. The “an hero” meme was born. Within hours, the anonymous multitudes were wrapping the tragedy of Mitchell’s death in absurdity.

Someone hacked Henderson’s MySpace page and gave him the face of a zombie. Someone placed an iPod on Henderson’s grave, took a picture and posted it to /b/. Henderson’s face was appended to dancing iPods, spinning iPods, hardcore porn scenes. A dramatic re-enactment of Henderson’s demise appeared on YouTube, complete with shattered iPod. The phone began ringing at Mitchell’s parents’ home. “It sounded like kids,” remembers Mitchell’s father, Mark Henderson, a 44-year-old I.T. executive. “They’d say, ‘Hi, this is Mitchell, I’m at the cemetery.’ ‘Hi, I’ve got Mitchell’s iPod.’ ‘Hi, I’m Mitchell’s ghost, the front door is locked. Can you come down and let me in?’ ” He sighed. “It really got to my wife.” The calls continued for a year and a half.

Malwebolence (NYT Mag)

(Via Daily Intel)

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Scrabulous users have known for months that Hasbro was planning on putting the unofficial Scrabble site out of business. A couple of weeks ago EA launched its own Facebook Scrabble app with Hasbro’s blessing. And in the past 24 hours Hasbro succeeded in forcing Scrabulous off Facebook.

It looks like you can still play on Scrabulous.com. But somehow playing via Scrabulous.com is nowhere near as rewarding. I know, I’ve tried.

The irony is that I was asked to be a beta tester for EA’s new version of Scrabble at the beginning of this month and, to be honest, I thought it was pretty good. The one and only problem I could find was that because the rights for Scrabble have been sold to two different companies in two parts of the world, I could only play EA Scrabble with people in North America. Which is kind of ridiculous considering the main benefit of internet Scrabble ought to be that you can play with anyone, anywhere, anytime.

Since I liked the look and feel of EA Scrabble I was planning on using EA for games in North America and Scrabulous for playing with friends in Europe. Not anymore.

You would have thought that since Scrabulous is so popular, Hasbro would have thought a little more before doing something like this. Then again, anyone who has read Stefan Fatsis’ paean to Scrabble, Word Freak, would know that Hasbro has never been all that interested in helping the game anyway.

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Call me naive, but I have a pretty high opinion of the NYPD. I certainly feel safer in New York than London. But watching this video I have my doubts. According to Gawker (via Gothamist and the NYT’s City Room) the cyclist was arrested while the cop has been put on “modified assignment” pending an investigation. Though what on earth the poor guy on the bike could have been doing to warrant this kind of treatment beats me.

Bully Cop Shoves Man Off Bike (Gawker)
Police Investigate Officer in Critical Mass Video (City Room)
Video of Cop Assaulting Cyclist at Critical Mass Ride (Gothamist)

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