Wow — after a decade, it looks like the Mia Zapata murder has been solved. (And with DNA evidence, so that’s always an item of interest professionally speaking.) Of course the thing that settles in with you, after you are relieved for her poor family and friends and after you remember and mourn again for her and, oh, huge swaths of the history of rock — the Gits could’ve been epochal, they really could’ve — is that this was just some random crime by some waste of XY carbon wandering the streets. Who lived for ten years with having done this deed. If he in fact remembers doing it at all.

This RIAA statement: Gotta be a fake. Must be. Mustn’t it? A fake? Can’t be real, I mean. Fake then. Gotta be. (Update, and not 20 minutes later: Yes. Shame really. Nice hack whomever!)

Johansen wins! Jon Johansen wins his DeCSS case! Oh, the excitement — Jack Valenti’s got to be seething. (That’s good; Valenti’s one of LBJ’s old crew and probably needs to seethe to keep from molting into his true alien form.)

I’m a little late posting this, but Penn Jillette’s been having adventures with airport security folk. He handled the initial incident really well, but the followup is kind of… well, okay, he’s reporting not storytelling here, but it’s an anticlimax for those of us who’d like to see the pocket-Nazi army of X-ray police reined back within the bounds of Constitutionality. He’s a good geek, though, and he did what he could to advance the cause, not to mention foregrounding the effect that celebrity status has on the whole situation. Both pieces are worth your time.

Stephanie Zacharek’s got a nice review of American Normal in Salon today, and she says something really smart and sad at the end: We’ve lost not only our cultural tolerance for people who are strange and/or solitary, we’ve lost our respect for smart writers turned loose on unfamilar topics such as Asperger’s syndrome (a neurological diagnosis oft applied to the strange and/or solitary, not to mention everybody interesting int he tech industry). To misquote Tony Soprano (but only in words, not in sense), specialization and standardization have brought us to this.

I’d find this essay on the American burqa industry (that is, cosmetics) much more effective if the author would’ve taken a deep breath and reminded himself of the following facts: 1) even when you’re as bad at eyeliner as I am it does not obscure your vision to the extent of causing you to fall down in the street; 2) if your makeup slips off during the day the worst that can happen is horror and/or derision and/or pity from passersby, and even then you’ve got to have been messing with some truly badass lipliner; 3) no American woman, not even in Superior NE, has been murdered for not wearing full makeup. Essay courtesy of the same godforsaken town that claimed that the Giants’ Series defeat was a sign that America was a truly evil place.

Hmm. I’ve been wrong before, but 2003 may be not so horrid, as I see they’ve decided not to build that upchuck of a new Guggenheim in Lower Manhattan. No, trust me — it was a wretched shiny building and it would have been a misery to all within sight of it. I was in Seattle for another Gehry project and really, the joke was on the city. Consider NYC saved from a terrible blemish.