It’s the end of November and we’re deep into the holiday season. Yes, millions of Americans have begun their slide into the seasonal insanity that’s sparked by the inane corporate Christmas muzak piped into every mall in the country minutes after the clock struck midnight on the last Thursday of this month.

We extend our sympathies to them, because the pain won’t end until the first of January ushers in an 11-month respite from the aural pollution of dogs barking “Jingle Bells”.

In the meantime it’s important to keep the mind occupied, lest thoughts of gleeful mayhem under the mistletoe become hard to ignore. There are a lot of ways to keep the subconscious pinned down, but I find that the planning and execution of practical jokes is the best way to suppress holiday muzak rage.

This works really well, because the best practical jokes aren’t pulled off overnight. Days, weeks, months, or even years may be needed to plan, organize, and execute a really spectacular practical joke. My most recent effort, accomplished earlier this week, really did take several years to pull off.

Known as The Great Pumpkin Caper, it was a truly monumental undertaking that originated, as with all the best ideas, in humble origins.

The Great Pumpkin Caper was born out of a simple desire to fill Timothy’s bedroom with pumpkins. Nothing more, and nothing less. Bedroom, meet pumpkins. Pumpkins, bedroom.

Once the Halloween and Thanksgiving seasons are past there isn’t much use for pumpkins. Thousands of them spend December slowly rotting in fields and providing no entertainment to anyone. Well I’m a steadfast believer in recycling and claiming unwanted goods.

Wednesday afternoon I cruised down to a local farm, loaded up a truckload, a hundred or so pumpkins, and sped North to the Fortified Mountain Compound. Little did Timothy realize, but my frequent checks on his return to the compound this week were all about making certain that he wouldn’t get back before I could finish stacking all those orange globular gourds in his room. I actually spoke with him on the phone while in the middle of the rinsing process early Wednesday evening.

Little did he realize that I was stacking pumpkins on his chair as we spoke.

The key to a good practical joke is the balance between the scale of the prank and the inconvenience caused. The old salt in the sugar shaker gag is a small trick, and more annoying than anything else. It’s also been done before. Wrapping someone’s car in aluminum foil, on the other hand, is eye-catching and inventive enough to balance out the trouble caused.

Filling a room with pumpkins seemed to be one of the latter kind of pranks, when it first came to mind. My only regret is not getting more help from friends. I really could have used another truckload of pumpkins. As it was I only managed to fill his room waist-high.

So, Timothy, as the recipient of this pranking, how do you think it came out?

I’m very proud of the grinning jack-o-lantern, even though its candle had pretty much put itself out by the time that Timothy opened his door.

We’ll have photos of the Great Pumpkin Caper up on the website sometime in the next few days so that our dedicated listening audience can see for themselves what a room waist-deep in pumpkins looks like.

Coincidentally, Timothy and I now happen to have one truckload of slightly used pumpkins. We’re open to suggestions from the listening audience on how to dispose of them in the most entertaining way possible.

It can’t be all entertainment. There’s also news, this news, the Timothy Jordan Show News for the last day of November, the 30th, one month out from the end of ‘07.

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They’re holding Comcast to the fire, but that’s not all they do.

We saw another victory for the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) this week in their epic and ongoing legal battle against the government’s warrantless wiretapping program. On Tuesday a Federal judge in Washington D.C. ordered the Office of the National Director of Intelligence (ONDI) to release all communications between that Office, the major telecommunications companies, and Congress about ongoing changes to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.

As regular listeners know, the current controversy is centered around Bush administration and telecommunications industry requests that the pending intelligence authorization bill include complete and total retroactive immunity for any violations of U.S. law that the companies may have committed while cooperating with the warrantless wiretapping program.

Both the government and the telecoms insist that the program was entirely legal, making it hard to understand why they need protection from the law.

Tuesday’s court victory was related to a Freedom of Information Act request filed by the EFF on August 31st of this year. The request covered all communications between the Director of National Intelligence, the major telecom companies, and Congress about legal immunity for the telecoms between April and September of 2007.

Ten days later the ONDI responded, saying that the request would receive expedited treatment, which is the last that the EFF or anyone else heard. Normally a Freedom of Information Act request requires a response from the agency in question within 20 days. That’s a legally mandated deadline that can only be extended in exceptional circumstances. Expedited treatment, which the request in question clearly deserves, is supposed to mean a kick right to the front of the line.

But four months after filing their original request the EFF asked a D.C. Federal court to take a look to see just what “expedited treatment” really meant to the ONDI.

According to Judge Illston, the, “… agency’s description of its processing methods in this case—which apparently are assigned to a single agent—appear to be wholly inadequate to the task of handling an expedited request, let alone a standard request, on the timely basis required by Congress.”

Yep, that’s right. A single agent to handle an expedited request for documents covering dozens of companies, agencies, and Congressional offices.

The lead intelligence agency told the court in its defense that it was working to preserve the “delicate balance” between disclosure and the protection of classified information.

Judge Illston responded with a legal smackdown in her decision, saying that, “If [the] defendant is truly concerned about achieving the delicate balance required by Congress, it should consider assigning more than one agent to the processing of plaintiff’s requests.”

Oh the sarcasm, sweet, sweet sarcasm.

The order requires that the government provide an initial release of documents before the end of the day today, and to be in full compliance with the expedited FOIA request by the 10th of December.

Congress is set to pass the intelligence authorization bill sometime before the end of the year. Tuesday’s court order means that the public will have a far better sense of the pressure being put on them to provide amnesty to the telecoms is really coming from.

• EFF v. ODNI Order PDF (53KB)

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Congress is also under pressure to maintain funding for the GWoT. The President’s $195 billion request for additional supplemental funding in 2008 is still on hold. If enacted, it would push total war spending to $805 billion, according to the Congressional Research Service.

The year-to-year spending increase is painfully apparent in the most recent Congressional review of the war’s cost. The report indicates that 2008’s funding request is a 20% increase over this year’s, and a 60% increase over 2006 levels.

To get a better sense of what that means, it works out to the U.S. government spending just under $400,000 per pair of boots on the ground in Iraq and Afghanistan. Five soldiers cost two million dollars to keep deployed each and every year.

Looking to the future and assuming gradual troop withdrawals, the largely conservative CRS estimate is that we can look forward to another $783 billion in spending between now and 2017.

Lovely.

• CRS: The Cost of Iraq, Afghanistan, and Other Global
War on Terror Operations Since 9/11 PDF (270.4KB)

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Oh, and in case you missed it, we’re now committing to a permanent presence in Iraq. That’s right. It only seemed as if it was going to go on forever before. Now if the President gets his way, it just might.

The U.S. military, the Air Force in particular, has made no secret of its desire to maintain some permanent bases in Iraq. There’s a lot more room to stretch your wings in a country the size of Texas, like Iraq, than in one that’s better compared to Delaware like Dubai.

Well the entirely independent Iraqi government, undoubtedly without the tiniest touch of encouragement from our own political leadership, signed the U.S.-Iraq Declaration of Principles for Friendship and Cooperation, a document which contains the promise that we’ll be providing, “security assurances and commitments to the Republic of Iraq to deter foreign aggression against Iraq that violates its sovereignty and integrity of its territories, waters, or airspace.”

Absent from the document is any kind of timeline to indicate an expiration date for these commitments of American military personnel.

• U.S.-Iraq Declaration of Principles for Friendship and Cooperation

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But it’s not all bad news in Iraq, these days, right? Aren’t things becoming more peaceful? That’s certainly the theme being promoted by the Bush administration and virtually every one of the major media outlets these days.

It’s almost enough to make a person think that things are improving. Well, they may be, but it’s always relative.

Yes, reports are that violence in Baghdad may be down, but only compared to the chaos of late 2006. Buried in the glowing coverage of an apparent success for the surge are the real levels of violence. We’re being told that violence is down, what we’re not being told is that it’s only diminished from late 2006 levels to late 2005 levels.

The country is still a deadly place to try and live. Late 2005 levels of violence mean that only 460 civilians were killed this month. That number itself bears some further scrutiny. As the LA Times is reporting this afternoon, the reporting of casualty statistics is falling more and more on Iraqi government forces.

If the well-documented problems with U.S. military underreporting of civilian deaths that we’ve covered on this show in the past are any indication, basing our decisions on the reports of an Iraqi military even more dependent on presenting a good public image than our own may be the wildest of follies.

What we know is this: deals have been struck between the U.S. military and former Sunni insurgent organizations. Other deals have been struck between the Iraqi government and their political allies, the Shiite militias.

The Sunni groups were handed guns and legitimacy in exchange for ferreting out the handful of foreign insurgents operating in their territories. The Shiite groups were allowed to quietly wrap up their ethnic cleansing of Baghdad, so long as they put away the heavy weapons. They’ve been less hesitant about beheading women in oh-so peaceful Basra, according to the Aswat Aliraq media group.

And meanwhile, in Iraq’s separatist North, a sovereign Kurdistan becomes more of a reality each and every day.

Yes, there’s a relative moment of peace in Iraq, and Kristin hasn’t blinked in at least fifteen seconds. I’m going to expect that both streaks are going to end sooner or later.

• Iraq Coalition Casualty Count, civilian deaths

• LA Times, Iraq’s numbers don’t add up, U.S. says

• Aswat Aliraq, Women under extremists’ guillotine in Basra

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Speaking of streaks, it’s about time to take off my pants and run naked through the parking lot. But before I traumatize some college students, it’s time for something nearly as excellent.

We’ll start off with the near-excellence this week, which came in abundance.

There was Greenpeace’s effort to raise some money online by holding a name-the-whale contest. With voting open to anyone on the Internet, there were respectable whale names like Shanti, Aurora, Echo, and Humphrey to choose from; but this is the Internet that we’re talking about. It wasn’t even close. The winning name wasn’t Atticus, or Libertad. The winning name was… Mr. Splashy Pants.

With 73% of the vote.

• Greenpeace, Name a whale voting results

Also overwhelmed with the Internet’s affection was Emma Clarke, formerly employed by Transport of London as the voiceover artist behind all those, “Mind the gap” announcements on the Underground. Well she recorded some gag announcements a few weeks ago. Word of the got around thanks to an interview in The Guardian, and then all hell broke loose early Monday morning. Transport of London officials freaked out, she lost her job, and the Internet descended on her website.

The website went from 3,000 hits per day to over 300,000. She hasn’t gotten her job back, but the free publicity can’t be bad for her career.

Let’s play some of those for our listeners, why don’t we?

• Emma Clarke, “What yesterday was like for me”

• Spoof Underground Announcements (mirror)

All impressive, but our winners this week really went above and beyond. They probably should have earned the Award a year ago, but a court victory earlier this week removed all doubt.

The UnterGunther is a group of urban explorers who have devoted themselves to restoring hidden parts of Paris to their former glory. Last year’s project, and the work that has garnered the most attention to date, was their repairs to the Pantheon clock.

The clock had been broken for decades, its gears locked by rust and neglect.

• The UnterGunther

• The Guardian, Undercover restorers fix Paris landmark’s clock

Editor’s note: The text for this section was eaten by a rogue midget. Tune into the podcast for the end of the News. At the end of the show caller also informed us that the Pantheon clock was originally broken by an ax-wielding technician frustrated by having to wind the clock twice per day.

This entry was posted on Friday, November 30th, 2007 at 6:00 pm and is filed under News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.