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August 20, 2003

Snowball We Hardly Knew Ye

Some interesting things float to the top at Technorati sometimes, including this 63-year-old report on the assassination of Leon Trotsky:

"According to the police Johnson had a small pickaxe, of the type used by Boy Scouts, hidden in his trousers. He is alleged to have attacked Trotsky suddenly, battering his skull and injuring his right shoulder and right knee. According to one of this bodyguards Trotsky's last words before he became unconscious were 'I think Stalin has finished the job he has started.'"

"Who'd care about dumb old Trotsky being dead?" you ask? Here's a report on one group that still seems to.

Personal Note: I think my vision has mostly recovered. The only discernible side effect to the pupil dilation is a sudden awareness of the refresh rate of my monitor, which still looks like a freaking disco strobe. Much thanks to everyone who wrote in with advice and kind wishes: it's a lonely struggle here at PuddingTime!, but with the help of our legions of readers, we'll continue the hard but rewarding work of making sure you know everything we do as we come to know it, which we continued even as we sat in the dimmed lights of the study, fighting back the tears beneath two layers of polarized glasses and gauze strips that did little to keep the salty drops from trailing off our cheeks and down onto our hard, washboard abs, which rippled suggestively as we playfully stroked our mouse and caressed the keyboard.

In other news, the SCO suit is finally put in proper perspective. One of my newer gigs involves doing a quick rundown of the SCO flap now and then, which requires me to adopt a "long view" voice and act like everybody's to be taken seriously in this little affair. When SCO busts out stuff like "the GPL isn't valid anyhow," though, I get irritated. Figuring out how to express that irritation will be a preoccupation for this week's column, which will likely represent a distillation of twenty pages worth of writing related to copyright law and the GPL (PDF, ~70kb) down to a few hundred words: enough to maybe convince some of the suits out there in IT-land who still think Linux is an illegal file-sharing program written by Marxists that SCO's crazy... without calling SCO crazy.