Nice when “edge” bands do fun stuff for kids, although perhaps a harder group also would have woven in a subtle statement on the Banana Wars. Maybe when/if I see them live (they’re playing in my neighborhood in a couple weeks) I’ll ask if they had to self-censor to get on Nick, or if actually they don’t care about the connection. Seems like a Marley, Rancid, Clash, or even Police treatment of the topic would go so much deeper.
The latest in anti-pirate satellite imaging has led the UN to make some interesting conclusions about security programs, according to the Danger Room from Wired.com
There have been a total 84 reported pirate incidents in just the last three months, UNOSAT says. Half of them occurred in or around the shipping “corridor” sent up by the international community to protect commercial vessels. And that corridor didn’t seem to do much to deter the pirates; their rate of successful attacks dipped only slightly (37 percent, versus 42 percent) inside the protected area. What the corridor did do was concentrate the pirate strikes. “The mean distance between reported attacks has fallen from 30.5km… to 24.6km after,” UNOSAT says.
Perhaps this has been asked elsewhere and I haven’t noticed but, if the corridor is successfully concentrating attacks, should we now expect a navy to deploy heavily-armed decoy ships to trick the pirates and destroy them upon contact or start taking hostages? I’m just reading out of the old anti-pirate playbooks at this point, and wondering when history will repeat itself.
Feist’s rendition of “Please Be Patient…Due to Increased Prayer Amounts” is aslo amusing, especially the part where she explains that prayers will be taken in the order that they were received. Sadly, she does not reach the lyrical achievement of Nelson, but I think that is because of the format she was given. I wish (not pray, mind you) that Feist had been allowed more of her usual punchy rhythmic upbeat style instead of a syrupy formulaic hymnal, but I suspect Colbert was going for a different style of parody.
a blog about the poetry of information security, since 1995
