When was the last time you walked out of the theater physically worn out from both laughing and being continually surprised by the lengths the filmmakers went to to shock you?

This is one of those films.

Well, that would have to be The Aristocrats, but Borat is better. Whereas The Aristocrats was all talk -- and anyone who's heard it will be glad it was only talk -- Cohen is able to physically inhabit his character, and to embed him in the all-too-real world, replete with its gullible, bigoted people. Whereas The Aristocrats draws its power from an intense focus on one thing -- the eponymous joke, inspected from every possible angle -- Borat is about so many things, and often all of them at once. It frequently overflows with more comedy (slapstick, over the top racial and sexual humor, the deepest, darkest satire you've seen) than you can process, and it is complexly layered in ways that should reward repeat viewing. (You will probably need a few iterations anyway, just to pick up all of the dialogue amidst the belly laughing of your neighbors.)

As an example, most Americans, on their first viewing, will probably interpret the "sack" scene as a simple gag. It is not.

Borat | Premiere Magazine

Even John Kerry likes it!

Sometime in early 2005, a mustachioed Kazakh journalist known as Borat Sagdiyev slipped into America with the intention of making a documentary for the alleged good of his Central Asian nation. Many months later, the funny bruised fruits of his labor, “Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan,” are poised to hit the collective American conscience with a juicy splat. The Minutemen, those self-anointed guardians of American sovereignty, were watching the wrong border.

Among movies currently in theaters, "Borat" is tied for the highest rating (8.5) on cin-o-matic. Here are the top reviews:

E!

Cohen has updated the art of racial satire for a new, troubled world, and Borat is its king.

Rolling Stone

...a mind-blowing comedy classic in the making...

Entertainment Weekly

...scandalously rude and funny...

Chicago Tribune

...a provocative, riotous and multidirectionally offensive comedy...

New York Post

Propelled by Sacha Baron Cohen's genius performance, this proudly offensive mock documentary is a blast of fresh, rude air.

New York Times

The brilliance of Borat is that its comedy is as pitiless as its social satire, and as brainy.

LA Weekly

Wherever Borat goes, Cohen implodes notions of political correctness and leaves you both hurting from laughter and marveling at the fact that he managed to get the movie in the can without getting himself lynched.

Let Borat Be Your Voter Guide!

Fans of great dance music -- from Basement Jaxx and Daft Punk to old-school industrial -- will want to check out Land Shark's new release.

Slated for worldwide release September 12, 2006 the self titled, full length album from Land Shark a.k.a. Lance DeSardi on Coco Machete/OM will shake up any preconceived notions held by fans of all dance, rock, electro and alternative sounds. The Land Shark project is an edgy departure from Lance's previous releases as an underground house music mainstay. Still deeply rooted in dance rhythms, Land Shark takes derailing hard left turns into the sonic realms of industrial, punk and electro.

You'll also find some Land Shark RealAudio here.

From the All Music Guide review:

The music, all down and dirty house, will send the dancefloor into spasms of delight.

"Riot" adds even more funk to the mix and a touch of industrial to further dirty up the sound, and by the time one gets to the uncomfortably catchy "Fear (& Loathing)," it all begins to feel like an adulterous dirty weekend ... so good, at least before the guilt kicks in.

It's one hell of a ride, pulling house down into dark alleys it usually avoids, but De Sardi's careful never to take it too far, carefully balancing the set's sharp, dark edges with enough hypnotic rhythms and slick house styling to carry even the most trepidation-filled listener along the way.

The promo material boasts:

The music itself, drenched in angular synths, gravelly basslines, hypnotic live and electronic drums, defies genrefication, just like the label from which it spawned.

Emusic says:

It's packed with lean, limber dance grooves made more to fill floors than to blow minds. Which is by no means a problem: "Riot" reveals DeSardi's early love of darkwave, "Can You Relate" is taut and tense and "Shake Me" is four and a half minutes of ominous pulse and pound.

Land Shark

Chants of "Down with America" and "Down with Musharraf" rang out as the tribesmen gathered.

The Afghan government hailed the strike on the madrasa and hoped Pakistani forces would continue its militant crackdown.

"We welcome and support this act, and hope that this is the beginning of more such operations," Afghan Defense Ministry spokesman Zahir Azimi told Reuters in Kabul.

Islamist politicians said the attack on the school was really carried out by a US Predator drone aircraft, and the Pakistani army was covering up its acquiescence by claiming responsibility.

Nowhere is Musharraf's alliance with the United States in a war on terrorism more unpopular than in the Pashtun tribal belt straddling the Pakistan-Afghan border.

Pakistani Tribals Seethe Over Airstrike on Madrasa

Interesting.

“We received confirmed intelligence reports that 70 to 80 militants were hiding in a madrasa used as a terrorist-training facility, which was destroyed by an army strike, led by helicopters,” Maj. Gen. Shaukat Sultan, a military spokesman, told The Associated Press.

“This area is not an area where there can be any training camp,” said Qazi Hussain Ahmed, the leader of Jamaat-e-Islami. “This is actually tantamount to a declaration of war on Pakistan.”

Pakistan Says It Killed 80 Militants in Attack on Islamic School

What’s next? That was the subject of a symposium in Washington this month held by the Computer Science and Telecommunications Board, which is part of the National Academies and the nation’s leading advisory board on science and technology. Joseph F. Traub, the board’s chairman and a professor at Columbia University, titled the symposium “2016.”

Computer scientists from academia and companies like I.B.M. and Google discussed topics including social networks, digital imaging, online media and the impact on work and employment. But most talks touched on two broad themes: the impact of computing will go deeper into the sciences and spread more into the social sciences, and policy issues will loom large, as the technology becomes more powerful and more pervasive.

The announcement is here. This is an interesting group: Eric Schmidt, Rick Rashid, Prabhakar Raghavan, Jon Kleinberg, and many more.

Coverage by ACM is here and here.

Computing, 2016: What Won’t Be Possible?

Decius wrote:

There is not one damn thing that is new about Iraq.

Occam's razor suggests that the people of this country just aren't down with the Republicans in the wake of Katrina, and the conservative pundit class is trying to save itself while diverting attention from that issue. I hope that's the answer.

I have two book recommendations for you.

Recently I mentioned Political Fictions ($12 in paperback at Amazon). Over the weekend, I spotted We Tell Ourselves Stories in Order to Live, an Everyman's Library edition of the collected nonfiction of Joan Didion, including Political Fictions. The collection is only $20 in hardcover. From the Publishers Weekly review of PF:

As the title implies, her focus is how the press, think tanks, political strategists and opinion makers conspire to create stories that reflect their biases and serve their own self-interest. Didion's willingness to skewer nearly everyone is one of the pleasures of the book.

This book will offend many Democrats, particularly of the Democratic Leadership Council persuasion, and many more Republicans, but it is members of the press who fare most poorly. To Didion, they are purveyors of fables of their own making, or worse, fables conceived by political strategists with designs on votes, not news.

My other recommendation for today is David Thomson's The New Biographical Dictionary of Film. In particular I would like to quote from the entry on Godard which I reviewed today:

Godard's collected works are an Encyclopedia Cinematografica, the insistence that all things exist only to the extent that they can be expressed in cinema. Godard more than any other director taunts reality. It is not that life imitates art, but that it is all art, all fictional as much as documentary, and it is cinema once any lens -- in camera or eye -- notices it.

Joan Didion and David Thomson | Two Book Recommendations

This work was previously reported on Memestreams back in November 2005, when Markoff wrote about in NYT. There must be some reason why it is being revisited now, but it may not be publicly obvious. One presumes that it came up during the Here's Looking at You... session at Phreaknic. (Is there a slide presentation for that?)

This paper examines the problem of surreptitious Internet interception from the eavesdropper’s point of view. We introduce the notion of ‘fidelity” in digital eavesdropping. In particular, we formalize several kinds of “network noise” that might degrade fidelity, most notably “confusion,” and show that reliable network interception may not be as simple as previously thought or even always possible. Finally, we suggest requirements for “high fidelity” network interception, and show how systems that do not meet these requirements can be vulnerable to countermeasures, which in some cases can be performed entirely by a third party without the cooperation or even knowledge of the communicating parties.

For practical results in real-world systems, see the authors' IEEE article, Signaling Vulnerabilities in Wiretapping Systems, in which this paper is reference #11.

In a separate work [11], we formalized the concepts of evasion and confusion as eavesdropping countermeasures and identified the “eavesdropper’s dilemma” as a fundamental trade-off in certain interception architectures.

The Eavesdropper's Dilemma - Matt Blaze et al... [PDF]

Nearly every night here for the past month, Iraqis weary of the tumult around them have been turning on the television to watch a wacky-looking man with a giant Afro wig and star-shaped glasses deliver the grim news of the day.

Mr. Sudani, the writer, said he has lost hope for his country. Iraq’s leaders are incompetent, he said. He fears that services will never be restored. The American experiment in democracy, he said, was born dead.

All anyone can do, he said, is laugh.

A TV Comedy Turns an Unconventional Weapon on Iraq’s High and Mighty: Fake News

Geoff Huston has prepared a thoughtful essay about Internet routing, based on his participation in a recent IAB workshop on the subject.

I attended a Internet Architecture Board workshop in October 2006 on the topic of routing and addressing, and in this column I'd like to report on the impressions on this topic that I took away from this workshop. I should note at the outset that this is not in any way an official report of the meeting, nor even a report of my impressions of the presentations and the related workshop discussion. This article could best be described as my reactions to what I heard at this workshop and what I think they might imply in the area of routing and addressing.

... as we look forward some rather tough questions tend to reveal themselves.

The published report on the 1998 workshop is RFC 2902.

W[h]ither Routing? Geoff Huston on the IAB Routing Workshop