0903 United Airlines flight 175 strikes the World Trade Center South building.

0846 American Airlines flight 11
strikes the World Trade Center North building.

My name is Jeff Hess and I’m a biblioholic. I own hundreds of books. Not valuable books, mostly Science Fiction paperbacks and text books, tomes rescued by the bag from library book sales. A few years ago, in the interest of not burying myself, I began reading more books from the library and taking notes. My electronic chapbook was born.

This is a passage I copied from Reading Lolita In Tehran by Azar Nafisi.

Don”t go chasing after the grand theme, the idea, I told my students, as if it is separate from the story itself. The idea or ideas behind the story must come you through the experience of the novel and not as something tacked on to it. p. 109

My Soundtrack: Midlife Crisis by Faith No More on WOXY.

My name is Jeff Hess and I’m a biblioholic. I own hundreds of books. Not valuable books, mostly Science Fiction paperbacks and text books, tomes rescued by the bag from library book sales. A few years ago, in the interest of not burying myself, I began reading more books from the library and taking notes. My electronic chapbook was born.

This is a passage I copied from Reading Lolita In Tehran by Azar Nafisi.

…the one thing these authors all had in common was their subversiveness. … I explained that most great works of the imagination were meant to make you feel like a stranger in your own home. p. 94

My Soundtrack: Novel by Tim Williams on WOXY.

…the image above was the one that greeted my regular Have Coffee Will Write readers. At first my reaction was that I had been targeted for my number of pro-Israel posts in July and August discussing America’s reactions to the Hezbollah kidnapping of Israeli soldiers and its deliberate rocket attacks on civilians in Northern Israel.

Over the next few days I learned that this was most likely not the case. HCWW was only one of more than 3,000 websites hosted on the my ISP’s server. I personally think the attack was associated with Hezbollah only by the twisted humor of the adolescent-minded sea slug sucking waste of human genome that put the attack together.

I think it most likely that these little boys playing at being boogie men thought that by plastering a few images from the recent fighitng on their childish hack they could puff up their own pitiful images.

The use of the skull and crossbones — a Western image — and other clues (see additional screen shots) in the hack lead me to this conclusion.

But I think that five years after 11 September 2001, this minor incovenience is instructive for those of us who spend way too much time on the Internet. If bored little boys can do this much damage, imagine what a dedicated, American-educated programmers might do if set to the task.

Mulitply the monetary loss of being down for five days across not one server but thousands of servers.

The hacker rule has always been: what can be programmed can be deprogrammed. No code, no firewall is ever 100 percent secure.

What this illusrates is the futility of building fences. The silliness of security checks. If this had been a real attack by Islamists, the consequences would have been more serious.

Building the wall higher is not the answer. Rather, we must seek ways to make the wall unnecessary.

My Soundtrack: We’ve Got The Books! by The Whole Fantastic World on WOXY.

Part of being a good citizen of the blogosphere is visiting, reading and, most importantly, taking the time to leave a comment on other’s blogs. It’s all about the conversation. In the interest of setting an example I’ve decided to link to those blog posts that have compelled me to leave a comment.

1147 I Thought That Was What The Editorial Page Was For

1208 Ban on gay rabbis in Conservative congregations likely to be lifted

My Soundtrack: Wild Wood by Paul Weller on WOXY.

My name is Jeff Hess and I’m a biblioholic. I own hundreds of books. Not valuable books, mostly Science Fiction paperbacks and text books, tomes rescued by the bag from library book sales. A few years ago, in the interest of not burying myself, I began reading more books from the library and taking notes. My electronic chapbook was born.

This is a passage I copied from Reading Lolita In Tehran by Azar Nafisi.

Then I found myself beating my fists against a tree and crying, crying, as if the person closest to me had died and I was now all alone in the whole wide world. p. 91

My Soundtrack: SONG by GROUP on WOXY.

Today is my dad’s 77th birthday (one week before my own 51st) and my parents are leaving today on a 17-day trip of western national parks. Before they take off, my dad sent me this and asked: is this profiling? A man goes into an adult book and novelty store and asks the clerk behind the counter for an inflatable doll.

The clerk sets down his racing form and asks the customer: Male or female?

The customer responds: Male.

The clerk then asks: Black or white?

The customer says: White.

Not finished yet, the clerk asks: Christian or muslim?

This question takes the customer aback and he asks: What the hell does religion have to do with it?

The clerk taps his cigar on an ash tray: The Muslim one blows itself up.

My name is Jeff Hess and I’m a biblioholic. I own hundreds of books. Not valuable books, mostly Science Fiction paperbacks and text books, tomes rescued by the bag from library book sales. A few years ago, in the interest of not burying myself, I began reading more books from the library and taking notes. My electronic chapbook was born.

This is a passage I copied from Reading Lolita In Tehran by Azar Nafisi.

Then I found myself beating my fists against a tree and crying, crying, as if the person closest to me had died and I was now all alone in the whole wide world. p. 91

My Soundtrack: The Freest Man by Tilly And The Wall on WOXY.

This is the question that one of my co-bloggers at The Writing On The Wal has posed at the Booman Tribune. After observing the way things are done here in Cleveland, and more broadly Cuyahoga County, I know the question is far to simplistic, but for whatever reasons, others are paying attention to us. What would you say to Robert?

Ken Blackwell is floating like a river rock, stinging like a slug. Yet, uninformed reporters are swallowing his pap and spewing it back on the paper as if it was delivered from up on high. Which is why it’s great that we have bloggers like Bill Callahan willing to step up and tell us to stop for a dab nab minute.

In this case it’s Blackwell’s lame attempts to distance himself from the Tom Noe scandal by playing as if it was from before his time. Bill set’s him straight.

In a widely printed story about the Strickland/Blackwell debate in Youngstown yesterday, the Associated Press says:

Strickland, meanwhile, tried to link Blackwell to the government corruption scandal that overtook the state beginning in April 2005.

…Strickland said Republicans had levied a “corruption tax” on the state, which he defined as “the pay-to-play system that has been presided over by Bob Taft and Ken Blackwell and others that has wasted multiple millions of Ohio dollars.”

Blackwell received $3,000 in campaign contributions from the Toledo-area coin dealer, Tom Noe, at the heart of his scandal.

Like many Republicans, Blackwell returned the money.

But having first been elected secretary of state in 1998, Blackwell had the least responsibility of any statewide elected official for overseeing investments made by the Bureau of Workers” Compensation. [emphasis added]

This line bookends nicely with Blackwell”s recent claim to the Columbus Dispatch that Strickland “probably has more ties to the scandals at BWC than Tom Noe”.

But the AP story leaves out what may be a highly relevant fact: Before Blackwell took office as Secretary of State in 1999, he was State Treasurer.

As Bill goes on to show, it was during Blackwell’s term as treasurer that the Tom Noe scandal began. Blackwell can try to run away from his record, but he has to deal with dozens of savvy bloggers now, not just a handful of lazy reporters.

My Soundtrack: Take, Take, Take by The White Stripes on WOXY.

Pro Wal Mart blogger Perry Eidelbus thinks it is wrong to hinder Wal-Mart”s ability to offer goods on its own terms. Well, the Wall Street Journal yesterday offered the perfect object lesson why Wally World is a special case and why Perry is wrong on this point. It has to do with a certain principle of economics called monopsony.

From Ezra Klein:

Over the past couple of weeks, I’ve talked about Wal-Mart’s near-monopsony powers, and why the perfectly rational and understandable decisions of the company may not, in fact, be in the wider interests of the country. Today, in The Wall Street Journal, there’s a concrete example of they use the powers:

Recently, for example, the major studios opened negotiations to provide movies to be played on Apple Computer Inc.’s video iPod — an important step toward Hollywood’s digital future. Then Wal-Mart, the biggest seller of DVDs, disrupted the talks when it delivered a pointed warning to the studios not to give Apple a better deal for digital movies than the retailer gets for physical copies.

That, of course, is ridiculous. A physical digital video disc must be produced, printed, labeled, packaged, shipped, affixed with bar codes and pricing information, and shrink-wrapped before being sold. This must be done for every single copy. To demand that a download of the actual data — which requires none of the production, packaging, or delivery costs — should be priced similarly is nuts.

See how Wal Mart reacts when someone figures out a way to undersell its cheap plastic crap?

Hat tip to Jonathan.

My Soundtrack: Mayor Of Simpleton by XTC on WOXY.

This was the post I was working on at 0700 last Saturday when hackers sea lug waste of human genome tried to pull the plug on Have Coffee Will Write. I’ve been a daily listener and promoter of WOXY since Adam Harvey turned me onto it on 24 June 2005. The first WOXY song I heard was Bottle Rocket by The Go Team.

From the crew at WOXY:

This sucks.

This is the moment all of us hoped would never come. After plugging away at this for the past two years, it”s become pretty clear that operating woxy.com as a stand-alone Internet “radio station” is not going to cut it.

Our operating costs are higher than you might think, and the revenue we were able to generate from advertising isn”t close to supporting what we”re doing. Even membership revenue wasn”t enough to get us there. When your business doesn”t make money, you eventually go out of business.

[Snip]

Barring something exceptional happening in the next two weeks, we will silence our broadcasts on Friday, September 15th.

Sometimes no matter how hard you try and how special the thing you do, it simply isn”t enough to beat the odds. It”s the cold reality of business that not even we could escape. When September 15th comes, we”ll meet it proudly with heads held high and celebrate the past two years of woxy.com and the spirit of 97X. For those lucky enough to have been part of it, The Future of Rock and Roll will forever be in our minds and hearts.

So enjoy these last two weeks with us. Shall we rock?

Eternally yours,

Bryan Jay, Mike Shiv and Barb

If this isn’t a sad enough moment for you, take a look at the original of the music video that began it all with MTV on 1 August 1981, more than 25 years, half my life, ago

My Soundtrack: Flyswatter by Eels on WOXY.

My name is Jeff Hess and I’m a biblioholic. I own hundreds of books. Not valuable books, mostly Science Fiction paperbacks and text books, tomes rescued by the bag from library book sales. A few years ago, in the interest of not burying myself, I began reading more books from the library and taking notes. My electronic chapbook was born.

This is a passage I copied from Reading Lolita In Tehran by Azar Nafisi.

Later when I saw a slogan by Khomeini saying that the Islamic Republic survives through its mourning ceremonies, I could testify to its truth. p. 90

My Soundtrack: Former Hero by Heikki on WOXY.

Hello? tap… tap… Is this thing on? Test, one two scree Yeow! cough. After 88 hours and 32 minutes down a feckin’ hole dug by a crew of what can only be described as a sea slug sucking waste of human genome, Have Coffee Will Write is back. I’ll blog more about the details, complete with screen shots, in the next couple of days.

I want to thank everyone for their well wishes and for keeping each other informed (thank you Molly and Jill). George Nemeth deserves a singular mention for his allowing me to borrow Brewed Fresh Daily for posting updates. A very special thank you goes to my Web Sorceress who did all the work behind the scenes and who is still laboring mightily to tweak the little fiddly bits. I can’t recommend her enough.

I’m going to be back filling posts so that I can keep this one on top for a bit. Feel free to check for new posts between this one and the, now, infamous Sabbath, Bloody Sabbath post.

B’shalom, Y’all

My Soundtrack: Svefn-G-Englar by Sigur Ros on WOXY.

It’s been a busy week in Wally World: the universe’s source of cheap plastic crap. On The Writing On The Wal — the blog USA Today says should be on its readers’ radar — Jonathan Rees, Robert Feinman and I continue our work dedicated to drawing back the curtain on the Bentonvile Behemoth’s corporate disinformation and other flackery.

“I KNOW THEY”RE PREDATORS… I WANT THEM…” Youngstown, Ohio is the poster child for industrial death in Ohio and the heart of convicted felon and former Democratic Congressional representative Jim Traficant”s district. It”s not an inviting part of the state right now. Keep reading…

THE LITTLE RED BOOK… REMAINDERED…? As further evidence of the changing political and economic environment in Communist China, the New York Times this morning has a piece about how Chairman Mao is beginning to disappear from school books in Shanghai. Keep reading…

AT THE WALLY PLEX… There are sound stages on Hollywood”s back lots smaller than Bentonvile”s behemoths, so it”s no surprise that budding video talent has been sneaking cameras in at odd hours. And now for the midnight show at the Wally Plex featuring Belovedhatred. Keep reading…

OUR WORKING POOR… Sometimes not owning a TV is a bad thing. This past week I missed the POV report Waging A Living on PBS last Tuesday and it is a show I would have watched. PBS ought to archive and post shows like the for streaming. Keep reading…

THE REST OF THE STORY…
I”m a firm believer that reasonable people can engage in reasonable discussions. That view might seen polyanish to some, but it”s too easy to assume anyone who disagrees with you is an idiot. And it isnt” very helpful in the long run. Keep reading…

BILL CALLAHAN ON LABOR DAY… Bill Callahan is a founding blogger of the No Cleveland Walmart blog (the precurser to The Writing On The Wal) and a well respected voice on matters of community development, energy and labor issues. What follows is part of his Labor Day post: Keep reading…

LOOKING FOR SMALL-MART…
I”ve been a fan of Tom Peters since 1982 when I first read In Search of Excellence. A little more than a year ago founding blogger George Nemeth linked to Peters Wallop Wal Mart Sixteen. Then Peters” said beating the giants was a lark. And it can still be. Keep reading…

My Soundtrack: Since We Last Spoke by RJD2 on WOXY.

My name is Jeff Hess and I’m a biblioholic. I own hundreds of books. Not valuable books, mostly Science Fiction paperbacks and text books, tomes rescued by the bag from library book sales. A few years ago, in the interest of not burying myself, I began reading more books from the library and taking notes. My electronic chapbook was born.

This is a passage I copied from Reading Lolita In Tehran by Azar Nafisi.

The only way to leave the circle, to stop dancing with the jailer, is to find a way to preserve one”s individuality, that unique quality which evades description, but differentiates one human being from the other. That”s why in their world, rituals — empty rituals — become so central. p. 77

My Soundtrack: The Clock by Thom Yorke on WOXY.

From Wiley Miller

My name is Jeff Hess and I’m a biblioholic. I own hundreds of books. Not valuable books, mostly Science Fiction paperbacks and text books, tomes rescued by the bag from library book sales. A few years ago, in the interest of not burying myself, I began reading more books from the library and taking notes. My electronic chapbook was born.

This is a passage I copied from Reading Lolita In Tehran by Azar Nafisi.

Nabokov describes a similar link to another world, a puddle that appears to Krug, his fictional hero [in Bend Sinister], at various points in his novel: “a rent in his world leading to another world of tenderness, brightness and beauty.” p. 56

My Soundtrack: Lamb by Cedars on WOXY.