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T A B L E__T A L K Netscape vs. Internet Explorer: Has anything changed in the browser wars in the Digital Culture area of Table Talk - - - - - - - - - - R E C E N T L Y Service with an artificial smile By Robert Rossney Supermarket clubs point the way to a future of corporate-mandated friendliness and Stepford clerks (10/14/98) Getting to know all about you By Jennifer Vogel Attention, shoppers -- what you tell supermarket clubs may be used against you (10/14/98) The joy of Perl By Andrew Leonard How Larry Wall invented a messy programming language -- and changed the face of the Web (10/13/98) Typing for nonconformists By Alex Marshall The Dvorak alternative keyboard is a boon for the aching hand (10/12/98) Let's Get This Straight By Scott Rosenberg Free speech or blatant ripoff? Copyright suit pits newspapers against conservative site (10/09/98) - - - - - - - - - - BROWSE THE 21ST FEATURES ARCHIVES - - - - - - - - - - 21st Log Congress' roster of hypocrisy; Lego robots for Mac addicts - - - - - - - - - - S A L O N E M P O R I U M FREE! 12-ounce bag of Salon Blend with a purchase of $30 or more. While supplies last.

T h e   c o o k i e   m o n s t e r   o f   P u t n a m   P i t An angry muckraker seeks access to the municipal computer systems in a small Tennessee town. BY MATT WELCH | In a tiny one-room backyard office here in the lower-rent flatlands of Beverly Hills, Calif., 54-year-old Geoffrey Davidian is pacing around his cluttered newsroom, sipping a glass of Jack Daniel's and listening to Canned Heat on vinyl. "Can you believe that a guy like me, in this little piece-of-shit room, is creating so much ruckus by doing what we're supposed to do?" asks Davidian, wearing bright brown baggy cords, black Converse All-Stars and a green T-shirt. "My God, you got the fucking New York Times, you got the L.A. Times, they're all sitting around doing thumbsuckers about where the economy's going to go." He raises his voice suddenly. "May they ROT in HELL for every story they could have done that could have rectified some injustice!" Davidian's keen sense of outrage has led him down a circuitous path to publishing a muckraking newspaper and Web site called the Putnam Pit in the unlikely town of Cookeville, Tenn. From here, he has also launched a handful of lawsuits seeking access to the "cookie" files on the town's computers -- arguing that they are public records comparable to phone logs. This week, Davidian and his lawyer plan to file an appeal in the 6th Circuit Court of Appeals to a summary judgment decision handed down Sept. 24 by U.S. District Court Judge Thomas Higgins. Higgins rejected Davidian's claims -- that Cookeville violated his civil rights by denying him access to the cookie files and by refusing to post a link to the Putnam Pit on the city's official Web site. Before the end of the month, Davidian also intends to file a breach-of-contract suit against Cookeville for allowing its employees to visit the Pit on taxpayer computers without paying for the privilege. In August 1997 the site had posted a warning that city employees must pay a $16 license to access the site at work, or face a $500 fine; its current front page says that city employees must pay a $20 subscription fee. Journalism is Davidian's second career. In the 1960s he was mostly a musician, a "blues freak" who rose to the rank of road manager for Canned Heat. In 1969 he was arrested in Lebanon for smuggling hashish and getting a false passport, and served the next three years in jail. It was there that an American University professor turned him on to philosophy, bringing a new book each week. Davidian came back to America with a new sense of focus, earning a philosophy degree and a master's in journalism and doing work toward a doctorate in history before newspapering called him away. His first job was with the Roswell (N.M.) Daily Record. "The first story I did got an innocent man out of prison on a murder charge where he was sentenced on information contrived by the D.A. and the sheriff," he recalls with pride. For the next 20 years he worked for several major dailies, including the Milwaukee Journal, Arizona Republic and Houston Chronicle, where he covered the Gulf War. Davidian's entanglement with Putnam County, Tenn., began in January 1995 in Portland, Maine, when he met a woman named Claudia Eldridge on a Holiday Inn shuttle bus. Upon learning that Davidian was a reporter, Eldridge told him of her suspicions that law enforcement officials in her hometown were lying about her daughter's 1992 death by fire, which the district attorney had said was an accident. Davidian's children lived in Knoxville at the time, so he decided to travel the 100 miles to Cookeville, population 26,000, to check things out. "I went there, and it was true," he says. "The D.A. was incompetent, the prosecutors had conflicts of interest, they knew who the killer was but they didn't arrest him. The killer was linked to the D.A., they had a drug and sex relationship -- allegedly. Some of this is in public records, and as I started to investigate it, they began to stop me." (The officials named have all denied these charges.) On a second visit, Davidian, Eldridge and her daughter Chantal were all stopped by the same Cookeville police officer within one week for speeding, having a dog without a leash and interfering with an arrest, respectively. "I'm starting to think, this cop is the finger on somebody's hand that's trying to manipulate the system," Davidian said. "I said this is a conspiracy to stop me, and I'm going to show that it's related to the Eldridge murder." So Davidian used his speeding ticket appeal to subpoena the entire Cookeville City Council, as well as the judge presiding over the case. In addition to trying to uncover links with the Eldridge case, Davidian also sought to show that the court was not truly independent -- because the judges were appointed by the City Council, who depended on court-enforced traffic tickets for city revenue. Several hearings and quashed subpoenas later, Davidian lost the legal battle but vowed to win the long-term war: "I'm not the kind of guy who lets it go ... So I started a paper." N E X T_ P A G E .|. Municipal nuisance or scourge of corruption and lies?