Different River

”You can never step in the same river twice.” –Heraclitus

I’ve been on the Internet long enough to remember it before AOL was connected to it in 1994. (AOL was originally a self-contained service with its own content, separate from the Internet.) I remember when CompuServe (now owned by AOL) was first connected to the Internet around 1990 (anyone else remember those e-mail address with the numbers and commas?)

Though I was never particularly active on USENET (“newsgroups”), I also remember the USENET purists decrying the “commercialization of the ‘net” when all these non-tech-geeks who were unaware of USENET etiquette (“netiquette”) and history came into the newsgroups, some of them apparently unaware that they weren’t just another service of CompuServe or AOL.

Well, the wheel has turned, and AOL is disconnecting from USENET, which is to say, no longer providing newsgroup feeds to its users. Of course, the Internet being what it is now, people who want newsgroups will be able to find other sources. But as the article notes, “the event nonetheless represents a milestone in Internet history.”

Slashdot discussion here.

Eugueni Kniaze — a nice, law-abiding immigrant has been granted a green card … three and a half years after being killed by terrorists at the World Trade Center.

Note that this came through almost three years after one of the terrorists got his student visa approval to go to flight school … six months after flying a plane into the World Trade Center, killing Eugueni Kniazev (among many others, plus himself).

Full story from Michelle Malkin in the New York Post.

I never thought I’d be linking to ESPN but here goes:

Here’s a movie idea: diehard Red Sox fan falls into a coma before the 2004 playoffs, spends the next four weeks fighting for his life, then regains his senses after the World Series. He survives … only he feels ripped off, because as millions of Sox fans say, “I saw them win in my lifetime,” this poor guy is the one who didn’t see anything.

Never mind. It’s too improbable, right?

Meet Steven Manganello, known from this day forward in Red Sox history as The Coma Guy.

Plus…

Growing up in Maine, his family followed the Sox because his grandfather did, one more diehard who ended up with these dates on his tombstone: 1917-2003. Ouch.

Here’s the article.

Clayton Cramer reports on the latest effort to get kids to smoke:

Yeah, “It’s just a plant,” but it’s a vile habit, with some unpleasant and destructive results. And now there’s a children’s book, even. Will those corporate greedheads ever stop? Oh, whoops! It’s not tobacco this new children’s book teaches kids is okay:

The holidays are over, but if you spaced on buying the budding reader in your life a present, Ricardo Cortes’s It’s Just a Plant is available on the Barnes & Noble Website this month. It’s the story of Jackie, a young girl who walks in on her parents smoking marijuana. The rest of the book follows a fact-finding mission Jackie and her mom take to learn more about pot. They visit Farmer Bob, who grows it, and Dr. Eden, her mom’s groovy physician (who warns the child not to use the drug till she’s an adult). Then they run into some guys passing around a spliff in front of a Chinese takeout joint [pun intended? --DR], who are promptly busted. That’s when she learns that “a small but powerful group decided to make a law against marijuana” from one of the cops, who lets the tokers go with a warning. And Jackie decides she’s going to “vote to make the laws fair” when she grows up.

Then there is this whopper:

“The book is not pro-drugs by any means,” says Cortes.

Really? What would he consider “pro-drugs”?

Or did marijuana kill so many of his brain cells he doesn’t know the different?