Metadata

Logging on

It may have crossed the curiosity of some souls that the Trumparians have discovered their ‘October surprise’.

It was intended to be the hard-drive from a MacBook that came from the Delaware repair shop of Mr John Paul MacIsaac. Legend, and the ever-unreliable Murdoch scandal-sheet, The New York Post, maintained this hard-drive contains every possible kind of dirt on Hunter Biden.

The only claimed link to anything Biden was a sticker on the MacBook.

To nobody’s great bestaggerment, Mr MacIsaac is a committed enthusiast for President Trump. As has been Rupert Murdoch. Already some kind of pattern seems to show.

Connections

Somehow, after many months, the damaged hard-drive was duplicated by MacIsaac, who then proceeded to sit on the business until December 2019. This duplicate was passed, as one does, to Robert Costello. Who he? — well, lawyer to Rudy Giuliani, ex-Mayor of NYC, and a close associate of @the real DonaldTrump. The pattern persists.

The ‘chain of evidence’ (who passed what to whom) involves ever-present Steve Bannon — who, lest we forget — is under Federal indictment for fraud.

Confusions

If there wasn’t enough ordure already, how the NYPost published the non-story is also whiffy.

The names on the piece are Emma-Jo Morris and Gabrielle Fonrouge, but the NYTimes suggests the actual writers refused to by-line the item. Said Emma-Jo made her very first appearance as a credited writer for the Post with this piece. Her previous was with the Hannity support team at FoxNews.

Nor do we have the originals of any ‘smoking gun’ emails. Hizzoner Giuliani has kept these close to his bosom. What the Post got, and published were .pdfs made in September and October 2019 — long after the hard-drive came into the keeping of Mr MacIsaac. There’s a further oddity, because secreted in the metadata is at least one Russian term — where we might expect the language to be Ukrainian.

Recursion

I may not be up-to-speed on how to access a dodgy hard-drive (if all else fails, I drive a six-inch nail through the platter before disposal). The kindest thing that can be said about this Biden email froth is to call it ‘dubious‘, and then to look at the ‘chain of evidence’ As the NYTimes says:
The Post report described a circuitous and unusual path by which the newspaper had obtained the email correspondence that involved two of Mr. Trump’s staunchest allies: Rudolph W. Giuliani, the president’s personal lawyer and a former New York City mayor, and Stephen K. Bannon, a former White House adviser.​

So, to tick the boxes about ‘propensity’, that’s one guy who has been futilely touting this kind of smear for a couple of years (even though Senate Republicans found no evidence that Biden Snr. was in on Biden Jnr.’s Ukrainian business) and another guy under a federal charge of fraud. Nor are we any too clear how the information got from Mr MacIsaac to Hizzoner Giuliani — or why it took so long, over a year, or why it pops up, conveniently, three weeks before the Election, and penned by a very right-wing, neophyte journalist in a Rupert Murdoch tabloid. Nor, yet again, with so many dubieties, it is so wrong for a responsible social-media operation to hesitate.

Which is why ‘metadata’ is the header here.

When I raised the notion of ‘metadata’ on politics.ie, I was told it was a ‘big word’.

I responded: ‘prestidigitation’, ‘logorrhoea’, ‘floccinaucinihilipilification’ — yes, they are ‘big words’, and each relevant to this topic.

But not ‘metadata’: that’s quite a small word, and even a rather cuddly one. If a bit of a neologistic bastard. It was coined a bit more than half-a-century ago, self-evidently by a semi-literate computer-programmer (the OED suggests may have been PR Bagley of Philadelphia) because it’s a spatch-cock from Greek (μετά) and Lain (datum). Metadata is, simply, ‘data about data’. No need for a dress rehearsal.

‘Metadata’ on any piece of data, then, is the header-and-footer house-keeping of a computer filing-system.

Similarly ‘header’ is what we old fogies, who still can operate a fountain pen and writing paper, might call the superscription (address, reference codes, salutation) at the top of a letter, just as the signing-off bit at the end is the subscription. As you see, I was already ready for infants school before Shockley, Bardeen and Brattain had made their first crude transistor do its business.

‘Metadata’ has been around a lot longer than these tech-speakers imagine, in fact as long as there have been librarians. Callimachus was the cataloguer at the Library of Alexandria in the third century BC: he loathed ‘big books’, but he was surrounded by hundreds of thousands of them. So he devised a way of indexing. Even he wasn’t the first: four hundred years before, Ibnissaru had to cope with thirty thousand clay tablets, in various languages, in the Library of Ashurbanipal: so he produced a data-base on more clay tablets (some of which are to be found in the British Museum — which puts the life-span of floppy disks into perspective).

A catalogue

The joy of a good library index is that I can walk into any general library in any Anglophone society, and find my way around.

The system is most likely to be Melvil Dewey‘s from 1876, and why American poetry (call number 811) comes before English poetry (821) which comes before Old English (829). And which, to me, seems illogical.

WordPress needs a good kicking

That previous post shows all the problems WordPress heap upon a poster.

Why in the name of all that is wonderful (and that excludes this Gutenberg editing) should any one want to mess with the ‘classic editor’?

Some time, some day, I’ll go back to my initial thoughts on Sterne and clean them up.

It just won’t be while I’m grinding my teeth down to the gums in blind frustration.

 

Close the door

Blame this one on terence patrick hewett, pointing me at Sterne.

In the exchange that followed the previous post, I claimed to have a copy of Tristram Shandy:

a disgracefully dog-eared cheap effort. That copy may have been plucked from the 6-pence racks outside Greene’s bookshop (lorst and gorn for ever) in Dublin’s Clare Street.

Such may once have been the case. Like one of the most delicious bookshops ever to grace this earth, that text went the way of Greene’s and its sixpenny racks. Probably around the time (2010-11?) I replaced it with a Visual Editions version, introduction by Will Self.

And that would have been sprung from one or other branch of Daunt Books.

Greene’s

For much of my mis-spent time TCD I existed in a cold-water basement in Elgin Road, D4. When I was flush I’d exit College by the Front Gate, cross the road, find my way to the Church Lane door of M.J.O’Neill’s oasis (not so grand or faux-‘Victorian’ then as now) and mildly carouse. Then take a bus to Ballsbridge. In times of financial stricture (i.e. mostly), it was Back Gate and a leisurely stroll through Merrion Square and Mount Street.

It needed an act of will not to pause and scavenge through through those racks at Greene’s.

I doubt that’s yer akshal Malcolm at pillage in that image; but it could be.

I’ll have a Sterne word with myself to stick to the plot

The joy of Shandy is that new dimensions emerge with every reading. For example, Chapter 5 starts:

On the fifth day of November, 1718, which to the æra fixed on, was as near nine calendar months as any husband could in reason have expected,—was I Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, brought forth into this scurvy and disasterous world of ours.

Yet, in Chapter 4, immediately previous, we are told:

I was begot in the night, betwixt the first Sunday and the first Monday in the month of March, in the year of our Lord one thousand seven hundred and eighteen.

So Mrs Sterne’s pregnancy ran almost exactly eight months. Ahem!