Waffle

Hesiod at Counterspin Central reports about a TV program he saw about interrogation techniques in recent history. The program gave some examples of the similarities and differences between various historical torture techniques such as those used by the Gestapo, and those used at Abu Ghraib.

But it is the story of the Germans' most effective interrogator that caught my eye:

The second example was of a Luftwaffe Corporal, Hans Joachim Scharff, who spoke perfect English. He was in charge of interrogating downed American and British pilots.

His technique?

He was really nice, joked around with the prisoners, treated them well, gave them coffee and tea...and found out an absolute shitload of information from them.

You see, the pilots were all conditioned by the allies to believe that the Germans would do all sorts of horrible things to them if they were ever captured. So when their captor was a really nice and pleasant guy you could smoke a cigarette with and joke around with, they dropped their guard and gave away a lot of information inadvertently.

Amazing, huh?

He was probably the most effective interrogator the Germans had during WWII, and he was extremely humane.

[snippage]

Now, Scharff was the exception to the rule for German interrogators. But, he was also the most effective, and did not violate the Geneva conventions to do it.

Not to toot my own horn, but Geir and I were right about this.

Now that The Rite of Serfdom is finally lumbering towards a dénouement, I'd like to solicit input from you, the readers to help me wrap it up as neatly as possible. To start with, remember this outburst from Maghreid?

In this forum thread, reader gwalla writes:

Bad time for a rant! Sheesh. As a politician, she should know better than to badmouth the goals of her allies.

Yup, and she's chosen the wrong moment for it too. But I was wondering if any of you regular readers were on to the game Maghreid has so far been playing (which, incidentally, she will have lost as a result of this moment of honesty - even though she echos my own feelings on the subject almost exactly). I know what she's up to but I wonder how much work I need to do to make it clear before the story ends.

So: what variant of the political game do you think she has been playing? Post it in the forum thread, which is open to unregistered guests!

After posting those songs in the previous entry, I decided to check if Richard Thompson had weighed in on recent world events. If he has, he hasn't posted the results yet, but I did find this on his website:
Dear Janet.

Thompson's albums tend towards the serious and bleak, but he has lighthearted pieces like this in his live shows, and it is these tracks that end up on his website. It, and I Agree With Pat Metheny, aren't representative of his body of work as a whole. I expect that if and when Thompson writes about current events, the result will be much more stinging and philosophical than the songs in the previous posting, and that they will be part of his next album, just like the title track to Shoot Out the Lights (inspired by Russia's invasion of Afghanistan), "Psycho Street" off Rumour and Sigh (inspired by the Salman Rushdie affair, but far removed from it by the time it appeared on record) and "Outside of the Inside" off The Old Kit Bag, a haunting, scary track exploring the mindset of Islamic fundamentalists. Those tracks take work but they're more than mere throwaways or protests.

(By the way, all the links to Thompson albums above go to Amazon in the US, and I get a kickback if people buy them, or if they continue to browse from them and buy something else. So you can familiarise yourself with Thompson's work, and supplement my income at the same time! Sounds like a deal to me.)

FCC Song all fucks by Eric Idle.
President's Day by Loudon Wainwright III.

I saw Loudon in concert in Groningen yesterday, and the response then was pretty much the same as at the in-store performance at McCabe's Guitar Shop in Santa Monica, California where this recording was made.

Commentary by Loudon:

Due to its particular timeliness with regard to our nation's impending electoral decision in November, I have made the rather unusual (for me) decision to cast it into the ether of cyberspace, there to be had gratis(*), absolutely free of charge for citizens armed with an MP3 player and a taste for broadside material. It is my sincere hope that those of you who like the song and approve of my plan will assist me in spreading the word about "Presidents' Day" in order to inform and/or inflame any swing voters out there who remain at all ambivalent or apathetic about the current administration and its reckless, dreadful policies.

(*) Indeed, Loudon has made his opinion about MP3 downloading known in the song "Something for Nothing", off the So Damn Happy album he is currently promoting. If you can still see him on his tour, don't miss him.

Today's Rogues of Clwyd-Rhan comic was colored by reader Drooling Fan Girl. Yay for her! She's doing a fine job, staying close to the existing style but putting in her own little touches.
We'll see some more DFG-colored comics in a week or so. She's saving me a lot of work this way so I'm finally getting ahead.

The Cartoonist's Choice Awards are on again, for the fourth time. The first two years I was quite enthusiastic about taking part, using my website to suggest possible nominees as well as asking my own readers to nominate Rogues of Clwyd-Rhan. Last year and this year, though, I don't think I can be arsed, frankly.
Why is this? I don't really know. It's just a feeling I have, but thinking about it:
It may have something to do with the way it creates bad blood in the "Webcomics Community" (as if there is such a thing) each year. There's always a lot of criticism and when I take part I always end up weighing in. Bleah.
Also, there isn't much in it for my own comics. I got a few nominations in the past, but right now, ROCR isn't a fresh comic -- it has become part of the landscape. And nobody nominates the landscape. If it was going to generate a big buzz it would have done so in 2001/2.
Other, newer cartoonists may still want to take part though.

A number of blogs and forums I visit now protect their comment sections with CAPCHAs, form fields in which you have to type a number/letter combination displayed in an image above the field, in order to prove you're a human. Allow me to state three things for the record, so you can laugh at me if I change my mind in a few months or so.

1. I fucking hate them.
2. I expect spammers will find a way to defeat them, whether this will be Chinese slave labor or a clever combination of Bayesian filtering to determine whether a form field may be a CAPCHA and OCR.
3. Consequently, I do not intend to use this technology on this weblog right now.

Recent search terms for the Waffle front page:

With which key words
1. eurovision 3
2. blog 2
3. waffle 2
4. tally 1
5. cronies 1
6. final 1
7. official 1
8. estonian 1
9. semi 1
10. 2004 1

I'll bet the actual search phrase was
"Estonian cronies waffle official Eurovision semi-final tally 2004".

I have upgraded Opera on the studio computer from version 7.23 to 7.50. As usual with Opera, upgrading wasn't nearly as straightforward as it should be, because existing mail, bookmarks etc. have to be manually imported (as did the registration). Also, the interface has had quite an overhaul and it took me some time to make it look the way I was used to on my own account.

Having done those things (and they're not really difficult, just a lot of busy-work), It's nice and quick. I like the addition of an RSS reader in the mail panel, and the chat client, while feeble compared to standalone chat applications, will do in a pinch.

So Jeroen: Don't panic!

One of the aspects of doing a webcomic that I like the least (no, make that loathe with a passion) is the need to constantly mind the websites it appears on. Current status: rocr.keenprime.com (aka rocr.reinderdijkhuis.com) is dead, and unless and until I sit down for a few hours and get my file permissions in order, it won't be revived. Not sure if I can be bothered right now.
rocr.xepher.net is chugging along nicely but few people seem to know about it and it should be seen as strictly a mirror site and home for this blog.
rocr.net has been fairly stable lately, but visitor numbers are slowly slipping. I can think of two reasons (beyond the obvious confusion factor):
1. That damned stroboscopic green card ad that has been showing up in the host's ad system!
2. Keenspace's "no Hotlinking" measure which disallows display of the images to browsers when the referrer string isn't a Keenspace-hosted site. Because some Firewalls (Norton especially) strip the referrer string altogether), many people visiting the site for the first time see a broken site.
I understand the need on Keenspace's part to limit bandwidth theft and protect their ad revenues, but I really don't think this is the way to go about it. It causes the sites hosted by them to make a bad first impression to new readers, and it puts the onus of explaining the problem to readers (those that bother to stick around long enough to look for an explanation, and if you know anything about the habits of web users you'll know that that's a vanishingly small minority) on the site owners, many of whom don't understand the problem themselves. This is a serious problem: like I said, most users will not bother to look for an explanation, and from the point of view of those that will, it's not at all obvious where they should look.
Most users do not, and should not, know who hosts the website they're visiting. There is no reason whatsoever to assume that they will look beyond the site they're already on, or at best the forum or blog for the site they're already on, and make the mental connection that "the answer may be on the Keenspace forums" (which I think it is, but by now it has become pretty hard to find). I have answered queries about this in email, on IRC, on third-party forums that were completely unrelated to Keenspace and in person. I only have a vague idea (unless I can look it up) how to solve it. I can (and really, I should) devote real estate on the website to explain the problem, but really would you accept it if CNN.com said "if you can't see the images, dig into the bowels of your computer and make changes whose effect on your privacy you may not really understand"? You'd have to be pretty fanatically devoted to CNN over ABCNews.com to bother with that crap.
There is another solution which I oughtta implement, which is to create a replacement image that will show up in case of an image block (Keenspace's approach does allow for that), and use that to show the explanation. Still doesn't alter the fact that the host has imposed a solution that other parties have to pick up the slack for.