greg.org

It takes the village paper, the Guardian, to report this story from Urbana, IL:
“The mother who convinced everyone her child had leukemia”

Terri [Mom] fed Hannah [seven-year old daughter] sleeping pills, then took her on long, aimless drives among the strip-malls and cornfields of Ohio until she fell asleep. Afterwards, she would tell her they had been to the hospital, and that she had slept through her treatment again…
Within weeks, [the head of the Mother’s Club at Hannah’s school] had the pupils holding cookie sales and donating the aluminium ring-pulls from fizzy drink cans, which they sold for recycling. “They even had a Hannah Hat Day,” the Urbana Daily Citizen newspaper noted in a report last June, under the headline Community Reaches Out To Little Girl. “Everyone wore a hat, because Milbrandt must wear a hat since she had the chemotherapy and lost her hair.”

Josh Newman and Colin Spoelman, the budding moguls at Cyan Pictures should be celebrating, if they weren’t working so much. Their short film, Coming Down the Mountain, has just played at a couple of film festivals.
And, shooting recently wrapped on their first feature, actor Adam Goldberg’s directorial debut, I Love Your Work. Naturally, there is a behind-the-scenes weblog.
With just six days worth of posts from the twenty-plus day shoot, the weblog’s kind of slight, but it makes for good readin.’ Figuring (rightly) that posting in real-time and producing would suck, Josh brought in Helen Jane, a blogger pro, so to speak. HJ knows refreshingly/annoyingly little about filmmaking, giving the weblog an amusingly wide-eyed, “I can’t believe I’m getting paid for hanging out with Franke Potente!” tone. No news here, but I’d rather see a weblog from the POV of a principal player (producer, director, actor) rather than a friendly groupie. Of course, that’s why I’m here.
[Update from the “Going out in a blaze of glory” department: writing about the ILYW weblog may be the new way to cease publication, if Shift and Salon are any indication. If I’m not around next week, you’ll know why…]

Q: When your cable modem drops its DNS settings, and your wireless network connection goes out while you’re away for a few days, how many voicemails requesting you call your damn ISP can your neighbor leave before committing a breach of wi-fi netiquette? Does this number vary by coast?
Or is this the karmic price for your own use of the wi-fi connection you find blazing through your window when you’re away?

First, sorry I couldn’t get this story out in time for Canadian Flag Day (Feb. 15, if you didn’t know, and chances are, you didn’t.) As every Canadian unlucky enough to cross my path the last couple of weeks can attest, I’ve been trying to get to the bottom of the well-known but underexamined “Canadian Flag On Backpack” (CFOB) technique of terror preparedness. It’s Canadian Common Sense: when you travel abroad, sew a Canadian Flag on your backpack, and everywhere you go, everyone will treat you with friendly kindness. And let you sleep in their barn.
To this embattled American, the explanations I’ve gotten range from the naively implausible (“It’s gratitude for all our peacekeepers.”) to the blindingly obvious (“It’s so we’re not mistaken for Americans.”) to what I thought was the same thing (“It’s just Canadian Pride.”).
Yeah but how’d it start? Look at the built-in assumptions: 1. You travel with a backpack 2. You travel with a backpack. My guess: It’s a generational thing. The Maple Leaf flag was only adopted in 1965; Gen-X are the first to grow up with it. When they go abroad junior year, they take the flag with them. Douglas Coupland should be able to clear this up in no time.
Interesting in peace-ier times, but only as much as it sheds light on the sudden surge of references I’ve found– from far-flung media sources– to Americans abroad using the CFOB technique to protect themselves from terrorists (or argumentative Old Europeans). As this MetaFilter thread shows, these “Canadians” are not a new phenom, either. Hell, when Americans could care less, like, say during the Kosovo crisis, big-time experts casually recommended Canadian drag, or at least avoiding American symbols (both clothing and TGIFriday’s, I guess.)
But the US administration seems to have set its sights on Canada now, which may bring an end to the benefits of posing as OR being Canadian. BoingBoing points to a story about a Canadian who had her passport shredded by the INS and who got shipped to India. Danny O’Brien writes about a Canadian they shipped to Syria, where he sits, uncharged, in jail. There’s nothing on Ready.gov about CFOB, either. And since the insidious PATRIOT II act being proposed sets a far lower threshhold for stripping an American of his citizenship, who knows if sporting a Maple Leaf is enough to classify you as an “enemy of the US.” My advice, if you’re gonna be “Canadian” while you’re abroad, fine. Behave yourself, make our northern neighbors proud. Just ditch the patch before you come back.
[A heady read: Sean Maloney’s Dec 2001 paper, “Canadian Values and National Security Policy: Who Decides?”]

Matt Webb posted a nice collection of style guides.
An addition, while not a style guide, per se: having Netscape crash and take your in-progress post with it can help you pare down later drafts to the bare essentials.

My bad. If only I’d watched Access Hollywood before posting about Gerry. Michel Marriott has an article in the NYTimes about the convergence between video games and films. Actually, it’s about Enter The Matrix, the video game.