From Lawrence Lessig, of Stanford Law, in a q&a on downloading copyrighted music: “The RIAA is the Recording Industry Association of America. It is not the Recording Industry and Artists Association of America. It says its concern is artists. That’s true, in just the sense that a cattle rancher is concerned about its cattle. “

From a reader’s letter on nonsmokers’ rights in today’s Kansas City Star: “Requesting a nonsmoking section in a restaurant is like asking for the nonurine section in a pool.”

Matt asks whether “the current XHTML/CSS paradigm” and the ease with which “skins” are laid on top of applications are contributing to an undoing of “the old humanistic saw about the mutually informing and inextricable nature of the relationship between form and content.”

Kari then takes the discussion in an interesting direction by bringing up W. W. Greg’s classic differentiation between “‘accidentals[,]’ those features of an author’s work–spelling, punctuation, style–generally regarded as contingent rather than constuitive” and “‘substantives,’ or linguistic content, the real locus of authorial meaning.” She writes that against this long-influential view “a younger generation of mavericks … hold that accidentals are substantives, a variation on the old saw that the medium is the message.” These “mavericks” argue that “[t]hings like font size and style, page layout, white space–all are semantically constituitive.” However, now that we can switch these elements around relatively easily in an electronic environment, textual theorists might need to rethink their assumptions about form and content.

Jason takes the XHTML/CSS binary and complicates things by arguing for a three-way (woo-hoo!) relationship involving the database backend (oh.) that runs MT blogs and other forms of information: “In looking at the CSS, the HTML templates, and even the database, I see a variety of levels of ‘form’ and ‘content’ intertwining in a (seemingly) organic fashion.”

All this has left me wanting to play devil’s advocate. Might we restrict our view to the “document” — whether that’s a blog entry or the interface for a chat client — as it appears on our screen? The skin, the database backend, or the stylesheet are the means by which the document was formatted, but now that it’s there on screen, do these things matter so much to our analysis of the document itself? The computer — or the printing press, for that matter — is the device upon which the process of document creation was enacted, but once the document is created, we’re back to the inextricable nature of form and content. The links on Matt’s page used to be blue and underlined; now they’re green and have no underlines. I would argue that these features still signify; they’re still “substantives.” There is no reason to read them as “accidentals” simply because their change is the result of a stylesheet edit.

Interested in seeing where I worked for two weeks while in England?

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Following closely on the heels of September 11, comic book stores across the country offered a poster for sale, the proceeds of which went to one or more of the various funds established to provide for victims of the attack. It was a WWII-era image of Superman standing in front of large red, white, and blue shield and above the slogan, “Support Our American Heros.” I bought one, and in the days when “American Heros” invoked the police officers and firemen at the World Trade Center, it felt like a humanitarian gesture. Now, of course, the term takes a different valence.

The relationship of Superman to war, however, is more complicated than this poster would lead you to believe. The very first appearance of Superman has him taking the owner of an arms manufacturing company to the frontlines of some unnamed war in order to show him first-hand the horrors of combat. It’s a powerful scene. Bob Dylan covers similar ground in “Masters of War”. Lately, however, it occurs to me that things have gotten more complicated.

We’ve all read the news stories about which American companies have won the plum contracts to rebuild Iraq after the ravages of (our) war. What a nice humanitarian gesture, no? What could be more generous than to help put this country back on its feet? So what if these companies have ties to the decision makers who waged war in the first place.

Here’s a suggestion for the United Nations: pass a resolution that says that any country that wages war on another country is required by international law to pay for the rebuilding, but make it illegal for any corporation from the aggressor nation to receive a contract to take part in, or profit in any way from, the rebuilding.

Filling in the gaps regarding my travel home: I flew from Manchester to Atlanta, then Atlanta to Baltimore, where KB picked me up from the airport and took me to an amazing Afghani restaurant, the Helmand in the Mount Vernon neighborhood of Baltimore. All of the food was delicious, but the highlight was the appetizer, kaddo borawni, “[p]an fried and baked baby pumpkin seasoned with sugar and served on yogurt garlic sauce.” As KB says, “it kicks ass.” I think that’s a culinary expression.

Then back to KB’s to hang out a little and eat chewy chocolate chip cookies. By 10:00 pm, though, I was ready to crash and crash hard. In the morning, KB drove me back to the airport with a ration of more cookies, plus bing cherries and blueberries. (Ever notice how much I talk about food? I get that from L.) Then Baltimore to Cincinnati, and Cincinnati to KC.

And if all of that weren’t enough to qualify KB for sainthood, she also gave me a tape with the second half of this year’s season of Six Feet Under (she’d already taped the first half for us) along with the first episode of this season’s The Wire. For fans of NBC’s dearly departed Homicide, The Wire is a very satisfying fix, at least as good as its more famous HBO siblings SFU and the Sopranos.

Let me remind you that KB is walking in the Two-Day Colon Cancer March in October. If you’d like to sponsor her, email me and I’ll put you in touch with her.

I’m very lucky to have KB for a friend, and not just because of the cookies and the videotaped shows. To an Army brat like me who spent the first half of my life making and losing friends every two to three years, it’s been a very slow adjustment into adulthood friendships where people don’t just drop out of your life when you move away. As the really good things and the really bad things come, and as you realize that your family, though they may love you, don’t always know how to provide you with the support and community you need, good friends make all the difference in the world. I know this is a really simple, perhaps corny, point, but it’s one that I have to learn and relearn constantly.