Jon Weinberg has done a terrific job as a guest blogger (he even fought the spam, which decided to try to flood the blog while I wasn't looking). But I'm home, so the data/ink (or is that data/electron?) ratio will now go down to its usual level.
I hope to write a bit about my trip soon, but my first priority is to get some sleep. Then shop for food…
As it happens I am in London, spending an evening between planes on my journey homewards. I am watching coverage of the mostly failed bombing attempt today in London on the TV in an airport hotel. That was not the plan.
I had a very much better plan. I had a ticket to see the great Michael Gambon as Falstaff in Henry IV, part II this evening, at the National Theater. And I wasn't inclined to let a bomb threat campaign stop I think that the terrorists win if you cower at home. Seeing the TV news presenter read a government statement asking people to go on with their daily lives clinched it. Michael Gambon here I come, I thought, as I set out to brave what I imagined were the London crowds. But first I had to get to London from Heathrow.
The problem was that London transport is basically shut down. For a while there, I thought I had a Plan B – I figured out a route from the airport with the help of the excellent London Transport Real-Time Map. The Piccadilly line that takes you from Heathrow to central London was (and is) shut. There is an express train from LHR to Paddington – but given my late start, no obvious way to get from Paddington to the show in time. Surface transport would, I imagine be at a standstill, queues for taxis very long, and it's a bit far to walk in the time I had available.
So the plan was to eschew the express, take the local train about half way to Ealing, and switch to the central line, which seemed to be working. I went back to the airport, bought a ticket from the vending machine for the London Connection to Ealing Broadway, and descended to the platform. No trains showing on the departures board. A small hand-lettered sign revealed the reason: no trains today beyond Hayes due to “technical issues”. The nice but harassed lady at the station duly refunded my ticket.
It seems even when you don't want to let yourself be defeated by terrorists, you can still be defeated by British Rail. Then again, it's probably a mercy. By the time I got back to my hotel, the Central line seemed to have been stopped too.
I break my vacation silence (soon to be enforced by a lack of web access when I decamp to a different hotel, in Chania) to cheer my brother's brilliant idea on how reporters could advance the ball in the Plamegate inquiry, offered in his web column, Getting Worried at the White House:
But here's what that makes me think: if reporters want to help get New York Times reporter Judith Miller out of jail, let's contact every conceivable person who might have been her source, and ask them (or their lawyers): if for some reason Judy Miller were in jail thinking that she's protecting you, would that be a mistake? Would you tell that to her lawyer?
Let's start with Rove, Cheney Chief of Staff I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby, deputy national security adviser Elliot Abrams, Cheney national security adviser John Hannah, counselor Dan Bartlett, press secretary Scott McClellan, former press secretary Ari Fleischer — and every other person's name who has ever even remotely been attached to this story in the past.
What have we got to lose? Is anyone with me, or shall I get going myself.
I think Dan is going to be quite busy…
While I am in Crete attending a fascinating seminar, and Jon is doing such a wonderful job of blogging here, ICANN is having what promises to be a more-substantive-than-usual meeting in Luxembourg. At the heart of the debate are critical issues of DNS policy. (For the latest word on the politics of it all, see Kieren McCarthys ICANN Blog and his US Govt Interference Is a Big Deal, Says Europe.) One line you can expect to hear often is that it’s important to keep the Internet from being Balkanized.
The trouble is, the Internet is already being Balkanized. One the one had you have the Great Firewall of China and other national censorship efforts. And then there’s the roadblock I encountered today: Google. If you try to reach google.com from here, you are redirected to google.gr and all the prompts are in Greek. Go to google.us and you are redirected to google.gr. Run your search in English and you will get English language results (but the prompts are all in Greek). Amend the URL for that search, which used google.gr to one with google.com….and it’s still too smart and redirects to google.gr.
Are we Balkanized already?
Another thing I've done to prepare for my trip is to line up a superb guest blogger. I'm only going to have limited Internet at best while abroad, so Jonathan Weinberg will be minding the store. Jon and I have several things in common. Among them are some intellectual sympathies: we're both part of the tiny number of Administrative Law teachers who write about ICANN and the Internet. (They're not that many of us around, which may explain why ICANN is run so badly.) We are co-editors at ICANNWatch. And — although this is now a larger group than it used to be — we're both part of law-professor faculty couples.
In addition to being one of the nicest people in law teaching, Jon knows a whole lot more about the FCC than I do. He's an expert on RFID. And he's clerked for two people who sat on the Supreme Court. Jon writes interesting and very readable articles, the most recent of which are listed after his official bio.
Jon will start Thursday (or earlier if he likes). I'm sure readers will enjoy his company as much as I do.
This one is going to be a winner: Democrats to Use Newspaper Ads to Accuse 6 Republican Congressmen on Ethics Issues.
I've been going on about this for a while.
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