Just remember your password

PROVIDENCE, Rhode Island (AP) – Two weeks after Joshua Lipton was charged in a drunken driving crash that seriously injured a woman, the 20-year-old college junior attended a Halloween party dressed as a prisoner. Pictures from the party showed him in a black-and-white striped shirt and an orange jumpsuit labeled “Jail Bird.”

… [The prosecution] used the pictures to paint Lipton as an unrepentant partier who lived it up while his victim recovered in the hospital. A judge agreed, calling the pictures depraved when sentencing Lipton to two years in prison.

.

…

In the early days of the internet, back when I was in highschool, my mother warned me over and over again about the dangers of posting personal information – especially pictures! - on the internet. Address/phone number/real name/town/highschool … those can all lead back to you, the real you, not the miZH0tR0d who’s trying to make waves in cyberspace. Compromising statements can hurt your job prospects. Pictures of you doing illegal or really stupid (read: fun) things can land you in jail. Naked pictures – well, they’re embarassing, and they’re blackmail material in the wrong hands …

So I’m glad I paid attention.

I did talk to a few stalkers, of course (what teenager doesn’t?) – but I kept my cool, and I kept my identity to myself, and somehow – I still have no idea how – I made it through puberty and the simultaneous rise of The Internets, relatively unscathed. Although, yes, somewhere out there, there are IRC records of me successfully – geekily – finding pictures of people, starting with their IP address. And even worse, someone, somewhere, must have a record of me signing on under a fake name and hitting on my then-boyfriend, to see if he’d bite.

.

.

So no, don’t bother googling me; there’s no point. There’s just nothing that exciting about me on The Internets (yet).

But here’s the thing: If I hang with a crowd of my techno/sexo/psycho-logically emancipated peers, surely, someone in the crowd has posted naked pictures somewhere. Surely, somewhere, everyone I know is on record having a one-night-stand with the ugly guy/girl from Physics, trying the gallon-in-an-hour challenge, doing drugs, posting inflammatory messages to online communities, admitting an infatuation with Paris Hilton, waking up still drunk, face down in a gutter …. you name it. None of us is perfect. Everyone does stupid things – I’d even argue that doing stupid things – on purpose! – is the best way to discover yourself, even (sometimes) the best way to learn how to make good decisions. The most interesting people are those who’ve lived interesting lives.

So everyone’s done it.

And some of us have done it on the record.

.

But here’s the thing; sure, there are a few nutjobs out there systematically gathering images for their private ‘collections.’ We call them stalkers, and we prosecute. There are a lot more normal people who’ll enjoy your images without ever trying to put names to faces; they’re not interested in backstory, as it were. Unless you become really, really famous (Paris Hilton, again), none of those images will ever matter, no matter who sees them.

This is not true of the ‘official’ images, the ones you posted on facebook, that you posted on your blog, the ones on your myspace page, the ones someone tagged of you on Facebook. Those are the ones you really have to worry about.

They’re searchable.

They’re easily linked to you (no deniability).

They’re clearly your fault – you put them there, or you were an idiot around people stupid enough to do so, and you didn’t de-tag yourself/remove them/speak sternly to your friends.

So let’s face it: being able to take images down is as important – if not more important! – than whether or not you took ‘em, or posted ‘em in the first place . . .

.

So:

–> KNOW what information about you is out there

–> Don’t give info out, don’t get your picture taken doing stupid things – if you can help it.

–> And finally, above all, Remember Your Password.
You can always take everything down later, but not if you can’t access the site.

.

.

And no, the boyfriend didn’t hit on my characters back, not once – though I now suspect it was my transparency, and his overinterest in video games that did it, rather than any particular loyalty on his part …

“the side of Iran visitors rarely see”

A little vid from CNN about “the side of Iran visitors rarely see”

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/21134540/vp/20754821#20754821

I’ll post it in videos too.

The author effuses about nonmarried couples holding hands, in public (!!!!) and about a woman showing her own horse – at a high-class country club. If you go up in the mountains, he says, the police don’t go up (to the resorts and Very Nice Looking towns) very often. People are freer.

Oh, and there was the obligatory shot of an Iranian saying “I won’t talk about US politics, but the people are very very nice… We want better relations with the US…”

I don’t like feeling so cynical about the whole thing, but this vid really bothers me. The assumptions are manifold, and obnoxious;

• U.S. values are ‘better’ than Iranian ones.
• Breaking Iranian values (or relaxed restrictions of said values) means it’s a better, ‘freer’ society. (the assumption is that approaching U.S. values is a good thing and that this is all representative of a pro-U.S. shift in greater Iranian culture..)
• The privileges of the upper class as demonstrated here (anyone who collects cars like that is upper class) are reflective of hidden – yet existent! – Iranian freedoms that are simply invisible to the U.S.

In any society, there exists an upper class. It will have more privileges than the lower class. (That’s easily as true in the U.S. as anywhere else in the world.)

The freedoms of the upper class often have little to do with anything going on in the rest of the country.

Maybe this video truly is representative. I just have a hard time buying it, somehow …

What is Antonio Banderas doing in Argentina?

… and why is he meeting with (the new) President Fernandez?

In this picture released by Argentina’s Presidency, President Cristina Fernandez, right, shakes hands with Spain’s actor Antonio Banderas, center, as he introduces his wife US actress Melanie Griffith at the presidential palace in Buenos Aires, Thursday, Dec. 13, 2007.

(AP Photo/Argentina Presidency)

http://news.yahoo.com/nphotos/Antonio-Banderas/ss/events/en/121407banderas#/071214/481/d550da21993547ceac9415e2798a6e86

The author has gone to Chicago …

… and will return Sunday evening. Provided the plane gets off the ground this afternoon! It’s snowing like crazy here…

(cell phone pix…)

Istanbul

Soooo… I thought I’d post Istanbul pictures. (If you’re not sure where Istanbul is, go here to find out…)

So this is Sultanahmet, the old city. I loved the cobblestone streets. The hotel was about three blocks from here.

Down the street a little (to the right of picture 1; if you keep going down the sidewalk, you come to the Hagia Sophia and the Blue Mosque..):

David took this picture, and I really really like it; this is the Blue Mosque, seen through the trees on a cloudy day …

The Blue Mosque, from just inside the courtyard:

Wiki notes that the Sultan Ahmed Mosque (named after said Sultan, and a.k.a. the Blue Mosque) was built between 1609 and 1616, and that it stands as the “culmination of two centuries of Ottoman mosque development. It is,” (we are also told), “the last great mosque of the classical period.” There’s more links, if you care to go on :)

This shot (the Hagia Sophia behind us, Blue Mosque in front) really contains a great deal of Sultanahmet (the old city) as it stands today …

Hagia Sophia in the rain. I love doorways, windows, rainy days …

Beautiful, no?

shadowplay

Doing research on modern terrorism (under Soviet war in Afghanistan), I came across this photo in Wikipedia:

Soviet soldier in Afghanistan, 1988. Photo by Mikhail Evstafiev

Found myself thinking about light and shadow, about all the contrasts inherent in war. Soldiers giving peace signs to small children. A baby-faced 19-year-old screaming for his mother and trying to hold one arm on with the other. Silence before a mine explodes or a bomb strikes. Smiles on politicians’ faces as they proclaim victories we may never achieve.

A thousand shades of gray:

The study of policy is confusing, enlightening, embittering. Sometimes I get so far above the fray, into the theory, that I have a hard time coming back down to earth. There are so many ways to look at everything, it’s easy to get lost in ideology, or in points of view – as much value as each has, the older I get, the more I feel you have to see all the angles before you have any idea what something looks like …

The Vietnam War, for example:

• A “proxy” war - a way for the great powers/ideologies (USSR/Communism vs. US/Democracy)
• A rebellion/freedom struggle – the Vietnamese had been struggling to repel foreign invaders since the late 1800’s – the French, the Japanese, then us Estadonidenses…
• A massive terrorist action -I’m not saying this in an incendiary way, just as a way to look at it. Here’s a definition of modern terrorism:
  • “Terrorism is the capricious and illegal application of politically-motivated force or violence by a clandestine individual, small groups or cells claiming to represent larger bodies or communities, independent of the accepted conventions of the rule of law and international conflict.” (It’s from an article on the birth of modern terrorism, but I left the essay at work; I’ll drop the title in here on MondaySo “Terrorism” comes from the French, from the governmental massacre of dissidents, called “terrorisme.” (Now that I think of it, you might liken that ‘terrorisme’ to the killings by the Argentine Junta in the 70’s and 80’s … In any case, before modern terrorism, there was state terrorism, which basically involved killing a lot of innocents to frighten or intimidate the guilty (or the dissenters) and/or to get the citizenry to rise up against the guilty (as denoted by the state) in order to make the killings stop. This, of course, generally works best when the government is considered so strong as to seem unstoppable …) So: politically-motivated violence against the citizenry; that might fit the definition, eh?
• A ‘just’ war - this one’s easy. All U.S. wars are ‘just’ wars, wars considered ‘justified’ by the general public when initiated. In Afghanistan, we were chasing terrorists. In Iraq, WMD’s.
  • Please to note that this is not a normative statement. Term usage, not judgement made.
• A war to maintain U.S. internal stability – I don’t know enough about the Vietnam war to say for sure, but one could easily argue that this war, the Iraq war, came to exist, initially, due to a combination of factors including one president’s wish to remain in office, a U.S. economy that is largely a war economy (we need an excuse to power through on economic stupidity as we do)… anyone know it was the same w/the Vietnam War?

… and now i’m into the present …

• To give the army practice/To flex our muscles for the rest of the world/to say, “don’t step on me”/to gain a foothold in the Middle East
• To boost our national self-esteem/see if anyone wants to knock the chip off our shoulder …
• To divide the world into ‘us’ and ‘them’…/to show how bad ‘they’ were/to defeat evil in our time
  
• A war for religious freedom
• A war over resources
• A war to maintain control
  
• A war against religious intolerance
• A clash of ideologies/cultures/languages/traditions
• YourPointOfViewHere

Annnnd the bad guys and the good guys switch sides, depending on your starting point, your angle of view.

Shadowboxing.

My first new car

… will look like this:

This is from BusinessWeek, an article/slide show titled “Auto design students imagine the hybrid vehicle of the future in a sponsored student class“

… ok, so the title isn’t much, but the cars are cool! Check this one out:

I was struck as much by the similarities of the cars (tinted windows, bulbous shape, etc) as by their differences. I really like the first (love the doors, see the descriptions) and the second is really interesting. This one is a bit harder for me to wrap my head around, but I like it all the same :)

And the wheels on this baby!

In any case, I suspect the similiarities in the cars are what’s here to stay; the orange, perhaps not. I’d drive one, though, just to watch people’s faces … I bet I can plug my ipod into all of ‘em too. Or perhaps they have a downloading flash memory?

These are by post-graduate students at the Istituto Europeo di Design of Turin (IED), who

…teamed up with Toyota to create “Prius of 2010-2015″, the third year project of 26 students in the post-graduate Transportation Design Course. Led by Fulvio Fantolino, IED’s Transportation Design Course Coordinator with Elvio D’Aprile, Assistant Chief Designer at Toyota Europe Design Development, and Tateo Uchida, General Director Research and Project Forum, the students’ task was to come up with concepts that, in addition to emphasizing technological excellence, could stress the emotional—an essential characteristic in the European and world market. In all, ten projects were created and submitted to Toyota as the students’ final thesis projects, showcasing a variety of different proposals for future ecological hybrid vehicles.

… I miss Buenos Aires!!!! ….

From Fodor’s

Spring in Buenos Aires is a Culture Vulture’s Delight

Buenos Aires’ non-stop artistic calendar keeps the city’s culture vultures busy and content, and now that spring has arrived in the southern hemisphere, the city is absolutely teeming with cultural offerings for visitors and locals alike.

The city is celebrating Art Week this week with an array of activities, culminating on Saturday, October 6 with the extraordinary La Noche de los Museos, when more than 100 public and private galleries and museums open their doors to the public for a free night of museum madness. Porteños love the nightlife, so expect the museums to be jam-packed until the wee hours; more than 300,000 people participated last year, and more are expected this year. The party will end with a midnight concert headlined by Grammy-nominated Argentine/Alaskan musician Kevin Johansen + The Nada.

Buenos Aires’ premiere design fair opened its doors last week and will run through November 25. Casa FOA gives top Argentine and international decorators, architects and interior designers a place to show off their latest creations and spaces. This year, the exhibition is taking place in a former train station in the hip Palermo neighborhood.

Renowned Argentine silversmith Marcelo Toledo has created a jewelry exhibition inspired entirely by Argentina’s legendary former first lady, Eva Peron. The Evita: Figure, Woman, Myth collection of broaches, earrings, necklaces and more will be on display until the end of October at the Evita Museum in Palermo. The collection will tour the United States and Europe next year.

For documentary film buffs, the 9th Annual National Video and Film Documentary Festival will take place from October 6-13. Dozens of Argentine and Latin American documentaries will make their world premiere at the festival, with screenings throughout the week in the neighborhood of San Telmo.

For a one-of-a-kind experience, be sure to visit the first-ever exhibition of Argentine Arte Villero (Shantytown Art) at the Boquitas Pintadas pop-hotel from October 26 to November 24. The show will feature paintings, sculptures, music and videos imagined by young artists from the scores of shantytowns, known as villas, that line the urban belt of Buenos Aires. It’s sure to be an eye-opening experience for all.

—Brian Byrnes

frillery

This has nothing to do with policy, or anything like it

I spend most of my time in easy-to-read-in clothing, and I’d just love to have a more glamorous life :) One of these days, I’m definitely going to get into evening gowns.

In the meantime, this is a lovely hat:

This is my favorite of the collection,

and i just can’t get over the lines on this:

…. a model being personable:

I need a pair (or three, or six!) of these

.. ok, a little policy -can’t escape it!! World (fashion) view of the U.S., anyone?

… maybe it’s a statement about oil and wars?

and:

… very Aubrey Hepburn found rooting in a Hong Kong secondhand store. In the rain….

It seems everyone’s going pseudo-Middle East, though (this is a French designer):

He also came out with an all-new version of Peter Pan!!

This was lovely:

as was this; too bad Valentino is retiring…

And finally, a little something to wear to the movies:

Technical Help

Dear friends, family, and everpatient blog readers. I’ve been Very Very Busy.

Unfortunately, the more fun things i do, the less I tend to blog, and vice versa. This seems to have the (unhelpful) effect effect of rendering my bloggish moments fairly dull…. ;)

In any case. For those of you using gmail, here’s a Very Easy Way To View My Most Recent Posts (it will notify you and provide a link):

1. Click on “Settings” (top right of the screen)
2. Go to the “Web Clips” tab (far right)
3. In the “Search by topic or URL” box (leftish), enter the following URL: http://www.lningram.wordpress.com/feed
4. Hit “Search”
5. You should get one result, that looks like this: Al Fin del Mundo http://www.lningram.wordpress.com/feed
6. Click “Add”
7. Now when you check your google, if i’ve got a new post, it should show up. I’d recommend then going to “My Clips” and deleting anything you’re not interested in.
8. This should also work if you’re using other emails that have an RSS feed, but i’m not sure how. Look in your “help” section, or send me email and i’ll look into it :)

Let me know how it goes!