Empowering your neighbors (to censor what you read)

As most people know, I'm not one to get my dander up much. I know that the world is full of ridiculous people doing ridiculous things. The whole New Mexico High School censorship deal is a bit disturbing, but the ruckus and attention is healthy, the project will be a learning experience and, surprise, the idiots who tried to shut down the poetry class will learn a few things about the real value of freedom of speech-- and the kids might learn a few details about the power of the pursestring.

On the other hand, I do worry about things like this: a new bill that would empower anyone offended by material "harmful to minors" to sue in federal court and seek compensentory damages of up to $100,000. James Dobson's "Focus on the Family" says this will "turn parents into prosecuting attorneys fighting a wave of obscenity."

As some of you know, I read romance novels now and then, to see where that market is heading and how I can appeal to its readership in my SF. A lot of romance novels are signficantly sexually explicit, and those books are on the shelves at Target and K-Mart. A work is "harmful to minors" if it:

(A) depicts, describes, or represents, in a manner patently offensive with respect to minors, an actual or simulated sexual act or sexual contact, an actual or simulated normal or perverted sexual act, or a lewd exhibition of the genitals or post-pubescent female breast; and (B) a reasonable person would find, taken as a whole, lacks serious literary, artistic, political, and scientific value for minors sufficient to overcome the pernicious effect of that material.

Even if the lawsuit fails, it's an expense and a waste of time for the retailer. Prosecuting obscenity is what prosecutors should be doing; empowering ordinary citizens to do what the government is supposed to be doing, and then deploying the force of the goverment behind those ordinary citizens, ought to scare the pants off anyone.

Military Liasons

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Military Liason. A lot of people have been hearing this term a lot in relation to the New Mexico story and wondering what it means. It means the same thing it's meant since WW2: an officer at the local recruiting office whose job it is to go to all of the high schools and liase with the school there, looking for recruits. It's not new, you had one (or at least your school district did) when you went to school, if you were in the U.S.

Of what you should be aware is the new powers military liasons acquired in the past four years. Ever since the Vietnam war, some schools have balked at allowing recruitment and JROTC projects on their campuses, and some school districts have had policies restricting the activities of military liasons on school property.

The No Child Left Behind act changed all that. As Donald Rumsfeld himself wrote in a letter to every school administrator in the U.S., "Congress passed legislation that requires high schools to provide military recruiters access to secondary school students and directory information on those students. Military recruiters are entitled to receive the name, address, and telephone listing of juniors and seniors in high schools."

If you do not want military recruiters sniffing around your kids, there is a simple way to do it. The ACLU has some sample opt-out forms that allow you to invoke Family Educational Rights & Privacy Act and keep your kids records out of the hands of recruiters.

Desirae's Anniversary Party

Gods but I'm exhausted today. I knew I shouldn't have stayed out until midnight; my bedtime is 10 sharp and dammit if I miss it by two hours it doesn't matter if I get two hours more the next day I'm still lagged terribly.

Still, it was worth it. We took Desirae, who's husband is stuck in Iraq, out to have drinks and dinner... mmm... steak. Had a wonderful conversation where part of it involved figuring out what deep secrets the well-heeled visitors to the Met Grill kept hidden deep inside. "Pee fantasies," I said, pointing to one man with a very pinched face. "Black SS uniforms," I said, indicating another. And then the young lady in the booth to my right. "When I turned 18, Daddy bought me a new nose."

Then we went to the 'Spot, where it was Grind night. I surprised myself by getting out onto the floor, listening to very dark goth backbeat Rammsteinesque versions of Britney Spears and Taty, and enjoyed myself very much. Omaha, in contrast, didn't do so well; whatever it was she ate, it was so rich and high in dairy fat that she quickly grew queasy and had to sit down. We left early; we'd hoped to be out another hour or so.

But I had a lovely time. Quite a number of friends were there, as were a number of other people who I haven't seen in quite some time. There was quite a bit of eye-candy. I have to admit that I like watching a woman with well-chosen piece of lingere better than than watching a woman with large breasts allowing them to freely fwap about.

Omaha and I went out, collected Kouryou-chan from some wonderful friends who'd agreed to oversee her for the evening, and then headed home. Within ten minutes we'd fed the cat and gone to bed.

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On the advice of fallenpegasus, who seemed to have amazing luck with OK Cupid, I decided to try it. I'd been there before, so I tried to log in. The password didn't work. So I tried "lost password," which came back with the response that there was nobody with my email address in the database. So I tried to make a new user: "That email address is already in our database."

Arrrrgh!

Play albums in random order using XMMS

I have no idea if this is at all useful to anyone but me, but I ginned this up on the bus the other day and figured I ought to put it somewhere where others (and Google) can find it.

I keep my MP3 collection sorted by album, usually in the format:

Artist's Name - Album Name

And the interior of the folder sorted with a prefix indicating the track number. So, my goal was to generate an MPU file (suitable for XMMS and, I understand, WinAmp, although I haven't tested that) which would be random by album but sorted internally.

This script does that. You pass in the path to your MP3 collection (it understands Ogg files as well) and it spits out (on standard output) the MPU. It also sends to stderr a list of empty directories it encounters. This was written out of necessity, but learning how to use os.path.walk was extremely worth my time, given as my professional life is all about the quantitative display of filesystem status and process information.

The program is written in python, so it will run on Win32 and Mac OS X boxen with python installed. However, it might need a later version of python, perhaps 2.1 and up, for the error reporting to work.

One other thing: if you have a directory named "Miscellaneous" (capitalization is important in Mac and Un*x, might not work in Win32), the contents will be further randomized rather than sorted.

( Source code under the cut )