Blowing up old statues is one thing, but requiring Hindus to wear labels on their clothing is quite another. It’s hard to imagine a more screwed up place than Afghanistan.

Dan Gillmor on Edward Felten’s battle with SDMI and RIAA over his right to publish his research. I know I beat on the DMCA drum a lot, but I find the law so deeply offensive that I find it difficult to pass up any retelling of its perniciousness.

More interesting stuff: Curt Schilling is not only a top flight pitcher, he’s also a publisher of esoteric board games.

File under must be read to be believed: Doug Glanville of the Phillies hits two home runs off Curt Schilling of the Diamonbacks as payback for betrayal in Everquest.

William Shatner as the U.S. version of Chairman Kaga? I don’t know, it kind of works.

An Interesting People reader sent in a first hand account of the runaway train incident in northern Ohio yesterday. Apparently he was in the area and listened to the whole thing on his scanner.

Slate’s Rob Walker on George Shaheen’s severence package from WebVan:

<

blockquote> Bear in mind that shareholder value as a yardstick of CEO success is not something that I made up

You can never read too many times about the evils of Henry Kissinger. When I see a butcher like Kissinger gladhanding with people like Juan Antonio Samaranch at the Olympics, it turns my stomach.

You know, we all scoff at China for giving Wang Wei (the pilot of the fighter that collided with the U.S. surveillance plane) “hero of the revolution” treatment, but I see today that all of the members of the crew of our plane were awarded medals for heroism.

Want a good example about what a fraud the dot com economy was? WebVan owes their former CEO, George Shaheen, $375,000 for the rest of his life. What a scam. They promised a ridiculous amount of money to some incompetent asshole with a nice C.V. so that investors would be impressed and they could wring more filthy lucre out of the stock market in the short term.