crunch Posts

As the evidence accumulates on the Follieri/Galante church-for-beach-house developer scandal, it's become something of a parlor game around the kitchen table to speculate on who will play all the characters in the upcoming mini-series. It's only a matter of time really. We've got a glam Eurotrash huckster, a Hollywood actress, the Sopranos-like mob vice president, Bill Clinton shady dealings with his all-but-pedophile drinking buddies--and of course the Diocese of Camden's Bishop Galante and at least one diocesan priest with a fondness for playing dress-up. It will only become more truth-is-stranger-than-fiction when a few more details work their way from open secret to FBI documentation and NY Post headlines.

So while it's not a surprise, there is a certain satisfaction in the latest media rumor that "Law & Order" is planning one of their classic "ripped from the headlines" dramatization of the scandal:

Raffaello's arrest was and still is the buzz in New York City's social circles....He was the ultimate con man; handsome, rich, smooth and with a celebrity girlfriend to make him seem legit. I'm sure this will be the highest-rated Law & Order episode next season.

There's enough angles to this story to fill an entire season of television so we don't know how prominent the Bishop's part will be. But L&O creator Dick Wolf grew up an altar boy at St. Patrick's cathedral in New York and the L&O costume department has more clerical outfits that Raffaello Follieri's closet. Wolf rarely misses the chance to throw a priest into the script. Whole seasons of the show were devoted to ripped-from-the-headlines pieces on the priest/bishop sex abuse scandal in the early 2000s and I'm sure a follow-up look at the web of financial fraud fueled (or at least justified) by the settlement payouts would be a big ratings hit.

I just wish Lennie Briscoe was still around to make the collar. BOMP BOMP.

• sIFR
  Flash/javascript rich fonts for websites
  (tags: tech.design)
• Google Maps adds geotagged photos
  But only from their own service, Panoramio. Yahoo's Flickr is snubbed. Does Google really need to use it's dominant mapping service to wrest control from one of the few well-known services it doesn't own?
  (tags: comment tech)

• Small Biz Survival on DIY Websites
  Not every small business can afford to hire someone to create or maintain a website. So let's go over some relatively easy do-it-yourself ways to build your site, kind of two by two. It just so happens that these are all free, or nearly so.
  (tags: tech comment)
• Techcrunch: Is Keyword Search About To Hit Its Breaking Point?
  My answer: no. But some argue that " keyword search is already delivering diminishing returns...As the Web swells with more and more data, the predominant way of sifting through all of that data--keyword search--will one day break down."
  (tags: comment tech tech.seo)

• Qr Agitator reviews some autism books
  Reviews Temple Grandin's "Thinking in Pcitures" and Paul Collins' "Not Even Wrong: Adventures In Autism"
  (tags: autism books)
• WIRED: The Truth About Autism: Scientists Reconsider What They Think They Know
  Autistics like Baggs are now leading a nascent civil rights movement. "I remember in '99," she says, "seeing a number of gay pride Web sites. I envied how many there were." This movement is being fueled by a small but growing cadre of neuropsychological r
  (tags: autism)
• NYTimes: How About Not 'Curing' Us, Some Autistics Are Pleading
  This school's program does not try to expunge the odd social behaviors that often make life so difficult for [autistics]. Its unconventional aim is to teach students that it is O.K. to "act autistic" and also how to get by in a world where it is not.
  (tags: autism)
• More substantiated rumors of immenent Flickr video from TechCrunch
  Yahoo PR and other employees are still dead quiet on the subject (I asked every one of them at the party tonight), but the buzz is growing and the leaks haven't been totally contained. Get ready for Flickr Video. It's coming. Really.
  (tags: tech tech.flickr comment)
• Google's tips for making information universally accessible
  You can think of the Google crawler as the world's most influential blind user. The content that matters most to the Googlebot is the content that matters most to the blind user: good, quality text.
  (tags: tech tech.seo tech.design)
• URL Trick in Gmail
  And my comment about how to use it with Remember the Milk.
  (tags: comment tech.organization)
• Photoset from Congo Yearly Meeting
  89 photos from two visiting British Friends
  (tags: quaker quaker.africa)

• New Mozilla Thunderbird group thinks email is broken
  As the number of such interactions grows, and as the number of ways in which we interact grows, the joy that communication can bring is too often replaced by frustration, confusion, or stress.
  (tags: tech comment)
• Blog post on using Flickr and Lightbox
  Lightbox lets blog users enlarge Flickr photos on a website.
  (tags: tech tech.flickr)
• Lightbox JS:original
  
  
  Lightbox 2:updated
  
  
  Which Lightbox is right for you?: etc: quick links to good stuff
  A list of all of the Flickr/Lightbox clones and variations
  (tags: tech.flickr)
• Flourishing Jaime challenges us to pick up the nearest book
  Glad he didn't tag me, the "I Love Lucy Complete Picture Collection" wouldn't look so good!
  (tags: comment)
• Slimbox, the ultimate lightweight Lightbox clone · digitalia.be
  Slimbox is a 7kb visual clone of the popular Lightbox JS v2.0 by Lokesh Dhakar, written using the ultra compact mootools framework. It was designed to be small, efficient, more convenient and 100% compatible with the original Lightbox v2.
  (tags: tech.flickr tech)
• Imperfect Eileen on "eco-moms" and working a concern together
  It's been pretty lonely being the only family on the block that composts, yet in my Quaker meeting I compare myself to some of the single people who live much less wasteful lives. Talking with other parents... seems like a good next step.
  (tags: quaker quaker.witness comment quaker.parenting)
• New Blog: The Ecstatic Quaker
  A blog dedicated to the revitalization of Quakerism through a rediscovery of the ecstatic experiences of early Friends. From a Friend in Delaware USA.
  (tags: quaker quaker.blogs)
• Robin transmits the 123 meme too
  I'm missed once more but have the 1806 Book of Discipline under my laptop just in case!
  (tags: comment)

Microsoft's Steve Ballmer is the Godfather of our age. His letter to Yahoo's board in their unsolicited takeover attempt is the twenty-first century white collar rewrite of The Godfather's "I'll make him an offer he don't refuse":

"Depending on the nature of your response, Microsoft reserves the right to pursue all necessary steps to ensure that Yahoo's shareholders are provided with the opportunity to realize the value inherent in our proposal."

Are the chills going up your spine? Flickr, Del.icio.us, Yahoo Pipes, heck half my universe would suddenly be run by the boys from Redmond, coders not particularly known for their Web 2.0 sleekness or social ingenuity.

• In Japan Half The Top Selling Books Are Written On Mobile Phones
  Half of the top ten selling works of fiction in the first six months of 2007 were composed on mobile phones... Mobile phone novels... have become a publishing phenomenon in Japan, “turning middle-of-the-road publishing houses into major concerns."
  (tags: publishing)
• "Why can’t we be Friends?", Kirk W finds Quaker video on YouTube
  It’s a good mix of earnest effort and teenage humor. They’ve got the Quaker Oats gag in there (several times) but they manage to get past that. They even have some of our Friends in it.
  (tags: comment)
• Video: Quakers Rock (via QuakerQuaker.org)
  High school history project video . "Why the Quakers in the Middle Colonies of the Colonial Era were better,.. a very funny film staring superspeed native beating and a transvestite Scarlett O'Hara." Warning: Oat jokes, non-PC humor. (via Kirk W)
  (tags: quaker quaker.youth quaker.depictions)
• Peter B on reading Marcus Borg on reading the Bible
  That’s me in a nutshell—my personal faith and practice in five simple sentences—and the first bit could just as well have been a quote from George Fox with the language updated and the thee’s and thou’s taken out.
  (tags: quaker quaker.liberal quaker.christianity)
• Sheffield Gordon on the relationship of individual and community
  If we fail to make the distinction between community, fellowship and friendship [then] we will allow ourselves to become subsumed into the overwhelming individualism of our age, and we will become merely another political action group.
  (tags: quaker quaker.witness)
• Six Apart sells its LiveJournal service to the Russians
  "The company continues to lead in the blogging and social media industry with the Movable Type Publishing Platform, the TypePad hosted blogging service, and Vox, a free blogging service for friends and families."
  (tags: tech tech.movabletype)