I haven't blogged in a while, but I'd like to interrupt my hiatus to endorse the Hwang/Wong "Dismantle the UC" ticket for the UC Presidency and Vice Presidency. If you're the kind of person who gets fed up with the UC, this is the ticket for you: they advocate transferring party and House Committee funds directly to the HoCos themselves, letting existing student groups take care of advocacy to the faculty on policy issues and creating a more responsive, democratic body to allocate student group funding.

For more information, see their blog at http://dismantletheuc.blogspot.com/
and consider joining their Facebook group at http://harvard.facebook.com/group.php?gid=2220771657

According to this article, which I found through the newly Conde Nasty reddit, the frat boys depicted in the Borat movie are suing the makers and distributers of the film, alleging that they, in an event unlike anything that has ever happened within their wholesome fraternity home, were given large amounts of alcohol to turn them into misogynistic pigs willing to sign waivers willy-nilly, told they were appearing in a documentary to be shown only within "Europe," where they apparently believed Kazakhstan to be located, and placed in a motor home with "prankster" Sacha Baron Cohen to make fools of themselves. They seek an injunction banning the exhibition of the film, which they claim falsely depicts them as racists, and monetary compensation, presumably to outfit their frat house with HBO so that this sort of thing never happens again. (Apparently Bill Maher showed up the other day, but CNN refuses to air the footage).

The pair, John Doe I and John Doe II, who may be the only two fratboys in America who have never seen Ali G, must have been pretty drunk to think a foreign documentary-maker would place them in a trailer with a strange mustached man sobbing over Pamela Anderson's sexual history, but perhaps the most amusing part is that they seem to have hired one of Borat's relatives as a lawyer.

In just the first couple of pages of the complaint, we're told that Cohen enjoys "unleashing these characters into[sic] selected individuals for public viewing," and that these "musings" of his originally "only aired on HBO." Through his ability to "lie really well," Cohen managed to fool "Congressman[sic] from both sides of the isles[sic]" despite the legislators having "staff whose job it is to screen such pranks." Admittedly, the defeat of Senator Rick Santorum alone should save the American taxpayer several million dollars a year, as his extensive staff of prank screeners can be returned to their original tasks at Best Buy and Home Depot.

Anyway, the court is told that "Borat, it seems, has overgrown his pint size format and has become a full length picture" in which "people are tricked in[sic] making fools out of themselves."
As they put it, "[t]he film has been described in many, colorful ways. Some call it hilarious and some call it offensive. Where one falls on that line depends largely one's [sic] tolerance for incest and penis jokes."

Anyway, even if you haven't just seduced your first cousin with witty banter about the one-eyed spitting cobra that dwells deep within the pants of all men, Borat is pretty funny. I'd recommend it.

From today's Crimson, and definitely not plagiarized:

Dear Sara,

I can’t stop thinking about anonymous hookups, and I really want to try one! Where should I get started? What’s the etiquette on things like this? What are the risks, and how can I best avoid them?

—Horny at Harvard

I don't think we need a punchline today.

Freshman Girl, Sister of  Crazy:  Where is the Quad, anyway?
People: It's up Garden Street... The street past CVS.. Not the street with the movie theater, the next one.
Freshman: Movie theater?? That's what that is? I always thought it looked like a movie theater! It had that sign out front that looked like a movie theater but I didn't think it was one!
Me: Yeah.. Didn't you notice the marquee had the names of current movies?
Freshman: I guess, but I never made the connection.

(Later)
Freshman: Did you know that thing next to CVS is a MOVIE THEATER??
Others: Yeah...

According to today's Crimson, Kathleen Breeden claims that she only actually copied the Handelsman cartoon and offered to take a polygraph test to prove that she didn't copy the others. Somehow I doubt (and really hope) the Crimson newsroom is not equipped with polygraph machines and syringes full of sodium penthothal, but I guess it's a nice gesture.  She also sent an email to Handelsman apologizing for her indiscretion. Both she and Victoria Ilyinsky will be allowed to reapply for columns next semester; Breeden indicated to the Crimson her intention to do so, and Ilyinsky said the same to me.

In other news, the aforementioned uTube versus Youtube battle is heating up, as the Universal Tube and Rollform Equipment Corporation(uTube) actually filed suit against Youtube. Any visually impaired readers using text-to-speech software might just want to skip the rest of this entry, unless the previous sentence included the phrase "ut oo bay." The documents are made available at The Smoking Gun. Also, you might want to take a minute to visit the hideous utube site. Here's a good example page, for their Universal Controls Group, a corporate division that sounds like something sinister in a Philip K. Dick novel.

Note the irregular capitalization and odd choice of font color. I think if someone started a MySpace clone just for machine tool makers this is what it would look like. Incidentally, check out http://www.myspace.com/utube and look what happens when you create a profile and don't friend anyone besides Tom, i.e. "dc has 1 friends." 80 bazillion pageviews a second and they can't even write a simple if statement. But I digress.

Anyway, according to the suit, "uTube primarily sells reconditioned equipment that makes pipes and tubing," while "YouTube condones the public exhibition of lewd and other  disgusting videos." uTube helpfully links to a number of such videos in the filing, and complains of 70,000 "confused" visitors who are "not the kinds of visitors that Plaintiff wants at its website." These confused, certainly-not-from-around-here surfers "often fill out Plaintiff's sales request form... in a vulgar and belligerent manner," saying things like "WHERE THE FUCK ARE ALL THE VIDEOS??" and, to paraphrase, "I am an Australian police officer and you are hosting a kiddie porn film called 'Cunt: The Movie.'" Even worse, one misdirected videophile, asking "where r da videos," even went so far as to misrepresent his email address as "fuckyou@utube.com."

As the lawyers put it,  uTube has lost the right to "quiet enjoyment" of its domain name, and lost,haha, "its kingdom with its domain." They claim that YouTube is infringing on their trademark for the term "uTube." Good luck to them. Personally I think it's pretty frivolous and I'll just be taking my tube and rollform equipment business elsewhere.

I'm getting an unbelievable number of hits based on searches for phrases like "Ilysinky literally" and "Harvard Handelsman." Why does everyone care? Some Crimsonian fools copied articles and cartoons from other publications, so I see why that's exciting on campus, but why do random people from Ohio have any interest in it whatsoever?

On another note, check out this US Central Command PowerPoint slide in this article in today's New York Times. Aside from the amusing "Last week, Current, Chaos" timeline, look how ugly and difficult to read the slide itself is. The "Index of Civil Conflict" chart uses the same colors as those used to indicate the bizarre, seemingly unrelated categories of "Routine," "Irregular," "Significant" and "Critical," the overly wordy yet vague bullet points and the summary outlined in an ugly purple box at the bottom... Maybe it's time to draft Edward Tufte. If they can't win the war, at least they could do a better job of showing why they're losing.

I'm a little late picking up the story this go-round, but I'm sure this isn't my last chance. Apparently a series of editorial cartoons in the Crimson by one Kathleen E. Breeden "bear similarity to" (the less potentially libelous way of saying "were copied from") a number of prominent syndicated editorial cartoons.

The Crimson doesn't seem to want to incorporate the copied cartoons into their coverage, so it's hard to the see them back to back without clicking on links, but the no-longer-anonymous Ivygate authors seem to take a broader view of fair use, so you can see the original Walt Handelsman cartoon and the Breeden copy here. They also have some coverage, complete with leaked emails, of the internal strife over who would get to publish which part of the Ilyinsky story first - the editorial board or the news reporters. Apparently that pompous Crimsonian tone isn't limited to editorials; it's actually how they communicate with each other! If a Crimson editor falls in the woods, or perhaps in the street outside a "semi-secret Sorrento Square social organization," and there's nobody there to hear him, does he still scream "Alas! This University administration should, nay, MUST send qualified medical personnel to rescue me forthwith or suffer great losses to overall credibility and national recognition!"? Answer: yes.

The funny thing, of course, is, as somebody points out in the IvyGate comments, that political cartoons are very seldom original or funny, so it's particularly striking that someone did such a bad job of recycling the catchphrases of the day that it's being called plagiarism.

I don't know anything else about Ms. Breeden (e.g., whether she's secretly royalty(good "Breeden"?) or a Jehovah's witness, as commenters variously alleged about my last duchess, Tori Ilyinsky), besides this fairly innocuous Crimson profile:

Kathleen E. Breeden ’09 is a prospective history and literature concentrator in Hollis Hall, where she’s petitioned for a resident cat to assist in the ongoing war against mice. This Kentuckian enjoys making tea, building shrines to C.S. Lewis, and pulling all-nighters in Lamont. She swears she won’t procrastinate on drawing submissions, though, so you can look for her cartoon on Thursdays.[Blogger comment: Not anymore!!! Muahaha!!!]

I'm not sure an organization that considered that funny, original and publishable should be so shocked to find plagiarism in their midst...

Breeden's deleted her picture and locked her facebook.com profile, but inquiring minds can still see her picture on the Harvard College Facebook. I'm not a stalker, and neither are you (please don't call me a sex god or invite me out for crepes, okay?), so I won't reprint it here.

How do you know when you're a pompous ass of a Web 2.0 guru? When you're in a foreign country, get lazy, eat at McDonald's and decide to write an imitation Paul Graham essay about it, perhaps. An essay called "The Interface of a Cheeseburger," with paragraphs having names that seem like pickup lines out of My New Filing Technique, like "I'll Fill you Without Any Brain Stress," "Sandwiches Can Be Complicated at Times" and "I Have to Print This Cheeseburger on my Business Card." The essay is basically about how many sandwiches are often difficult to use and full of nasty surprises, like, say, Microsoft products, but cheeseburgers function perfectly like iPods, or like iPods would if you ate them before the batteries had time to run down. The essay is really about whether the Zune will beat the iPod, but he suddenly becomes vague when it's time to actually make a prediction...

Also, Anne-Marie Zapf-Belanger is upset I no longer blog about her, and Serena Rezny is quite glad I don't blog about her or mention her by name in this dubious forum. No, this is not a real post by any stretch of the imagination. But check out http://regrettheerror.com, which I never heard of before they linked to me over the Princess Ilyinsky story - it's a collection of amusing newspaper corrections.

Example (from http://regrettheerror.com, where screenshot is available):

John Gray, a relationship expert and the author of Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus, writes a syndicated advice column for Creators Syndicate. The October 15 edition of his column included data from a Mars/Venus/Redbook poll of women and their bedroom habits. Unfortunately, the data was, er, perverted by the inclusion of a response from a previous poll.
The result was the revealing assertion that 40 percent of women say "We both love any and all animals" when asked, "How kinky are you?" Not surprisingly, we're told the previous question was, "Do you and your guy match up in the pet department?"

Because my blog is apparently the new headquarters for Crimson bashing after Gustavo abandoned ship (or did he?), I've been asked to post this by the self-proclaimed wannabe "next Lena Chen,"(edit: sorry boys of the Internet, she's just wishing she could nipple wink!) which is certainly better than the "next Kaavya."

Dear Rebecca,

I'm a reporter with The Harvard Crimson, and as I understand, you're the
Communications Manager of the Harvard Computer Society. I was wondering if
you had some time to talk with me about Macs and their presence on the
Harvard campus. Apple Computer recently announced that it was emerging
from its best ever back-to-school quarter for its higher education division,
and I just wanted to ask you a few questions about why you think this
occurred,  what gives Macs appeal on college campuses, what has Apple done
differently in recent years to improve this appeal, etc. If you could give me a call
at [1-800-CRIMSON] sometime this afternoon, that would be great.

Thanks so much for your help,

[Dr. Magenta]

Dear Dr. Magenta,

I am no PR shill for Apple and the story you describe below sounds
better suited for a paid advertisement than a news article. If you are
looking for actual news about technology, consider covering electronic
voting machines and the threat they pose to democracy in this country.
The machines responsible for the election in two weeks are rife with
enough security holes and opportunities for abuse the fill an entire
edition of the Crimson.

http://itpolicy.princeton.edu/voting/
http://www.blackboxvoting.org/
http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/55/34051.html

Best,
Rebecca

And I'm not even gonna tell you what she did to the guy who wrote this article...

The Crimson issued a new Editor's Note and took away Ms. Ilyinsky's column. Apparently she also copied some content from this blog that tracks usage of the word "literally."

See also Boston Globe coverage here.

Don't plagiarize, kids.

For the people who think I'm being ridiculous by dissecting my blog comments, let's move on to another topic: my outclick logs.

Due to the coverage in IvyGate, I've been getting way more than my normal amount of blog hits recently. So what do you think they're all clicking on? The link to the IvyGate article? The comments page? The links to the Crimson and Slate pieces in question? Nope - everybody's clicking to see the Crimson's list of the "15 Hottest Freshmen" of 2003.

Now, keep in mind it's Harvard, so hotness is relative, and anyone reading my blog is by definition on the Internet, which reliable sources tell me is just chock full of pictures of scantily clad women (and men, but somehow I think most of these people are looking for the pretty ladies) and that the 15 hotties aren't even properly labelled, so unless you intend to make an evening of Facebooking, you can't even figure out which one is the 2003er of your dreams.

But, if this is the sort of thing that floats your boat, you might want to visit Sex and the Ivy,
where a post unsubtly titled "Cocktease in a Blue Tee" will tease not only your underutilized genitalia but your brain as, try as you might, you just can't find that other nipple.

I really didn't want to devote inordinate amounts of time to writing about Victoria Ilyinsky, but then,  people have been posting silly comments on my blog and IvyGate.

First, we have the anonymous commenter who posted the same comment here and on IvyGate:

Wow, this reporting is so misleading. You cut and pasted her article together to create similarities where they didn't exist. If you ever want to be considered an actual source, you better start presenting the facts truthfully, and stop relying on google and the facebook to do your investigative work. Good thing Victoria neither plagerized[sic] nor copyied from the Slate article- the same two literary references to the word "literally" are EVERYWHERE on the internet, it is almost impossible NOT to find those two quotes when doing any research on the word. Please, find something better to do with your time than ripping apart a talented writer who's[sic] column is arguably the most interesting the Crimson has to offer.

As an anonymous reply on IvyGate points out, the author is basically saying "sure, Victoria found her quotes through Googling, but don't you Google her!" More to the point, he (or she, but I'll stick with he) makes it sound like I singlehandedly came up with the notion that Ilyinsky copied from the Slate article. That's just not what happened - I never would have noticed the similarities had the Crimson issued the "Editor's Note." The quotes in question may be "everywhere on the Internet," but the Crimson acknowledged she copied them from the Slate article. I checked out the Slate article out of curiosity and was surprised to find not only that the articles basically made the same arguments and used these same quotations but that another paragraph on "Janus words" seemed to have been closely adapted from the Slate article as well without attribution. That's when I wrote the original blog post.

I cut and pasted the article to point out similarities that do exist. If you think my editing is misleading, please be more specific. I went out of my way to copy and paste paragraphs in their entirety. My argument is still that Ilyinsky wrote an uninteresting, hackneyed column, Googled her topic, found the Slate article which made exactly the same points, and copied and rephrased the section with the quotes and the section on "Janus words." Arguing that she could have copied the quotes from somewhere else and that it's just "research" doesn't really make sense when the Crimson acknowledges she copied them from Slate and implicitly acknowledges she was wrong to do so without attribution. (I also contacted the Crimson by email when I wrote the original post, asking if they or Ms. Ilyinsky had any comment; I know from my referrer logs that they saw the email and read the post, but I got no reply).

Then, we have the comment, allegedly by "Tory's sister," who also can't spell "plagiarism," on IvyGate:

This is ridiculous. I am Tory's sister and I completely agree with the above blog. The one point I will concede is that Tory's article may not be novel or inspired, but that certainly doesn't make it palagrism[sic]. So what you're basically saying is that an author can't write about an idea or topic already broached at some point in the history of literature lest she be accused of "ganking". Yikes, that doesn't leave too many topics left in the world, amazing we even have newspapers and magazines. Plus, I thought Tory did a great job applying the idea to her world - her campus, her friends and herself - and that IS a novel perspective. I googled the two quotes Tory used in an effort to see how many times they came up (as did the above blogger) and I too had to stop counting. The saddest part for me about this accusation and its aftermath is that I know Tory to be honest and hardworking and I fear that this incident may stifle her creative spirit and love for the written word.

That's not true either. Obviously writers can borrow from each other, but when they learn something obscure from one another it's usually customary for them to indicate it. I'm hopeful and optimistic that Ms. Ilyinsky's "creative spirit" will recover and her "love for the written word" be diminished only by reading my meandering prose. Of course, she and anyone else from the Crimson are still welcome to comment here or send me an email and "set the story straight."

For another perspective, we have Gazelle, who submitted her comments through instant messenger (you can do the same since I am bored at work: my screen name is stevemm81, although I reserve the right to block you at any time, whoever you are) :
Gazelle: she's an idiot and should be expelled
Gazelle: along with fucking kaavya
Gazelle: haha palagrism
Gazelle: amazing

Should the Crimson pull Victoria Ilyinsky's column? I don't really have a strong opinion either way. As IvyGate said, they let her publish what was obviously an unoriginal article, in a column that seems to have taken its name("On Our Language") from William Safire's famous New York Times Magazine column("On Language"), so maybe it's not fair to punish her because her ideas were even less original than they appeared at first blush.

Other fun facts about Ms. Ilyinsky you could learn from Google and the Crimson archives:

• She likes "bad boys" - from the kind who have trouble with calculus and drive their father's Volvos into things when drunk to the kind who write existentialist poetry and shoot at construction workers. At Harvard, this translates into guys who need a mother figure to help them with their poorly constructed honors theses and throw away their empty Gatorade bottles.
  
• When her bad boys get in deep and say "Save me princess, save me," they're not just using an arbitrary term of endearment. If this random website is to be believed, Ms. Ilyinsky is a "princess" descended from the Russian Romanov dynasty.
  
• She was one of the Crimson's 15 hottest freshmen in 2003. Is she just too pretty to be punished? Hard to say, since she doesn't have a Facebook picture and the hot frosh photos aren't individually labeled.

Not quite, but an editor's note (in many publications, though not necessarily in this one, the most serious form of correction) in today's Crimson but apparently not online pointed out that Victoria Ilyinsky's October 16 column failed to note that she obtained two examples of the figurative use of the word "literally" from this Slate column.

That's putting it charitably. Ilyinsky's column, entitled "This Word is Killing Me, Literally" makes entirely the same arguments as Jesse Sheidlower's Slate piece "The Word We Love to Hate: Literally." Of course, they're the same points that every sufficiently stodgy high school English teacher makes when she hears the younguns talking in the halls, and I'm sure they're not the only two articles in the last two years to discuss the rising colloquial mis(?)use of the word. But, Ilysinky copied the two quotations from Sheidlower and just presented them with slightly modified punchlines, all to make the same point.

From Sheidlower:

As is often the case, though, such "abuses" have a long and esteemed history in English. The ground was not especially sticky in Little Women when Louisa May Alcott wrote that "the land literally flowed with milk and honey," nor was Tom Sawyer turning somersaults on piles of money when Twain described him as "literally rolling in wealth," nor was Jay Gatsby shining when Fitzgerald wrote that "he literally glowed," nor were Bach and Beethoven squeezed into a fedora when Joyce wrote in Ulysses that a Mozart piece was "the acme of first class music as such, literally knocking everything else into a cocked hat."

From Ilyinsky:

Not only is “literally” one of many misleading terms, but it’s also had multiple meanings for quite a while. The third aforementioned quote—“the land literally flowed with milk and honey”—comes straight from Louisa May Alcott’s 1868 novel “Little Women.” And who doesn’t remember Fitzgerald’s description of Jay Gatsby: “He literally glowed?” But neither was the town of Plumfield overrun with food-stuffs nor our favorite social climber actually luminescent.

So, it seems like one of two things happened, neither of which looks particularly good: either Ms. Ilyinski read the article in Slate (or heard Sheidlower on NPR) and decided to rewrite it for the Crimson, or, slightly better but still bad, she started writing her article, started Googling, noticed there was an article with the identical theme in Slate a year ago and rephrased Sheidlower's bits on the quotes.

I want to believe the latter, but note the paragraph on "Janus words" or "contranyms" in both articles. It's possible that Ilyinski is a language buff and found these terms on her own or knew them already, but I read Safire every week and I've never heard them. Notice also that both use the less common, some say not "etymologically correct" spelling "contranym" rather than "contronym." And, a cynic might also point out the only reference listed on Wikipedia's "auto-antonym" page is the Slate article, and that the article showed a sudden burst of editing traffic, along with the creation and ultimate merger of a "contranym" page, around the time of the Slate article. Similarly, Wiktionary's page for contranym only came into existence around that time, and seems to take its examples from Sheidlower without attribution. Not very nice.

So, my conclusion is that Ilyinsky plagiarized Sheidlower; of course, she may not have started writing with that intent, but it looks like that's what happened. If she didn't, my only conclusion is that the two are obviously destined to be together. Incidentally, there's an interesting profile of Sheidlower from the New York Times in 2000 that's still available online. He's the editor-at-large for North America for the OED, and, it seems, the author of "a 288-page book" on the word "fuck."

Edit: The text of the Editor's Note:
Again, From Ilyinsky:

From Sheidlower (hyperlinks, italics,etc. in original):

I've decided to make a Facebook memories note, tagging only people whom I've never met. We'll see what happens.

Text is as follows, taken from someone else's newsfeed-clogging memories note. Yes, I have no soul or sense of nostalgia.

Leave one memory that you and I had together. It doesn't matter if you knew me a little or a lot, anything you remember! Don't send a message, leave a comment on here. Next, re-post this in your notes and see how many people leave a memory about you. It's actually pretty cool (and funny) to see the responses. Repost as "memories."

I guess I shouldn't import this into Facebook.

Some people might think it excessive to devote an entry to discussing Dan Brown's Digital Fortress. They're probably right, but the book is just so amazingly bad that it's impossible not to discuss it at least a little more. If you think you might read it some day for whatever reason, I am going to reveal the plot, so you may not wish to read this post. However, you probably want to reconsider your life choices, unless you promise to do what I did, and only read the book while in class and only in a postmodern ironic "I'm going to have such a time blogging this" sort of way. Even then, consider carefully.

Now, many books are pretty bad, but Digital Fortress is truly awesomely bad. It is also the only book I've ever encountered featuring a beautiful, brainy heroine racing against time to make sure that the government can continue to secretly read citizens' mail. As I mentioned before, the main character is a cryptographer at the National Security Agency, basically a cross between a stock scientist character and a romance novel heroine. When the novel starts, she is called in to work by the NSA's deputy director and told that a former NSA cryptographer, outraged by the NSA's failure to reveal that their massively parallel computer can brute-force any code currently in use, has devised a remarkable code so complex that even when you crack it, you don't actually know you cracked it because the decrypted plaintext is still encrypted.

The protagonist and her boss are understandably skeptical that such a thing is possible, but, we're led to believe, it is possible in the world of Digital Fortress. Anyway, the creator of the code has suddenly died of a heart attack in Seville after posting online a copy of his algorithm encrypted with the algorithm itself. As he dies, he hands a golden ring with the decryption key to a stranger in a park, and Sexy Cryptographer's Sexy Boyfriend, a Georgetown professor of modern languages, is dispatched to Spain to recover it, since he speaks Spanish and all.

Boyfriend parades around Seville with the luck of a Hardy Boy, just happening to stumble on to the next clue he needs at every seeming dead end. At one point, for instance, he encounters the woman he's been looking for all over Seville in an airport women's room, which he wanders into after finding the men's room closed for cleaning. Meanwhile, he manages to repeatedly outrun and outfox a highly-trained (but deaf!) professional assassin; luckily for him, he plays squash weekly with his university colleagues and thus is in prime physical shape.

Boyfriend is obviously a stand-in for the author. Remember what we know about Dan Brown: he thinks the government should listen in on your phone calls and hates the Catholic church. So, it's not that surprising to find Boyfriend muttering to punked-out teenagers, "I want you to wash your hair, clean up your language, and get a job," or, while fleeing a deadly assassin through a cathedral, happening to stumble upon the Cardinal of Seville gulping down communion wine. Luckily for Boyfriend, the Cardinal has installed a secret back door in the centuries-old cathedral so that he doesn't have to cross paths with "the sinners." Boyfriend is also propositioned by about 1/3 of the female characters in the book, including a sexy Spanish prostitute; he doesn't encounter the other 2/3s.

Meanwhile, back at Fort Meade, Sexy Cryptographer is discovering that things are not as they seem. You know how the idea of a code you can't brute force doesn't actually make any sense? Yeah, it's true, but the NSA cryptographers apparently temporarily forgot it for a second. The encrypted mesage is actually a VIRUS, designed to penetrate top-secret government databanks, tear down firewalls and reveal every classified bit of data the government has. Sexy's boss, who is secretly in love for her, falls for the trick, contaminates the NSA's computer, sends Boyfriend to Seville to get him killed and win Sexy's heart for himself. So, the author acknowledges the idea of sending a lone language professor to recover state secrets is, in fact, ridiculous and actually sort of manages to explain it simply by making the deputy director of the NSA a complete madman.

His trickery is first discovered by one of Sexy's colleagues, a brash young ex-Marine most noted for exposing the NSA's trickery with the Skipjack cipher. Now, a word about Skipjack. Skipjack is a real encryption algorithm, and it really was invented by the NSA. It was proposed as part of the Clipper Chip, where US residents would be strongly encouraged to use for secure communication encryption provided by a chip designed by the NSA, with each chip having a unique secret key held in two parts by two government agencies and allowing law enforcement agencies to decrypt users' messages after some sort of proper legal procedure. When handshaking to initialize keys to use for particular messages, the chips would publish the  session keys encrypted with the secret key held in "escrow" by the government, so that authorized government eavesdroppers could always decrypt the messages. Needless to say, the plan was highly controversial; even then-Senator John Ashcroft opposed it as a threat to civil liberties. After a flaw was pointed out by cryptographer Matt Blaze in the initial key escrow system that would make it easy to circumvent the part of message transmission that involved publishing the encrypted session key, the NSA basically lacked the political capital to provide a fixed standard. All of this, though, was discussed and debated out in the open. At the time, the Skipjack cipher was classified, but it was later publicized, and it never contained a backdoor. The only backdoor was in the proposed Clipper chips, and it was not secret and did not require "exposure." Obviously Dan Brown has the right to make up nonsense about recent historical events like this, but it's an annoying habit. Just because there's no law that says you can't pick your nose at the salad bar doesn't mean it's a good idea.

Anyway, Crazy Boss kills Brash Marine, and meanwhile the other five or so employees of the NSA try to figure out what's going on. This involves a bizarre subplot where one assistant to the director blackmails another using security footage of him licking honey and flour off of a hot  Hispanic pastry chef while listening to her sexy Latin music, and excessive discussion of the habits and hygiene of an IT guru nicknamed "Jabba." Soon, they realize that Crazy Boss is crazy and that a virus is threatening to invade the government's central top-secret database, which stores everything from nuclear launch codes to a three volume collection of proto-emo poetry written by Richard Nixon,  and tear down all five of the machine's impenetrable firewalls. Of course, hackers the world over are penetrating the firewalls as they come down, waiting to publish all of the government's secrets and Tricky Dick's Watergate Elegies, and the NSA's code gurus struggle to solve a simple riddle revealing the secret abort code for the virus, which turns out to be the numeral 3. Seriously - the numeral 3.

After somebody hits the "3" on the keyboard, the world is saved (thankfully, the Num Lock was turned on, or you wouldn't even be alive to read this), but the codebreaking computer, which we were led to believe was the only thing saving the world from anarchy and civil war, is destroyed. Still, it's apparently a happy ending, and Sexy and Boyfriend go off to be married. Crazy Boss is dead, as is Killer Assassin (and a bunch of innocent people, but such is life).

When I saw the Crimson headline "DormAid Cleans Out Closets," I was convinced the cleaning service, famous for their John Galt style libertarian speechifying on the Daily Show, had started blackmailing secret homosexuals to make ends meet. Rather, it turns out that they're now offering an "a la carte" clothes-washing service for the absolutely ridiculous price of $19.99 a bag (even more at some other schools!)

The company's website, trendily built on Rails, as this error page shows, asks potential customers to imagine what they could do with "3 extra hours each week." Intriguingly, they show the same message to parents - perhaps the only parents willing to pay $20 a week for their children's laundry are the ones who actually receive a FedEx shipment of dirty underwear every Monday. In any event, I was briefly intrigued by the idea of having an extra three hours to train my Pandora stations to stop playing James Taylor and induce uncaught exceptions in cleaning services' websites, but I ultimately realized that, ever since I retired the old washboard (that's me in my hillbilly phase, did you ever see that picture? I think that was before we really knew each other..),  laundry doesn't actually take three hours. In fact, I would wager that it would actually be more inconvenient to arrange to give my laundry to DormAid and wait 2 business days to get it back than to make a couple of trips to the Leverett basement.

DormAid, who seem to have set themselves up as some sort of successors to Cisco with their slogan "empowering the next generation," also have begun offering one-time room cleans for $66.95 per clean (the cheapest per-clean rate is for the twice a week "Platinum" plan).  In case you don't feel spoiled/entitled enough, even after listening to the Rush Limbaugh endorsement("the Harvard Crimson newspaper, a bunch of leftist journalists, is trying to stop him!"), they'll even leave a chocolate on your pillow. If they did any more to make you feel good, we'd just have to call them Lena Chen.

Eh, probably not. It's too long - a good editor could have gotten rid of upwards of 50% of the text without losing anything meaningful. Blue and Gareth, the narrator-heroine and her beloved father, are basically fully explored within the first 50 pages. The other characters (Hannah, the Bluebloods) aren't really fleshed out at all. What's so beguiling about Hannah? We know everyone finds her alluring, and we're told she's beautiful and charismatic, but there's nothing to make the reader fall in love with her. Same with Gareth - he's a handsome, authoritative, pompous professor, and we're told women fall head over heels for him, but Pessl never shows us why. Since the charisma of Hannah and Gareth is a major theme of the novel (they implicitly compare themselves to Charles Manson, and we're led to believe they have the same commanding personalities), this is a problem.

Pessl repeats words and phrases ad nauseam - we probably hear a hundred times about the gloomy pronouncements Gareth makes in a "bourbon mood." It's a cute phrase the first time around, but isn't Blue supposed to have a little more command of the English language?

Like a buzzing housefly, the plot seems to disappear for chapters on end, reappearing at last only when we're about to fall asleep, then promptly vanishing again as soon as we try to grab hold. Its ultimate conclusion is cliched and variants of it have been used dozens of times on mediocre television police dramas. The novel is intended to be a coming-of-age story, but the narrator really only starts to mature in the last chapter, and the prose style of the entire book indicates she doesn't get particularly far. It's also just a bit pretentious - the author and the erudite characters all love Nabokov
Still, I finished it, and it's a lot better than another book I just picked for free at the Bookcrossing shelf in Maxwell-Dworkin: Digital Fortress, by Da Vinci Code author Dan Brown. Imagine that the National Security Agency's sexxxiest female cryptographer("her shoulder-length auburn hair looked newly blown dry. Trailing her was the faint scent of Johnson's Baby Powder. His eyes fell the length of her slender torso -- to her white blouse with the bra barely visible beneath, to her knee-length khaki skirt, and finally to her legs...") and her uberhunk boyfriend("a rugged, youthful thirty-five with sharp green eyes and a wit to match,") a professor of languages or linguistics or something like that at Georgetown are confronted with a code so powerful that even the top-secret codebreaking computer at the NSA can't make head or tail of it.

This computer, called TRANSLTR, presumably since the NSA stores all of its documentation within an MS-DOS directory, is able to brute force any cipher presented to it, regardless of the encryption algorithm used, through its millions of parallel processors and some sort of quantum mechanical magic tricks, until an NSA scientist turned privacy activist devises a diabolical cipher that actually mutates the plaintext while you decrypt it, so that you never know when you've actually decrypted the message. At first, the sexy cryptographer and her boss think the code must have been encrypted with a conventional cipher using a "10 billion digit" key, but they soon realize renegade genius Enkei Tankado has finally perfected his theoretical shapeshifting cipher and rendered TRANSLTR obsolete.

When Brown exhausts a particular stream of cliches and nonsense("Becker listened, spellbound. The teacher had become the student"; "Susan wondered how the day could get much worse.. She was about to find out"; "It is said that in death, all things become clear; Ensai Tankado now knew it was true"; "His hatred of America slowly faded. He became a devout Buddhist. He forgot his childhood vow of revenge; forgiveness was the only path to enlightenment."), he appears to hemorrhage random cryptographic terminology onto the page("PGP, Diffie-Hellman, ZIP, IDEA, El Gamal"; "stream ciphers, self-decimated generators, knapsack variants, zero knowledge protocols, unicity points") like a Tourettic Bruce Schneier.

When he attempts to present actual facts about the real world, they're wrong. In Brown's novel, the NSA routinely provides decrypted emails to prosecutors in ordinary criminal cases, and, amazingly, when text is encoded using a public-key scheme, the revolutionary bit is that "the only way to unscramble the message was to enter the sender's 'pass-key.'" Lest you think I've gone through the entire book with a fine-toothed comb looking for factual errors and exuberantly awful prose, I should mention that I've actually only read the first 38 (out of 430) pages.

So definitely don't read that. What should you read, then? Well, I really enjoyed The Prestige
by Christopher Priest, and the movie does feature David Bowie as Nikola Tesla... If you want to read an actually good thriller about cryptography, there's Neal Stephenson's Cryptonomicon. Read Calamity Physics if you really want to - I liked the first fifty pages a lot, before she started to repeat herself too much. A lot of people liked it more than I did, including people like Jonathan Franzen and the person who reviewed it for the New York Times. The website is really cute too - although the butterflies and moths in the novel and the Flash animations might make you wince when you read the book and a couple of interviews and realize how much Pessl wants to be Nabokov. Some people seem to argue she only got published because of her youth and good looks, but I wonder if these actually hurt her - had the publisher not been in such a rush to put out the book, would it have gotten a more thorough editing job? Obviously, Pessl is talented. Her book is really just too damn long. 

I've gotten a lot of Facebook event invitations from people I barely know lately. This made me think there must be some kind of "invite all friends" button on the event creation list. As far as I can tell, there isn't, so this means that a lot of my "friends" are probably wearing out their fingers and mouse buttons clicking on the name of everyone they've met since kindergarten.

Is there a better way? Well, here's one, although it probably technically violates the Facebook Terms of Service since they ask you not to run scripts.

To invite all your friends, go to the page where it has the list of friends with checkboxes for each person. Then, copy and paste (make sure it all pastes on the one line) the following JavaScript code(including javascript:) into your address bar. Press enter. Continue to press enter until all your friends are invited.

There's probably a simpler way - this just simulates clicking on each of the checkboxes. I'm sure there are similar tricks to tag everyone you know on a note, but that's somehow lower in the heirarchy of semi-legitimate spam, so you can find that on your own.

javascript:var fl = ge('friends_list'); var len = fl.childNodes.length;for(var i = 0; i <len;i++){fl.childNodes[i].childNodes[0].onclick();}

Youtube is presumably pretty happy this week, but utube isn't having much fun. The site utube.com apparently belongs to the Universal Tube and Rollerform Equipment Corporation, which sells refurbished equipment for manufacturing tubes but has been overwhelmed by hits from web surfers looking for the video site, forcing Alaska Senator Ted Stevens' ISP to delay their long-planned upgrade yet again. These visitors were presumably confused by the message from the tube metamiller indicating that their shopping cart currently "contains 0 machines." The Universal Tube CEO claims he has attempted to contact Youtube to complain (good luck), but was unable to get through since, of course, the tubes are congested with congratulatory voicemail.

In more narcisstic news, I was looking through my logs today.. Most of my hits, of course, come from American college students using Google Image Search to find pictures of Budweiser, but one interesting one came from an IE-on-XP using Cox Cable customer in Phoenix, AZ googling for "Lucy Caldwell Crimson." Could this be Mr. and Mrs. Caldwell? Let's all hope Lena Chen's parents really don't speak English well enough to Google.

Speaking of Ms. Chen, she's apparently being auctioned off tonight as part of a charity(?) date auction in Mather House. Cotton and Increase may be rolling in their graves, but for those modern-day Matherites who aren't so puritanically inclined, I suspect you're likely to get more "bang" for your buck from Lena than the other bachelorettes being auctioned, no?