Twitter isn’t behaving itself – posting links to a “Draw Mohammed Day” competition – and Pakistan’s collective panties have been throughly bunched. Or, they’re testing a new URL filtering system. Both motives are malevolent.

If the aim was indeed preventing the spread of blasphemous images, it didn’t work. In fact, it had the opposite effect, as many more Pakistanis are now aware that “Draw Mohammed Day” exists. Whoops! (And many more are now aware that the Pakistani government has something up its sleeve when it comes to sudden, wide-spread URL bans).

I’m still sifting through the information on this one, but this is just another example of what extremist governments do when social media doesn’t do exactly what it wants: they lash out, usually in a really, really stupid way. The young and savvy of the oppressive nation collectively roll their eyes – and then, immediately, they adapt. Nothing is achieved. And that’s what’s so awesome about the Internet. Attempts to control it never really work. 

It’s easy to see why government’s find social media and the Internet so profoundly disquieting. It’s difficult as hell to control – even China hasn’t mastered the art of the information lockdown. It’s really difficult to turn off (although some have tried).

Convincing the major social networks to comply with your dictatorial whims is both complicated and not guaranteed to be successful, even if you send Mark Zuckerberg threatening letters. If you’re somewhere like Afghanistan, you can always threaten to kill the  Internet pioneers, of course – but there will be more.

There’s no books to burn, everyone’s able to post their 95 theses anywhere online whenever they want, and what’s worse, it’s really hard to tell who’s looking at what when thanks to the advent of better security software. What’s an oppressive, backwards regime to do?

The transformative power at the Internet – hell, look at the Arab Spring – is the best argument there is for the Internet being a basic human right. The Internet definitely has a lot of pornography, stupid cat videos, and Facebook circle-jerks, but it also contains the entirety of the human experience – really, it’s inseperable from us.

The Internet isn’t just a useful business tool, it’s the best agent of international freedom we have. And that has a lot of people scared.

I’d like to direct your attention to 3DStudioLab, a truly awesome 3D production studio (with rentals avilable!) in downtown Los Angeles. Please “like” their Facebook page. Do it for me.

Why? Well, I’m down here in LA helping these genuinely nice people get their social media presence up and running.

Also, I get to play around with 3D video cameras and the accompanying software, which is the kind of thing that makes my life worth living. (As well as brushing up on Final Cut).

The studio is located in the Brewery Arts Complex, the world’s largest art colony. Thomas Edison once had offices here.

Now it’s a bunch of delightfully scrappy lofts with DIY backyards and many, many ardent Burning Man patron tenants. Everyone living here has something cool going on. There’s also a restaurant-bar in the condo facility with a good wine selection and fish tacos. Life is hard. 

Thoughts on Los Angeles: a sea of movie studios, taco trucks, and interesting-looking hipster bars with odd names.

Also, I like it a lot more than I anticipated. But don’t worry, I’m still coming home to you, New Orleans.

My friend and fellow Simon’s Rock veteran Laura Byrne was until last week a waitress and bartender at the Green Goddess, a New Orleans restaurant that was surely among the most creative in the French Quarter.

The restaurant is undergoing a change in management. (EDITED: I earlier heard it was closing, but it hasn’t! So you can go check it out! Different chef, though.)

So myself and my friends Braden and Nicole decided to pay her and creative bartender Scott one last visit.

Well, a first visit for me. I am now wishing I’d come earlier.

Laura started us off with this lovely cheese plate. Nicole can’t really eat cow’s milk cheese, so we had a selection of goat’s and sheep’s milk stuff instead. Convenient, as that happens to be my favorite.

It’s really, really hard not to love Purple Haze chevre – especially those chewy little bits of fennel stuck to the sides. Note the well-thought out accompaniments of spicy pumpkin seeds, pistachios, apple, and delectable saffron honey. Not pictured: an olive oil cracker, Italian. Great with a crisp white. I did not take pictures of the wine bottles. I suspect Laura can help me out.

Watermelon soup with lump crab meat and avocado mash. A light little wisp of a thing. Perfect for a New Orleans summer. Something about Green Goddess recipes makes me want to try them myself, and I think that’s a good thing.

The Green Goddess wedge salad with radishes, shrimp, romano cheese, egg, and hearts of palm. You’d be a fool to eat here without ordering something with Green Goddess dressing on it. Per the restaurant name, it’s a damn fine rendition of this classic dressing, with lots of delicious herbs. I would dearly love to eat this salad once a week.

Tumblin’ Dice: seared tuna crusted with fennel pollen and Persian spices, with watermelon chunks, avocado oil, and organic Treme sprouts (grown locally! Really locally!).

This is just a brilliant idea for a light summer dish, really. My hat is off. Something else I’d love to take a stab at in the relative privacy of my own kitchen. Not to mention it’s just gorgeous to look at. I love creative cooking like this.

Snails, tails and tasso: escargot, crawfish tails, tasso ham, green onions, Creole spices, grits. With a name like this I knew I would love it: a great riff on shrimp and grits with funkier ingredients. Once you get past the snail part, they’re just pleasingly firm (not snot-like) little niblets, that go well with the crawfish and the smoky tasso. And they are lovely little fibonacci spirals, lending a touch of elegance to what might otherwise be a rather pedestrian brown gravy.

“Midnight pasta” with spaghetti cooked in crab boil, tossed with olive oil, lemon zest, herbs, and bottarga, pressed, dried Italian caviar. The operating principle here, as Chris explained it, is a pasta that you throw together when your friends show up at your house after a night of drinking and everyone’s really goddamn hungry.

In Italy, apparently this midnight pasta making endeavor can turn into something of a competition, often between men: who can make the best dashed-off pasta while barely sober? This seems like a good way to lose a fingertip or incur a knife injury in the heat of battle, but sometimes the results are glorious. This was spicy, zesty, and salty in all the right ways. Really robust.

Bacon sundae: pecan praline ice-cream, bacon praline caramel sauce, pink and black lava salt, Nueske’s applewood smoked bacon, whipped cream. I’m not even sure I need to talk about this much to express how good it was. I have no sweet tooth, but when you add salt and bacon to a sweet dessert, you’ve suddenly got my attention. Crack-like in its elegance. This might be worthy of “nuclear secret” status. Or poorly advised as hell, the jury is out.

Most restaurants in the Quarter are more than content to rely on Creole standards that tourists like, expect, and crave, but the Green Goddess doesn’t do that. That would be too easy.

Under the guidance of chefs Chris DeBarr and Paul Artigues, the Goddess had this funky, well-written seasonal menu that was really a joy to eat through. New Orleans is a place where you should never ever be bored, and the food at the Green Goddess does a masterful job of living up to that standard.

Chris DeBarr is leaving, but the Green Goddess is still open. How the hell did I miss coming here earlier? Chris is opening a new place in Mid City soon called Serendipity. Plans call for more space, a similar menu philosophy, and live music.

Laura being Laura. Bring on more of that Trader Vic’s macademia nut liqueur, plz thanks.

Turns out if you measure Cambodia’s Internet penetration rate by Facebook users instead of individual ISP subscriptions, the outlook for this notoriously off-line nation gets a lot better. Check it out. I’m working on a piece on this and the stats are rather interesting.

Cambodia’s Internet penetration rate is dismal. Well, that we know of. Since Cambodia currently has dozens of ISPs and a remarkably dysfunctional governmental monitoring system, no one is quite sure how many Cambodians are online. Internet World Stats.com as of 2010 indicated roughly 0.5% of Cambodians were online, using figures gleaned from ISP subscription rates. But that’s not the whole story.

According to Socialbakers.com’s Facebook usage stats, Cambodia comes in at 165 on its list of Facebook using countries as of the week of May 14, 2012, with 497, 700 users and a 3.37% penetration rate. By penetration rate alone, this wedges Cambodia – a relatively small country – in between Pakistan and Equatorial Guinea when it comes to Facebook usage rates by percentage of population. Not great, but…..let’s look at the rest of Southeast Asia.

OK, so Thailand has a  21.14% Facebook usage rate. But Cambodia actually beats tiny Laos when we measure things this way, with a 2.35% Facebook usage rate, and it’s more than comparable to bigger, more populous Vietnam, with 4.50% usage – that’s only 1.13 percentage points away from little Cambodia! (OK, Vietnam restricts Facebook, while Cambodia does not. But that’s still pretty good.)

If we looked at these stats the old way, by simply comparing ISP customers, we’d be getting a very different picture. Measured in this manner, according to Internet World Stats, Cambodia comes in dead last in Southeast Asia with only 78,000 users and 0.5% Internet penetration – instead of a rather respectable third-and-growing in Facebook usage rates.

Much of this can be attributed to the Cambodian government’s inability to curtail access to the networking site, but this is pretty interesting information. Maybe we should be rethinking how we measure Internet penetration rates.

I’m looking for a job in New Orleans. On my way to Los Angeles for a while. Let me know if you hear of anything in the dark swamps of Louisiana.

Behold the pleasing geometry of fine cheese. I shot a whole bunch of photos at the Cocktails and Curds booze-and-cheese pairing competition at La Thai on Prytania Street in New Orleans, with the help of the rightfully beloved St James Cheese Company next door. My Simon’s Rock friend Laura Byrne competed, pairing her English Beat concoction with Jasper Hill cheddar.

Other bartenders created cocktails using such ingredients as infused beet liquor, mushroom brine, and lava salt, paired with everything from Greek-style Chevre to one delightfully stinky blue, Mycella. The ultimate $1000 winner was Jennifer Rogers with her Montresor concoction, based partially on Cava and rimmed with aforementioned black lava salt.

What I like best about New Orleans? An event like this was carried off casually and with no pretension, and everyone was actually having fun rather than attempting to out-hipster one another. I call it a success. Also, why I want to move back here very, very badly.

Casamentos is one of my favorite New Orleans institution restaurants. It’s been in the same spot on Magazine Street since 1919, and the old-school tile interior (easier to clean) hasn’t changed much since. Nor has the food: “oyster loaves,” made with buttered pan bread instead of the standard Leidenheimmer po-boy bread, are an institution here.

Me, I always get the fried seafood, the mixed seafood platter if someone is with me who is capable of sharing, since it’s largeish. The best fried shrimp in the whole world are on offer at Casamentos, with a feather-light cornmeal breading and a gentle treatment that ensures the meat squeaks delicately under your teeth. Then there’s slender strips of catfish, not too muddy, served with perfect, light-weight fried oysters. Crab claws, too: bite the end and scrape the meat off. Skip the fries, but that’s not the point.

They’ve added chargrilled oysters with parmesan and butter to the menu, and I fully salute this decision. Chargrilled oysters are one of man’s great inventions. Even better with some crackers or bread to soak up the juice. Waiting at Casamentos – and you will wait, as they don’t take reservations – is a pretty painless thing. Order a beer, sidle up to the bar. Get a dozen raw oysters and eat them standing up. They’ve always got the good fresh stuff. Gulf oysters are my favorite – I think they resonate with my gene pool, or something obscure like that. California oysters have never quite hit the spot.

I was back in New Orleans for the first time in a year when I stood outside Casamentos and waited for my parents and our friend Kevin to pull up in a taxi. It was just dark outside and Ms Mae’s bar next door was beginning to shamble into business. I drank an Abita outside and talked with a group of Latino guys who had just finished playing pick-up basketball across the street.

“Now, we’re gonna take care of you,” one dude with a white tank-top, sweaty armpits, and a beer assured me when I said I was waiting for my parents. “Ain’t nothing to worry about.”

We chatted briefly about Cambodia and clinked beers. In New Orleans, you just need to be standing still for a minute to make friends. I tell them I’ve come back from Cambodia recently, and people greet me like a returning native daughter. And of course, I’ve come back. Why wouldn’t I? 

The street outside Casamentos smelled of warmish beer, garbage truck, and impending summer. Home again, home again.