Flippant Observation of the Day

Syrian rebels smuggled a wounded British journalist out of the besieged central city of Homs Tuesday and whisked him to safety in neighboring Lebanon, activist groups said.

How utterly fucked has the region got it that "safety" is associated with Lebanon.

ART + CRITICISM: Defending Your Work pt. 2

Mike Daisey continues to fight for his work to make its proper impact -- in this case, by challenging NYTimes Tech Columnist David Pogue to come engage more deeply with his work.

LEGAL COMMENTARY/QUOTE OF THE DAY II

A little icing on the legal cake: buried in SCOTUSBlog's run-down on a ruling whether law requiring the losing party to pay for the cost of an interpreter applies to translation fees:

It’s fun to note here what Kan Pacific said in its brief opposing cert.: “the issue is not especially important, and certainly not exceptionally important."

LEGAL COMMENTARY/QUOTE OF THE DAY

Here's Garrett Epps, in The American Prospect, describing the broader legal implications in the Ninth Circuit Court's decision to uphold the invalidation of Proposition 8:

“It’s always been this way” is the essence of Edmund Burke-style conservatism. Reason, Burke argued, is fallible; we shouldn’t change traditional ways on such an uncertain basis. A wise society restricts even our best impulses: “the restraints on men, as well as their liberties, are to be reckoned among their rights,” Burke wrote in Reflections on the Revolution in France. 

American law doesn’t recognize “better to let everything alone” as “legitimate,” much less “compelling.”  The right to marry is a constitutional right, long recognized in history and caselaw. The government can’t deny constitutional rights on the grounds that “we just always did it that way.”  Government has to give a reason.  In historical terms, that’s a remarkable thing. It reminds us that, underneath its social inertia and conservative exterior, America and its Constitution are the products of a revolution.  

Put in a shorter form (which is the quote of the day):

My Con Law prof, Walter Dellinger, once said the course could be summed up in two sentences: “When government wants to do something to you, it has to give a reason. When it wants to do something really bad, it has to give a good reason.”

ART: Shrewd Financial Decision of the Day

A graf artist paid in Facebook stock.

LOCAL: The Non-Profit/Broadway Merger Watch

Even Ken Davenport has noticed it.

QUOTE OF THE DAY 2: Two Decoder Two Furious

There's another great installment of "The Decoder", where Howard Sherman breaks down awful PR speak into understandable tid-bits.

I just wanted to highlight this one:

7. Timely = addresses topic that is in the news a lot right now and boy, did we get lucky on the timing.

Really, I just wanted to smile and share how funny it is when these things happen... obviously in our line of work, being timely is just a massive accident.

Right now, we're running a huge interactive performance online (haven't been following? check it out here), and one of the tangential components was this dumb video uploaded by one of the characters: 

It posted the day before the massive internet blackouts that caused SOPA and PIPA to be withdrawn from consideration. Here's the thing, though -- and you'll have to believe me on this -- we recorded it in December, when really it was only the sort of thing TechCrunch or BoingBoing or Slashdot were following. 

We had absolutely no idea that the day we would post it, it would be so timely as to almost seem crass.