My cousin blogs about the Pope's US visit

I've found out that there's another member of my family with a blog: Mark Ockerbloom, one of my cousins, who is a night-time news anchor in Boston. (Our names are similar enough that searching online for one of us often turns up the other. In his case, though, "Mark" is his first name; in my case, it's the first part of my family name.)

One of his recent posts asks about the effect of Pope Benedict's US visit on area Catholics, in the light of recent sex abuse scandals in the Church. This is this Pope's first visit to the US. Thus far in his papacy he's shown himself not quite the Pope that many people were expecting from his earlier career. The priest at our parish's Mass last Sunday spoke intriguingly of the two encyclicals he's written; I have not yet read them, but I've posted links to them for folks who want to check them out.

I remain disappointed, however, in his handling of the sex abuse issues. In the press coverage I've seen of the Pope's visit, he's expressed regret for the wrongdoing priests, but I haven't seen a word about the bishops that knowingly concealed their crimes and shuffled them from parish to parish as they continued to rape and abuse children. Indeed, the Pope is still keeping Cardinal Law in positions of responsibility in Rome, where the former Boston archbishop also happens to be out of the reach of US law.

It's easy to point to bad priests as the problem. It's harder, but necessary, to reform the hierarchy that enabled them, and that, unreformed, erodes the moral authority of the Church.

I has a new blog

I've created a new blog for issues related to libraries, in a broad sense. It's called Everybody's Libraries, and you can check it out here.

I'm keeping this blog as well, for the occasional post about things not related to what I do for work. (Yes, there are some such things. :)

A watershed post

My son's been learning about the water cycle in school this past week, which is as good an occasion as any to shed a little light on the name of this occasional blog.

When it rains on our front steps, the water runs down to our street, falls into a drain, and flows into a stream buried underground for about a mile and a half, finally coming into daylight near the site of the first paper mill in British North America. It then runs for about half a mile more before emptying into Wissahickon Creek, as that creek's dramatic gorge veers southwest.

Along the mouth of our stream, in 1777, came a column of Continental soldiers trying to surprise and surround British troops housed at Germantown and eventually drive them out of Philadelphia. General John Armstrong had his troops pull a cannon along, but the rough terrain defeated them, and he had to abandon it in the gorge. (It was a harbinger of what was to be a disastrous day, as the various Revolutionary columns in the over-complicated battle plan got stalled, delayed, disoriented in the fog, and even fired upon by their comrades.) Looking up from the stream's mouth, you can see high cliffs on the opposite bank that for centuries have been subjects of "lover's leap" legends. Just a bit beyond that lies a cave where three centuries ago a band of German mystics awaited the end of the world.

We're just about at the upper edge of that stream's watershed. Turn left from our doorstep, go to the corner, turn right and cross Allens Lane and the railroad bridge, and in less than 100 yards straight-line distance you've reached the head of a trail leading down into another watershed, Cresheim Creek, named after the German village from which the area's first European settlers came in the 17th century. That stream flows freely through the woods of Fairmount Park before joining the Wissahickon miles above our stream.

Or you can turn right from our doorstep, walk a block up the hill, and cross over into a completely separate watershed, one which eventually feeds Tacony Creek, flowing eastward directly into the Delaware.

The stream whose headwaters flow off our front steps and those of our near neighbors drains most of west Mount Airy and southwest Germantown. The water is pure when it lands on our street. By the time it emerges from its tunnels and flows to the Wissahickon, it's often picked up frightening amounts of pollutants. No one's sure exactly where they're coming from, but it's widely suspected that sewage from century-old lines running alongside the buried stream leaks into it. Various tactics have been proposed and tried to mitigate this effect, so far without success. Tearing up the streets above it, and uncovering and rerouting the lines would probably work, but that's evidently much too expensive to seriously consider.

The name of the stream, as you've undoubtedly surmised by now, is Monoshone. I hope that we give it a good beginning, and help make its end a beneficial (even if imperfect) contribution to the lands and waters downstream.

This week's death threat

Okay, so it's fairly clear by now that, at least for the moment, this will be a space for the occasional miscellaneous post that doesn't fit anywhere else I usually post. But that's cool. At least this is Google-able.

One of the things Google and other search engines are useful for is for quickly checking scams or other possibly alarming messages to see what's behind them. Recently I've received a nastier version of the Nigerian scam, one that instead of claiming that you're about to get millions of dollars (which inevitably involves various fees you have to pay before you supposedly will receive it), claims that you're about to be killed, unless you pay protection money. They scrape web pages looking for contact information (including addresses and phone numbers) and then try emailing them hoping that some will be scared enough to send them money.

My copy of the scam was sent out via 193.93.97.67, an overseas address that has also been used to send out "next of kin" and accommodations-booking scams, according to Google searches. It uses a Yahoo address as the return. (I've already notified security there.) The text appears to be similar to those used in other reports, so I'm posting it here. Hopefully other folks who get messages like this will find this page, or others making the scam apparent, when they feed passages from the subject or body into a search engine. (Basically: don't worry, you're being threatened from someone bulk-mailing these from another continent. Nonetheless, it is a death threat and extortion attempt, so do report it to the ISP being used as the return address, and to appropriate security/law enforcement authorities. Although remote extorters are unlikely to be able to do anything to you, note that some people that traveled to Nigeria in response to the more typical scam *have* been murdered or held for ransom there. And be mindful that if you put your contact address on a public web page, it can be found by anyone, including unsavory characters.)

Anyway, here's the text, with some redactions of personal information. (The info I'm redacting can be found elsewhere, but why make it easy for more scammers?) There were some HTML links in the HTML version, but they didn't go to anything directly associated with me or the letter.

Date: Mon, 9 Jul 2007 12:35:36 -0700 (PDT)
From: MR JEFF DON 
Subject: Be More Careful.
To: [My email address - JMO]

Listen John Mark

Van Pelt-Dietrich Library Center
[My work address and phone numbers - JMO]

I am very sorry for you, is a pity that this is how your life is
going to end as soon as you don't comply. As you can see there is
no need of introducing myself to you because I don't have any
business with you, my duty as I am mailing you now is just to
KILL you and I have to do it as I have already been paid for
that. Someone you call a friend wants you Dead by all means, and
the person have spent a lot of money on this, the person also
came to us and told me that he want you dead and he provided us
with your name ,picture and other necessary information's we
needed about you. So I sent my boys to track you down
and they have carried out the necessary investigation needed for
the operation on you, and they have done that but I told them not
to kill you that I will like to contact you and see if your life
is Important to you or not since their findings shows that you
are innocent. I called my client back and ask him of you email
address which I didn't tell him what I wanted to do with it and
he gave it to me and I am using it to contact you now. As I am
writing to you now my men are monitoring you and they are
telling me everything about you. My dear do you want to LIVE OR
DIE? As someone has paid us to kill you. Get back to me now if
you are ready to pay some fees to spare your life,
$20,000[TWENTY THOUSAND DOLLARS] isall you need to spend You
will first of all pay $10,000 [TEN THOUSAND DOLLARS] then I will
send the tape to you and when the tape get to you, you will pay
the remaining $10,000[TEN THOUSAND DOLLARS]. If you are not ready
for my help, then I will carry on with my job straight-up.
WARNING: DO NOT THINK OF CONTACTING THE POLICE OR EVEN TELL
ANYONE BECAUSE I WILL KNOW.REMEMBER, SOMEONE WHO KNOWS YOU VERY
WELL WANT YOU DEAD! I WILL EXTEND IT TO YOUR FAMILY, INCASE I
NOTICE SOMETHING FUNNY. DO NOT COME OUT ONCE IT IS 7M UNTIL I
MAKE OUT TIME TO SEE YOU AND GIVE YOU THE TAPE OF MY
DISCUSSION WITH THE PERSON WHO WANT YOU DEAD THEN YOU CAN USE
IT TO TAKE ANY LEGAL ACTION. GOOD LUCK AS I AWAIT YOUR REPLY .

JEFF

Tag!

Dorothea Salo wrote a post listing five of her blogger heroes and tagged me at the end of it. (And if you followed the link and read her article, you're now tagged too.) But I didn't have a blog, which left me no choice but to start one. I'll explain the name later.

Here are five of my blogging heroes (where I use "hero" without regard either to gender or cardinality), and some reasons why I admire them:

1. Pamela Jones of Groklaw definitely ranks. Since 2003, she's been exposing legal and PR shenanigans against open source software from a variety of shady characters, ranging from failing software companies in Utah to lumbering monopolists in Washington State to patsies in paid journalism. She and her associates grab, transcribe, analyze, and explain legal filings, articles, interviews, and other primary sources faster and more comprehensively than anyone in the commercial media. Through it all, she's run the blog with panache, and a strong ethical drive, both in her well-placed sense of outrage and in being willing to make sacrifices for her principles (like resigning from a job because it might have created an appearance of a conflict of interest in her blogging). Through it all, she's been subject to harassment and intimidation, but keeps going. For her courage, integrity, dedication, and smarts, I salute her.
   
2. Blogs can be great for teaching as well as reporting. The team at Real Climate, who as far as I can tell already have time-consuming academic jobs, have also done an admirable job at explaining developments and popular controversies around climate science, in a way that's both detailed and accessible to non-climate-scientists. Readers can get the latest scoops on new scientific research, op-ed and PR memes, or just get useful background on common climate questions. They also respond frequently to questions and misconceptions in the comments, and link out to many useful external resources in climatology and other sciences. The blog is a model for teaching when your classroom is the world.
   
3. The lifeblood of many of the best blogs is in the comments. Teresa and Patrick Nielsen Hayden have assembled an impressive salon of smart, funny, and creative commentators at their Making Light blog, thanks to their eclectic interests, wide knowledge, wit, and an attitude that's both welcoming to new contributors but swift and firm with folks who misbehave. (By the time I get to any of their threads, just about any comment seriously out of line has already been disemvoweled, a technique I believe they pioneered.)
4. For some people, blogging is an organic extension of what they naturally do on many fronts: engage the community to help develop and promote ideas for improving the world. That's the case with Lawrence Lessig, a lawyer who crusades for open access, copyright reform, and justice for abuse victims, all while being a law professor and helping bring up two small kids. (I can relate to that last bit.) He's a founder of Creative Commons, a movement that's helped make millions of creative works sharable, adaptable, and reusable. He himself shares his ideas through freely readable online books, talks, and his blog. He also solicits suggestions and critiques in associated book-wikis and blog comments, giving ample space both to those who agree with them and those who think he's all wet.
5. The last blogging hero I'll mention is the one who sucked me into this: Dorothea Salo, whose Caveat Lector blog is one I keep coming back to, and not just because she works in the same environment (libraries) and has some of the same non-work interests (such as choral singing) as I do. For the past several years, starting as a burnt-out grad student and now a rising librarian, she's consistently given the straight story on the tribulations and triumphs she's experienced, unafraid to kick up a fuss or point out emperors with no clothes. And not in a full-of-oneself way (she's at least as hard on herself as on others), but in way that reflects the best of the librarian ethic of bringing knowledge to folks who need it. I get the sense, reading her blog and seeing the talks and tutorials she's presented, of someone who's learned a lot of stuff the hard way and wants to make sure that lots more people who need to, learn it as well, or become comfortable saying it as well. Whether it's improving service in libraries, exorcising gender inequities in geekdom, or revolutionizing the way knowledge is discovered and shared, she gives me (and many other information professionals) much-appreciated inspiration as well as kicks in the pants.

There are numerous bloggers I admire or are friends with, who I haven't mentioned above. I might mention some of them later on. But I hope these examples suggest some good places to visit (or re-visit). And they might also give you an idea of some of my models for blogging, whenever I get around to posting again here.