Foxy lady.

I just downloaded Firefox 3.5, and I already love it. I never made the switch to Chrome or Safari, partly out of inertia, but mostly because of the huge array of available add-ons. Since I haven’t done a list in a while, here’s my list of nerdery:

• Adblock plus. No more of those stupid dancing-woman ads for mortgages or shitty diploma mills.
• Better Gmail 2. This is one of my favorite add-ons. In addition to little things like highlighting the email you’ve moused over, it includes the truly outstanding Folders4Gmail, which allows you to create hierarchical (nested) labels. Doesn’t require a separate Greasemonkey install.
• Forecastfox. Since I’m on a PC at work, I don’t have a handy little weather widget. Or should I say… I didn’t, until I found this. Has options for multiple areas.
• Various PageRank checkers. I used Live PageRank, but they don’t have a version for FF3.5 yet. Currently using SearchStatus, which is more fully-featured.
• Ubiquity. Get this. I’m not even kidding. This is the first thing that gets added to any FF install. It’s a command-line type interface that lets you do just about anything you want, including:
  • Search Google, Wikipedia, Youtube, Google Maps, Flickr, Yelp, Weather.com, Yahoo (how far you’ve fallen, Yahoo), Amazon, and probably a bunch more.
  • Tweet, Digg, StumbleUpon or create TinyURLs.
  • Send email in Gmail. Yep. You can highlight some text on a page, or the url bar, then type ‘email this to martin’ and, hey presto, I just got some email.
  • Translate selections or pages.

“The King stay the King.”

So. Michael Jackson is dead. No doubt, he had one of the all-time great runs with the Jackson 5, Off the Wall and Thriller (update: forgot Bad), but it would’ve been a tragedy maybe…twenty years ago? Twenty-five? Maybe I’m just heartless, but I can’t get worked up over a celebrity’s death.

On the other hand, I didn’t know Michael was awarded a patent for the anti-gravity lean.

(Yes, the title is another gratuitous reference to The Wire.)

MicroKhan on the Supreme Leader.

Brendan Koerner tackles the mess in Iran. The emphasis is mine, because I think it gets at why this struggle has affected me so strongly:

I can’t shake the Iran story because the country is so integral to one of my formative memories: The 1979-80 hostage crisis at the American embassy in Tehran. I was five years old at the time, and had obviously never heard of Iran before. But when I saw terrifying newspaper photographs like the one above, I could only conclude that the nation was a sinister place, as dark and foreboding as fairy-tale forests. And when first impressions are made in a child’s mind, they can be tough to shake.
[...]
To see the streets of Tehran flooded with people demanding a most basic right—that their leaders live up to a sacred promise—has been a somewhat overwhelming emotional experience for me—even more so than watching the Berlin Wall crumble.
[...]
Even though Iran will be irrevocably changed by the events of the past few days, linear progress is far from guaranteed. Tyranny does not melt away easily, because those who enforce it are so scared of change, of the unknown.

Sort of like five-year-olds, come to think of it. The future does not belong to them.

You motherfuckers.

The photos, tweets, blogs and stories coming out of Iran are beyond enraging. The BBC has confirmed that at least one man has been murdered, and initial signs are pointing at riot police and the Basij, a loosely-controlled paramilitary force “active in monitoring the activities of citizens.” niacINsight reports that

“Reliable news from Iran has arrived that after the death of one person by Basij, the Basij base in Azadi Sq. has been burned down and the commander in that base has been killed.” [The fire is being confirmed by an eye-witness.]

Below, some shots from the Big Picture. You really need to see the full set. More…

“Iran has a bright future, with so many young people getting involved.”

If you haven’t been following Iran’s election results, I suggest you do so. TPM and Andrew Sullivan have been covering the story in-depth, much better than the mainstream media, blah blah blah blogs are great.

But if you don’t want to wade into all that, here’s Laura Secor’s one-stop NYer story:

There can be no question that the June 12, 2009 Iranian presidential election was stolen. Dissident employees of the Interior Ministry, which is under the control of President Ahmadinejad and is responsible for the mechanics of the polling and counting of votes, have reportedly issued an open letter saying as much.
[...]
What is most shocking is not the fraud itself, but that it was brazen and entirely without pretext.