My bud Angela — the original Web Doyenne — has scored a gig tracking war blogs for USA Today Online. I’d be even more congratulatory if I weren’t so abysmally envious of her…

Big anti-war protest in San Francisco today. Tied up traffic big-time, which is always a way to gain sympathy for your cause.

One friend reports that at one point, there were 200 anarchists marching down Market Street. What I don’t understand is, how do you get 200 anarchists to do anything together?

Only magazine-obsessed dweebs like me realize the dark secret behind titles like Car & Driver, Woman’s Day, Metropolitan Home, and Boating. They’re all owned by Hachette Filipacci, which is a division of the French company Lagardere, which is 2 percent owned by…

Saddam Hussein.

No, it’s true. Really. And it’s not such a huge secret, either.

Anyway, Aaron Gell at flak magazine has written a very funny memo from Saddam to Hachette Filipacci CEO Jack Kliger, suggesting just a few tweaks here and there….

From the British magazine Computing:

More than half of the emails sent from company systems have nothing to do with work, according to exclusive research for vnunet.com‘s sister title Computing…

On average, 53 per cent of emails sent during one week were not related to business. The highest instance was reported at a public sector organisation, where 70 per cent of messages were personal.

 

Al Gore was named today to the Apple Computer Board of Directors. The vote margin was not released.

I wonder if we’re going to start seeing an iPod on his hip, next to his ever-present Blackberry….

From the AP:

CLEVELAND — Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia banned broadcast media from his speech Wednesday at an appearance where he received an award for supporting free speech.

WASHINGTON (CNN) — The FBI has recovered a valuable copy of the Bill of Rights that had been missing for 138 years, bureau sources said Wednesday.

If you want to know what it’ll be like for the 500-odd reporters “embedded” with the armed forces in and around Iraq, I’ve got a couple of links for you.

This one, via the invaluable J.D. Lasica, extracts some interesting points from the Pentagon’s ground rules for reporters. (There’s also a link to the full official document.) There will undoubtedly be some gears grinding in the actual practice, but these look like pretty reasonable and enlightened rules.

As for what reporters can expect from moment-to-moment life with the troops, turn to Joe Galloway. Joe covered Vietnam for UPI and wrote the book “We Were Soldiers Once… And Young.” (They turned it into a Mel Gibson movie last year.) For many years, he wrote for U.S. News & World Report; now he’s the military affairs reporter for Knight Ridder.

This piece from Editor & Publisher is the memo that Knight Ridder reporters get when they’re leaving for a war zone. It tells you how to survive. Here’s some sage advice from Joe:

• If things start happening suddenly and violently — incoming mortars or a chemical warfare alert — and you don’t know what to do, watch a sergeant and do what he does and what he tells you to do. Failing that, get down and stay down until the picture becomes clearer. If someone, anyone, tells you to move out or run or dig a hole, do so with vigor.


• Don’t sit down on the ground or flop down on a tank deck or lay down … without first taking a very good look for bugs, critters, snakes, scorpions, and the like. You will have a very painful war if you are nursing a scorpion bite on your butt.

… and something that no reporter should ever forget: engage with the people you’re covering:

• Don’t be a whiner and complainer. Don’t huddle in shared misery with other reporters. You are there to cover soldiers. Spend your waking hours with them, listening to them. You may be surprised to find your average infantry captain, while from a totally different culture, is often intelligent and a good companion.

With war drums beating louder than ever, the economy in a shambles, smoking about to be banned through all of the city, this item actually made the NYTimes today:

Two 17-year-old boys, apparently following instructions penned by Abbie Hoffman, caused a flash fire in a Brooklyn apartment yesterday afternoon while trying to make a smoke bomb on the stove, the police said. One of the teenagers received second-degree burns to the upper torso.

Very little property damage. No other injury. One of the kids goes to LaGuardia High, a good school. The other — the one who was burned — goes to Bronx Science, a very good school. The apartment is on a good block in a good neighborhood, Park Slope. The street was crowded because of a St. Patrick’s Day parade, but there was no apparent connection.

Without the oh-so-tenuous Abbie Hoffman link, seems to me that this doesn’t even make the local giveaway weeklies. At least the kids didn’t get the recipie off the internet….

The chairman of Motorola stood up in front of the cell phone industry today and said that what people want is better voice service. The chairmen of LG and Nokia said what people want is more bells and whistles.

From CNet:

But not being able to rely on a cell phone because a network is shoddy will turn back the expected tide of new users, Galvin said.

Absolutely right. If you can’t rely on a tech gadget to work, people won’t use it. And games and whizbang stuff aside, the main purpose of a phone is to make phone calls. But maybe I’m just an old fart.

How could LG and Nokia disagree that service needs to get better? Probably because better phone service is mostly an infrastructure issue, and Motorola is a much bigger infrastructure player than LG or Nokia, which rely more heavily on handset sales.

If cell networks aren’t built out, people won’t rely on cell phones. And that’s bad for the whole industry.