As we mentioned back here, most people pick too-easy passwords for the many places on Ye Olde Internet where they need one. It seems to me that this will often be the case when you're trying to come up with one that you can remember. Yes, it's possible to think of one that would be hard for a person (or of greater threat, a computer program) to guess...but you should also use different passwords on every or nearly every site.
All of that made me decide I should, first of all, forget about trying to remember passwords. I just now use a different one for every place I need one and I don't try to keep them all in my mind. I keep them in Roboform, which is a fine program that stores your passwords, credit card info and other data. They have a pay version and a free version...and frankly, the free one isn't much good except for testing it out on your system and, if you like it, upgrading to the one that costs cash. But even then, it's only thirty bucks.
I've directed my Roboform to store all its sensitive data on a flash drive I keep plugged into a USB port. I can take it out of the computer and carry it with me...and when I do, my passwords and such aren't even on my computer. If you do this, it might be a good idea to back the flash drive up to something else...which I do.
So what about the passwords? I just use gibberish. You can generate your own like this: gfuir9u or vrfe5ori or cf984Nfd but it's easier to use GRC's Ultra High Security Password Generator. It's free and you can add it to your browser toolbar so you can access it immediately whenever you need a new password. If a site requires one of 8-12 letters, I just zip over to the U.H.S.P.G. and copy 8-12 letters off whatever they've generated for me. Couldn't be easier...or as I like to think of it, couldn't be 1jokwdT!
Above is a photo of the DeMille Barn, so called because Cecil B. DeMille shot The Squaw Man in it in 1913 and many other films followed. It was not then located where it is now. It was at Selma and Vine and later, to preserve such an important relic of Hollywood history, it was moved to several different pieces of real estate and it also changed owners a few times. In 1983, a group called Hollywood Heritage acquired the place and stuck it in its current whereabouts, which is on Highland Avenue in a lot where people park to go to the Hollywood Bowl. Inside, Hollywood Heritage operates a small museum that you can read about on their website.
This afternoon, I went up there to speak at "An Afternoon of Remembrance," which is an annual event put on by the animation community. The Animation Guild, ASIFA and Women in Animation all stage this ceremony, which is kind of like a gang memorial service for everyone in the cartoon biz who died the previous year. A little tribute speech is delivered about each person and some speakers talk about more than one person. I was there to memorialize Greg Burson, Steve Gerber and Harvey Korman.
I was fortunate they were all friends whose last names began with letters in the first half of the alphabet. The ceremony goes (mostly) in alphabetical order, starting today with John Ahern, and there were 54 names to get through. The speeches are supposed to last no more than three minutes each but...well, I got there at 1:15 for the milling and refreshments. Eulogizing commenced a little after 2:00 and I departed at 4:15, which was how long it took to get to the late Mr. Korman. If I'd stayed to speak about Dave Stevens, I might literally still be there. Fortunately, Bill Stout came in to handle that.
Korman was #26 on the list. There was a 15-minute intermission just before we did him so figure 13 speeches per hour. To get through 54 people could take more than four hours. But since most in the audience are there to speak and since many leave after they're done speaking, the crowd thins out. The place was half empty by the time I had to go. I doubt there were many there to hear the tributes to the fallen whose surnames begin with "W," which makes me feel bad for their friends and any family members who might have attended.
To my friends in the animation community, I want to say: Let's stop doing this. I absolutely appreciate the respect for the deceased and their contributions to cartoon-making but there's got to be a better idea. Most of us show up because we feel obligated. I would have felt terrible if there'd been no one who knew them well who could speak for Burson or Gerber. I did feel bad about having to leave when I did and not hear L-Z but (a) I had other responsibilities and (b) I couldn't sit for four hours and listen to people talk about how great I was, let alone about other people. Let's think of another way to honor these folks...please?
A couple of folks who read the previous posting have written to ask me what a rape case has to do with the Death Penalty since, after all, they usually don't sentence someone to die for the crime of rape.
I thought it was obvious but just in case others are wondering: A court system that could send an innocent man to prison for 25 years for rape or any other crime is a court system that could send an innocent man to the gas chamber. The Innocence Project, which is not the only group doing this kind of thing, has notched 232 post-conviction DNA exonerations in the United States since they began doing this in 1989. That includes seventeen who had served time on Death Row.
No one expects a Zero Defect System in our courts but I think a lot of folks have their heads in the sand over how often judges and juries put the wrong person behind bars. At the very least, there needs to be more willingness by officials to investigate and admit error. Jerry Johnson was telling people for years that he, not Timothy Cole, had committed the rape for which Cole was convicted. That's the kind of thing that can be fixed.
I've just been reading a number of news stories on an amazing DNA "innocence" case down in Texas. And with this one, you kind of have to read a number of them because no one report seems to have all the maddening details in full. Here's one and here's one and here's one and now I'll try to summarize the whole ugly tale for you...
In the mid-eighties, a sicko who some called "The Tech Rapist" was terrorizing young women at Texas Tech University in Lubbock, Texas. It was assumed he'd been caught and his career ended when a young man named Timothy Cole was convicted of the 1985 rape of a 20-year-old woman. The woman identified him from a police lineup but Cole maintained his innocence, pointing out (among other things) that the victim described her assailant as a heavy smoker. Cole had terrible asthma and didn't/couldn't smoke.
In court, Cole's lawyer tried to suggest that another man, a fellow named Jerry Johnson, was the actual guilty party. The victim's i.d. was too compelling, however, and Cole was convicted and sentenced to 25 years in prison. He was offered one of those plea bargain deals where he could get probation if he confessed but he refused, insisting he was not going to say he'd raped someone when he hadn't.
In 1995, Johnson began confessing to the rape. In fact, he repeatedly told authorities he'd done it but no one paid any attention to him even though he had a history of similar crimes. Indeed, DNA testing would later prove that he, not Cole, was the rapist...proof that came too late to help Timothy Cole. In 1999, Cole died in prison from heart problems related to his asthma. Last Friday, a judge said, "I find to a 100 percent moral, factual and reasonable certainty that Timothy Cole did not sexually assault [the student]" and he ordered Cole's name cleared. It's a nice gesture but a little tardy, don't you think?
How many things went wrong in this case and how often do they go wrong, individually or collectively, in others? The victim identifying the wrong man is the least of it. There's no way to prevent that from happening but then we have the situation where Cole was basically told, "If you admit you did it, you'll get out of prison and if you insist you didn't, you'll stay there for a long time." That's a horrible choice for him and a horrible choice for society. But I guess it does make the prosecutors' lives easier when someone confesses. So the accused have to be given some incentive to do that whether they're guilty or not.
A lie would have gotten him out but standing by the truth put and kept Timothy Cole in prison. Then along comes a convicted sex offender...one who had also been a suspect in the case so it's not like he was some stranger who was nowhere near the scene of the crime. He says, "Cole didn't do it...I did" and the authorities ignore him. Could that have had anything to do with the fact that it's embarrassing to admit you put an innocent man in prison? That it's easier to pretend that other confession couldn't be legit and to hope it will just go away? One might even suspect that when you have a serial rapist around, there's great pressure on law enforcement to make an arrest...so maybe they were a wee bit hasty to pin it all on Cole and once they had, they couldn't go back.
My friend Roger and I sometimes debate the Death Penalty, which I'm largely against because I think our judicial system is too inefficient to be trusted with that power. Roger's attitude is that even if the wrong guy is occasionally convicted and executed, that's no great injustice because the kind of person who winds up wrongly on Death Row is the kind of person who's probably guilty of something else heinous, anyway. Still, of this case, I don't think even he'd say, "Well, how do we know Timothy Cole didn't rape someone else?" He'll more likely say, "No system is ever going to be perfect. This kind of thing is going to happen once in a while." I suspect "once in a while" occurs a lot more often than any of us might like to think.
As you may have figured out from this website, there's darn near nothing I like better on a movie or TV screen than the finer exploits of Mr. Stan Laurel and Mr. Oliver Hardy. Today's video link, however, is not a Laurel and Hardy comedy even though it's often mistaken for one. Matter of fact, the people at Veoh, who host this treasure on their website, don't seem to know the difference.
This is The Paperhanger's Helper, starring Oliver "Babe" Hardy and Bobby Ray, originally released under the title, Stick Around. It was shot by a Hollywood studio called Arrow Films and came out in March of 1925. By the time it was released, Hardy had finished another film or two for Arrow with Ray, then moved over to work for the Hal Roach Studio. There, the following year, he teamed with Mr. Laurel and...well, you know what happened. On several occasions, Hardy would cite The Paperhanger's Helper as a kind of foreshadowing of his on-screen work with Stan. You can see a lot of the Ollie/Stan relationship in it, and some who've studied such things say this is the first film in which Hardy does his famous long-suffering stares into the camera lens. The two men are even wearing derbies.
Many versions of this film abound, including one common one with titles that say the other guy is Laurel. (Some sources, by the way, will tell you this was from 1915. They're wrong about that, too.) Embedded below is a print just shy of nine minutes. It came from the legendary Castle Films home movie company, complete with their title cards and a music score that they probably added. Take a gander...
February 8, 2009
