I read some of "The Adventures of Tom Sawyer"

Catalyzed by a scheduled getaway with mom and sister to Hannibal, MO, Mark Twain's (Samuel Langhorne Clemens) boyhood town, this week, I'm reading the Adventures of Tom Sawyer and the writing is blowing me away. I want to buy 9 copies for the young people in my life. The writing so entertains my mind and triggers images of the author contemplating each paragraph for a whole morning at his desk and how he could most creatively and humorously, with metaphors and adult-life reference points, present the mood and energy of seemingly simple boyhood pleasures and antics. Here he talks about Tom's new whistling skill:

[His] new interest was a valued novelty in whistling, which he had just acquired from a Negro, and he was suffering to practise it undisturbed. It consisted in a peculiar bird-like turn, a sort of liquid warble, produced by touching the tongue to the roof of the mouth at short intervals in the midst of the music. The reader probably remembers how to do it if he has ever been a boy. Diligence and attention soon gave him the knack of it, and he strode down the street with his mouth full of harmony and his soul full of gratitude. He felt much as an astronomer feels who has discovered a new planet. No doubt as far as strong, deep, unalloyed pleasure is concerned, th advantage was with the boy, not the astronomer.

Spam, a little history

Spam. It’s Hormel’s SPicey hAM product popularized after being distributed to every American soldier in WWII but became the moniker of unsolicited emails after a Monty Python skit in 1970 in which diners, trying to order something from the menu that has no Spam, is overpowered by a group of Vikings in the background chanting Spam! Spam! Spam! As the short order cook tells them to shut up. See this video on You Tube.

In 1994, a couple lawyers started the spam craze when they made $100,000 on 1000 clients by sending a mass email to millions offering services to help get immigrants into the country. Their internet service providers (back then there were a lot of individual ISPs, I remember) disowned them - cancelled their accounts. The community was so incensed by the inappropriate use of the web, a techno-faux pas. They proceeded to write a book about it.

What’s a botnet? In 2003, the Sobig virus was sent out, designed to embed code into machines that enabled it to send millions of emails (turning it into a pseudo network). The infected PCs called zombies or slaves linked together in a sort of network (botnet) controlled by folk somewhere in the world.

So, easy-to-guess passwords on your wireless network can make you vulnerable to getting spam-making viruses or virus-sending spam. Cruising the net and clicking on infected websites can trigger a “drive-by download” of a virus to your computer, then find address books and send itself to all your contacts!

2003 was the year they passed the CAN-SPAM act –Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography And Marketing. The bill permits e-mail marketers to send unsolicited commercial e-mail as long as it adheres to 3 basic types of compliance: unsubscribe, content and sending behavior. In May 2008, two spammers were convicted and sentenced to pay $234M to MySpace in damages under the CAN-SPAM act.

Did you know that in 2007 (I read about this in the August 2007 New Yorker magazine article by Michael Specter) Microsoft Hotmail had 285M accounts which were all filtered for Spam (in this case I should call it spam, no capital S) plus 130,000 special email accounts designed to trap and examine suspicious email? some designed to function as “honeypots” that receive emails and determine the source’s internet address after the sender thinks they have successfully infected it…

Billions of dollars a year are spent to filter/examine spam. USA today (Dec 2009) says spam accounts for 88% of all e-mails. Image spam was the latest thing… computers have an easier time filtering for text than for images, because computers can’t see, and images have a lot more data to look through…

Ok this blog entry is long enough.

Cattle Rustling in Karamoja

Karamoja is the dryest, poorest part of Uganda - with 80% illiteracy rate - in NE Uganda on the border with Kenya. Karimojong are the people - nomadic pastoralists competing across the Kenyan border with the Turkana nomadic pastoralists. Both rustle cattle across the border, a practice sometimes ritualized as a way to manhood, but fraught with violence as many gun-carrying men protect their herds which represent their wealth and symbolize their power in society. Kotido and Moroto make up the political area of Karamoja. Pastoralists from Kotido raid Kitgum to the east. Raiders from Sudan go into Kitgum. Raiders from Kenya (the Turkana) go into Kotido and Kitgum, and those guys go over to Kenya. These cows travel a lot. They bring diseases with them, foot and mouth disease is one.

Karimojong have had the belief that cattle naturally belongs to them so they can take more. In the 1980s they acquired guns from unhappy national army soldiers, and so began the gun culture. All this raiding brings a big demand for guns, so the Turkana, Karimojong and Sudanese are expert arms dealers specializing in inexpensive guns. They are expert marksmen too.

They don't want to wear western clothing but Idi Amin tried to make them. In 1972 Amin had 200 Karimojong shot for choosing not to wear western clothing. Now they wear sarong things, and army jackets I read somewhere.

The "Magoro accord" was sealed back in 1998 between Karimojong and the neighboring Teso tribe. If you kill someone in a raid and people find out, the government will take 60 of your cattle and give it to the victim's clan.

In June 2009, the Ugandan army sent out some troops as the cattle anti-theft force to protect the border between Kitgum and Kotido, and protect Kitgum from Sudanese too.

NY times story from 1991

Amazing timeline of Gun History in Karamoja