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Tuxedo and brown shoes
That pretty much sucks. What was that old "Lonesome George" Gobel quip to Johnny Carson from years back, after following Bob Hope and Dean Martin on the Tonight Show: "Did you ever get the feeling that the world was a tuxedo and you were a pair of brown shoes?"

Then again, it could have been worse. For an even more appalling nightmare, try read George Ou's recent experience over at Stanford. Ouch.

From Ou's blog site: http://www.formortals.com/

FCC hearings at Stanford

The hearings at Stanford on Thursday was probably one of the most hostile and uncivilized crowd you can expect and it was sad to see such a circus act. I didn?t feel too good about my presentation and missed a lot of key points since I was somewhat rattled and veered off my own script in my hands. Despite knowing what I might be in for given Richard Bennett's experience, I still got rattled and panicked a bit when the Commissioner skipped over me and then spent valuable time to apologize while my measly 5 minute clock was ticking. Before I could finish introducing my name, the "Raging Grannies" started to shout me down screaming "WHO PAID YOUR WAY GEORGE!" when I've never taken money for any political activities from anyone in my entire life. Maybe I need to grow some thicker skin but I was bothered by the raging grannies who didn't even know who I was and shouldn't have had any beef with me other than the fact that someone told them that they should shout me down.

I was disappointed by the audience because I thought surely that law students and other Stanford students would be there since this was such an elite institution of higher learning. I thought surely these kids would be interested in an FCC hearing and even if they were going to come in with a bias, at least they would try to listen to an honest debate. But other than one Stanford Grad Student I saw and spoke to, what you had were a bunch of people who basically had their cue to cheer and their cue to boo and they already knew to shout down George Ou right off the bat. By the end of the day during public comments, half of the people were from Poor Magazine and they all went on to vent their rage at something or anything corporate or America. One guy indicated that he wanted to injure the economist on the second panel while another pleaded with the FCC to stop the defense department from implementing the secret Internet2 project designed to give the military control of the Internet. Maybe my expectations were a little unrealistic and overly romanticized, but this was downright ridiculous.

Even more ridiculous was Larry Lessig's excruciating 50 minute circus act of an "opening speech" which single handedly eliminating nearly all of our break session. Lessig pulled all the stops including one word at a time slides running many hundred slides long and the usual misleading and inflammatory statements that "Verizon blocked text messages" when no text messages were ever blocked. Verizon merely had a one day bureaucratic snafu in approving a 5-digit short code phone number for abortion rights group NARAL and they quickly apologized but people like Larry Lessig and Tim Wu continue to mislead the public that text messages were blocked. Lessig (Stanford Professor), Harold Feld from Media access, Rob Topolski (Software Quality Assurance Engineer), and Barbara van Schewick (Stanford Professor) when on forever during the panel while Brett Glass and myself got cut off.
Posted by: klumper   Posted on: 05/22/08 You are currently: a Guest | Members login | Terms of Use
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Tuxedo and brown shoes  klumper | 05/22/08

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