You’re an Egyptian guy who happens to be in a Manhattan hotel room on 9/11. The hotel is evacuated, and someone finds an airplane radio in your closet.

The FBI takes you and questions you. You don’t know where the radio came from… It’s not yours. The FBI forces a confession out of you by threatening to send your family to Egypt to be tortured. You confess to being involved in 9/11 in order to spare your family.

Then the airline pilot shows up at the hotel and asks where his radio is.

You sue the FBI. There’s a ruling in your favor. The court publishes an opinion about it. But a little while later, some ‘blogger writes about it. Suddenly, the opinion disappears from the court’s web site, and is later replaced with the information about the coerced interrogation redacted.

This is a true story. Follow the link for both versions of the opinion.

Take away: The FBI can coerce a confession out of you and then cause the records of this wrongdoing to be removed from the public record, because apparently illegal activity on the part of the FBI is top secret.

This is all inspired by a Google search for “ninja of the obvious,” which only yields three results. I thought I had coined the phrase. O well, o superman… But one of the results was a discussion of whether ‘O Superman’ was a classic or a dud. I vote classic. One of the commentors links to a subjective annotation of the song’s lyrics. Another commenter says this:

I remember in fourth grade, for P.E. class, we had to make up some sort of dance and perform it in front of the class (no, I don’t understand it either — maybe they were just trying to see if they could somehow make P.E. even more embarrassing?) and I did mine to “Born, Never Asked”. I think that officially makes me the dorkiest fourth-grader ever.

Awwwww….

(Note that during the exhaustive research required for this ‘blog entry, I discovered what ‘Superman that ho’ means. It amazes me how specialized sexual euphemism can be.)

I live here now. W00t. It’s on Book Island.

Come on by and click my notecard giver. It’s fun.

(Obviously it’s still under construction.)

Note that the first minute or so of this first video is probably bad for epileptics.

Like Stump, except with laptops.

They sample their guitars and then play them on keyboards. Crazy.

This is from two summers ago (now that summer is over).

I’m recycling.

I went to church today. Sort of.

The cat woke me up. I fed the pets (that’s a whole story unto itself). Logged in to SL to see what happens there on a Sunday morning. Well….

You can get a free poser object that animates your avatar to do various worship moves. Such as holding up your hands and waving them. Today’s sermon: SUPERNATURAL. Woo woo. The sermon is piped in from a real church over a video feed. The real church is lifechurch.tv, which has ‘campuses’ all over the country.

I was there pretty early, and I had a chat with the greeter. I said I was mostly curious about how religion played out in Second Life, and he said, “We don’t do religion here.” This is an important theological point for these folks: They say they’re not religious, because Jesus already died for their sins. Religion, says Mr. Greeter, is about what should be done, whereas Jesus is about what’s already been done.

I didn’t want to get into a theological discussion, really, so I just hung out for a while. The Christian rock band played for a while, and the sermon started.

Hmm. Texturemapped cleavage in the sanctuary.

This got me wondering about other SL churches. I’d already explored some of the Buddhist stuff and newagey places (they’re a dime a dozen, as are discussion groups about ‘spiritual warfare’ and personal development). So searching, we get to ALM CyberChurch.

ALM CyberChurch has a little more, ah, adventurous architecture going on. And when you teleport in, this is the message you receive:

Greeter: Please note, for your safety and peaceful stay here, we reserve the right to monitor and log all activity. None of your interactions will be shared with any third parties nor will be publicly viewable. Thank you for helping to make Truth a wonderful place to stay.

Big Jesus Is Watching You. At least they’re up-front about it. Unfortunately, however, the logging system was broken, so that any time anyone said anything, they got a whole screenful of messed-up HTML.

CyberChurch also has a kiosk that dispenses Bibles. I got one. You ask it for scripture and it tells you. I was hoping it would be a big ol’ leather-bound book object with included thumping animation, but no such luck.

Meanwhile, the Unitarians have their own island, too….

I could hang out here. Maybe a little too heavy on the fake plants and chirping birds, but still.

Church Of The Living God has a baptismal font. The big bathtub looking thing in front is the font. The brown balls floating in it are poseballs, which animate your avatar.

The theological implications of avatar baptism make one’s head spin.

Anyway. Wherever two are gathered, or whatever.

Your heart, trapped in barbed wire or maybe open breathing fresh and radiant. Your heart speaks and mumbles and shouts and grunts and, well, sex noises. You know.

Your heart whispers and you bend over to hear and it’s still quiet and you don’t know what else to do. Your heart is speaking barely more than a breath a sigh fog on a mirror.

Lean in, close your eyes, cup your hands, listen. Tell everyone else to shut up, you’re trying to hear. Take your heart to a quiet place, still can’t hear. Take it to a quieter place, almost, not quite. Take it someplace quieter still.

You wonder why I’m telling you to do this.

Listening to your heart, quieter, the faintest touch of a sound, the smallest sound you ever tried to hold in your hands without crushing, delicate.

Your heart is speaking. It’s telling you how a song goes. It remembers a song from a long time ago, and it’s trying to remember the chorus. Oh yeah, that tune, the one where.. Wait… Which one again? The chorus, the chorus.. It had something about… Man. Man. I wish I could remember.

Your heart can’t remember the song, though it’s trying. Maybe from that AM transistor radio you had when you were ten. You’d switch stations all the time just to feel the knob under your fingers and hear that khrick splazzle spit shtrong of between stations. That’s not the song your heart is trying to remember.

Listen.. Listen…. No static..

It’s remembering, and the song is there. Pure and sweet and loud. Yeah, that song. Yeah! It’s all coming back. Like yesterday, like ten minutes ago, all there, available. How could you have forgotten?

Please. Please do me this favor:

Sing that song to me.

Jesus. And then, of course, more clones after that.

I just answered this Featured Question, you can answer it too!

They don’t know what else to do.

I just answered this Featured Question, you can answer it too!

Just keeping this close-by.