Warning: If you receive an email about “new wireless laws” that are supposedly going into effect in North Carolina on 1 July 2008, please disregard. It’s been debunked by WITN (and others maybe?) as a fake. I was going to research the bill myself, but a quick Google search revealed that someone else had already done all the work for me.

The forwarded email is long and fairly detailed, but its main claim is this:

The first [law] prohibits all drivers from using a handheld wireless telephone while operating a motor vehicle. (Vehicle Code (VC) 23123). Motorists 18 and over may use a hands-free device. Drivers under the age of 18 may NOT use a wireless telephone or hands-free device while operating a motor vehicle(VC 23124).

The laws sound legit, and the FAQ format of the email makes them even more believable, as though the DMV was trying to quickly send around a layman’s explanation. Whoever made this definitely has 1) big concerns about the real danger of using a cell phone while driving; 2) incredibly too much free time. A full copy of the email can be found on this boyscout blog, but I don’t know if they’ll keep it up for long.  I’m assuming they posted it because they think it’s legitimate legislation.

Pulled from WITN’s Web site, here is a summary of the actual cell phone laws in North Carolina:

There are currently laws in North Carolina prohibiting cell phone use for some drivers. Drivers under the age of 18 may not use a cell phone behind the wheel, with the exception to call their parents or law enforcement. Bus Drivers are also not permitted to speak on cell phones while driving.

The lesson: the internet is sometimes (read: often) not so credible, and when the source of a forwarded email isn’t immediately apparent, you should always do a little fact-checking.

So this Belgian woman, Tania Derveaux, is claiming she will have sex with any virgin who supports net neutrality. I’m pretty sure it’s all a gimmick 1) to get emails to be sold to third parties; and 2) to bring legitimate attention to net neutrality. Some of Tania’s terms of service are absolutely hilarious:

3. General Requirements and Rules of Conduct

Services will only be provided to those who meet the following requirements:

- condom must be used, except if the applicant prefers to release his semen upon Tania’s body without any oral or vaginal contact

- Anal sex is negotiable, although Tania will cease the performance immediately if any form of ’surprise buttsex’ occurs

- multiple participants are not allowed, but applicants are entitled to have an audience observe the performance

- if anywhere along the process, it becomes clear that the applicant is not a virgin, Tania reserves the right to terminate all activity

- applicant agrees that in the event of the applicant infringing upon Terms of Service during the process of the act, Tania is not responsible for any genital injury that the applicant may suffer

- Tania may deny service for hygiene reasons

Conclusion: Belgians are weird.

If you don’t know what net neutrality is, here’s the short version: if Congress allows it, internet service providers will start selling bandwidth to the highest bidder, to the exclusion of other companies (aka, Wachovia signs an exclusive deal so BB&T, Bank of America, etc. don’t get ANY bandwidth). The internet thus becomes tiered. Rich companies will have faster web sites. Think: AOL, Yahoo!, Google, Time-Warner. Little guys will have slow web sites. Think: me, bloggers, ordering Jimmy John’s online.

You might think, So what? That doesn’t matter to me. ISPs own the networks, they should be able to sell it however they want. Property rights! Capitalism! Free market! But consider this: if sites like YouTube, Google, Amazon and Netflix didn’t have the benefit of equal bandwidth in their early days, they might never ever have grown into the companies they are now. In fact, they probably wouldn’t exist at all. And if small websites are pushed out because the government passes affirmative legislation granting ISPs an ability to sell bandwidth at a premium, there would be some serious First Amendment, “chilling effect” issues.

Also, I’ve been told, but have not done the research myself, that out of the three main presidential candidates, Obama has the best platform points about net neutrality. He’s the only candidate with a technology plank at all.

The new Cellar Door is out. I’m loving this gem from the interview with Alice McDermott:

To me, fiction is always a separate thing. I couldn’t write actual things that happened even if I tried; I would change them … whatever is real has to be changed. It feels like it’s changed utterly, right down to the very nature of it because its purpose in the story is toward something that doesn’t exist in the real world.

Haven’t read the whole issue yet, but the story about the bomb threat and the judge by Jesse Wooten is a good read. So what are you waiting for? Pick it up, yo.

Care to explain?

Photo courtesy of The Sporting Blog. (As Washer used to say, “without permission but with much respect”).

Right now I have a basketball hangover the size of a tractor-trailer. The campus is in mourning. Most of us agree the best thing that can happen on Monday is for a small meteor to crash into the Alamodome. Even Adam Lucas had no wit or wisdom except to wallow in the misery of defeat for 1,100 words. There’s really not much to say. Kansas simply ran us out of the gym on Saturday night.

The end of basketball season was surreal. All year I never once doubted that we were going to win a national championship. Guess this is what arrogance gets you. I just can’t believe my last college basketball game as a student has passed. Next time I watch the Heels play, I’ll be an alumni. Aren’t those supposed to be the old folks we have to cajole into standing up and getting loud when Carolina needs a run in the Smith Center? It adds another concrete detail to the still abstract conception that graduation is little more than a month away.

mi5intelligensia: the end is near
mi5intelligensia: which means you should write some emo blog entry about it
mi5intelligensia: and tag me on facebook
mi5intelligensia: make it happen

On Monday April 14, 2008 I’m giving a reading along with four other senior honors fiction students in the Graham Memorial Lounge. It’s my first and in all likelihood last public reading of fiction I’ll ever do. As I write this, it’s 2 a.m., I have a massive pile of laundry sitting on my bed, 15 more pages of thesis that need writing, quadruple that many that need revision, a rough draft of a paper that’s due Tuesday, and two more papers due the following week. Under normal circumstances, I’d probably be freaking out right now. But this is my last semester. I already have a job. I know that win, lose or tie, it’s not going to make that much of a difference. Senioritis is the fun word for it. Perspective is probably closer to the truth. I feel like I’m in transition. I don’t feel like I’m fully a student anymore, even though I’m still in college, but I don’t feel fully “adult” either.

I’ve thought a lot about what it means to be an “adult” lately. Is it buying your own health insurance? Is it paying more than $20,000 per year in taxes? Is it having any clue how a 401(k) works? If it’s any of those things, then I guess I’m going to be an “adult” pretty soon, but something tells me none of that’s really true.

Why does this question about adulthood matter? It probably doesn’t. I spent two hours tonight playing with this Duncan yo-yo that my mom gave me at Easter. It took me a while, but I finally got the sucker to start sleeping, which is where it spins at the end of the string for a few seconds instead of coming back to your hand immediately. Once I got that working I starting doing all the tricks I learned in middle school like walk the dog and rock the cradle and around the world. It reminded me of childhood as something separate, not just as something that already took place. The point is, neither my mother nor my father would spend two hours playing with a yo-yo on a Sunday night. So the question remains. If I’m not an adult now, when do I become one?

I promise I did that plug for the senior reading for a reason, and I’m getting to it. Everything I’m writing feels like it’s building into this idea of “giving up on your dreams,” but I don’t know if that’s what or how I want to say things. That’s such a bomb to drop. Not to mention that it’s cliché as hell to say you’ve given up on your dreams. Add in the fact that I’m only 21 years old and it becomes downright maudlin.

But in a way, I feel like that’s what I’m doing.

Why do I write? It’s a question that gets re-animated every time I address it. Why ask why do I write? Why not just write? I write because it helps me discover things I can’t figure out any other way. I also write to escape. One of the things I’ve learned is that as full as the world is with naïve idiots who want to stop genocides in Africa by wearing t-shirts and achieve gender equality by having women stand on stage and talk about their vaginas, the world is equally full with malicious, evil, soul-sucking people who want nothing more than to step on you for personal gain. At the end of the day, the number of people who would make a genuine sacrifice to help you out is generally less than five. And if it’s even so much as one, you should consider yourself lucky.

None of this is even coherent. Four years of school and I can’t even write a two-page personal essay with a discernible story or argument. But that’s kind of what graduation is like, right? It’s like you’re just swimming in jello waiting for someone to tell you what to do next, when all of a sudden you realize nobody’s going to tell you what to do next.

And maybe I didn’t give up on my dreams. But I certainly did shelve them. The job I took has a no-blogging policy, so I cant say much except that the job has nothing to do with being a writer whatsoever.

Throughout most of college I’ve been heart-set on writing. One of the first things I did here was join the conservative magazine. I wanted to be a journalist and a novelist and a columnist and a blogger and basically everything that involved putting ideas onto paper. But I suffer from this nagging feeling that I’m just deluding myself. That I have nothing important to say. That I’m not a good journalist nor a good writer or anything. I feel like a hack. I’m not helping people, I’m not breaking down ideas and sharing metaphors for others to understand. No, I self-servingly write to escape. I’ve always been writing to escape. Because when you write fiction or scribble in a journal, you get to make up realities where it’s okay not to know how everything is going to turn out. Where the villains get to be hated. Where the heros are likeable. Where everything gets tied up nice and neat and there’s a theme and a message and everyone walks away happy. I write to escape because reality is harsh and most of the time sucks. It sucks especially because when you’re privileged, and you know your privileged, you’re not even allowed to feel bad about life sucking. Because you’re privileged. I feel like my whole life has been filled with one word: opportunity. I’ve been raised to believe, and immersed in an environment that supported the notion, that I could do or be anything I wanted to do or be. But I guess the vestige of child in me is still swimming in that jello. I just want someone to say, “you should do this,” and I don’t want to feel like I need to question whatever that someone says. I just want to follow it.

I’m the freest fucking person in the world, and I have no idea what I should do.

Here comes a brilliant move by the National Collegiate Athletic Association. They’ve decided to restrict blogging during NCAA basketball games to 5 times per half, once at halftime and twice per overtime period. Other sports receive restrictions, too. Last year at a Louisville-Oklahoma State baseball game, a reporter was kicked out of the press box for posting updates to his newspaper’s blog. Here’s the blog of the journalist who was removed, Brian Bennett, and here’s a copy of the NCAA’s restrictions regarding live-blogging: 2008 NCAA Blogging Policy.

At first, it seemed to me that this was a blatant First Amendment issue (prior restraint) as well as an improper copyright protection (the second circuit court found in NBA v. Motorola that game statistics are facts and therefore incapable of being protected under copyright law — only expressions fixed in a tangible medium can be granted copyright protection). However, if you look closer, as one of my professor’s friends pointed out to me in an email, the issue is more contract law than anything else. Stadiums that are owned and operated by universities are allowed to be regulated by those same universities because the courts don’t see stadiums as traditional or designated public forums. Public forums are like street corners and public parks, the places that get the most protection under Amendment One. In order for any reporter to get into the Dean Dome or anywhere else, they have to be credentialed and therefore be subject to rules like the blogging restriction. Aka, journalists enter a contract with the host institution/athletic association, same as anyone who goes to a game agrees to follow all the stadium’s rules implicitly when they purchase a ticket, such as not being able to take ANY signs into the Dean Dome whatsoever.

Okay so cool, it’s a contract law issue. What I wonder is this: If I turn on my TV and start blogging about any game that I watch, how does the University or the NCAA or anybody claim a right to regulate THAT speech? Facts can’t be copyrighted, and it seems to me that television streams the scores and plays of a game to me as FACTS, not expressions. Does me commenting that Carolina is playing really tight D, or that Quentin’s dunk on the last play was fantastic, really constitute a “rebroadcast,” which is part of the NCAA’s claim? I think not. I don’t think I can be held to this contract regulation or limited public forum restrictions when I’m watching basketball in my living room. Put simply, the NCAA needs to wake up and realize that new media such as blogs are here to stay and that they’d be much better served to integrate those technologies into the ways in which they deliver their product. But no, they’ve decided to go the authoritarian route and put a partial ban on a totally good thing. Kudos, NCAA.

My roommate Andrew forwarded this to me. It’s just a picture of our cars in our driveway here in Chapel Hill. In most contexts, I would agree that this is a boring picture and not at all worth sharing.  But when you consider the source, it’s a scary, scary prospect. For when Man created Google, he knew not what he did:

Where my privacy, yo?.

I guess Google drove around Chapel Hill and took pictures of everything?  Never underestimate the creepiness of a company whose slogan is “Don’t be evil.”  They might be watching us.  Right now.

I wish I could make this up. But I can’t:

Their sidewalk procession had already attracted the stares of passers-by who were startled by the sight of the body flopping from side to side as the two men tried to prop it up, the police said.

Full story here courtesy of NYTimes.com

Maybe not. Why Starbucks actually helps mom and pop coffeehouses from Slate.com:

… instead of panicking, he decided to call his friend Jim Stewart, founder of the Seattle’s Best Coffee chain, to find out what really happens when a Starbucks opens nearby. “You’re going to love it,” Stewart reported. “They’ll do all of your marketing for you, and your sales will soar.” The prediction came true: Each new Starbucks store created a local buzz, drawing new converts to the latte-drinking fold. When the lines at Starbucks grew beyond the point of reason, these converts started venturing out—and, Look! There was another coffeehouse right next-door! Hyman’s new neighbor boosted his sales so much that he decided to turn the tactic around and start targeting Starbucks. “We bought a Chinese restaurant right next to one of their stores and converted it, and by God, it was doing $1 million a year right away,” he said.

Full article here.

From The Brookings Institution:

But neither the justices nor the public should take quite at face value the insistence, however passionately and eloquently argued, that large numbers of innocents populate Guantanamo. To focus just on the 37 before the court this week, most Americans would not use the word “innocent” to describe Bashir Nasir Al Marwalah, who told a review panel at Guantanamo that he had traveled from his home in Yemen to Afghanistan to train at an Al Qaeda camp in 2000, returned in the summer of 2001 for more specialized training as a sniper, and served the Taliban on the back lines. Asked “Are you a member of al Qaeda?” he responded: “I don’t know. I know I am an Arab fighter.”

Full article here.