Ultimate Success!

This weekend was Sectionals, the first round of pre-qualifiers for the 2006 national club ultimate frisbee tournament (organized by the UPA). You can see a chart of the regions (and their sections) here. We're in the "Metro New York" section which is part of the "Northeast" region.

The team I am on is called Crafty, most of the players are based in Brooklyn (around Prospect Park). As you might be able to tell from the above link, we did pretty well last weekend. Here are the results for our section.

Taking second place behind Puppet Regime (a really powerful and well-put-together team that's bound for Nationals) is an impressive result for us. And I think everyone on the team is pretty elated to be heading into Regionals second in our section.

As of right now they haven't posted the seedings for Regionals; they just have a list of the teams that made it).

There's a ton of quality on that list, we've got a lot of work to do if we want to make an impression there.

But in the meantime, I think we'll bask in the glow of our performance this weekend. Second place is the first loser, indeed!

Nobody Mourns the Wicked!

Last night, Nelly and I took in a broadway musical. Namely, Wicked. It was a really fun show. Tickets are rather expensive; it's not something I would spring for every week, but the experience of a broadway show makes it worth the occasional indulgence. Nelly and I had a wonderful time. It's a great show.

Wicked is a lively look at the background to the "Wizard of Oz": the motivations, histories and connections between the people that were in Oz before Dorothy arrived and who remained after she left. The imagination involved in the story, the knowing winks to the audience, and the revisitation (now that we're older) of a hallowed childrens' tale all combine to make a fantastic experience.

However, by comitting to cover such a large scope, the show end up running like a race. No scene gets the full amount of attention it deserves (although the actors will occasionally wrestle a memorable scene out of the grips of the musical's frantic direction). And I constantly felt like they'd skipped over the part I was waiting to see.

The cast is incredibly talented (especially the two leading ladies) and the writing is witty and incredibly enjoyable. The music is modern and fits the mood and bracing speed of the story. But the songs don't stick with you and, except for the lines the chorus sings over and over again, I don't really remember any of them.

While the musical has its short-comings, the strength of the story and the talented cast ensure that Wicked's frantic pace is a dizzying, breathtaking romp.

Agh! Child Pornography!

The Attorney General anounced yesterday that child pornographers are overrunning the internet. Indeed this menace is growing! So he's asking Congress to pass legislation which will require ISPs (the companies which provide internet access) to store records of their users online behavior possibly 2 years maybe more (the quote is "for a period of time").

He makes it sound so reasonable. And yet...

Would a government regulation that all cars record the detailed behavior (where they go, how fast they drive, how many passengers) of the driver be acceptable? After all, child molesters use cars to get access to children who are further away than they can reasonably walk! It would be so much easier for the government to prosecute these cases if they had a record of where every car in the country has been in the last two years.

The executive branch is trying to set up a huge database of personal information about every person in the country. Since the answer can't be Terrorism, I guess it has to be Child Pornography (An even more fictional threat).

Gonzalez sees a desperate need for new weaponry to fight the thousands of people online (out of an estimated 1.08 billion) right now browsing "child pornography". This is terrible because as we're told, those who consume this stuff are just bound to act on it. There's no actual evidence of that, but it's just, you know, that's what they said on Law & Order that one time.

Child abuse is terrible. A civilized society cannot accept such behavior and must do everything in its power to stop it. We're all in agreement on that point.

Which is why making a big show of "cracking down" on people who access this stuff online makes such a good smoke screen. These people are being tempted by the things they see on the screen and if we don't act now they'll soon be gangs of molesters wandering our streets.

The implication is that the majority of cases of child abuse are committed by strangers; unknown pervs who stalk our children! See here take a look at the statistics from the Department of Health and Human Services! They made a chart, so you can really understand the numbers they're talking about. And if that's not specific enough, they made a table where the numbers are even further broken down.

Well look at that. 90% of child abuse cases are perpetrated by parents/legal guardians. Dang. Well, that doesn't really support the argument. Better to not mention any numbers at all. Better to just say the threat is growing.

Child pornography is the straw man here. What Gonzalez is after is an online record of everyone's behavior. It's hard to really imagine what the federal government could reasonably want with this information.

The paranoid response is that they want it so they can weed out the political dissidents and intimidate the people who might try to stop them (You spent how many hours on what website? Well Congressman, you wouldn't want that to become public now would you?). I'm not going to say that the current administration is really that evil and corrupt, but the paranoids are not too far from the truth.

Gonzalez slyly lets the cat out of the bag: "We need information. Information helps us makes cases."

Information is power. I don't think they know specifically what they want to do with it. But if they had it, then they would use it. And they would use it however they liked.