Kindle is a device put out by Amazon in early 2008 that runs about $300 and because of a free wireless connection allows for the downloading of books, magazines, and newspapers online to the device. Pretty slick thing, and if you read (and travel) a lot (and buy books) and don’t want to haul 10 pounds of paper around the world plus are still dealing with the post-Katrina difficulty of getting newspaper delivery for the Times and WSJ (though I’ve now just gone on-line with both and learned to like it), it seemed an easily amortized bargain at the time, so this was one of the few areas in which I found myself a first wave early adopter of a new tech thing for the first time.
Looking on Steve’s kindle blog he had a button about free books, so irresistibly I clicked onto it.  Wow!  Seems there are almost 7500 free books!  Going through the first couple hundred entries, I was amazed.  I suspected a bunch of harlequin garbage or something.  Wrong!  It was a treasure trove of classics, probably long out of copyright, that anyone would want – ok, that I would want – in any good electronic library or any library at all.
There were fictional works by Mark Twain, Jack London, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Robert Lewis Stevenson, Lewis Carroll, Edith Wharton, Arthur Conan Doyle, Virginia Wolff, T. E. Lawrence, Henry James, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and on and on and on.  I also found Plato, Aristotle, Adam Smith, Machiavelli, de Tocqueville, Charles Darwin, Karl Marx, Henry David Thoreau, and more!  A hundred of such titles that could liven up hundreds of hours on a plane or elsewhere and the Kindle becomes a huge bargain, but it’s less about the Kindle and more about how to make electronic books accessible at low or no cost to anyone with a computer and an internet connection.
What a treasure trove and an opportunity!

A local, activist lawyer, Tracie Washington, filed a freedom of information (FOIA) request for the emails of the city council members on the public server. She was actually given these records by the head of the Sanitation

Department in sort of an “end around” play that had the City Attorney fuming since it went around him. Nonetheless nothing illegal there in having a city department head comply with a proper FOIA request. But, then all heck broke loose as the City Attorney and the Council wanted to block Washington from putting up the emails on her website for public perusal, because they wanted to make sure there was nothing confidential or harmful to the city’s (public?) interest.

Courts went back and forth recently on the issue. First, one said no, then the state district court of appeals said, yes, on Tuesday. Late on Wednesday the Louisiana Supreme Court stayed the order, but not before Washington’s people put up a couple of the emails on their site.

The three that went up were from first (and hopefully last) term Councilwoman Stacy Head. The Times-Picayune report said that the emails posted clearly were chosen to embarrass Head, but until all of them are eventually up, we New Orleanians have no idea if that was hard to do or not.

The e-mails are case studies in hateration, as they call it down here. She has a visceral attack on food stamp recipients (blackberry no doubt, Marc) because she resented standing in line behind some of them in the grocery store. She takes a couple of foul-mouthed swipes at another councilwoman, Jackie Clarkson, who may or may not have deserved it, and does so in an email to Shelly Midura, another councilwoman, implicating her in this chatty barrage. The other one that was published was an attack on Jerome Smith, the well regarded former SNCC organizer and head of Tambourine and Fan in New Orleans, who she accused of racism for absolutely no good reason in a dustup some months ago.

You get the message, huh? It’s not just that Head obviously has to go. It’s also that even if you can’t serve us well as citizens of this great and damaged city, at least have the judgment to put your hands in your pockets or jacket and don’t let us know what kind of nasty and evil person you are in real life. Enduring some of these folks as public servants is bad enough. Why inflict us with even more!