"As a working-class guy I kind of accepted long ago that I wasn't going to make a fortune or anything like that. What I figured was that if I worked hard, if I became a cop or I joined the phone company or something like that, at least I would have a regular working-class or middle-class life. At least you'd make your 50 grand or 55 grand a year. The government would take out your taxes, but you'd have something left over."

A Lost Eloquence

When I ask students early in the semester if they know a poem by heart, I usually hear the names Shel Silverstein and Dr. Seuss and occasionally Robert Frost. They often say that they can't memorize long poems, but then I ask them if they know the lyrics of "Gilligan's Island" or "The Brady Bunch," and my point is made.

McDonald's Tarnished Arches

Fast-food joints are losing market share to a growing niche of more expensive, and possibly healthier, "fast casual" eateries, like Panera Bread and Cosí, that offer more customized selections. McDonald's itself is expanding its successful Chipotle chain of Mexican-themed restaurants.

Spiritual Connection on the Internet

"Is it much different than kneeling next to your bed at night? The idea is to connect with God anywhere. In the moment you are typing, it's another form of devotion"

Who Owns the Internet? You and i Do

Joseph Turow, a professor at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania, studies how people use online technology and how that affects their lives. He has begun a small crusade to de-capitalize Internet — and, by extension, to acknowledge a deep shift in the way that we think about the online world.

WP: interrogations at Bagram.

originally posted by xowie

After a year of trepidation, unease, and malaise both at home and abroad, the media types who three years ago wouldn’t shut up about what to name our nascent decade now have an answer: the Uh-oh’s. It’s certainly more fitting than the Naughties, the Zeros, the Aughts, or the M&M’s; at least "uh-oh" communicates the sense of threat Americans have endured since 9/11. Uh-oh describes the moment after something precious has dropped, right before the damage has been checked. A person who’s previously been robbed might utter uh-oh after awakening to a thump in the night. Uh-oh often precedes a scream or a sigh. Uh-oh sounds a lot like now.

originally posted by xowie

Sainthood for Mychal Judge?

originally posted by daiichi

The first generation of the Internet — called the Arpanet — consisted of electronic mail and file transfer software that connected people to people. The second generation connected people to databases and other information via the World Wide Web. Now a new generation of software connects computers directly to computers.

And that is the key to the Total Information Awareness project, which is overseen by John M. Poindexter, the former national security adviser under President Ronald Reagan. Dr. Poindexter was convicted in 1990 of a felony for his role in the Iran-contra affair, but that conviction was overturned by a federal appeals court because he had been granted immunity for his testimony before Congress about the case.

The notion that women are less competent before or during their periods was exploded in 1914 by Leta Stetter Hollingworth, who gave 23 women a battery of tests over the course of several months and found no discernible pattern to the results. Yet it persists. Women themselves constantly attribute clumsiness and bad moods to PMS, as if they would invariably be calm and cheerful and supercompetent were it not for the menstrual cycle.

originally posted by xowie

The Beast 50 Most Loathsome People in America, 2002

originally posted by daiichi

FROM THE POETRY BLOTTER OF EARL S. STONAH, ESQ.

Taxicab, pouring
ass rain. I'm trying to meet
my sweet baby Jane.

Peer out the window
what do I see? Cupid's bow
pointing straight at me.

originally posted by daiichi

What I came to see I was writing about, which is something that's of great concern to me as a parent, is what I see as the lost adventure of childhood. I remember a childhood that was the kind of childhood that people had been having in the United States going back at least four or five generations before me. It was rooted in independence and freedom. I'd just go out in the morning on Saturday morning and say "Bye, Mom" and I'd be gone all day long.

She wouldn't know where you were.

She would not have the faintest idea where I was, and I'd come home for dinner. And I'd get into a lot of trouble, no doubt about it, and probably almost died a couple of times, but still that's the world. It dovetailed so completely with what I read, so when I went out to play I could go play in Narnia or I could go play in the Virginia wilderness of George Washington's boyhood if I was reading a biography of George Washington. There was a seamlessness between the world of literature and fantasy and the world that I was living and playing in. That really mirrored what was going on in the fantasy worlds themselves, where there was a seamlessness and a porousness between, say, England and Narnia.

Or even something like Tom Sawyer. Even though I wasn't a boy, there was a Tom Sawyer element to my childhood. Our mother didn't know where we were half the time and there was so much more undeveloped land to play on.

There was more undeveloped land and so much more free space. And now so much of the space we put our children into is created by adults for children. It's licensed by adults, patrolled and permitted by adults. There's nowhere for them to disappear into. They're under surveillance all the time. It's that idea of that lost ... that's the Summerlands, to me, ultimately. That this is imperiled, or probably gone forever, is a very painful idea to me. Maybe that ties into the idea of a lost innocence or a lost boyhood.

“Live Phish Downloads offers high quality, unedited soundboard recordings of select shows in the form of MP3 and Shorten digital music files.”

“Nintendo of America recently hosted an interview with two of the masterminds behind The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker. Producer Shigeru Miyamoto (who directed the original Zelda titles, including Ocarina of Time) and Director Eiji Aonuma spoke with members of the gaming media via video teleconferencing from Japan.”

Anti-war mp3: Jacob’s Ladder(Not In My Name).

originally posted by daiichi

Profile of “marijuana madonna” Renee Boje.

originally posted by xowie

The one upside to the fact that we no longer have any real leaders, only ersatz ones slavishly addicted to following public opinion, is that, at the end of the day, public outrage really matters.

originally posted by xowie

''They are good and courageous people, the sort of people who took great risks to save Jews during the occupation,'' Bromberger wrote to Summers. ''What you insinuated about them was sheer, crude calumny. You must have known that. You must know people like them. ... As a Jew, I found your statement to be slanderous. As a holder of a Harvard degree I found it embarrassing.''

originally posted by xowie

Rawhide Kid, Marvel’s leather-slappin' cowboy.

originally posted by xowie

In an apparent bid to become the office of Total Suitcase Awareness, the federal Transportation Security Administration is suggesting that travelers not lock their checked baggage, as such locks may require forcible removal.

I’d like to invite you to explore the randomWalks wiki. [Thanks to riley dog for that poor fucker with the scissors.]

Following Bush’s guidelines, Rooting Out Evil is demanding that his administration allow immediate and unfettered access to international weapons inspectors to search out their caches of chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons. If they refuse to comply, we will assemble as many volunteer weapons inspectors as possible at a major border crossing between the US and Canada and attempt to cross into the US on a mission of peace. We will be greeted on the US side by Americans who favour true global cooperation, an end to weapons of mass destruction, and a regime change in the US at the next election.

Because we don't know when we will die, we get to think of life as an inexhaustable well. Yet everything happens only a certain number of times, and a very small number really. How many more times will you remember a certain afternoon of your childhood, some afternoon that is so deeply part of your being that you, that you can't even conceive of your life without it. Perhaps four or five times more, perhaps not even that. How many more times will you watch the full moon rise? Perhaps 20. And yet it all seems limitless.

The L.A. ANSWER—organized candlelight peace vigil, the first of its kind to occupy a pedestrian-filled intersection, circulated steadily like a slow vortex around the four corners, blending imperceptibly with holiday shoppers, street vendors, and even the police, who appeared to be on hand only to pet all the dogs with peace signs hanging from their collars and make sure nobody got hit by a car.

originally posted by xowie

Touch Tarepanda for descriptions !

If you're actually able to handle the manuscript, you have a kind of contact with the author that you otherwise wouldn't get. At the risk of sounding too obscure, the most advanced physics teaches us that the moment you come into contact with something, it is part of you and you are part of it forever.

Alison M. Rosen on free tatt night at Luxx.

originally posted by daiichi

Eep opp ork ah ah.

Somewhere along the line, the actions of this government are the actions of me. And if there's going to be blood on my hands, I'm not willing to have it be invisible. I wanted to come to Iraq and see Iraqi faces -- children, adults, diplomats, anybody that implies -- and go home with some impressions that will not let me off the hook. . . . It's not abstract anymore.

If your local paper doesn’t carry it, you can finally read Lalo Alcaraz' new daily strip La Cucaracha at the uComics website.

“Spread the good word about Bagelhole.org’s collection of folklore, alternative energy methods, and low-tech sustainability articles.” Thanks to dangerousmeta.

“The Trained Eye series began in October of 2000 as I wandered in the railyard near downtown Colorado Springs. All of these images are from the sides of boxcars, coal cars, miscellaneous freight cars and a caboose. These cars have been scratched, gouged, painted, scraped, rusted, and repainted over the course of their lifetimes. From a distance they appear uniformly colored, neat, and tidy. But, up close, with their context removed, they have become the gallery you see here.” I’ll let you find your own favorites among these achingly beautiful photographs. Thanks, Jerry.

Mark Frauenfelder reviews Rebel Visions, a history of the underground comics movement, in this week’s LA Weekly.

The Club has chosen to invoke its internal policing power mainly against members who have pushed for the Club to adopt more robust environmental policies: ending livestock grazing, mining and logging on public lands; backing Ralph Nader and the Green Party; or opposing the sell-out of Yosemite National Park to a corrupt firm linked to Bruce Babbitt.

originally posted by daiichi

I’ve been sleeping on wimminandminorities.com but it’s time to WAKE UP!

As a lighthearted reminder, Pashkow circulates around the admissions office a three-page memo called "Jews Clues." The first piece of advice is to spot names ending in "baum," "berg," "burg," "bloom," "man," "stein," "thal," "vitz" or "witz." Another dead giveaway mentioned in the memo: If applicants mention that they have had a bar or bat mitzvah.

originally posted by daiichi

(Basically) every day for the past 6 years I have painted with watercolor for an hour. This activity has proved to be one of the most important aspects of my process, I believe there is a lot to be said for a daily practice. Since the possibility of being able to observe cycles by keeping work in chronological order appeals to me AND since I feel dealing with process is about honoring the ugly as well as the beautiful, keeping a bound journal was the next step.

originally posted by xowie

In an edition of his Hop Hop Political Newsletter which is unfortunately not online, Davey D makes a crucial point about Trent Lott’s wildly offensive remarks at a birthday bash for Strom Thurmond.

It will be interesting to see how the media references his remarks when mentioning his name. In other words there’s a tendency to always make mention of past transgressions when speaking about African American leaders even if the events or remarks were made 20 years ago. I still read newspapers where Jesse Jackson’s off color 1984 ‘hymie town’ remarks are made mention. Al Sharpton and the Tawana Brawly case are seemingly always in the same sentence. The word ‘anti-Semite and NOI leader Louis Farrakhan are always made to go hand and hand. I’ve heard apologies and explanations from these individuals just like Lott and his folks are trying to explain his ‘poor choice’ of words. My question is will Trent Lott go back to simply being the Senate Majority Leader or will he be forever known as the Trent Lott the Senate Majority Leader the ‘Jim Crow Law Supporter’? Will we start referring to Trent Lott as a bigot or will he still be viewed as a distinguished United State’s Senator who leads the Senate?

"Some people, some of the junior cadets, view it as a very personal thing," said Thomas. "They say, 'We are going to roll up in the desert,' 'We are going to go get those people,' 'We should have done it the first time.' But I think as they get closer to graduation, people have a much more balanced perspective on things. They are not only concerned about going to get Saddam, but the 25 million Iraqis he governs, the effect this is going to have on our allies, on world opinion. There is much more debate than there is rabid vilification of the enemy."

originally posted by xowie

The Corrals’ attorney, Ben Rice, said "deputy" status would put WAMM under the provisions of a federal law stating a person can’t be sued for having a controlled substance if he or she is carrying it while "enforcing" local drug laws.

originally posted by daiichi

‘Burning Bush’ comment draws prison term

SIOUX FALLS, South Dakota (AP) – A man who made a remark about a “burning Bush” during the president’s March 2001 trip to Sioux Falls was sentenced Friday to 37 months in prison.

Richard Humphreys of Portland, Oregon was convicted in September of threatening to kill or harm the president and said he plans to appeal. He has said the comment was a prophecy protected under his right to free speech.

Humphreys said he got into a barroom discussion in nearby Watertown with a truck driver. A bartender who overheard the conversation realized the president was to visit Sioux Falls the next day and told police Humphreys talked about a “burning Bush” and the possibility of someone pouring a flammable liquid on Bush and lighting it.

“I said God might speak to the world through a burning Bush,” Humphreys testified during his trial. “I had said that before and I thought it was funny.”

In one of Ram Dass' books, don't remember which, he told a story about his guru, Neem Karoli Baba, aka Maharaji. Ram Dass tried many times to give LSD to Maharaji. Nothing ever happenned. But he had some doubt that the old man was really swallowing the tabs. So the next time Ram Dass gave a tab to Maharaji, the guru made a show of placing it on his tongue and carefully swallowing. A short while later, Maharaji went wild, started acting crazy. Ram Dass was thinking, "What have I done to this poor old man?" Maharaji came immediately back to his senses and told Ram Dass, "They knew about this stuff a thousand years ago. If you take it in a meditative mood, you can visit Jesus. But after two hours, you have to come back. Wouldn't it be better to BE Jesus?"

originally posted by daiichi

FROM THE DESK OF EARL S. STONER, ESQ.:

We’ll probably have a presidential candidate forty years down the road, saying that as a kid in the Twin Cities she “experimented with BDSM” and it was “first-class training in the art of firm government.”

postscriptum: Uniforms for bad girls of all ages can be found at the Girl Scout Online Shopping Mall. Let’s see those cookies, baby!

originally posted by daiichi

Deadheads, a notoriously finicky bunch, are enamored of Herring. Having played with the Allman Brothers, his technique is sometimes described as a cross between Duane Allman's and Garcia's. On Thursday, he hinted at Garcia's quicksilver style but also carved out his own distinct airspace. More often than not, his tone was something very different: echoing, yowling, distant yet a key piece of the puzzle.

originally posted by xowie

Mike Gray’s Busted, reviewed by Judith Lewis.

originally posted by xowie

During the first days of Ocean View, Abramovic seemed restless, moving around, no doubt, so she would not drift mentally. She had to stay "present." She knew she would face this. First the boredom, then the pain. She had turned her most banal activities into rituals: showering, peeing, drinking water. By day three, she had taken to standing for long periods at the edge of the center platform, right behind the knife ladder. She looked shaky, vulnerable, like a person on a tightrope.

originally posted by xowie

"We recognize Filipinos, but this is a step backwards," said one of the more moderate voices at the microphone. "I think this would segregate the Filipinos . . . This is just starting a trend."

originally posted by daiichi

Blood - the most intense and powerful Biblical symbol - causes two realities in disarmament. First, it reaffirms the covenant with the nonviolent Jesus, a covenant sealed in his blood. Second, it stresses again the prohibition against killing. There will be no justice, no peace, no relief for the poor, no restoration of the ecology until we stop killing one another.

originally posted by daiichi

Mtv News: Roots' ?uestlove, Black Thought Delve Into Phrenology

“For the most part, none of us were in the studio at the same time for most of the recording,” he said. “It just came to be in the process of layering. Everybody came in and did their thing, and we just layered it up. Ahmir will come in the studio and lay three or five joints in a one- or two-session period, then the next time I’ll come through the studio it will be like, ‘Yo, put the joints on Ahmir was working on a couple of days ago.’ It might be two to three that I’m feeling that I wanna build upon. I might wanna drop that or ask him to come and add more to the foundation.” During a soundcheck a few months ago, the Roots came up with Phrenology’s first single, “Break You Off.” “We were doing a pilot for some TV show and we were jamming with Musiq,” Black Thought remembered. “We just came up with it and it felt real smooth. … It was sexy from the start. We couldn’t really take it nowhere else but keep it for the ladies. In a nutshell, the tune is about me meeting a young lady who’s already involved and she’s in a relationship. I’m coming to break her off, basically giving her what’s missing.” " ‘Me and Mrs. Jones’ for the new millennium," ?uest interjected. “The basic direction the album was going was so far to the left — it wasn’t like anything out there — we kind of needed a balance. We are smart businessmen and we know medicine tastes better with a little sugar in it. This seemed like a logical choice because it was something easy to get into."

What’s wrong with Ronald McDonald? Ronald lies to children. (I hit the Jackpot.)

Pop Culture Junk Mail (Dec. 1) sez:

If you enjoyed the film, you’ve got to watch the DVD with the commentary turned on. Not only are director Chris Smith and producer Sarah Price on the commentary, but Mark and his familiar buddy, the perennially out-of-it Mike Schank, comment right along with them. Mark and Mike are just as goofy as they were in the first go-round, and really, watching the commentary is like getting a whole new “American Movie” sequel.

Users are not actually moving the CD against the laser; rather, using a touch-sensitive "jog dial" that imitates the spinning platter of a turntable, they are "scratching" a copy of the song stored in the machine's memory.

D.J.'s can come to a club armed with beats and songs they put together hours or even minutes before. "I used to have to get samples and new beats cut onto a temporary acetate, which costs $50, doesn't sound very good or last very long," said DJ Swamp. "Now I just burn the music onto a CD. My laptop burns CD's internally, so I can be backstage putting stuff together right before I go onstage."

Cut Chemist of Jurassic 5 takes the process even further; at recent shows he has ventured into the crowd to record audience members talking, quickly burned a CD onstage and then immediately scratched up the vocals using the CDJ-1000. "It's something that you could never do with vinyl or a traditional turntable," Cut Chemist said. "And the audience just freaks out when they hear it."

David Rees of mnftiu spoke to a crowded house at the doomed Midnight Special bookstore last night, along with cartoon bad boys Robbie Conal and Lalo Alcaraz.

originally posted by xowie

A few NPR segments I've been collecting:
• "The pornography industry has been a key driver in the development of new technology -- technology that eventually finds its way into widespread use." (Listen)
• dan savage on skipping towards gomorrah (Listen)
• skinwalkers on PBS' Mystery (Listen)
• covert marketing (Listen)
• 'clean flicks' (Listen)
• 'skinny water': the most scathing outrageous joke about of consumerism my feverish imagination could muster, come to life (Listen)
• santa cruz pot giveaway (Listen)
• florida 'terror event' (Listen)
• vocal sampling (Listen)
• bill frisell on his old-timey album (Listen)
• turqouise (Listen)
• anti-matter (Listen)
• movie falls (Listen)
• Present at the Creation: Thoreau's Walden (have you read Walden?) (Listen)
• ATC feature on RV travel (HTML)
• Life as a Blackman board game segment details
• remodeling plans at mosque (Listen)
• teen horror films and the indictment of the family (Listen)
• beth orton profile (Listen)
• hybrid cars (Listen)
• "minority" enrollment at highest levels ever in FL state colleges (Listen)
• uncle tom (Listen)
• Present at the Creation: the surfboard (Listen)
• explaining punk music to my 11-year old son (Listen)
• the theremin (Listen)
• reading up on Islam (Listen)
• braving the badwater ultramarathon (Listen)
• "During his visit to Mexico, the pope will canonize the country's most well-known early Christian Indian, Juan Diego. The church's altering of a traditional painting of Juan Diego from dark-skinned to pale has angered Indian communities in Mexico." (Listen)
• a miner speaks (Listen)
• Dirty Work: cleaning oil tanks in 100-degree heat (Listen)
• Russell Simmons joins Urban League board of trustees (Listen)
• 'Ozzy' (Listen)
• 'Maryam' 'a movie about a first-generation Iranian teenage girl.' (Listen)
• 50th anniversary of Chesapeake Bay Bridge (Listen)
• Present at the Creation: 'Animal House' (Listen)
• iced tea (Listen)
• summer songs (Listen)
• wilco (Listen)

Visitors to the exhibit will be encouraged to make their own cow poetry by taking a tiny cardboard cow, writing a word on it and setting it down on the vibrating board from an old electric football game so it can wander and interact with other cows.

originally posted by xowie

Thriftdeluxe is another crafty DIY site, this one based in London. For the record, a few other good craft sites I’ve found are: digs, get crafty, not martha, rebecca’s domestic, and unique projects. (Now to click and see who’s still active.) Full disclosure: I’m not at all crafty and haven’t tried any of these projects. I do generally try to keep a dying plant nearby to remind me what color my thumb is not.

The good folks at Eatonweb might want to tweak their portal a bit; it’s less than accurate to suggest that the Aryan Revolutionary Digest is a weblog similar to randomWalks.

Syracuse New Times: The Plunder Down Under.

Tall and narrow, usually built for one and typically made of wood, most had flat roofs. Some had angled roofs and classy models had gables. A half-moon was traditionally cut into the door so no one mistook it for the wood shed, chicken coop or pigsty. Odiferous, dark and drafty, outhouses didn’t make good reading rooms, especially in winter.

Unlike current toilets, yesterday’s commodes weren’t simply the final resting place of their owner’s intestinal products. They made convenient dumping grounds for small imperishables that couldn’t be burned; and even served as vaults for storing small valuables like cash and unmentionables: grandma’s whiskey, dad’s porno, the kid’s tobacco. Since it was considered unwise and in bad taste to discuss “potty deposits,” the owner was usually the only one who knew about the stuff and it was sometimes left in the hole when illness or senility claimed him, or if he had to get out of town in a hurry. Today, these spoils are like juicy wild fruit, available to everyone, just for the picking.

Standing alone against the elements isn’t easy and an abandoned thunder house – not exactly a farmer’s pride and joy – didn’t last long. In fact, about all that remains of the majority of these uniquely American temples to the human appetite is the wood cut to create the holes in the benches. Allowed to fall to the bottom of the pit, the “holes” were quickly buried, especially if the family was big. Some of the slabs have survived and when unearthed, are rare, prized trophies by diggers who varnish them, attach plaques bearing the date and time of the find, and hang them on their living-room walls.

Most students entering college this fall were born in 1984. The Beloit College “Mindset List” has fast become a benchmark forwarded by scattershot email from those for whom feeling old still has some novelty. It’s refreshing to see that I (b. 1975) have got something in common with these kids, though: (18.) They have no recollection of Connie Chung or Geraldo Rivera as serious journalists.

The extraordinary array of groups questioning the Bush administration's rationale for an invasion of Iraq includes longtime radical groups such as the Workers World Party, but also groups not known for taking stands against the government. There is a labor movement against war, led by organizers of the largest unions in the country; a religious movement against the war, which includes leaders of virtually every mainstream denomination; a veterans movement against the war, led by those who fought Iraq in the Persian Gulf a decade ago; business leaders against the war, led by corporate leaders; an antiwar movement led by relatives of victims of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks; and immigrant groups against the war.

There are also black and Latino organizations, hundreds of campus antiwar groups and scores of groups of ordinary citizens meeting in community centers and church basements from Baltimore to Seattle.

The U.S. Central Intelligence agency reckons that in a mere seven years, by 2010, India will have the most HIV victims in the world -- somewhere between 20 and 25 million. China, it says, will have between 10 and 20 million.

The National AIDS Memorial Grove covers approximately 7.5 acres in the eastern end of San Francisco's Golden Gate Park.

originally posted by daiichi

bogus holidays make me tired, at blue period.

originally posted by daiichi

Supreme Court judges take issue with rhyming colleague.

originally posted by daiichi

On Sunday, hundreds of bloggers, diarists and other personal website publishers will link to resources about HIV and AIDS and reflect on how the disease has changed their lives as part of the Link and Think awareness campaign, an annual observance of World AIDS Day.

Suicide Girls isn't so much an offshoot of some kind of emo-porn phenomenon (as a past issue of Spin put it) but rather just a good example of the classic free-market tenet: Where there's a market, there's a way. After all, sex sells, even (especially?) if you bundle it with the DIY aesthetic, a connection to the punk and indie-rock community, and a liberal dash of personal weblogging.

originally posted by xowie

Giant guitar
of light-strummed
at dusk
it rests
by the intersection
Tuning not itself
like the organ keys
in a haunted house
but us
To make us see
we are the keys
and it the organist
invisible guitar player
of no spooky music.

originally posted by daiichi

A television commercial for a local Toughman contest came on. They were looking for tough men and women to fight three one-minute rounds in nearby Louisiana. "I'm drunk. Sitting around in a room full of guys, who are all tough anyway, because they're all prison guards and I'm the only girl in the group. You know, I've gotta be tough, too. So the commercial comes on, and I feel it's my need to assert my feminine side here, so I say, 'Y'all aren't tough.' I said, 'You want to know tough? Women. Menstrual cramps and childbirth. We're tough. You people aren't shit,'" Mahfood recalls. "They loaded my drunk ass up in the car. Carried me down there. I registered. I woke up the next morning and said, 'Oh, my God. What did I do?'"

originally posted by daiichi

Page Seventeen is huge.

originally posted by xowie

"He'll have jazz playing up his ass all day long! Man, he'll be sorry he met me, 'cause I don't let nobody run my life for me. I'm a man. Can't he see that? I'm a man. And I ain't doing nothing just 'cause some bus driver says so."

originally posted by xowie

What would you do on poetry’s behalf?

originally posted by xowie

Sweet potatoes aren't really yams; yams, which belong to the genus Dioscorea, are grown widely in Africa, where they originated, and elsewhere in the tropics but scarcely at all in the United States. What we are dealing with here is Ipomoea batatas, which is not only not a yam but not a true potato. Believed to be a native of Central America, it is closely related to the morning glory, with the same purplish, heart-shaped leaves. Sweet potatoes, which are less dense and starchy than yams, are rich in healthful beta carotene, an important source of vitamin A.

Lemon taught himself to read and write while incarcerated. Nine years ago, he watched poets performing at a community center. "I never knew they were poets," he says. "I thought they were rappers."

originally posted by xowie

"We do not think justice has been done," they said in a statement. "The dog is still free and is a danger to society. Our children were lucky that they avoided grievous injuries -- other children may not be so lucky."

originally posted by daiichi

Happy Birthday, IndyMedia.

originally posted by daiichi

Elvis Mitchell on Velocity, starring crufty pagan Fairuza Balk.

originally posted by daiichi

Perhaps scantily clad multimillionaire supermodels flaunting a socially constructed notion of idealized beauty for an hour isn't the gravest threat to women's rights and mental health since the invention of the tube top and/or "Baywatch." Possible?

originally posted by daiichi

"Tell me, is there any point?" she asked. "Here, I have to work and earn my living. Death will come in its own time, and when it takes me away, I will be happy that I have been released from this world and its suffering."

originally posted by daiichi

The Name on My Cross

April 23, 1990
Fort Benning, Georgia

Juan Ramon Moreno S.J.,
I carried your cross
in the circular procession today,
shaking my rattle.

I confess
I leaned on your cross a little
during the speeches,
rattling my applause.
Then looked over my shoulder.

The soldiers stood
in little motionless groups
as if posing for photographs with their
personnel carriers,
in battle camouflage and riot gear.
They watched.
I couldn’t tell if they listened.

I hoisted your cross
and turned your name around to face them.
Not to accuse anyone:
I wanted to feel the weight of the wood.
And I wanted them to notice
You had a name.
Not just another dark-skinned man on a cross.

- Stephen Wing

originally posted by xowie

"New Years Eve, nine years ago," recounts Moss. "We had a bunch of this Jager knockoff crap called Beck Torova that nobody would buy or drink for free, not even the bums. Well, one of the bums said 'I'm not drinking that ass juice' and that's how it started."

originally posted by xowie

Activists serve Citigroup with eviction papers.

originally posted by daiichi

Writer Alison M. Rosen has contacted us to complain that we are not linking to enough articles by Alison M. Rosen. Such as Sucking Strap-ons by Alison M. Rosen. Or Textbook Love Affair by Alison M. Rosen. Or Dude, Where’s My Double-Necked Guitar? by Alison M. Rosen.

originally posted by daiichi

Ode to ramen.

originally posted by daiichi

Friends in recent years have thought they detected a glimmer of light amid the darkness of Fischer's tortured psyche. For one thing, he has a girlfriend—Justine, a twenty-two-year-old Chinese-Filipina living in Manila, who couldn't care less about chess and has no intention of writing a tell-all memoir.

originally posted by daiichi

''If you want to play the game of truth, I'll tell the truth, and the truth will burn. It's not going to burn me. It'll burn you. Why did you play the Israel card? Why did you play it, America? To try to discredit me?''

originally posted by daiichi

Do you know what the flag of Iraq looks like?

“Any reviewer who expresses rage and loathing for a novel is preposterous. He or she is like a person who has put on full armor and attacked a hot fudge sundae.” – Kurt Vonnegut

"I would say tiki, and people would say, `What's that?" said Mr. Fisherman, scratching his goatee, his eyes wide behind rectangular glasses. "Nobody had ever heard of it. I was sad."

originally posted by daiichi

It was about Chinatown, and the formation of Chinatowns in America. I lost like three pages of it; it was terrible. It was a really, really good paper.

The order to return to life is often delivered by a religious figure like Jesus or Buddha, but a recent study done in India revealed something striking: at the end of the tunnel of light the Indians were met by a government official. "In three independent reports, the Indians said they were told to go back because there had been a bureaucratic mistake. Something along the lines of, ‘Oh, so you are Kumar from Calcutta? The person who was supposed to die was Kumar from New Delhi!’"

originally posted by daiichi

I'm really not terribly interested because I think that behind Man and Woman is spirit. And spirit is spirit. And that's where I live. I don't give a damn whether a person is a man or a woman. It's just not that interesting to me.

The song, says Lewis, is about those periods of being in a "love drought where you feel incapable of love and you can’t get yourself to snap out of your own self-centered world."

"It’s just another hopeful song," she says, "Because, God, it feels good when your heart is no longer slumbering, and it wakes up, and there’s a person or song or friend that snaps you out of your own craziness."

originally posted by daiichi

“What about where I’m the princess and you’re my zombie slave?”

originally posted by xowie

The Washington Post: Scientists Planning to Make New Form of Life.

If the experiment works, the microscopic man-made cell will begin feeding and dividing to create a population of cells unlike any previously known to exist. To ensure safety, the cell will be deliberately hobbled to render it incapable of infecting people; it also will be strictly confined, and designed to die if it does manage to escape into the environment.

Actually order and consume virtual McD's food, then use The Sims Online's "expressive gestures" in creative ways. Lie down and play dead. Emote the vomiting, sickness, or fatigue that might overcome you after eating a real life McNugget.

originally posted by daiichi

"It's a car. It's not like I'm wearing her nightgown. It's a car. It was his car. He had been driving it. It was the only car he had."

originally posted by daiichi

And the numbers continue to swell, as senior citizens, high school and university students, a range of religious denominations, blue-collar workers, veterans, progressive businesses, and women's, minority, and special-issue activist groups put their weight behind the cause.

originally posted by daiichi

Younger readers, including young feminists, are not committed to getting news the old-fashioned way. The locally generated and popular "The List" (formerly "Hannah’s List"), for example, is a well-distributed weekly e-mail, an electronic bulletin board, that combines traditional what’s-going-on information with classifieds, links, and a who’s who in young feminist circles — all with clear emphasis on transgender concerns, an edgy area for some, perhaps, but completely acceptable for most twentysomethings.

originally posted by daiichi

This week, federal prosecutors also began interviewing former L.A. Weekly and New Times Los Angeles employees, seeking information about the two papers' competitive relationship. Among those the government lawyers either have questioned or are seeking to interview are the Weekly's former publisher Michael Sigman, ex-editor Sue Horton (who now edits The Times' Opinion section), former classified advertising director Jim Kaplan, one-time City Hall columnist Marc Haefele and former New Times columnist Jill Stewart.

originally posted by xowie

What's wrong with journalism today?

Many journalists now are no more than channelers and echoers of what Orwell called the official truth. They simply cipher and transmit lies. It really grieves me that so many of my fellow journalists can be so manipulated that they become really what the French describe as functionaires, functionaries, not journalists.

originally posted by daiichi

So you feel like your role is to gather evidence?

That's one of the things we do. We bear witness, we present evidence. It's effective not to do it in a cold clinical way, but in a human way. The images are a cold statement of fact, but they present the human tragedy. There are consequences to what we do and don't do, serious consequences for ordinary people.

originally posted by daiichi

When the lyrics touched sore spots in those times, there was little concern among listeners that their favorite rappers could lose their lives. The landscape has since changed as more rappers begin to take sides in what is shaping up to be a hip-hop world war.

originally posted by daiichi

AllAboutGeorge’s Imperial tearoom with occasional randomWalkers.

originally posted by daiichi

Michael Jackson dangles child from hotel window in Berlin.

originally posted by xowie

The Sex Worker Arts Festival is under attack!

originally posted by xowie

In America, you don't have to be a celebrity like Oprah or Rosie or Martha to put out a magazine devoted to your own personal obsessions. Some energetic souls put out several zines. For instance, David Rees of Brooklyn, who chronicled his kung fu training in a zine called My New Fighting Technique Is Unstoppable, later went on to chronicle his job as a filing clerk in a zine called My New Filing Technique Is Unstoppable.

Their instincts as con artists, De Francesco reasoned, may have constituted the strongest inherent qualifications of his actors. One of them, Larry Miller, was asked in a television interview if he had any acting experience. "Other than acting like a damn fool? No," he said.

originally posted by xowie

''I'm not sure it will encourage people to read poetry ... But it does show poetry is moving to a more robust condition in America. It's returning a bit closer to the center of cultural life than it was 15 or 20 years ago.''

originally posted by daiichi

So you know that site Black People Love Us? The New York Times: Black-White Harmony: Are You Kidding Me?

“I think the anonymity of the Internet allows people to discuss issues without self-censoring and that’s politically useful in discussions of race,” said Omar Wasow, the executive director of BlackPlanet.com, the most heavily trafficked African-American Web destination, according to Nielsen NetRatings. Mr. Wasow stopped short of calling the Perettis' project social activism. “This is more to me like a prank,” he said. “A clever, socially engaged prank, but a prank nonetheless.”

http://www.bloggyopinions.com/Archives/boa_11_2002.html#84730645

If odd bits of news information is what you seek — you’ll be easily delighted in this site, but unfortunately there are many sites out there quoting random bits of news, and in no way does Random Walks come out on top.

Cristabel, 17, pulls up her top to show the numbers 'one' and 'eight' tattooed on her midriff, signifying her allegiance to the Calle Dieciocho, the 18th Street gang, named after a Los Angeles street. To enter the gang, she had to be ritually beaten by three of her 'homies' while the gang counted slowly to 18. On her back is a tattooed crucifix and RIP, in memory of her 'homegirl' who was killed by the rival Mara Salvatrucha gang last year. Cristabel's 17-year-old boyfriend, Nelson, has diecocho inscribed on his forehead, making him a walking target. It is ugly, but what is pathetically tragic is that it is spelt incorrectly - the tattooist has left the second 'i' out of dieciocho.

originally posted by daiichi

At the heart of the Crick-Koch hypothesis is a simple idea with vast implications. It is that consciousness, rather than representing some spiritual or God-given quality, is a biological process like digestion or circulation, generated by the activity of neurons in the brain. As he wrote in his 1994 book, "The Astonishing Hypothesis": "You, your joys and your sorrows--your sense of personal identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules."

originally posted by xowie

People who play Scrabble around the kitchen table usually score in the 200s. Good Scrabble players hit scores of 450 or more, said Wapnick, whose top score is 662.

originally posted by daiichi

I just got an email from the e-sheep guy saying:

I’m excited to report my friend Justine Shaw (or, as I like to call her, The Superstar) has just launched Part Two of her epic web comic NOWHERE GIRL. If you haven’t yet read part one of Nowhere Girl, all I can say is: Justine’s work blows E-sheep, and pretty much every other web comic, out of the water. If you have read part one already, I’m certain you’ve clicked through and forgotten all about this email by now :-)

I am not rich, famous or heroic. No one pounds at my door—thank God—asking for either my sperm or my autograph.

originally posted by daiichi

When meta intends to teach us a lesson -- that is, when it's a drag -- it's usually instructing us that we shouldn't confuse fiction with real life.

originally posted by daiichi

The title refers to an incident when Anne was a child. Her brother had waited until the night before a school project on birds was due to start work on it. He sat at the kitchen table, with a blank pad of paper and a pile of bird books, overcome by the immensity of the task. His father sat down, put his arm around him and said, "Bird by bird, buddy. Just take it bird by bird." This has become Lamott's way of tricking herself into writing. She tells herself that she's only required to write a small amount each day, just one "bird." No matter how busy, how distracted, how depressed, how uninspired, surely there's time enough for one measly paragraph or character description or scene outline? Of course, once you sit down to bang out that one small block of text, you end up producing two or three or more. But you always tell yourself you're gonna take it one unintimidating chunk at a time: bird by bird.

Would you even read a review of Guinness without your own preconceptions? When you clicked on the link to read this article, you didn't really click it to find out our opinion of Guinness- you already know that we like it and drink it and that you like it and drink it. Something else brought you here. Perhaps it was interest in the widget... perhaps it was interest in the new draught bottle. Perhaps you were wondering if the correct spelling is draft or draught. Well, let me try to satisfy your interests.

ARE YOU WONDERING...

• What is the best location for viewing the 2002 Leonid meteor shower?
• What night do I need to go out to see the the shower from my hometown?
• How active is the shower expected to be?

originally posted by Ben Fried

Click the strip.

originally posted by xowie

National ID for Philippines?

originally posted by daiichi

THIS IS EARL.
toon by Mr. John Van Vliet.

originally posted by daiichi

At last it happened...my name was called. It was time to be questioned for jury selection. The merry, chubby attorney for the plaintiff asked me what I did for a living. I told him I was a food writer, and that I had just returned from the legendary Peter Luger Steak House...where I had eaten during the lunch break. His mind boggled...I was in like Flynn!

originally posted by daiichi

"I did smoke a joint and I did inhale,'' he said, taking a jab at President Clinton's famous statement. "The bottom line is that's what it was in the '70s, that's what I did. I have never touched it since.''

originally posted by xowie

West Marin women strip for peace.

originally posted by daiichi

After a judge granted him permission to postpone his scheduled testimony until the afternoon, the reclusive pop star arrived at the courthouse without the surgical mask he had worn a day earlier, but carrying a black umbrella.

originally posted by daiichi

HyperDictionary is the only online dictionary I'll ever use from now on. Ever. Ever. See a word, click on it, get information. Isn't that what we were promised? That and flying cars.

Everyone interviewed was familiar with this phenomenon - that is, Americans being fond of wearing shirts emblazoned with kanji, oblivious as to its actual meaning. Or actually having it tattooed directly on their skin, with probably no greater authority than the tattoo artist present to assure them that they are not forever being branded with characters that mean "stupid American." For the most part, even the most serious-sounding of the respondents couldn't help but laugh at the phenomenon. They find it as funny as most Americans probably find "Japlish." Moreover, the majority of the respondents saw it as a parallel cultural phenomenon to Japanese-English: after all, both give a "sense of exoticism in a twisted way," both hold an appeal that has little if anything to do with literal meaning, and both appear rather humorous to individuals who are actually familiar with the meaning. Therefore, on at least this superficial level, the two phenomena are indeed extremely similar. There are, however, a couple of differences.

For one, the degree to which both cultural/fashion developments have flourished in their respective countries is separated by a rather wide gulf. While one can often find kanji on T-shirts and tattoos in America, that is more or less where its presence ends. English, on the other hand, literally cannot be avoided no matter where one should happen to go in Japan; even a blind man would perhaps pick up snippets of students practicing their English, or hear it used in commercials. Furthermore, while an American may put on a kanji T-shirt, or even consider a tattoo, it is not likely that he would feel enticed to buy a product because its advertisement contained Japanese characters. The language may seem fascinating and exotic, but with none of the "race envy" discussed earlier.

"Whatever the result, we are going to have to be terribly well behaved about it. We don't want one or the other sulking and moping around."

originally posted by daiichi

Best be bumpin your ride, homie.

originally posted by xowie

As controversial as the show sounds, Darnell noted that 60% of all marriages worldwide are still arranged, although not in most Western countries.

originally posted by xowie

Indigo Girls will help kick SOA’s ass this weekend.

originally posted by daiichi

A few links about using weblogs for knowledge management:

• a klog apart - a metaklog?
• Rick Klau's K-Log Pilot Recap

100 stickers for $30 seems like a good deal.

Unlike most of Timberline's dome-dreaming clientele, Ingle and Thompson had no particular drive to become dome dwellers. "I got the first Whole Earth Catalog and was excited," he says, shrugging. "I'm part of that generation. But I never thought I would live in a dome."

originally posted by xowie

And there it sat for over a decade ...

Until I received several pieces of email recently, the combined gist of which is that there are rumors abounding on the Net and the Web about a last episode of the show, either scripted and never produced, or produced and never aired, in which we learn that the kids actually died on the rollercoaster that supposedly took them into the Realm, and that they are, in fact, imprisoned in Hell and being tormented with a complex fantasy (as if just being in Hell wouldn't be torment enough) by the Devil masquerading as Dungeon Master, and do I have any words to share with the masses about this issue?

According to the Drug Enforcement Administration, the effects of the fentanyl class "are indistinguishable from those of heroin, with the exception that the fentanyls may be hundreds of times more potent."

That mystery drug? Shh. It's legal in the U.S.

There are some 3,000 photographs and undeveloped negatives in the house as well as bullfighting paintings, antelope heads from hunting trips to Africa and unfinished bottles of gin, Campari and Bacardi next to Hemingway’s favourite reading chair.

originally posted by xowie

Listen, people, I don't how you expect to ever stop the war if you can't sing any better than that. There's about 300,000 of you fuckers out there and I want you to start singing! Come on!

originally posted by xowie

Today's Democratic Party is less a party than an entrenched Washington apparatus, which operates as a sort of simulacrum of itself, bellowing the names of past icons, while it carries on the business of responding to the interests of one lobby group or another.

originally posted by daiichi

"I fixed my teeth, bought a new computer and started the project," Saidenberg says. "I wanted to run it as a collective, because of my background working as an activist. It was really important that it not just be me publishing my friends."

originally posted by daiichi

"People to me are like walking Smithsonians, and when they die, all this goes with them unless you document it. (...)

"I never saw an upholsterer in American literature," Ms. Cisneros said. Her father, Alfredo Cisneros, had an upholstery business in Chicago that is now run by three of his sons. "He was such an example of generosity and honest labor," she said. "I didn't want people to erase him."

Until a moment ago, The Roots and Michael Chabon had but a tenuous connection in the map of my head.

If you do not have previous experience with Chinese culture or medicine, be prepared for a cultural experience that can not only relieve your medical condition, but enrich your life.

originally posted by daiichi

Figure out what’s going on here (CSS Styling of Namespaces in HTML?).

Unlike Andre the Giant, Metafilter has a Wiki.

William Faulkner. Eudora Welty. Richard Wright. Tennessee Williams. Thomas Wolfe. Truman Capote. Carson McCullers. Reynolds Price. Zora Neale Hurston. Katherine Anne Porter. Robert Penn Warren. James Dickey. Flannery O'Connor. Willie Morris. Those dogs could hunt.

Granted, they wrote in different styles and with varying degrees of success. But there was still something there. Something solid and familiar and identifiable -- something Southern.

As the South has been swallowed up by America, all that has changed. The region has lost some of its manners and moorings. Irate drivers honk at each other in Jackson. You can buy the New York Times in Mobile. There's sushi everywhere. Faux moonshine, Mason jar and all, is sold -- and taxed -- in liquor stores.

"I’m a paper monkey. I basically do all the boring paper Asian girl things," she says. (And before you yank your underwear up your ass and get on your soap box, pal, please note that she herself said it, not us.)

originally posted by daiichi

Sedona, Arizona, Takes on the Big Boys of Sculpture, by my homegirl Patti Cohen.

originally posted by daiichi

The computers will get input from carbon-14 results or data from ancient texts--cuneiform, not a Sim City expansion pack.

originally posted by daiichi

"It was a bit odd," said Justin, "my fingers were working the controls, but they were also kind of working you."

Rhetorical figures: from alliteration to zeugma!

You gain a keen awareness of where your power is coming from, of the climate, of living close to nature. You conserve much more when you see the meter on the batteries go down. You tend to turn off the lights.

“All the Saints of the City of the Angels is a poetic and historical road trip through the City of Los Angeles, California, exploring our cultural and spiritual heritage by traveling through our 85 streets bearing the names of saints.” Though I’ve only been to LA once (when I was four, and the cylons on the Universal Studios tour scared the sh!t out of me), recent developments in my life reveal more and more connections with that place. [via Pop Culture Junk Mail]

It’s official: the station wagon is back!

Kosher pizzerias have cropped up in the Midwood section of Brooklyn and on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. Greeks have opened pizzerias in all five boroughs, making a Greek-style pizza with a highly seasoned sauce that finds echoes in the cornmeal-crusted pizzas served at the Two Boots minichain. Italians now share the Arthur Avenue neighborhood in the Bronx with Albanians, and while Tony & Tina's, a pizzeria there, serves decent if not great pizza, it has fabulous bureks — multilayer savory pies made with spinach, cheese and ground beef. And for the increasingly South Asian population in Jackson Heights, Queens, two Famous Pizza shops offer pizza with curry powder and jalapeño toppings. By the slice.

"There some challenges at Jack Kerouac Park, where if you're an advanced skateboarder, there's a challenge in the grinding and things," said Thomas Bellegarde, director of the city's Parks Department. "The skateboard parks we have are for the learner and the inexperienced person."

"We've had some odd occurrences in the store," said Haslam's co-owner Ray Hinst. "The temperature seems to change in certain spots, and books have flown off the shelves." Hinst said a psychic recently went through the store with "little sensing things." "She concluded spirits were around and one was Kerouac. He was restless . . . but comfortable."

Things it hurts to learn: (1) The late Dr. Smith was from the Bronx, not the UK. (2) Flea from RHCP is the voice of Donny.

originally posted by daiichi

Direct from Phil Agre’s RRE, “several astounding articles about the coming election in Florida”

• [www.miami.com/mld/miami...](http://www.miami.com/mld/miami/news/local/4417139.htm?template=contentModules/printstory.jsp)
• [www.bradenton.com/mld/brade...](http://www.bradenton.com/mld/bradenton/news/local/4416249.htm?template=contentModules/printstory.jsp)
• [www.law.com/jsp/print...](http://www.law.com/jsp/printerfriendly.jsp?c=LawArticle&t=PrinterFriendlyArticle&cid=1032128852568)
• http://newtimesbpb.com/issues/2002-10-31/news2.html/1/index.html
• http://www.salon.com/politics/feature/2002/11/01/lists/print.html
• http://www.cnn.com/2002/ALLPOLITICS/11/01/elec02.florida.voters/

She is showing even more of her ass. She is shrugging about her multiple body piercings. She says she likes to drink tequila. She has revealed the requisite amount of family problems. She claims she has actually had sex, and even liked it, sort of. Take that, Brit.

originally posted by daiichi

Boing Boing is the top blog.

rW is #252.

originally posted by daiichi

October 23, 1979. I was in my bathtub in the wee hours of the morning, as naked as a cartoonist. I put two and two together, and voilà! Just two decades later, my book. (...)

Cartooning is creativity stripped down to its core, because it's removed from the real-world constraints (and consequences) that complicate other applications of the creative mind. It's a form of play which depends on spontaneity and, by extension, creativity.

We bent down and began picking cotton. It was beautiful. Across the field were the tents, and beyond them the brown cottonfields that stretched out of sight to the brown arroyo foothills and then the snow-capped Sierras in the morning air. This was so much better than washing dishes South Main Street. But I knew nothing about picking cotton. I spent too much time disengaging the white ball from crackly bed; the others did it in one flick. Moreover, fingertips began to bleed; I needed gloves, or more expeience. There was an old Negro couple in the field with They picked cotton with the same God-blessed patience the grandfathers had practiced in ante-bellum Alabama; the moved right along their rows, bent and blue, and their bag increased. My back began to ache. But it was beautiful kneeling and hiding in that earth. If I felt like resting I did, my face on the pillow of brown moist earth. Birds an accompaniment. I thought I had found my life's work.

Ladies and gentlemen, we've done it. The Buy Bush a PlayStation Campaign has collected $370, enough to send the commander-in-chief a PlayStation 2 with all the trimmings. Thanks again to everyone who made this protest possible with your donations, ideas and support.

Over the next couple of days, I will begin the very serious business of buying the PS2, making the proper arrangements with the White House's office of presidential correspondence so that the Secret Service doesn't tear it apart, and turning the whole thing into a photo essay for your edification and amusement

Oh my god, have you seen the gamebutton arcade?

Death in the Family by Judith Lewis.

originally posted by daiichi

When a drumbeat on a vinyl record is scratched back and forth under a needle, it makes a sort of percussive swishing sound. The first scratches the average pop music fan ever heard were Mr. Mizell's.

Someday music will be only air. There will be no objects to hold or fetishize and people will simply collect lists. No disc, nothing spooled or grooved, nothing to scratch or break, no heads to clean, no dust to wipe, no compulsive alphabetizing. Nothing to put away in shoe boxes in spare closets and be embarrassed about.

BRAND: Was the crowd as large as expected?

MARSHALL: It was not as large as the organizers of the protest had predicted. They had said there would be 100,000 people here. I'd say there are fewer than 10,000. However, they did accomplish their goal of actually marching around the White House in one continuous stream of people. It is a little bit thin in some areas, but nonetheless, they have marched around the White House.

The great article Top Ten Digital Photography Tips led me to the very attractive O’Reilly book, Digital Photography Pocket Guide.

I am not a junkie...Ive had a rather unconclusive and uncomfortable stomach condition for the past three years...I decided to relieve my pain with small doses of heroine for a walloping 3 whole weeks.

Mr. Dunne, who, naturally, is working on his own bird guide, said birders did not see the guides as competing because they bought everything, and more than one copy. He cited an informal survey he did recently of him and two other birders while they were out in the field. How many Sibley's did each of them own, he wondered. The answers were five, two and five.

Following the success of Ghost World, in fact, Tomine has received several calls from would-be producers of the first Optic Nerve flick, but the cartoonist actually talked the callers out of it.

A year later, scientists and physicians in New York City are still trying to figure out just what tens of thousands of people inhaled that fateful day.

My favorite part is when the kid is saying to the other kid you are me. They become friends. They point to each other a lot in the book. The book has marks like a question mark and exclamation point. I liked the book.

If whiteness didn’t have a social meaning, if the advantages weren’t there, then people wouldn’t think of themselves as white.

My personal top 40 tunes this week:

1. Dedicated, Digable Planets
2. Stumbline, Smashing Pumpkins
3. Approaching Pavonis Mons By Balloon (Utopia Planitia), The Flaming Lips
4. Epiphany, The Spinanes
5. Ocean Beat, Tosca
6. Is This It, The Strokes
7. Intro, Aim
8. Wigwam, Bob Dylan
9. Toj, El-P
10. All We Have is Now, The Flaming Lips
11. From A Seaside Town, Aim
12. Neil Young - Heart of Gold, Neil Young
13. The Flute Plays On, Monsieur Charles
14. I Am Trying To Break Your Heart, Wilco
15. Baraat, Monsoon Wedding
16. War On War, Wilco
17. Pot Kettle Black, Wilco
18. Heavy Metal Drummer, Wilco
19. Poor Places, Wilco
20. I'm The Man Who Loves You, Wilco
21. Jesus, etc., Wilco
22. Radio Cure, Wilco
23. Glass Onion, Beatles
24. Good Disease, Aim
25. Do You Realize?, The Flaming Lips
26. the golden age, beck
27. Kamera, Wilco
28. Reservations, Wilco
29. One More Robot - Sympathy 3000-21, The Flaming Lips
30. Are You A Hypnotist??, The Flaming Lips
31. In The Morning Of The Magicians, The Flaming Lips
32. Ego Tripping at the Gates of Hell, The Flaming Lips
33. Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots pt. 1, The Flaming Lips
34. Smokes Quantity, Boards of Canada
35. It's Summertime (Throbbing Orange Pallbearers), The Flaming Lips
36. Ashes Of American Flags, Wilco
37. What Does Your Soul Look Like, Pt. 1: Blue, DJ Shadow
38. Rose Rouge, St Germain
39. One Very Important Thought, Boards of Canada
40. Kaini Industries, Boards of Canada

There's a Philip K. Dick novel, I can't remember the name of it, but I remember reading it and realizing that in order to understand it, the patterns of thought in your brain have to change. The Sound and the Fury does that, too. The Sound and the Fury reorders your mind. You can't just read it passively; it changes you. To understand it you have to work so hard that when you make the connections there's a physical change in your brain. Since everything the culture gives us is so mindless, and kills the connection in your brain, real art has to find some way to reorder the mind.

Alternet: Psychedelics and Zen: Teach your Children Well

[John Perry Barlow:] I consider LSD to be a serious medicine, but by diminishing the hazards in our cultural drugs of choice and demonizing psychedelics, we head our children straight down the most dangerous path their youthful adventurism can take. (…)

Laugh at authority in America and you will know risk. LSD is illegal primarily because it threatens the dominant American culture, the culture of control.

[University of Massachusetts professor Nick Bromell:] Why these drugs? What is the synergistic connection between these drugs and coming of age – of middle class adolescence? Clearly this is something fundamental and still unresolved. (…)

There was nothing noble about lounging all afternoon in a suburban rec room and feeling that life sucked. But there was (and still is) something mythic about dropping acid and descending into a maelstrom where the nameless nagging insecurities of the everyday become tempests and nebulae in the void of inner space.

[Ram Dass:] It’s a great gift, a profound sacrament. You can’t put it down. We just don’t know how to use it, for the most part. … I feel sad when society rejects something that can help it understand itself and deepens its values and its wisdom.

Two hunters are out in the woods when one of them collapses. He doesn't seem to be breathing and his eyes are glazed. The other guy takes out his phone and calls the emergency services.

He gasps: "My friend is dead! What can I do?" The operator says: "Calm down, I can help. First, let's make sure he's dead." There is a silence, then a gunshot is heard. Back on the phone, the guy says: "OK, now what?"

Bizarrely, computer analysis of the data also showed that jokes containing 103 words were thought to be especially funny. The winning "hunters" joke was 102 words long.

Here are some intellectually stimulating shots of beer guts!

originally posted by Bill

How can hundreds or even thousands be transported without exposing health care workers to contagious or otherwise harmful agents? Perhaps with an inexpensive, disposable plastic pod that seals off the human body much like a giant Ziploc sandwich bag, although one outfitted with a battery powered blower that brings in fresh air and an exhaust fan that filters biochemical particles.

• DC Indymedia
• Washington Post Dispatches: IMF/World Bank Protests
• Google News articles by date
• Yahoo photo searches one and two

We gave Sharon six weeks of quiet, during which time more than 79 Palestinians were killed. No one in the world cared.

September 2002 DC Mobilization Calendar of Events

Note the megatextual references to Heaven, Superior Being-as-girl-child, snow-as-inviolable-purity, and time-as-irrelevancy. [via riley dog]

“Here’s how the whole tabbed browsing thing happened…"

TrackBack is a system for connecting weblog posts across sites. If you've been reading weblogs for a while, you've probably seen how conversations can happen across several weblogs. TrackBack simply makes the connections more visible.

TrackBack was developed by Movable Type, and integrated into their weblog tool. It's rapidly becoming an open standard for connecting posts.

• TrackBack at MetaFilter
• homebrew trackback tutorial
• TrackBack development weblog
• TrackForward?

The question of the day at BlogRoots: is there sexism in blogging? For further reading see is MetaFilter a boyzone? and is randomWalks a fraternity?

Syracuse New Times: Dirty Thoughts: A germ-laden childhood might be a good thing for a person’s immune system.

The United States, like most other industrialized nations, has seen a rise in allergic reactions such as asthma, hay fever and eczema. Two British scientists believe this rise in allergic disorders may be the result of obsessive cleanliness, as well as the uses of antibiotics and vaccinations. They maintain that all of these elements deprive the immune system from learning to distinguish between harmful and non-harmful agents.

Among their findings are the discoveries that you are less likely to be allergic if you were not given antibiotics as a child; had older siblings, especially brothers; rarely washed your hands or face as a child; lived in a home with bacteria-laden dust; were brought up on a farm with animals; had a dog; had a childhood infection that was transmitted by fecal-to-oral contamination; and grew up in Communist, rather than Western, Europe.

Imagine libraries of TIFFs of phono-records available through the Internet Archive, available for downloading and processing into Ogg or MP3 files. Keep the TIFFs handy and you can re-rip them into new formats as they emerge. Imagine bulk-feeding phono-scanners that automatically feed stacks of wax through and turn them into digital music, rescuing and restoring entire libraries of music... Gosh, this is cool stuff.

It’s time once again for the Project Censored list of the top underreported, underplayed, and underanalyzed stories of 2001. Topping the list this year are radio and water, two things that have been increasingly on my mind. See also http://www.projectcensored.org/.

You wanted to hear Aloha? You’re in luck: http://www.insomniaville.com/aloha/sounds/.

Before I steal a half-dozen links from one buddha, allow me to politely point you in his direction. Get your third eye open!

Mass graves discovered in May near the northern city of Shebergan could contain as many as 1,000 bodies of Taliban prisoners who suffocated in sealed trucks last November. The deaths allegedly occurred during the transport of prisoners by a militia under the command of Gen. Abdurrashid Dostum. The Newsweek report described Dostum's militiamen cramming Taliban fighters who had surrendered into sealed trucks for the trip to Shebergan. The report said many prisoners suffocated slowly in the intense heat and that drivers were beaten by Dostum's troops for trying to allow the captives to breathe.

Women in the U.S. armed services are increasingly at danger -- not from foreign terrorists, but from men in the U.S. armed services.

9 percent of women in the Marines, 8 percent of women in the Army, 6 percent of women in the Navy and 4 percent of women in the Air Force and Coast Guard were victims of rape or attempted rape in one year alone.

Early this morning, as the restaurants and clubs were shutting down in the Adams Morgan neighborhood here, a young waiter named Rick Roman joined a crowd gawking at the new attraction on the sidewalk: an 18-foot-wide vending machine.

Mr. Roman looked through the glass at the dozens of products - bottles of olive oil and milk, cartons of eggs, chicken sandwiches, paper towels, detergent, diapers, pantyhose, toothpaste, condoms, DVD's - and realized what he absolutely had to take home at 12:15 a.m. After he inserted a $10 bill and punched numbers on a screen, the crowd watched a metal bin rise to collect a package of razor blades from one shelf and a can of shaving cream from another.

It's a masterpiece of convenience in the drive-through age. Perhaps it shouldn't come as a surprise, then, to learn that the Tik Tok Easy Shop is actually a division of the people who spawned fast food and helped put a happy face on the exporting of American culture: McDonald's.

You cannot go back and become a person who doesn't know how to write FedEx, but if you will actually decide to write it over your paintings, FedEx may sue you, because it hold a "copyright" it owns the part of your brain where the FedEx logo is located.

I can’t remember the last time it really rained. Our farmer says:

We did get a small fraction of an inch of rain this week, but it was hardly enough to even wet the dust. We are now going on over 2 months without more than a sprinkle. 4 months of really very little rain. The ground, out here, is cracking. Deep cracks several inches wide. I can’t plow without first watering the ground, the plow just bounces on top of the concrete like soil. This last week a number of trees started dying. We are sure fortunate to have a good water source for our vegetables. Our spring, as of now, shows no signs of slowing. There are other springs around here, springs that didn’t even dry up in the 30’s that are now completely dry. There are people around here who are having to sell their cattle because they don’t have enough water for their animals.

I understand over 50% of the rest of the country is also in a major drought. That is almost to the level of the 1934 dustbowl days.

I wonder, if we weren’t such a large and powerful country, how long it would take before droughts like this started causing food shortages.

I think maybe if we can't grow (or pay to have grown) our own food nearby, maybe we shouldn't be living here. What do you think? I mean, if we can't directly experience the impact we have on the world, how can we possibly judge whether what we're doing is something we ought to be doing?

We went to the pond today, and I wouldn't have been able to take this picture (from May). I can't remember the last time it really rained.

The government is preparing a national crackdown on file traders that would crush the rogue swapping networks in the same manner hackers were pushed underground 12 years ago.

Remember last year's summer of the shark? Welcome to the summer of the abduction.

The public didn't need to watch little Samantha's funeral "live ... in its entirety" on CNN. The public didn't need to listen to Larry King bloviate about this topic night after night, not just with Runnion's grief-stricken mother, but also with a panel of people involved in the case, and, most pathetically, with celebrity hack Dominick Dunne. It's fine to alert the public when a child is missing or there's a serial killer on the loose in the neighborhood, but that's largely a job for local news. What Larry King, Bill O'Reilly, and the rest are doing is something else entirely: It's sensationalizing other people's tragedy.

The world is a scary enough place without kids being made to feel that at any moment a masked man could sneak into their bedroom and spirit them away. It could happen--and does on extraordinarily rare occasions. But our children are in no greater danger this summer than any other.

What will comics look like in 5 years? I don’t know either, but Patrick Farley makes web comics look like a mature art form. While you can’t go wrong with anything at electric sheep, particular favorites include “Overheard at the Rave”, “The Guy I Almost Was”, and “The Spiders”. I’m mentioning e-sheep again because Farley has just launched the weekly strip “Barracuda: The Scotty Zaccharine Story, a look back on the rise and fall of Dot Com San Francisco.”

Cooking with monkey! Oh, my.

“Not directly experiencing racism is, in fact, directly experiencing racism.” Aaron, uppity-negro.com

This week, the government refused to comply with a federal judge who ordered that he be given the underlying evidence justifying Hamdi's treatment. The Justice Department has insisted that the judge must simply accept its declaration and cannot interfere with the president's absolute authority in "a time of war."

Is that one of those guitars that’s, like, a heart-shaped triple guitar?

My inner child lives in an Earthship.

I'm black and I'm going to do anything I want to do. Then it'll be black because I did it.

Get Your War On 13

What kind of title is “San Francisco’s ‘Sleeping Giant’ Awakens” for an NPR segment? How often do we see white people described with racialized, monolithic, and anthropomorphizing imagery?

“When Shiva holds the center of the stage, the role of the personalized Brahman is colored with death and destruction. Shiva’s stern asceticism casts a blight over the fields of rebirth. His presence negates and transcends the kaleidoscope of sufferings and joys. Nevertheless, he bestows wisdom and peace and is not only terrible but profoundly benign. Shiva’s nature at once transcends and includes all the polarities of the living world.” “Shiva opens his third eye only in anger, and the offender is burnt to cinders.”

“30 Years After the Murder of George Jackson: A 29-minute documentary about the origins of the modern anti-prison movement.” Who was George Jackson? I’d never heard of him until I read of him at Full Bleed. This audio documentary is the top Google result about the activist who was murdered in San Quentin prison in 1971.

Washington Post: At 70, Master Jhoon Rhee Is Still Getting in His Kicks. He taught Bruce Lee to kick, trained more than 270 members of Congress, and does at least 1,000 push-ups and a few hundred sit-ups every day.

I'm all for random searches . . . but I do think the number of Caucasian, lactating mothers who have passed through al Qaeda training camps is negligible.

The Memory Hole: “You might think that Kennedy revealing an A-bomb a few blocks from the White House would be highly newsworthy, but you’d be wrong.”

ME: You put it all into WorldCom, didn't you?

CITIGROUP: Funny how nobody ever calls it warm, soft cash.

ME: Uh-huh, uh-huh. Point taken. But just out of curiosity—you know, not that such things matter to me—exactly how much of my cash do you still have left?

CITIGROUP: Don't wait until someone says "Your money or your life" to remember that they are two different things.

ME: Oh, sweet Jesus. It's all gone, isn't it?

Doc Searls says “Bring on the WiFi Radios!” Also of interest: Radio’s titan hits the skids, in which Eric Boehlert looks at the antitrust cases facing Clear Channel Communications, a.k.a. Why Commerical Radio Sucks, Inc.

There’s a lot going on over at Blogroots – new look, new TrackBack-enabled weblog-related post aggregator (when will Blogger Pro support TrackBack?), and the highly-anticipated We Blog is due out in two days. In other news of limited interest, dive into mark has a good summary of the proposed changes in XHTML 2.0 (which look just great to this web head).

I did a triple-take when I saw this gay-themed Snapple ad at a Metro station this morning.

Corky Lee was set on his course in junior high school by a famous photograph taken at Promontory Point, Utah, in 1869. The picture commemorated the completion of the transcontinental railroad and showed workers posing with two trains, one from the Central Pacific line and one from the Union Pacific. But something was wrong with this picture. No Chinese workers.

Thousands of Chinese men worked on that railroad. In fact, Mr. Lee said, the saying "He doesn't have a Chinaman's chance" comes from the fact that when the Sierra Nevada had to be blasted for the railroad, the Chinese were usually the ones lowered from cliffs laden with dynamite and fuses. Each time they went down to set the charges, they got paid a dollar more. But when the time came to party and be photographed, the Chinese were nowhere to be found.

Since Mr. Lee first laid eyes on that photograph, he has devoted himself to making Asian-Americans visible.

And the best thing is Twinkies have so many preservatives that they never go bad. If you got trapped in the room, you could eat the Twinkies for years.

One of the benefits of 21st-century economic and cultural globalization is the overdue nod toward artists like Hélio Oiticica, who turn out to have been doing things 30 or 40 years ago that pass for new today.

"It's the search for peak experience, something that's really going to be special," says Adam Eidinger, a District political organizer. "It happened to me just last week. There was a concert at Fort Reno -- Fugazi." His cell rang. "There's this guy, Bernardo, who's one of the biggest swarmer cell-phone people I know." Came the restless call: " 'Where are you? There are all these people here!' And he wasn't just calling us. He called 25 people. Pretty soon everybody he knew was sitting on the grass, and none of them knew they were going to be there that morning."

If the death of five Americans leaves Mr. Bush “furious," you’d think the death of one would at least find him peeved. According to unconfirmed reports, however, the shooting of an American citizen – shot in the head and chest while her 9-month old son sat on her lap – in Palestine by the Israeli Defense Force registered as a slight itch on the back of the President’s right knee.

I don't think it's that women are less sexual than men. I think they could or would like porn if the situation were different. There are still fairly big taboos about women admitting to being interested in porn - even for the ones who rent pretty racy stuff from upstairs. And the movies would have to be different. There'd have to be more about why these people are having sex. A better reason than Tab A fitting into Slot B, at least.

And, from what I do know about porn, the sex would have to be different. It doesn't look like the women on porn boxes are having that much fun. They're always being bent or twisted into uncomfortable positions, or trying to avoid sperm being shot directly into their eyes. The fact that the men watching want to see as much as possible means that the women don't seem to be getting touched much. They're just getting poled by some guy who's apparently deliberately avoiding their erogenous zones. Whee. So we don't get many women downstairs. I hope the few brave feminine souls who do go down there find what they're looking for.

Oh, by the way... Management found out about this journal and the NPR piece over the weekend.

I am not fired.

Kobun Otokawa Roshi, 64, drowned Friday, July 26, in a pond near Lucerne, Switzerland, while attempting to rescue his daughter Maya, 5, who had fallen into the water. Maya also drowned. Roshi leaves his wife Katrine, their daughter Tatsuko, 7, and son Alyosha, 3. He also leaves two grown children: Yoshiko, 29, of Albuquerque, N.M., and Taido, 31, of Washington state. The loss of a great heart always leaves a void. His was a life worthy of celebration.

The New York Times' wine tasters hold forth on Wheat Beer, the Antidote to Summer Heat. (Don’t miss the tasting report.)

Rest easy, old friend, your targets are covered.

Priests tend to inflict maximum damage on their devout victims because Catholicism teaches that priests are God's representatives on earth, worthy of complete obedience and trust. To children, it often seems as though God is abusing them, a violation that can forever destroy the refuge organized religion provides.

Pornographer’s Picks: “A subjective listing of excellent free and membership porn sites, as chosen by a pornographer, together with occasional musings on sex, the smut industry, or whatever else I feel like rambling about. Some of these links may make me money when you click on them, but the links will always be what they claim to be, and the best of what’s out there. Oh yeah! Clicking on any links provided will likely result in explicit sexual content, so consider yourself warned.”

What’s a “ricer”?

Half of the Pixies' Fort Apache demo tape was released as “Come On Pilgrim”. The other half is just out with the title “Pixies”.

It is absolutely clear that Islam stems from the Judeo-Christian tradition. Indeed, we should think in terms of the "Judeo-Christian-Islamic tradition."

I’m not ashamed to say I’m a fan of John Ritter’s work. I am a little ashamed to tell you that John Ritter is co-starring with Katey Sagal in a sitcom for ABC this fall, “Some Show Whose Title Is Eight Words Long” or something. If that’s not enough, both ABC and WB have developed shows in which the main character is a thirtysomething man time-travelling back to high school in the 1980s. I’m not making this up!

I'm just blown away by the whole thing, still; that it happened, that we accomplished what we did, and that we survived, and survived as friends, and that it was as positive an experience as it was.

It's a way to get around without buying into the money economy, a way of consuming without waste, of living off the leftovers of American abundance in the same spirit as squatting unused land and subsisting on food that grocery stores and restaurants discard. Freight trains are like a communal garden that moves.

If you spot somebody you believe may be a TIPS informant, do two things:

• Mark the informant. In a subtle way, place the mark of the all-seeing eye (the eye-in-the-pyramid from the Great Seal, shown above) on their home, vehicle or person. Chalk is best, though it must be renewed. This is like Hobo Signs.
• Register them here.

“Why would anyone pay for this stuff?” - Doonesbury 7/21/2002

Internet radio stations are closing by the hundreds because they can't afford to pay expensive new royalties. But a compromise may be on the horizon.

Palestine Chronicle - ‘Murder in Gaza’ “contains images of the death and destruction created by the Israeli attack on the Gaza City, late Monday, July 22, where 12 Palestinians were killed and 140 wounded.” If you don’t think you want to see this, you don’t. Don’t click.

Go Eliot!

Now that OS X has a RealAudio client, I can bring you the best of NPR so far this month:

All Things Considered
• the struggling comic book industry
• Alan Lomax
• toothpicks and logos: history of design
• identity crisis
• HOPE (hackers on planet earth) convention
• catching casino crooks
• "seeds of peace" summer camp
• from a fashionable white enclave -- to victim of white flight -- to integrated professional community
• Yucca Mountain: time, and rain
• Hem: Rabbit Songs review
• Kenneth Koch interview excerpt
• the covers project is a web site devoted to finding strings of "cover" versions of popular songs - coversproject.com
• reconsidering 'people of color'
• The Hip Hop Generation by Bakari Kitwana

Morning Edition
• recycling toxic computer waste
• latino youth overrepresented in juvenile justice system
• Latin American Youth Center in DC
• muslim child custody case
• annual report on minorities in the media
• Juan Williams talks with Sudanese ex-slave
• Jägermeister
• marshmallow Fluff
• 1933 Kansas law prohibits Asians from inheriting land
• Lovely and Amazing movie review
• Lord Buckley biography

Game over, folks. The Classic Nick Homepage is the absolute best thing on the Internet.

Looking for Macworld info? Check out Xspot.

I would have loved to have seen Tom Cruise's character use that fancy glove-based interface to make a warm and charming virtual greeting for his pregnant wife, instead of posing with her with no technology in sight.

If it's true that commonly used pesticides compromise the immune system of a vertebrate organism, which is what these findings suggest, then we're looking at a much bigger problem than deformed frogs.

It's sort of like alchemy to turn horror into humor or to see the absurd side of tragedy.

When asked to explain any new insights he may have gained into his character, Tony Soprano, he shrugged and said, "We've just finished the season so it's very hard for me to answer that. I almost need to clear my head a little bit and then look back at it." In trying to explain the enormous appeal of the mob boss, he likened his character to Ralph Kramden of "The Honeymooners": "It's like this moron is just doing the best he can and he just keeps screwing up. But I think that is changing a little bit."

San Jose Mercury News: Gay hip-hop innovators refute common stereotypes by Davey D.

We could go on and on naming gay artists who have made an impact on hip-hop. Gays have always been down with hip-hop. The question is: Do we accept our gay brothers and sistas?

I always forget to read the Funny Paper column in the Baltimore City Paper.

Somewhere, six feet under the fruited plain, the corpse of Hank Ketcham stirs from its fitful dreams of Swiss mountain sunlight and rolls over in dismay. Its dead bony hand scrabbles restlessly at the earth, fumbling for a chilled martini.

Lobot Is Lando Calrissian’s #1 helper. Lobot runs plant operations in Cloud City for Lando. But one day, something happened. Now you should look at the story.

By all rights, Metapop should be bigger than bread.

We went to Mammoth to do some songwriting, but it started snowing really hard. And we made a toboggan out of a plastic trash can. We’d get three of us in it. We kind of went through an embankment and straight down into this culvert. We all landed on Chris [Derson, drummer] and broke his arm. We had to walk to the clinic in the snow... Victor’s [Krummenacher, bassist] dad was a pharmacist, so he kind of needled the doctor into giving Chris more and stronger drugs than he really needed. So we bought some beer, walked home in the snow and popped some pills. That is when we decided to record Tusk.

Well, the truth is that there is a lot of luck involved. Some people prefer to pick matches from the top rows of gems, leaving a couple potential matches on the lower reaches as a ‘reserve.’ On the other hand, particularly in the timed game, some players prefer to make matches on the bottom rows to maximize their chances of a big cascade, with its correspondingly big time bonus. But if you’re playing the non-timed version, probably the most useful strategy is just to cross your fingers and pray.

Figure drawing: Basic Pose and Construction. Via xblog.

Dear Arjuna,

    How was the They Might Be Giants concert? I would have loved to go, but poker was great so I'm not upset about missing it.

    When you and your iBook move to L.A. this fall, be sure to keep an eye out for these warchalking symbols which indicate WiFi Internet access points. L.A. isn't quite as saturated as, say, San Francisco (scroll down), but it couldn't hurt to bring along your iBook and a copy of MacStumbler when you go apartment hunting, could it?

    Can you make it to dinner on Sunday?

          Love,

          Adam

SCIFI. COM chat transcript: Singularity with Venor Vinge and Ray Kurzweil

ChatMod: Tonight we’re pleased to welcome science fiction writer Venor Vinge, and author, innovator, and inventor Ray Kurzweil – the founder of Kurzweil Technologies. Tonight’s topic is Singularity. The term “singularity” refers to the geometric rate of the growth of technology and the idea that this growth will lead to a superhuman machine that will far exceed the human intellect. (…)

RayKurzweil: the event horizon of the Singularity can be compared to the concept of Singularity in physics. As one gets near a black hole, what appears to be an event horizon from outside the black hole appears differently from inside. The same will be true of this historical Singularity. (…)

vv: When dealing with “superhumans” it is not the same thing as comparing – say – our tech civ with a pretech human civ. The analogies shouldb with the animal kindgom and even more pershaps with things enve further away and more primitive (…)

RayKurzweil: The Singularity emerges from many thousands of smaller advances on many fronts: three-dimensional molecular computing, brain research (brain reverse engineering), software techniques, communication technologies, and many others. There’s no single Singularity studies. It’s the result of many intersecting revolutions. (…)

ChatMod: For both guests – will we notice the Singularity when it happens, or will life seem routine until we suddenly wake up and realize we’re on the other side?

RayKurzweil: Life will appear progressively more exciting. Doesn’t it seem that way already. I mean we’re just getting started, but there’s already a palpable acceleration.

vv: Yes, I know some people who half-seriously suggest it has already happened (…)

RayKurzweil: I do think that the entire Universe will be changed from “dumb matter” to smart matter, which is the ultimate answer to the cosmological questions.

Project Cryo: “I’m not sure if you want to place a Lego figure inside your mouse but if you do now you know how.”

How to survive without audiogalaxy: a guide to file-sharing alternatives

The leading clients are less user-friendly, slower, and sometimes shady. Using, and protecting yourself, from these apps takes more work and research.

Major music companies are preparing to mount a broad new attack on unauthorized online song-swapping. The campaign would include suits against individuals who are offering the largest troves of songs on peer-to-peer services. The suits would be part of a broader effort, including a public campaign that may feature prominent artists urging music fans to respect copyright rules.

Washington Metropolitan Area Air Quality Forecast

Did you know you have a clothespin on your shirt?

In an outstanding series on weblog usability (30 days to a more accessible weblog), Mark Pilgrim argues convincingly that web designers should not have links open new windows by default. I agree without reservation.

New York Times: Shameless Secrets of the Chefs

Yes, culinary snobs of the world: Coca-Cola has nuance. And, if you are to believe some of the country's top chefs and take a peek into their pantries, so do Heinz ketchup, Werther's caramels, Hellmann's mayonnaise, Hungry Jack potato flakes and other pedestrian ingredients. You may have even had them in a $30 entree without knowing it.

Wired News: Routes of Least Surveillance

The demonstrated tendency of Closed Circuit Television (CCTV) operators to single out ethnic minorities for observation and to voyeuristically focus on women’s breasts and buttocks provides the majority of the population ample legitimate reasons to avoid public surveillance cameras.

This page on melting metals in a domestic microwave describes a technique by which one could for example cast silver jewelery at home.

As seen on slashdot, the future of Internet radio just might be decentralized “swarming” networks of p2p hosts which broadcast copies of the stream they’re enjoying. streamer: pirate radio for the digital age; OPENdj: GPLed swarming streamer for Linux. Thanks to Cory for both of these.

Everyone has linked to these outstanding satirical propaganda posters, but somehow you haven’t seen them yet.

I’ve never heard of Aloha, but on the strength of this review I sure will try: Sugar high (Metro Times Detroit).

drylongso is “news, political and cultural commentary, fiction, poetry, essays, interviews, contests, and events for thinking people of color.”

Dear Dude,

    I like my job. How is the move going? I know you can email from work, a word or two. I hope the weekend isn’t too stressful. Call us if you need to talk!
    We’re excited about the Smithsonian Folklife Festival. The Silk Road, it will be great. Look at the Food section from this week: The Flavor Of the Silk Road. Just like we always talk about!
    Listen, this question might change your life: have you heard Aim’s Hinterland? Hello to E.

            Yours,

            Adam

The Washington Post on community gardens.

The overriding thing the committee concluded is that, given that we know acrylamides are cancer-causing in animals and probably in humans, it is intolerable that they are in foods at the levels found and we have to find a remedy. But there is not enough information to make any consumer recommendations because we need more research.

sfbg.com on John Sayles' Sunshine State.

wood s lot reverentially observes the recent passing of Beat poet, novelist, and Zen priest Philip Whalen. Two links I may and may not have stolen from the woods:

• Philip Whalen chapbook: Mark Other Place
• Jack Magazine on the passing of Philip Whalen

Good bands make good live albums. Bands that are not so good can make albums that initially sound okay, but which become increasingly sterile the more you listen to them. Here are some of the great live rock and/or roll albums.

If I may call your attention to Warblogger Watch, in part to note the stylish (but too w i d e?) redesign, but mostly because it’s the first and best site bold enough to flip the script and pay the warbloggers the only kind of attention they deserve.

Adam is committed to collaborating with other relevant initiatives
Adam is going to kill you
Adam is a singer, songwriter and pianist whose music embodies the fierce and tender spirit of Women's Music
Adam is renowned for his fine buildings, both public and private
Adam is unable to respond at this time
Adam is also active in the field of acting
Adam is the ideal human male with his rippling muscles and elegant contours
Adam is almost ready
Adam is never as funny and clever as it thinks and/or hopes itself to be
Adam is on TV, Wednesdays 7pm
Adam is famous
Adam is a polo shirt wearin sleep mo fo
Adam is a square

Adam is a complicated man

NPR has revised its linking "policy." The revision seems like an improvement, but it's not -- it's just as bad as it ever was. NPR still maintains that people who link to NPR's site require permission -- the new policy merely conditionally grants that permission.

I'll say it again: The most harmful lie you can tell about the Web is that permission is a prerequisite for linking. There is no copyright interest in controlling how people reference your work.

I'm sending fresh mail to Jeffrey Dvorkin, NPR's ombudsman, to tell him what I think of this. I recommend that you do the same. I will also be withholding my donation from NPR until this policy is reversed. Much as I hold public radio dear, NPR's policy has the potential to irreparably damage the Web. I would give up a thousand NPRs for the WWW.

The math doesn't even work anymore.

The Post on Hip-Hop and politics; the Times on Hip-Hop and theater.

You don't know anything except what's there for you to see. An act. Lies. Device. Not the pure heart, the pumping black heart.

When I wrote that play Dutchman, I didn't know what I had written. I stayed up all night and wrote it, went to sleep at the desk and then woke up, and looked at it and said "what the [f---] is this?" And then put it down and went to bed.

"I get into a zone," says Mr. Ince. "I can see them bopping their heads as they walk past. They don't see me, but I can see them hearing it. It's beautiful."

Hear that blue jay? Totally wrong.

Mr. Chin met his assailants, Ronald Ebens, a supervisor at Chrysler, and his stepson Michael Nitz, who had recently been laid off, at a strip club in Highland Park, a small blue-collar city surrounded by Detroit, where Mr. Chin was having his bachelor party.

A dispute started inside the club about a stripper. Then a dancer heard Mr. Ebens hurl profanities at Mr. Chin, blaming him for the loss of American jobs. Moments later, according to court documents, Mr. Ebens and Mr. Nitz chased Mr. Chin down the street and crushed his skull with a Louisville Slugger.

Asian-Americans called the killing a hate crime. But a judge ruled the death was no more than the tragic end to a barroom brawl. The two pleaded guilty to second-degree manslaughter, and as part of the plea agreement, were sentenced to three years of probation and $3,780 in fines and court fees.

"It sent a chilling message that it didn't matter if you worked for American companies and spoke English without an accent, you still weren't regarded as a red-blooded American worthy of rights," said Frank Wu, a law professor at Howard University and author of "Yellow: Race in America Beyond Black and White."

"The tragedy marked our political coming of age," said Helen Zia, a writer who helped found American Citizens for Justice in response to the Chin killing. "But we also need to consider where we go from here."

We're talking here about a man who's held a responsible job with the same company for 17 or 18 years and his son, who is employed and a part time student. These men are not going to go out and harm somebody else. I just didn't think that putting them in prison would do any good for them or society.

It didn't take us long to realize we had a huge hit. In fact, it took less than 24 hours. The first day Today's Papers appeared, we got a message from Bill Gates asking when we were planning to make it available by e-mail. (...)

Scott Shuger was, in a way, the first complete Internet journalist, in that the Internet was essential to both his input and his output, and the result was something new and useful that couldn't be done before. Without the Internet, Scott couldn't have read five newspapers from across the country—and done it before the paper editions were even available.

The Asian-American rights organization cited the behavior of the Queens poll workers - as well as similar complaints against workers in Chinatown and Brooklyn's Homecrest and Sunset Park sections - in a report released yesterday that disclosed a wide range of problems Asian-American voters faced last year.

"If it was defeated at the polls it would be a monumental setback for civil rights in the state and some thought it would be better to let sleeping dogs lie and not take the chance," he said. Florida is the only state that hasn't acted on the restrictions.

originally posted by beXn

Let it not be said that people in the United States did nothing when their government declared a war without limit and instituted stark new measures of repression. The signers of this statement call on the people of the US to resist the policies and overall political direction that have emerged since September 11 and which pose grave dangers to the people of the world.

We believe that peoples and nations have the right to determine their own destiny, free from military coercion by great powers. We believe that all persons detained or prosecuted by the US government should have the same rights of due process. We believe that questioning, criticism, and dissent must be valued and protected. We understand that such rights and values are always contested and must be fought for.

We believe that people of conscience must take responsibility for what their own governments do - we must first of all oppose the injustice that is done in our own name. Thus we call on all Americans to resist the war and repression that has been loosed on the world by the Bush administration. It is unjust, immoral and illegitimate. We choose to make common cause with the people of the world.

We too watched with shock the horrific events of September 11. We too mourned the thousands of innocent dead and shook our heads at the terrible scenes of carnage - even as we recalled similar scenes in Baghdad, Panama City and, a generation ago, Vietnam. We too joined the anguished questioning of millions of Americans who asked why such a thing could happen.

But the mourning had barely begun, when the highest leaders of the land unleashed a spirit of revenge. They put out a simplistic script of "good v evil" that was taken up by a pliant and intimidated media. They told us that asking why these terrible events had happened verged on treason. There was to be no debate. There were by definition no valid political or moral questions. The only possible answer was to be war abroad and repression at home.

In our name, the Bush administration, with near unanimity from Congress, not only attacked Afghanistan but arrogated to itself and its allies the right to rain down military force anywhere and anytime. The brutal repercussions have been felt from the Philippines to Palestine. The government now openly prepares to wage all-out war on Iraq - a country which has no connection to the horror of September 11. What kind of world will this become if the US government has a blank cheque to drop commandos, assassins, and bombs wherever it wants?

In our name the government has created two classes of people within the US: those to whom the basic rights of the US legal system are at least promised, and those who now seem to have no rights at all. The government rounded up more than 1,000 immigrants and detained them in secret and indefinitely. Hundreds have been deported and hundreds of others still languish today in prison. For the first time in decades, immigration procedures single out certain nationalities for unequal treatment.

In our name, the government has brought down a pall of repression over society. The president's spokesperson warns people to "watch what they say". Dissident artists, intellectuals, and professors find their views distorted, attacked, and suppressed. The so-called Patriot Act - along with a host of similar measures on the state level - gives police sweeping new powers of search and seizure, supervised, if at all, by secret proceedings before secret courts.

In our name, the executive has steadily usurped the roles and functions of the other branches of government. Military tribunals with lax rules of evidence and no right to appeal to the regular courts are put in place by executive order. Groups are declared "terrorist" at the stroke of a presidential pen.

We must take the highest officers of the land seriously when they talk of a war that will last a generation and when they speak of a new domestic order. We are confronting a new openly imperial policy towards the world and a domestic policy that manufactures and manipulates fear to curtail rights.

There is a deadly trajectory to the events of the past months that must be seen for what it is and resisted. Too many times in history people have waited until it was too late to resist. President Bush has declared: "You're either with us or against us." Here is our answer: We refuse to allow you to speak for all the American people. We will not give up our right to question. We will not hand over our consciences in return for a hollow promise of safety. We say not in our name. We refuse to be party to these wars and we repudiate any inference that they are being waged in our name or for our welfare. We extend a hand to those around the world suffering from these policies; we will show our solidarity in word and deed.

We who sign this statement call on all Americans to join together to rise to this challenge. We applaud and support the questioning and protest now going on, even as we recognise the need for much, much more to actually stop this juggernaut. We draw inspiration from the Israeli reservists who, at great personal risk, declare "there is a limit" and refuse to serve in the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza.

We draw on the many examples of resistance and conscience from the past of the US: from those who fought slavery with rebellions and the underground railroad, to those who defied the Vietnam war by refusing orders, resisting the draft, and standing in solidarity with resisters. Let us not allow the watching world to despair of our silence and our failure to act. Instead, let the world hear our pledge: we will resist the machinery of war and repression and rally others to do everything possible to stop it.

From:
Michael Albert
Laurie Anderson
Edward Asner, actor
Russell Banks, writer
Rosalyn Baxandall, historian
Jessica Blank, actor/playwright
Medea Benjamin, Global Exchange
William Blum, author
Theresa Bonpane, executive director, Office of the Americas
Blase Bonpane, director, Office of the Americas
Fr Bob Bossie, SCJ
Leslie Cagan
Henry Chalfant,author/filmmaker
Bell Chevigny, writer
Paul Chevigny, professor of law, NYU
Noam Chomsky
Stephanie Coontz, historian, Evergreen State College
Kia Corthron, playwright
Kevin Danaher, Global Exchange
Ossie Davis
Mos Def
Carol Downer, board of directors, Chico (CA) Feminist Women's Health Centre
Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, professor, California State University, Hayward
Eve Ensler
Leo Estrada, UCLA professor, Urban Planning
John Gillis, writer, professor of history, Rutgers
Jeremy Matthew Glick, editor of Another World Is Possible
Suheir Hammad, writer
David Harvey, distinguished professor of anthropology, CUNY Graduate Centre
Rakaa Iriscience, hip hop artist
Erik Jensen, actor/playwright
Casey Kasem
Robin DG Kelly
Martin Luther King III, president, Southern Christian Leadership Conference
Barbara Kingsolver
C Clark Kissinger, Refuse & Resist!
Jodie Kliman, psychologist
Yuri Kochiyama, activist
Annisette & Thomas Koppel, singers/composers
Tony Kushner
James Lafferty, executive director, National Lawyers Guild/LA
Ray Laforest, Haiti Support Network
Rabbi Michael Lerner, editor, Tikkun magazine
Barbara Lubin, Middle East Childrens Alliance
Staughton Lynd
Anuradha Mittal, co-director, Institute for Food and Development Policy/Food First
Malaquias Montoya, visual artist
Robert Nichols, writer
Rev E Randall Osburn, executive vice president, Southern Christian Leadership Conference
Grace Paley
Jeremy Pikser, screenwriter
Jerry Quickley, poet
Juan Gumez Quiones, historian, UCLA
Michael Ratner, president, Centre for Constitutional Rights
David Riker, filmmaker
Boots Riley, hip hop artist, The Coup
Edward Said
John J Simon, writer, editor
Starhawk
Michael Steven Smith, National Lawyers Guild/NY
Bob Stein, publisher
Gloria Steinem
Alice Walker
Naomi Wallace, playwright
Rev George Webber, president emeritus, NY Theological Seminary
Leonard Weinglass, attorney
John Edgar Wideman
Saul Williams, spoken word artist
Howard Zinn, historian

Bloop – monster of the deep?

I got a 10-disc unabridged reading of On the Road from the library this week – it was like a gift. I mean, I have to give it back, but who knew that such a thing existed, and at my library? This one is read quite well by Frank Muller (a renowned audio book narrator) but to my surprise there are also unabridged readings by Tom Parker and actor Matt Dillon available.

Two from the Washington Post: Bourbon, Straight and The Search for the Perfect Hash Browns.

My perspective isn't particularly that of a New Yorker (though that's where I moved from, so that's where my habits were most recently molded). I've lived for extended periods of time in (alphabetical order) Amsterdam, Ann Arbor, Athens, London, New Haven, New York, Riyadh, San Francisco, Sydney, and now, Washington.

Each of these cities has something to offer. Each has aspects that make them less desirable. Each reaches balance somewhere. New Haven's certainly the worst of the bunch. Ahead of that, Washington and Riyadh are pretty much tied. Riyadh is more affordable and has more interesting neighborhoods; Washington has public transportation and we're allowed to wear shorts.

Have you ever had blueberry wine?

Not too far from the Diana Ross Playground at West 81st Street, we examined a huge outcrop of bedrock called mica schist. This is the rock that underlies most of Manhattan and provides the foundation for its skyscrapers. Using the "Cambridge Guide to Minerals, Rocks and Fossils," we determined that the schist contained the following minerals: flashing bits of muscovite, a white mica that gives almost all of Central Park's outcrops a glittering sheen; and biotite, a black mica that gives the rocks their dark color. There were also flecks of pinkish feldspar. But most interestingly, we found shining, millimeter-size grains of red garnet.

In the way cathedrals are built in the shape of a cross, most traditional Hindu temples are laid out to suggest a god in human form lying on his back and looking toward the heavens

Thursday night's storm finished off the ailing oak, which began its life around the time the first European colonists settled in this region. Centuries later, the area around the tree hasn't actually changed that much. Route 662 -- itself a descendant of an ancient trail used by Native Americans -- runs next to the tree, and a steel grain tank sits across the street. But mostly, there are acres upon acres of farmland and pristine woods.

It got on our menu kind of as a joke. When we were about to open last year, we were all stressed out, and they asked me, 'What do you really feel like eating?' and I said, 'Macaroni and cheese.'

A former head of the Census Bureau said, "The longer you are here, the more it makes you American."

Your opponent is evil and evil only and nothing rational could describe their evil evil evil acts of evil, negotiation is useless (they are, afterall, subhuman and quite evil), there are no root causes to disputes, force works and people don't mind our civilian casualties because we're the good guys, blowback doesn't exist and my favorite: We don't care what the world thinks. Bombs away and that Ted Rall/Noam Chomsky/Mike Moore he's no good!

Subject: Re: Tab Browsing Update
Newsgroups: netscape.public.mozilla.general
> > while using tabbed browsing, are their keyboard
> > shortcuts for swithing tabs?
> The shortcuts are Ctrl-PgUp, Ctrl-PgDown

So now you know.

Wonder Twin powers, activate!

Beer-chan are fairies and always says it's so good !! Try to get Beer-chan surprised, and you'll see Beer-chan blowing their barm. Green soybeans are Beer-chan's favorite. Keep it away from Beer-chan if you don't want to miss it.

Two in the Times: a South African wine called Goats do Roam and the growing presence of women among sushi chefs.

"I don't see a difference between a chimpanzee," he states unequivocally, "and my 4 1/2-year-old son." (...)

Some talking points: Chimps have complex social interactions. They use tools. Research by Harvard anthropologist Richard Wrangham, among others, has shown that, even in the wild, they demonstrate an idea of the future and remember the past. They can count. And they can communicate in sign language at the level of a 3- or 4-year-old child.

Apparently, when Laura Ingalls Wilder wrote her loosely autobiographical series of novels, she left out two pivotal years -- years she and her family spent in Burr Oak, Iowa. The family moved there after a grasshopper invasion pushed them into poverty and out of Walnut Grove, Minn.

New York Times: Books for Summer Reading.

Movie Title Screens Page - “A unique catalog of movies on video…specifically, screen captures of movie title screens! What good is it? Whatever use you put it to.” Kind thanks to xblog.

(randomWalks now supports RSS auto-discovery.)

Back in the day, having a board with more than one phone line was huge. Two lines meant more than one person could be online at the same time. This was heavy. But it was the end of something, too: the end of that amazing solitude you felt when the busies stopped, and the carrier finally screeched through, and you knew the board was yours. And then, for as long as you were online, nothing changed unless you changed it. Everything stopped; frozen in time, waiting patiently for you to peruse it, or ignore it. Two lines, though, and it was gone. It was just one more person, but that was a lot.

Cincinnati CityBeat: Shut Up, Already, Damn!: Talking black at the movies. I didn’t really like this article. So why did you post it? ‘Cause I thought you might want to read it.

Inuit elders and hunters who depend on the land say they are disturbed by what they are seeing swept in by the changes: deformed fish, caribou with bad livers, baby seals left by their mothers to starve. Just the other year, a robin appeared where no robin had been seen before. There is no word for robin in Inuktitut, the Inuit language.

"ArtBots," held at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn on Saturday, featured 10 robot-centric projects by artists, engineers and tinkerers and attracted hundreds of spectators. The show filled a warren of rooms with the whirr and whine of tiny electric motors. On the floor of one room, three robots made of Lego bricks topped with plastic dolls' heads pulled Japanese ink brushes across a scroll of paper, producing swirls of thick black strokes. When all three had finished their maneuvers, onlookers applauded.

Recent compositions include a bubbling symphony of boiling tea kettles, the gentle hiss of blank tapes being played through a stereo and the soft bumps of helium balloons hitting the ceiling.

One recent album was so quiet, listeners wondered whether it actually contained any sound at all.

MOTHER GOOSE & GRIMM: Monday: "On his day off, the Grim Reaper loves making parking meters expire." OK, Mike Peters, here's the three ways you ruined the gag. 1.) Why "on his day off"? It's confusing and irrelevant. 2.) Saying "loves making" it happen is a bad setup. Who cares what the Grim Reaper feels here? He's the Grim Reaper. You've got to do a lot more setup if you want to make the Grim Reaper's emotional state be part of the gag. 3.) The "expire" thing is worthless, and bolding it for emphasis is extra-worthless. The real joke is not some lame pun about expiring, it's the conceptual gag about how when the Grim Reaper comes by, the parking meters' time is up.

So from the original caption, we're left with ". . . Grim Reaper . . . parking meters . . . " Both of which are in the drawing, so you don't need to mention them by name. Now get rid of the Reaper's "heh, heh, heh" thought balloon--which is really just you laughing at your own gag--and you've got just the image: Death striding past a row of parking meters, which are going "click," one by one. Now that, Mike Peters--that's a strip you could sell to the New Yorker. If you weren't such a crappy artist, we mean.

Did you know how Margaret Wise Brown died?

You know, as I said in the first newspaper report about it, if I had to choose between losing my soul or losing my show, I'm glad I chose losing my show. You know, I never sold out. When I came over to the network, everybody said you're going to lose your edge. You're going to sell out. Well, I didn't and I got fired. And that's OK.

The MC-5 is a whole thing. There is no way to get at the music without taking in the whole context of the music too- there is no separation. We say the MC-5 is the solution to the problem of separation, because they are so together. The MC-5 is totally committed to the revolution, as the revolution is totally committed to driving people out of their separate shells and into each other's arms.

I'm talking about unity, brothers and sisters, because we have to get it together. We are the solution to the problem, if we will just be that. If we can feel it, LeRoi Jones said, "feeling predicts intelligence." The MC-5 will make you feel it, or leave the room. The MC-5 will drive you crazy out of your head into your body. The MC-5 is rock and roll. Rock and roll is the music of our bodies, of our whole lives- the resensifier (sic), Rob Tyner calls it. We have to come together, people, "build to a gathering," or else. Or else you are dead, and gone.

The MC-5 bring you back to your senses from wherever you have been taken to hide. They are bad. Their whole lives are totally given to this music. They are a whole thing. they are a working model of the new paleo-cybernetic culture in action. There is no separation. They live together to work together, they eat together, fuck together, get high together, walk down the street and through the world together. There is no separation. Just as the music will bring you together like that, if you hear it. If you will live it. And we will make sure you hear it, because we know you need it as bad as we do. We have to have it.

The music is the source and the effect of our spirit flesh. The MC-5 is the source and effect of the music, just as you are. Just as I am. Just to hear the music and have it be ourselves, is what we want. What we need. We are a lonely desperate people, pulled apart by the killer forces of capitalism and competition, and we need the music to hold us together. Separation is doom. We are free men, and we demand a free music, a free high energy source that will drive us wild into the streets of America yelling and screaming and tearing down everything that would keep people slaves.

The MC-5 is that source. The MC-5 is the revolution, in all its applications. There is no separation. Everything is everything. There is no thing to fear. The music will make you strong, as it is strong, and there is now way it can be stopped now. All power to the people! The MC-5 is here now for you to hear and see and feel now! Give it up- come together- get down, brothers and sisters, it's time to testify, and what you have in your hands is a living testimonial to the absolute power and strength of these men. Go wild! The world is yours! Take it now and be one with it! Kick out the jams, motherfucker! And stay alive with the MC-5!

I think if people understood they could give six copies of Dr. Seuss and every child could have one ... that translates better than saying give us some more money.

Dear Jess, Thank you for the old lady guide to being cool in 2002. I didn't even know the Breeders were touring again. Shows how much I know. I'm glad you had fun at the show . . . Love, Joanna.

On the long fall and recent rise of the fire lookout.

No one I know in the hip-hop community is really plugged into reparations, and I know a lot of people. Something is very wrong with that. It is the responsibility of those of us who are informed to reach our young people in their language with this idea that is age-old, and has no chance of being achieved without their support.

Get educated on the India/Pakistan conflict:

• BBC Q&A: Kashmir dispute
• Washington Post: The Conflict in Kashmir
• photographs of Kashmir
• Yahoo full coverage: Kashmir Dispute

Raj, 27 and from India, was smoking a cigarette outside the school where he took computer classes last fall when a white man walked up and sucker-punched him in the face. The same stranger had earlier taunted him, shouting, "You Muslims all grow up to be terrorists." The police officer who met with Raj in the emergency room refused to write down the phrase.

Raj (not his real name) found an attorney to help him lodge a bias complaint, both about the assault and the officer's conduct. During a meeting with a New York City prosecutor, his lawyer thought to ask, just in case, "if there would be trouble" for her client. (...)

The prosecutor was honest. If the feds came snooping, he said, Raj's nationality—and a criminal record reflecting a store robbery—could land him behind bars, no matter that he was the victim in this case. The conversation with the prosecutor so shook her, a hate crimes specialist not easily spooked by the system, that she advised Raj "to go underground. We suggested that when the prosecutor's office called him, not to return the calls. We told him never to apply for citizenship, not to leave the country and expect to come back, and if he sees a cop, to go the other way."

If you're going to put buildings on that site, build one of the seven modern wonders of the world, and please give us a skyline that will once again cause our spirits to soar.

Wiley Wiggins is guestblogging over at Boing Boing.

Freddie tried to explain it: We are made from cells that can divide and multiply and add and subtract.

The "3 Rs" of BookCrossing...

• Read a good book (you already know how to do that)


• Register it here (along with your journal comments), get a unique BCID (BookCrossing ID number), and label the book


• Release it for someone else to read (give it to a friend, leave it on a park bench, donate it to charity, "forget" it in an airliner seatback pocket, etc.), and get notified by email each time someone comes here and records journal entries for that book. And if you make Release Notes on the book, others can Go Hunting for it and try to find it!

“Here’s an annotated version of the schedule from the Emerging Technologies 2002 conference. Under each session are links to the blog entries about that session.” As Cory sez, “I can’t stop clickin'.”

Sorry Palestine was a dud. (What happened?) Let’s pick a lazy book for the summer, like Design for Community or I’m Just Here for the Food.

Tomorrow’s New York Times has a special section on children’s books.

Here is an exhausting bunch of links “on the idea of automatically creating back links based on referrers” which seem to have all been prompted by Jon Udell’s Blogspace Under the Microscope, although it seems to me that yaywastaken was the first to spark interest in this among webloggers by providing an easy-to-implement javascript referrer service. Most people would use this sentence to say something about the “semantic web”, but I must simply point you to write the web [dormant?] and a google search on the subject.

How to glue this to that.

I have stared at the sun, and for the sake of my sanity, will never again look directly at the consciousness of the online ueber-geek collective. [Rob Flickenger on EtherPEG at the Emerging Technology conference]

Saudi Crown Prince Abdullah has said he had to spend hours briefing US President George W Bush on Middle East issues at their last meeting.

"He listens and debates politely, but was not fully informed about the real conditions in the region, especially the conditions suffered by the Palestinian people."

Wal-Mart does not want the U.S. buying public to know that its famous low prices are the product of human misery, so while it loudly proclaims that its global suppliers must comply with a corporate "code of conduct" to treat workers decently, it strictly prohibits the disclosure of any factory names and addresses, hoping to keep independent sources from witnessing the "code" in operation. (...)

"There will always be people who break the law," says CEO Lee Scott. "It is an issue of human greed among a few people." Those "few people" include him, other top managers, and the Walton billionaires. Each of them not only knows about their company's exploitation, but willingly prospers from a corporate culture that demands it. (...)

Wal-Mart operates as a massive wealth extractor. Instead of profits staying in town to be reinvested locally, the money is hauled off to Bentonville, either to be used as capital for conquering yet another town or simply to be stashed in the family vaults (the Waltons, by the way, just bought the biggest bank in Arkansas).

Why should we accept this? Is it our country, our communities, our economic destinies--or theirs? Wal-Mart's radical remaking of our labor standards and our local economies is occurring mostly without our knowledge or consent. Poof--there goes another local business. Poof--there goes our middle-class wages. Poof--there goes another factory to China. No one voted for this ... but there it is. While corporate ideologues might huffily assert that customers vote with their dollars, it's an election without a campaign, conveniently ignoring that the public's "vote" might change if we knew the real cost of Wal-Mart's "cheap" goods--and if we actually had a chance to vote.

Why the Elvises, why the Spocks, why the guys who paint their bellies at football games? Why the Harleys buzzing toward Sturgis, why the Civil War reenactors?

In the case of "Star Wars," the why starts when you're about 8 years old, and you are sitting in one of those long-ago demolished twin cinemas that used to be in old shopping malls, and it is 1977, and your head has just been blown off. (...)

In one darkened convention room, a endless video loop shows old Kenner "Star Wars" toy commercials, which seem grainy and ancient -- little boys with John Denver haircuts, wearing turtlenecks and corduroys, dash across the back yards of some other era and play joyously with action figures and spaceships. There is something wistful in it, watching these commercials with a roomful of men who were those boys, and realizing that "Star Wars," like any drug, eventually leaves you bottomed out.

On a daily basis as a straight person…

• If I pick up a magazine, watch TV, or play music, I can be certain my sexual orientation will be represented.
• When I talk about my heterosexuality (such as in a joke or talking about my relationships), I will not be accused of pushing my sexual orientation onto others.
• I did not grow up with games that attack my sexual orientation (IE fag tag or smear the queer).
• I am not accused of being abused, warped or psychologically confused because of my sexual orientation.
• People don't ask why I made my choice of sexual orientation.
• People don't ask why I made my choice to be public about my sexual orientation.
• I do not have to fear revealing my sexual orientation to friends or family. It's assumed.
• I don't have to defend my heterosexuality.
• I can easily find a religious community that will not exclude me for being heterosexual.
• I am not identified by my sexual orientation.
• I can be sure that if I need legal or medical help my sexual orientation will not work against me.
• I can choose to not think politically about my sexual orientation.
• I can go for months without being called straight.
• In everyday conversation, the language my friends and I use generally assumes my sexual orientation. For example, sex inappropriately referring to only heterosexual sex or family meaning heterosexual relationships with kids.
• People do not assume I am experienced in sex (or that I even have it!) merely because of my sexual orientation.
• I can kiss a person of the opposite gender on the heart or in the cafeteria without being watched and stared at.
• People can use terms that describe my sexual orientation and mean positive things (IE "straight as an arrow", "standing up straight" or "straightened out") instead of demeaning terms (IE "ewww, that's gay" or being "queer").
• I am not asked to think about why I am straight.
• I can be open about my sexual orientation without worrying about my job.

"This is not weather that we see very frequently," said Jim Travers, meteorologist in charge of the Weather Service's Baltimore-Washington office in Sterling. "Although this spring's been pretty different."

The farmer's abiding friend for thousands of years, the honeybee in America stands on the edge of the abyss. In recent years, two tiny spider-like parasites have been weakening and killing bee populations across the United States. While the mass media have played up the threat of Africanized "killer" bees in the Southwest, the rest of the country has been losing 80 percent or more of its wild honeybee populations.

Man, I love me some canned fruit. I usually rock the fruit cocktail in its many varieties and syrup densities. Like the Del Monte "Fruit Naturals Chunky Mixed Fruits in Fruit Juices," for example. That's some good fruit.

Mamatron.org was created in response to an amazing community message board coming to its end. The closing of the HipMama (HM) community boards left innumerable mamas (including this one) feeling like they'd lost their homes, support systems, and friends. Mamatron.org was created to fill the void. In many ways, HM was used as a model.

According to their mission statement, HM was a place for "mamas of color, bi/lesbian/poly mamas, very young mamas, mamas on public assistance, sex worker mamas, single mamas, artist mamas, socialist mamas, green mamas, anarchist mamas, and pro-choice mamas." Mamatron.org will strive to be the same sort of place.

The hardest hurdle for me is that I just remember being in a really close relationship with a black man and being able to come home at the end of the day and say to him, `It's hard being me. It's hard being a black woman in a predominantly white field.' I needed to be able to say that to Jason or else I couldn't live with him. . . . He can take it. He knows how to give me space to talk about a situation with white people without having to defend himself.

“The Weblog Bookwatch searches weblogs that pass through the Recently Changed list at weblogs.com looking for links to books at Amazon.com. The books [listed] were the most frequently mentioned.”

Best of the [Happy|Pioneer] Valley, 2002

They live a Spartan existence. Sometimes they spend eight to nine hours a day cooking for the masses. These devotees did not spend hour after hour doing this so the landlord could rent their space to a chic restaurant for five times what they were paying.

Robert Christgau on international hip-hop.

O’Reilly is publishing a book on weblogging, due out in September.

It's a curious phenomenon -- all over the sunny Southwest, Latino teens enthralled with the mope-rock saint of Manchester -- but it's no weirder than middle-class white boys thumping along to "Fuck Tha Police." Alienation knows no borders. And it's thrilling to see it, a subculture free of all the strained nostalgia and wink-wink irony that accompany most retro trends. These kids aren't in it for the camp. They love the Smiths.

It's easy for social justice activists to tell themselves that since Jews already have such powerful defenders in Washington and Jerusalem, anti-Semitism is one battle they don't need to fight. This is a deadly error. It is precisely because anti-Semitism is used by the likes of Mr. Sharon that the fight against it must be reclaimed.

When anti-Semitism is no longer treated as Jewish business, to be taken care of by Israel and the Zionist lobby, Mr. Sharon is robbed of his most effective weapon in the indefensible and increasingly brutal occupation.

“The American Arab Anti Discrimination Committee urges all its members and supporters to contact Dick Armey and demand that he not only retract but also apologize for his endorsement of ethnic cleansing of Palestinians.”

How about the Washington Warriors?

“ClipIt! follows in the footsteps of programs like Deskswap, an application that allows you to share screenshots of desktops with other people, but is more interested in sharing the low-bandwidth information of everyday interaction. When multiple users are connected, their clipboards are uploaded and shared with each other, thus providing an ambient link and direct window into someone else’s activities. The project allows people to be aware of each other’s computer usage and to ‘get a feel’ for what they are working on or thinking about in real-time.” I am obsessed with the clipboard. I’m running ClipIt!, but I may be the only one – the only stuff I’ve seen so far is my own. Quick, paste the contents of your clibpoard into a comment!

"For the individual or individuals who may have been responsible for this: You have got our attention. We are not certain we understand your messages. We would like to hear from you - you do not need to send any more of these devices." — FBI agent Wayne Dun

A new translation offers a radically different view of the famous sex manual, and argues that the most widely read English version is riddled with errors and plays down the role of women.

"This translation will change peoples' understanding of this book and of ancient India," said David Shulman, professor of Indian Studies and Comparative Religion at Hebrew University in Jerusalem. "Previous translations are hopelessly outdated, inadequate and misguided."

There is a lady in my life that I love. She was with me before, during and after my trial and conviction. A great deal of the album is an ode to her very existence. I've made plenty of mistakes in the past. Writing songs to her and about her was progress in healing those wounds. You ask me later on in the interview if I have any regrets, one — I wish I would have kissed her more.

“Jubilant astronomers unveiled humankind’s most spectacular views of the universe, courtesy of the newly installed Advanced Camera for Surveys (ACS) aboard NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope.”

The Onion a.v. club interviews Danny Hoch:

This kid came to my show, like, “Yo, homeboy,” with his hat to the side and his pants hanging off his ass. He came to my show four times and paid to get in, and he brought his friends, and I was blown away. He’s like, “Hey, man, yeah, you know, I never seen anything like this. What is this?” And I said, “What do you mean, what is it?” And he said, “What do you call this that you’re doing?” And I said, “Theater.” And he said, “Nah. No, bullshit, it’s not theater. What is it called?” And I said, “No, really, it’s theater.” And he said, “No, dude, if it was theater, it wouldn’t be about me."

Thanks to Ishkur’s Guide, I finally understand electronic music – every artist is a genre!

Morris Engel and Ruth Orkin: Poets of Everyday Life (Bright Lights Film Journal).

It’s not hard to see why Little Fugitive, Engel and Orkin’s most famous and successful film, was so inspiring not only to the French but also to American auteurs like Cassavettes and Scorsese. Like the two features that would follow it, Little Fugitive is a paean to the sights, smells, and sounds of New York, from the cramped but somehow comforting streets of Brooklyn to the dazzling chaos of Coney Island as seen through a child’s eyes. Engel and Orkin extrapolate the universal from the personal in this Homeric story of a little boy’s heroic trek alone through the vastness of an urban amusement park.

“Be the first person to write a review!”

Abercrombie should be held responsible for the false and misleading message it has sent the public: that it's harmless fun to portray Asian Americans as coolies, laundrymen and rickshaw drivers, because everyone knows better and there no longer exist any problems of racial discrimination, harassment and violence based on the misconception that Asian Americans are exotic foreigners.

Federal Trade Commission rules require a business who engages in misleading advertising to spend 25 percent of its advertising budget on corrective advertising. By analogy, activists should demand that Abercrombie dedicate one-fourth of the costs it incurred in designing, manufacturing, distributing, and marketing the T-shirts to educate its own employees and the general public regarding historical and continuing racial discrimination against Asian Americans.

I wouldn't necessarily want to trip in the aftermath of Sept. 11, but I can now use my psychedelic training for coping with the epistemological cyclone of a cataclysm such as this. I grew up in the cushiest reality in the history of the planet. Now I see demons pouring over the lip of my existence, but I've learned through psychedelics how to breathe through it and not believe its story.

Ladies and gentlemen, Christianity offers the only viable, reasonable, definitive answer to the questions of 'Where did I come from?' 'Why am I here?' 'Where am I going?' 'Does life have any meaningful purpose?' Only Christianity offers a way to understand that physical and moral border. Only Christianity offers a comprehensive worldview that covers all areas of life and thought, every aspect of creation. Only Christianity offers a way to live in response to the realities that we find in this world -- only Christianity.

The NY Times auto-blog updates with each addition to the New York Times website. “If the NY Times had a weblog, this is what it might look like,” says creator Dave Winer.

The Illustrated Complete Summary of Thomas Pynchon’s “Gravity’s Rainbow” is, I gather, suitably inscrutable.

Dan Bricklin logged about 2 hours on a Segway earlier this month, riding indoors, outdoors, over bumps, hills, and people’s feet. Read his impressions in two parts: “what happened” and “what I learned”.

In Central Asia there is a simple one-stringed instrument, the tar -- 'tar' means string -- and it's played by wandering bards and mystics, fakirs. The idea of the tar seems to travel to ancient Persia, where one string became two, and it was called the dutar. And then in India it became the more familiar sitar. The string seemed to travel China and also westward, and in Arabian countries it's known as quintara, with five strings, and in Greece it's known as the chitara, which was much like a zither. And in the form of a stringed lute, it travels to Spain, and it is known as the guitarra, and then to America, where it is known as the guitar . . . and so if you're following the terminology of stringed instruments, you're following the influence of the Silk Road.

Vatican Meeting on Abuse Issue Is Set to Confront Thorny Topics (NY Times).

A top Vatican official said today that next week’s meetings with American cardinals about the sexual abuse scandals in the church would cover controversial issues like celibacy, the screening of gay candidates for the priesthood and the role of women in the church.

By one estimate, what we now know as mods appeared in 1983, with a fan-made reinvention of the original "Castle Wolfenstein," a classic arcade-style action game for the Apple II. (You played an Allied spy fighting it out with Nazi combatants, who'd shout at you in German as they opened fire.) But the inspiration for this mod was not so much WWII as Saturday-morning cartoon.

The Village Voice reviews Cornershop’s new Handcream for a Generation.

Of the roughly 6400 astronomers in America, two dozen are black. Facing that and similar voids in its astronaut pool and engineering base, NASA is sponsoring the fledgling City University of New York space science program to draw bright college students into its ranks, but more surprisingly, it's reaching down into junior high and grade school to spark black kids into thinking about getting fitted for a space suit. NASA began after-school programs last week in Brooklyn for junior high school kids to study the science they'll need to be part of the space program decades down the line.

Debunking six common Israeli myths:

• Myth 1: There is no moral equivalence between suicide bombings on the one hand, and Israel's killing of Palestinians on the other
• Myth 2: Israel's invasion of Palestinian cities and refugee camps is self-defence against suicide bombings
• Myth 3: Arafat Refuses to Condemn Suicide Bombings in Arabic
• Myth 4: Arafat has not done enough to stop terrorism
• Myth 5: Arafat Spurned Barak's generous offer at Camp David and broke off negotiations with Israel
• Myth 6: Arafat started the Intifada

The Palestinians are a brutally oppressed people--and Israel is a nation under siege. The deaths of 400 Israeli civilians since the start of this latest intifada are senseless and tragic and maddening--as are the deaths of 1500 Palestinians during that same time. And if you read that last bit and vehemently disagreed with half of it, and are already composing a response in your head to explain why the side with which you are aligned is morally superior to the side with which you disagree--well, that's kind of the problem at this point, isn't it?

How to use a monopod – I think I can use these great tips (which distinguish a monopod from a tripod), since my Nikon 990 has a lens that swivels independent of the mount point.

Woodmore is a racially mixed subdivision, with African American professionals making up more than half the population. And it's by far the classiest address in Prince George's County. But the county, The most affluent majority-African American county in the nation, has not seen the price appreciations of other markets in the Washington area. It's also not suffering from the same desperate lack of houses that parts of Northern Virginia, Montgomery County and the District are facing, shortages that fuel prices in those areas. In other words, right now it's the best buy in terms of value for money in the Washington area.

"The word is Orwellian," said one producer who asked not to be identified. "We're all pretty stunned. They're dumping people but calling it an initiative to strengthen cultural programming."

How I Benefit from White Privilege by Donna Lamb

On the highway, rescue workers laid out the cell phones of the dead in a neat row. For hours they rang and rang and rang.

If we assess the foreign policy accomplishments of the Bush administration since Sept. 11, the scorecard is quite dismal. There are some people in the Bush administration who have the same mentality as Arafat or Sharon. I can name names, like Ashcroft, Cheney and Rumsfeld, although that is considered impolite. ...The war on terrorism cannot be won by waging war.

O is for the Other Things She Gave Me: Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections and Contemporary Women’s Fiction (Jane Elliott in Bitch Magazine)

As Franzen himself pointed out when he admitted that Oprah had picked ‘some good books,’ the Oprah list is neither as middlebrow as its detractors would have it, nor as unfailingly invested in bringing quality to the mainstream as its supporters often claim. Despite the widespread perception of Oprah books as spoon-fed schmaltz, many of the novels Oprah has chosen—like Edwidge Danticat’s Breath Eyes Memory and Joyce Carol Oates’s When We Were Mulvaneys—invite the same sort of thoughtful reading Franzen seemed to desire from his audience. But because it draws unapologetically on one person’s taste, the Oprah list doesn’t reflect a consistent standard of literary merit. Rather, it records exactly the sort of meandering path many habitual readers take through the landscape of the literary, dipping into the comfort of Maeve Binchy’s Tara Road one day and stretching to accommodate the difficulty of Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye the next. And just because the same person reads both Binchy and Morrison doesn’t mean she reads them both for the same reason or suffers from any confusion about their relative merits. Just as the presence of male writers on Oprah’s list often gets erased, many critics ignored these quality variations as well, lumping her choices into the general category of what one commentator called ‘earnest, womanly fiction.’ As the pejorative use of the word ‘womanly’ suggests, these generalizations rely on assumptions about literary quality that are close at hand—namely, the longstanding association of female writers, ‘feminine’ forms, and middlebrow status.

“I helped kill a Palestinian today.”

ABC Electric Journal: Book Discussion Scheduled – “Interested parties should read the short classic tale on this page and meet back here, at this entry, at nine o’clock EST this Sunday (the fourteenth of April) to unearth its deep mysteries, to sound its fine art.”

A young calf has his belly shaved. Many slashes are made in the skin. A prior batch of smallpox vaccine is dropped into the slashes and allowed to fester over a period of days. During this period of time, the calf stands in a head stall so that he can’t lick his belly. The calf is led out of the stock to a table where he is strapped down. His belly scabs and pus are scraped off and ground into a powder. The powder is the next batch of smallpox vaccine.

Boing Boing discussion: Oprah sez: “Literature is dead”

U: This just in – MetaFilter is not dead: a wonderful discussion about the demise of Oprah’s Book Club in which the “everybody read” phenomenon, the “high vs. low art” debate, and many good authors, books, and bookstores are referenced is well worth your attention.

It's like, you know, you put dog or cat in some box and put smoke there, how he gonna fight for life? Same we did.

McFarlane Toys has released a “statuesque” Jerry Garcia action figure. Oddly, all these photos and the photos on the package show Jerry with glasses, but the actual figures I saw at the toy store yesterday must have been wearing contact lenses. Jerry was cool, but I couldn’t resist Moishe.

• Independent Media Center: Palestine
• Electronic Intifada
• BBC News: Middle East
• wire service images (Yahoo News)
• Ha'aretz breaking news

Counterpunch: An American Student in Ramallah

My name is Tzaporah Ryter. I am an American student from the University of Minnesota. I currently am in Ramallah. We are under a terrible siege and people are being massacred by both the Israeli army and armed militia groups of Israeli settlers. They are shooting outside at anything that moves.

I am urgently pleading for as much outside help as possible to help save lives here.

I arrived in Ramallah last Thursday. I had come back for a visit to the Palestinian city where I had been previously living and studying. On Thursday afternoon, the Israeli army began sealing off each entrance to Ramallah and there were rumors that they planned to invade.

Women carrying their children were trying desperately to flee from Ramallah, carrying infants and toddlers, and their young children were running along in the rain through the fields, slipping and falling on the rocks, trying to reach safety. Israeli jeeps were speeding across the terrain pulling up from every direction and shooting at the women and children, and also at me, as we ran in opposite directions. They were chasing down people, hunting them like that in the fields.

When night fell, Israeli tanks began to invade and also we saw Israeli troops coming on foot from the valley, and surrounding our house. I could hear them calling to each other in Hebrew. They were against our door and all around. They were firing everywhere a barrage of bullets and there was tank fire. We had to lay on the floor and keep silent. We stayed there, on the floor, for nearly four days in the darkness.

We knew that our circumstances were better than others because old people or infants or people with medical emergency needs had no help. It was very cold, with most families packed all in one room. Some people are without life sustaining medicines like insulin, and they are altering their doses dangerously if they have any medicine left to take. People are becoming dangerously sick from lack of food and water and heat. The fear and terror only makes things worse, but it cannot be avoided.

The numbers of these killings I fear are much greater than the numbers confirmed in the press, because the human rights offices and the media centers have been stormed, and everything is shut down. No one can move without almost certain chance of being shot by the Isreali snipers, who are everywhere.

The Israelis are demanding that all journalists leave Ramallah and today another foreign journalist was shot. They do not want any more internationals here and are deporting people. It seems quite clear that they do not want eyewitnesses which is only heightening my own fears.

The hospitals have also been surrounded and invaded and Israeli troops are taking the injured people and interrogating them. Today a woman, a patient, tried to walk out from hospital. The Israelis shot her in the neck and killed her.

There are reports that they are rounding up men between the ages of 14 and 45 in that neighborhood, and these civilians, from these same Palestinian families trapped in that building, were just used to walk in front of an Israeli tank as it invaded the Preventative Security Compound.

This is a massacre. The foreign delegations tried to get in but were turned back, the International Committee of the Red Cross is trying to help but they are being ignored. Please help.

On the news in America, we see hardly anything of demonstrations. What are you doing over there?

For the love of God, please stop this slaughter. Please help.

Lynda Barry: Let us now praise hairy men!

Here's a rundown of the extra scenes:

• Bilbo's journal, "Concerning Hobbits": A brief introduction to the history of Hobbits, which comes after the introductory prologue about the creation of the ring.
  
• The introduction of Samwise Gamgee ( Sean Astin)--a scene that had showed him doing his gardening work.
  
• More footage from the Green Dragon Inn, with Merry and Pippin singing Hobbit songs.
  
• Sam and Frodo ( Elijah Wood) on the road to Bree, during which they see an exodus of elves.
  
• Aragon song: Viggo Mortensen singing an Elvish song foreshadowing his relationship with Arwen ( Liv Tyler).
  
• Aragorn in Rivendell at the site of his mother's grave.
  
• An extended scene in which the Fellowship leave Rivendell.
  
• New scenes, pre-battle, from the Mines of Moria, which explain the history of the mines.
  
• Cate Blanchett's character giving a special gift to each member of the Fellowship before they depart.
  
• Thirty more seconds of footage from the film's climactic battle scene.
  

This image of black water off the coast of Florida was acquired on March 20, 2002, by the Sea-viewing Wide Field-of-view Sensor (SeaWiFS). Scientists and local fishermen are not sure what is coloring this typically turquoise water black. Amid growing concern, scientists are now trying to determine the source of the black water.

I am insane now. I have become the honking, and the honking has become me. I cannot throw eggs. It is bad and wrong. But I can't just do nothing, either.

The Warmth Of Oscar’s Open Arms (washingtonpost.com)

“I feel like I won the Academy Award last night. I leaped up and made a fool of myself,” said director Warrington Hudlin, who watched the awards at a big party in New York. “I lost it, I can’t be cool. It’s too wonderful. It’s too historic.” Entertainment lawyer Nina Shaw said she watched the faces in the audience at the Oscars as they listened to Berry’s emotional acceptance speech and could see the import of the moment dawning on them. “There was absolute shock on some of those faces, as they realized for the very first time they were witnessing history."

Terrorism Fears Push Maryland Toward Wider Police Power (washingtonpost.com)

“I realize that this bill basically says you can tap someone’s phone for jaywalking, and normally I would say, ‘No way,’ " said Del. Dana Lee Dembrow (D-Montgomery). “But after what happened on September 11th, I say screw ‘em.”

The Cloud of Unknowing and post-modernism

Tonglen means "taking in and sending out." This meditation practice is designed to help ordinary people like ourselves connect with the openness and softness of our hearts.

As a fervent dissenter, I'd love to think I'm taking an illustrious, courageous stand, but it worries me how easy this is when I'm preaching to the converted. If you don't like my cynical critique of everything under the sun, I know you won't be reading FmH regularly for long no matter if I'm the most thoughtful, literate, erudite weblogger on the planet.

Writing quickly and well: 13 secrets from Poynter Senior Scholar Roy Peter Clark. All great, but – “texterity?”

With the smart eye band implanted, you'd set your eyes to read a book, say, by clicking a button on the device sitting behind your ear. This would generate a magnetic field to activate the eye band's artificial muscle.

In the end, we will need to give up any lingering fantasies of a color-blind Web and focus on building a space where we recognize, discuss and celebrate racial and cultural diversity. To achieve that goal, all of us -- white folks and people of color -- will have to shed the defensiveness that surrounds the topic of race.

Yeast Infection: The Pitfalls of Self-Diagnosis

A new study of customers in pharmacies and grocery stores showed only a third of the women buying over-the-counter vaginal antifungal product had accurately self-diagnosed their conditions.

Boing Boing seems to attract a knowledgeable crowd. Here, they discuss absinthe.

Age: 30 - “A simple project: Take a photograph of myself every day of my 30th year. Digital, 35mm, 120, webcam, Polaroid, whatever ? as long as I end up with 365 images documenting the year. No real reason, I don’t care that I’m 30, it just seemed like a good project.”

What the Christ is the matter with the Jews, Bob?

With mp3s and CD burners commonplace, the art of the mix is being revived. Burn, Baby Burn! (closed), a “blogger CD swap”, met with unanticipated interest upon being linked from MetaFilter and has closed registration early. The responsible MeFi thread spawned (predictably) an already popular MeFiSwap and also points to a handful of similar projects around the net. I’ve got a couple hundred blank CDs looking for a purpose so I plan to get my hands into as many of these as I can:

• frykitty's greenshoes
• CD mix of the month club
• secret DJ
• midsummer night's burn (european)

"You swipe the license, and all of a sudden someone's whole life as we know it pops up in front of you," said Paul Barclay, the bar's owner.

Mr. Barclay bought the machine to keep out underage drinkers who use fake ID's. But he soon found that he could build a database of personal information, providing an intimate perspective on his clientele that can be useful in marketing.

Now, for any given night or hour, he can break down his clientele by sex, age, ZIP code or other characteristics. If he wanted to, he could find out how many blond women named Karen over 5 feet 2 inches came in over a weekend, or how many of his customers have the middle initial M. More practically, he can build mailing lists based on all that data ? and keep track of who comes back.

The church says priests must be male because Jesus' apostles were male. So should women have stayed out of U.S. government because the founding fathers were male?

Celibacy is not church doctrine but a tradition from the Middle Ages. By that logic, hospitals would still be using leeches.

It may be a news flash to the Vatican, but it's been clear for years that the church is in a time warp, arrested in its psychosexual development. The vow of celibacy became a magnet for men trying to flee carnal impulses they found troubling. In some cases this meant homosexuality, in others pedophilia. (...)

Societies built on special privileges become far too invested in preserving those privileges. They will never do the kind of soul-baring and housecleaning that might raise questions about the kind of secret society that creates that kind of privilege.

Furthurnet “is the first and only 100% non-commercial peer-to-peer network of legal live music created by fans for fans!” They’ve got java-based clients for Windows and for Linux and OS X.

If one looks at the map of the big American bases created for the war, one is struck by the fact that they are completely identical to the route of the projected oil pipeline to the Indian Ocean.

Picking up the pieces in Ramallah (BBC News)

The men of Amari were taken bound and blindfolded to the Beitounia army camp, where they spent three cold nights under canvas, with little to eat or drink, before their release.

Some families, one of them including three small children, were held captive in their own homes while the troops used them for cover as they occupied the narrow alleyways deep inside the camp.


Their houses had great holes punched in the sides, where the troops had employed the controversial “walking through walls” tactic to avoid being exposed to sniper fire in the alleyways. (…)

The camp’s inhabitants say this was not an “anti-terrorist” operation as the Israeli army maintains, but an operation to terrorise them - and it has worked.

The temptation to be unproductive is so great. We're sucked into the fact that we now have this home entertainment system on our desks.

… and identical twins at that. Perhaps someone from upstairs had a say in this.

During this time of heightened security awareness, we will report suspicious or questionable requests for printing or document reproduction to law enforcement authorities.

HERMENAUT: The B Side of Paradise: The Ten Best Jazz Records for Driving

World Press Photo of the Year 2001

A review of Web-based color pickers will come in handy.

Newsnight: Anthrax attacks (BBC)

Three weeks ago Dr Barbara Rosenberg - an acknowledged authority on US bio-defence - claimed the FBI is dragging its feet because an arrest would be embarrassing to the US authorities. Tonight on Newsnight, she goes further…suggesting there could have been a secret CIA field project to test the practicalities of sending anthrax through the mail - whose top scientist went badly off the rails…

Before the Age of Reason was announced, humanity had polished strategies for interacting with the world of the imaginary and invisible: complicated magic-systems; sprawling pantheons of gods and spirits, images and names with which we labelled powerful inner forces so that we might better understand them. Intellect, Emotion and Unconscious Thought were made divinities or demons so that we, like Faust, might better know them; deal with them; become them.

Ancient cultures did not worship idols. Their god-statues represented ideal states which, when meditated constantly upon, one might aspire to. Science proves there never was a mermaid, blue-skinned Krishna or a virgin birth in physical reality. Yet thought is real, and the domain of thought is the one place where gods inarguably ezdst, wielding tremendous power. If Aphrodite were a myth and Love only a concept, then would that negate the crimes and kindnesses and songs done in Love's name? If Christ were only ever fiction, a divine Idea, would this invalidate the social change inspired by that idea, make holy wars less terrible, or human betterment less real, less sacred?

The world of ideas is in certain senses deeper, truer than reality; this solid television less significant than the Idea of television. Ideas, unlike solid structures, do not perish.

At Airport Gate, a Cyborg Unplugged (NYT)

Steve Mann has lived as a cyborg for more than 20 years, wearing a web of wires, computers and electronic sensors that are designed to augment his memory, enhance his vision and keep tabs on his vital signs. Although his wearable computer system sometimes elicited stares, he never encountered any problems going through the security gates at airports. On Feb. 18, his experience was entirely different. This time, he said, he was told to turn his computer on and off and put it on the X-ray machine. Still not satisfied, the guards took him to a private room for a strip-search in which, he said, the electrodes were torn from his skin, causing bleeding, and several pieces of equipment were strewn about the room.

Everything it takes to stage a guerrilla drive-in fits neatly into the back of a Honda Civic: a VCR, a video projector, an FM receiver and a generator. The only other things you need are a film and a wall.

It would be hard to design a drug that acts on the reward center that would be more effective than nicotine.

boom selection/bsXtra

“The bootleg scene is … one of the most interesting things happening in music right now,” he said after listening to exactly part of exactly 2 different tracks. He didn’t, you’ll notice, indicate whether he particularly cared for the music itself.

http://pollinator.com/identify/whatsbuzzin.htm

The Language and Rhetoric of Race (Robert Jensen in The Mighty Organ)

White people who struggle against racism need not deny what they have achieved. In fact, it is by acknowledging those achievements that we open up the space to go further, both individually and collectively, in resisting the society’s racism and one day eliminating it. It doesn’t mean we are off the hook; it means we are on the hook even more publicly.

The balance in all this is tricky. The tendency among progressive whites toward self-congratulation, denial, and avoidance is well-known, especially to non-white people.

Central Booking - “a Fat Albert club house full of fun stuff to read, useful book-related information and a place for bibliophiles to meet, share, hang out and drink Tang (sort of)."

• Teaching On the Road


• re:read weblog


• Ghost World reviewed

I ignore the weapon speed factor, the effects of weapons vs. armor, generally don't pay attention to anything but gross violations of encumbrance, and never use psionics.

How come existence?

"It will perfume a whole room," Ms. Goldman said. "And it's incredibly beautiful. It tastes horrible, but that doesn't matter."

Heirloom Gardening

Heirloom seeds pre-date hybridization (which does not breed true), disease and insect resistance straining, and genetic engineering. Heirloom seeds have been handed down from one generation to the next, preserving the diversity and the beauty of our gardens, the taste of our food, our ability to adapt to changing environments, and now to preserve plant reproduction itself.

Of their own free will, knowing who they're with and who they're supporting and who they're encouraging and who they're assisting...

"When they built the road there in the first place, people were cringing, as we knew what was underneath," said James Spollen, a Fire Department spokesman.

For months firefighters had suspected that many of their colleagues might be buried in this southern section of the site.

The south tower was the first to fall, so there was little sense of the extreme danger among the firefighters in the lobby, on the sidewalk, on the adjacent street, as well as those trying to help rescue victims in the lower floors.

“Booklend is an Internet lending library by post. Sign up, choose a book, and we’ll mail it to you. When you’re done, mail it back. …Booklend is like your local library. Except smaller. And less convenient.”

The Bruderhof company “community playthings” makes beautiful wood toys and furniture for babies and toddlers.

we have brains is a collaborative writing project for feminists.

As with all arguments over affirmative action, a little knowledge of history is helpful here. Today's equal-opportunity policy in the Army largely evolved after President Jimmy Carter made Clifford Alexander the first black secretary of the Army.

As Mr. Alexander later described it to me, he was dissatisfied with the absence of women and nonwhites on the first list of colonels he received who were candidates for promotion to general. He sent the list back and asked for it to be expanded, with an eye on including a more racially and gender-diverse pool of applicants.

One of the colonels on the new list was Colin Powell, later the nation's first black chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and currently its first black secretary of state.

"The radio business is a cruel and shallow money trench, a long plastic hallway where thieves and pimps run free, and good men die like dogs. There's also a negative side."
—Hunter S. Thompson

As Rabbis Face Facts, Bible Tales Are Wilting

When I grew up in Brooklyn, congregants were not sophisticated about anything. Today, they are very sophisticated and well read about psychology, literature and history, but they are locked in a childish version of the Bible.

O’Reilly, long considered the definitive technology publisher (I can see 19 O’Reilly books from where I’m sitting; 17 if I don’t turn my head), is increasingly becoming a destination for subversive and insightful technology analysis. Andy Oram’s Stop the Copying, Start a Media Revolution is a good example:

It’s thrilling to enter the cathedral in Rouen, France, and ponder how I am walking the same nave trod by the medieval residents of that town. But of course, my modern upbringing grants me a very different experience of the cathedral from theirs. In fact, if I go back the next day I am not having the same experience as I had the day before. My subjective experience of the cathedral at Rouen changes as rapidly as the light captured by Monet in his series of paintings of the cathedral’s facade.

The new art may be built on an understanding that an experience cannot be repeated. The artist may change it at whim, or build in an automatic form of evolution like the video I used to like at the MOMA. Like the river in Buddhist theology, art will be both eternal and evanescent.

U.S. Behind Secret Transfer of Terror Suspects (washingtonpost.com)

Since Sept. 11, the U.S. government has secretly transported dozens of people suspected of links to terrorists to countries other than the United States, bypassing extradition procedures and legal formalities, according to Western diplomats and intelligence sources. The suspects have been taken to countries, including Egypt and Jordan, whose intelligence services have close ties to the CIA and where they can be subjected to interrogation tactics – including torture and threats to families – that are illegal in the United States, the sources said. In some cases, U.S. intelligence agents remain closely involved in the interrogation, the sources said.

www.darpa.mil/iao/ - “The Information Awareness Office (IAO) develops and demonstrates information technologies and systems to counter asymmetric threats by achieving total information awareness useful for preemption, national security warning and national security decision-making."

I submit that “total information awareness” means exactly what it sounds like. Got privacy?

suggested reading:
No more Mr Scrupulous Guy, John Sutherland in the Guardian

One good thing about music, when it hits you
Feel no pain (repeat)
So hit me with music, hit me with music
Hit me with music, hit me with music now
I got to say trench town rock
I say don't watch that
Trench town rock, big fish or sprat
Trench town rock, you reap what you sow
Trench town rock, and everyone know now
Trench town rock, don't turn your back
Trench town rock, give the slum a try
Trench town rock, never let the children cry
Trench town rock, 'cause you got to tell JAH, JAH
You grooving Kingston 12, grooving, Kingston 12
Grooving woe, woe, it's Kingston 12
Grooving it's Kingston 12
No want you fe galang so
No want you fe galang so
You want come cold I up
But you can't come cold I up
'Cause I'm grooving, yes I'm grooving
I say one good thing, one good thing
When it hits you feel no pain
One good thing about music
When it hits you feel no pain
So hit me with music
Hit me with music now
Hit me with music, hit me with music
Look at that
Trench town rock, I say don't watch that
Trench town rock, if you big fish or sprat
Trench town rock, you reap what you sow
Trench town rock, and everyone know now
Trench town rock, don't turn your back
Trench town rock, give the slum a try
Trench town rock, never let the children cry
Trench town rock, 'cause you got to tell JAH, JAH why
Grooving, grooving, grooving, grooving

Six Months After, A Memorial Built On Beams of Light (washingtonpost.com)

The two light beams, made up of 88 intense searchlights arrayed in two side-by-side 50-foot squares, will cost about a half-million dollars, which covers the installation, security and a lighting technician.

The beams will be lighted from nightfall until 11 p.m., but are subject to temporary shutdown based on Federal Aviation Administration concerns about how the light plays in certain weather conditions and conservationists' concerns about the impact on bird migratory patterns. They worry the lights could draw migrating birds to their deaths.

Utne Reader presents America’s 60 Best Public Places

An eclectic assortment of favorite hangouts from Key West to Seattle. In drafting the list, we drew upon the work of the Project for Public Spaces, a national advocacy group, and Gianni Longo’s book A Guide to Great American Public Places, as well as suggestions from friends around the country and happy memories of our own travels. We define the idea of public place broadly here, ranging from rib joints to the Grand Canyon, art museums to Coney Island. Our only firm criterion was that these places must be open to everyone at no more than a modest cost.

The Privatization of Our Culture by Bret Dawson

Here is a convenient thesis statement for you: The discoveries, eureka-moments, fables, characters, songs and jokes that form the only common ground we share as citizens -- the set of ideas collectively known as ‘The West’ -- are now the property of a few multinational corporations. Our entire culture has fallen into private hands, taking with it our right to tell our stories, our right to keep our personal lives personal, even our right to heal our sick. Most of the thoughts passing through your head at any given moment are private property, subject to the whims and desires and litigious controls of the companies that own them. (...)

They can be stopped by large and small acts of civil disobedience, by the willful and deliberate and unauthorized use of those precious trademarks in media large and small -- on your school notebook, on your website, on your TV show. Eventually, they’ll lose their power, becoming as generic and empty and valueless as ‘Kleenex’ and ‘Aspirin’ and ‘Thermos’ have become.

Visible Darkness is down on Kerouac for all the wrong reasons. Kerouac’s contribution to literature was an unimaginable honesty. The trouble is most people simply aren’t interesting enough to create a masterpiece out of an honest accounting of their lives. His contribution to humanity, however, was much greater than his contribution to literature – the revelation of his tragic spiritual journey, and through it, his compassionate soul.

Some nice thoughts on children’s books at Open Brackets, via wood s lot.

I don't know a single Arab or Muslim American who does not now feel that he or she belongs to the enemy camp, and that being in the United States at this moment provides us with an especially unpleasant experience of alienation and widespread, quite specifically targeted hostility. Hundreds of young Arab and Muslim men have been picked up for questioning and, in far too many cases, detained by the police or the FBI. Anyone with an Arab or Muslim name is usually made to stand aside for special attention during airport security checks. There have been many reported instances of discriminatory behaviour against Arabs, so that speaking Arabic or even reading an Arabic document in public is likely to draw unwelcome attention. And of course, the media have run far too many "experts" and "commentators" on terrorism, Islam, and the Arabs whose endlessly repetitious and reductive line is so hostile and so misrepresents our history, society and culture that the media itself has become little more than an arm of the war on terrorism in Afghanistan. All with what seems like great public approval in the United States. (...)

I have come to deeply resent the notion that I must accept the picture of America as being involved in a "just war" against something unilaterally labeled as terrorism by Bush and his advisers, a war that has assigned us the role of either silent witnesses or defensive immigrants who should be grateful to be allowed residence in the US. The historical realities are different: America is an immigrant republic and has always been one. It is a nation of laws passed not by God but by its citizens. Except for the mostly exterminated native Americans, the original Indians, everyone who now lives here as an American citizen originally came to these shores as an immigrant from somewhere else, even Bush and Rumsfeld. The Constitution does not provide for different levels of Americanness, nor for approved or disapproved forms of "American behaviour," including things that have come to be called "un-" or "anti- American" statements or attitudes. That is the invention of American Taliban who want to regulate speech and behaviour in ways that remind one eerily of the unregretted former rulers of Afghanistan. And even if Mr Bush insists on the importance of religion in America, he is not authorised to enforce such views on the citizenry or to speak for everyone when he makes proclamations in China and elsewhere about God and America and himself. (...)

The US position has been escalating towards a more and more metaphysical sphere, in which Bush and his people identify themselves (as in the very name of the military campaign, Operation Enduring Freedom) with righteousness, purity, the good, and manifest destiny, its external enemies with an equally absolute evil. Anyone reading the world press in the past few weeks can ascertain that people outside the US are both mystified by and aghast at the vagueness of US policy, which claims for itself the right to imagine and create enemies on a world scale, then prosecute wars on them without much regard for accuracy of definition, specificity of aim, concreteness of goal, or, worst of all, the legality of such actions.

The trappings of a state of siege trap us in a state of fear, ill-equipped to deal with the Patriot Games, the Mind Games, the War Games of an unelected President and his unelected Vice President.

Let us pray that our country will stop this war. "To provide for the common defense" is one of the formational principles of America.

Our Congress gave the President the ability to respond to the tragedy of September 11. We licensed a response to those who helped bring the terror of September 11th. But we the people and our elected representatives must reserve the right to measure the response, to proportion the response, to challenge the response, and to correct the response.

Because we did not authorize the invasion of Iraq.

We did not authorize the bombing of civilians in Afghanistan.

We did not authorize permanent detainees in Guantanamo Bay.

We did not authorize military tribunals suspending due process and habeas corpus.

We did not authorize the resurrection of COINTELPRO.

We did not authorize national identity cards.

We did not authorize the eye of Big Brother to peer from cameras throughout our cities.

Nor did we ask that the blood of innocent people, who perished on September 11, be avenged with the blood of innocent villagers in Afghanistan.

We did not authorize war without end. Yet we are upon the threshold of a permanent war economy.

Yet the defense budget grows with more money for weapons systems to fight a cold war which ended, weapon systems in search of new enemies to create new wars. This has nothing to do with fighting terror.

This has everything to do with fueling a military industrial machine with the treasure of our nation, risking the future of our nation, risking democracy itself with the militarization of thought which follows the militarization of the budget.

As we grow to human maturity and care for the lives of others, we become creatively and beautifully silent. We evoke words from the other and generate life by our listening... The silent person is not the one who never speaks but the one who knows how to listen well.

“Look inside” Ram Dass' Be Here Now.

The French Senate approved a bill proposing that Saartjie Baartman's, the so-called Hottentot Venus, remains be repatriated, nearly 200 years after she was exhibited in Europe as a sexual freak and scientific curiosity.

originally posted by zakia

The Eye Begins to See “will be spending the week discussing Kerouac’s On the Road. We’re starting today with a background on Kerouac and the Beat Movement.” Woohoo!

BBC photo gallery: Winter Olympics closing ceremony
BBC photo gallery: Winter Olympics opening ceremony

Blair and Bush to plot war on Iraq (Guardian Observer). Tony Blair will visit the White House in April in order to “finalise Phase Two of the war against terrorism” in which military action aimed at toppling Saddam Hussein in Iraq will be “at the top of the agenda.”

Breaking the Cycle of White Dependence: LiP gives you Tim Wise. Or is it the other way round?

We were dependent on Mexicans to teach us how to extract gold and quartz from riverbeds, both critical to the growth of the national economy in the mid to late 1800's. And had we not taken over half their nation in an unprovoked war, the emerging Pacific ports so vital to the modern U.S. economy would not have been ours, but Mexico's.

Then we depended on Latino/a labor in the mid-20th century under the bracero program, through which over five million Mexicans were brought into the country for cheap agricultural work, and then sent back across the border when they were no longer deemed useful.

And we were dependent on Asian labor to build the railroads that made transcontinental travel and commerce possible. Ninety percent of the labor used to build the Central Pacific Railroad in the 1860's were Chinese, imported for that express purpose, and exploited because the railroad bosses felt they could control them better than white workers.

In fact, all throughout U.S. labor history, whites have depended on the subordination of workers of color by the marking of black and brown peoples as the bottom rung on the ladder, a rung below which they would not be allowed to fall. By virtue of this racialized class system, whites received the "psychological wage" of whiteness, even if their real wages left them destitute. That too is dependence, and a kind that has marked even the poorest whites.

“Is Metafilter a men’s room?” asks an insightful MetaTalk post. I have not yet read the thread.

Salon.com interview: Bill Clinton and Black America

My initial thought was, It can’t sit well with African-Americans to call any white man, a black man. But you note that it was tongue-in-cheek, right?

It certainly was tongue-in-cheek on Toni Morrison’s part. Anyone who reads the totality of what she said clearly understands that she’s painting a picture. But I think that in many ways it diminished what Clinton did to suggest that he is black. Because if you’re black and you did those things, now you begin to argue, “Man, you could have done more than that [for us], brother.” But the fact that he is white and did that much is quite remarkable.

Why do you think white people might wrinkle up their noses at the idea?

Largely because they don’t understand the history of the relationship between African-Americans and the 41 white men who have encumbered the Oval Office.

Looking through this slideshow of images (some are gross in a fakey monster movie kinda way) I got really irritated by all the candlelight vigils and mourning family members. THEY WERE DEAD! Come on! Boo hoo hoo- grandma was dumped in the woods and not crammed in an urn.

Read Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Notes from the Underground (translated by Constance Garnett) at the UVA Library Electronic Text Center.

A Diverse – and Divided – Black Community (washingtonpost.com)

America’s black community, which now includes more West Indian and African immigrants than ever, is no longer the monolithic group that many politicians, civil rights advocates and demographers say it is.

A new African American community is being forged, sociologists and anthropologists say, in which culture and nationality are becoming more important than skin color. It is as diverse – and as divided – as the Latino community or the Asian American community, each made up of migrants from numerous nations.

No gay bears will leave this store!

Enron Designed Fake Trading Floor (Click2Houston.com)

The bankrupt energy giant, Enron Corp., designed and maintained a fake trading floor at its Houston office.

According to former Enron employees, on the sixth floor of the company’s downtown headquarters was a set, designed to trick analysts into believing business was booming.

“It was an elaborate Hollywood production that we went through every year when the analysts were going to be there to be impress them to make our stock go up,” former employee Carol Elkin said.

The Myth of the “Great Red Heartland” exposed, via your favorite Ashcroft-bashing cartoonist and mine, Tom “we are the majority” Tomorrow.

From the 11217 I transmit
My area is thick my vision focused
My jitterbugs limp n' learn as I squirm
But I'm a team player so I waits my turn
And when I get the rock I'm going straight to the hole
My average per game is pure black soul
In the 13-X styles the ignorance
Got the clearance to speak intelligence on the block

Digable Planets - For Corners lyrics

I usually set my browser to default to a blank page (by deleting the “Home Page” URL in preferences) but I think I’ll try loading Daypop Top News Stories in new windows for a while. I haven’t looked at it before, but I am coming to love Daypop like I love Google.

We are the Chinese young man standing in front of the tank. And you? If you are nowhere to be seen, you are probably inside the tank, advising the driver.

Cats Painted in the Progression of Psychosis of a Schizophrenic Artist

The progressive escape of reality towards delusion is expressed in the pictures below. They have been painted by Louis Wain, an European artist in the beginning of this century. Since Wain was young, he used to draw and paint cats for calendars, albums, postcards, etc. When he became 57 years old, he was affected by schizophrenia, which overtook his life as well his art. The last 15 years of his life were spent in psychiatric institutions.

“This cat is alerted by an intuitional feeling that something is amiss."

His cats paintings started to change and to show startling images. Quite revealing of his psychotic condition were the cat’s eyes. See how they become fixed with hostility, even in the earliest paintings, because the psychotic probably tends to think that the world is looking upon him in a menacing way. Another sign is the fragmentation of the cat’s body. They become altered in a strange way under the psychotic’s gaze, and almost always are represented as distorted and phantastic shapes.

The okayplayers take on interracial sex scenes in movies.

If you don’t believe in his God, John Ashcroft says you’re uncivilized and ignorant.

Read Eric Glish’s (he wrote the literal book) introduction to CSS layout for Apple.com and drink from the holy grail itself – a 3 column liquid page layout with a header, (and fully and clearly explained) with CSS (no tables). But that’s just a warm-up:

To make things interesting, I took the Apple Internet Developer home page, which makes extensive use of tables, and I re-coded it using CSS for all layout. (…)

“Over 100,000,000 people live withing a single day’s drive of Potter County, Pennsylvania.” Do you?

• "NPR's Eric Westervelt reports on the hopes and plans of the Aryans Nation to rebuild their movement -- in rural Pennsylvania. (8:00)" - great segment includes a meeting of local church officials discussing how to protect the community
• Follow Me Here on Potter County
• Aryan Nations looking to move to Pennsylvania (Anti-Racist Info Center)
• Neo-Nazi cell calls whites to Potter County (Philadelphia Enquirer)

The Tomb of Horrors weblog (it’s not scary) points out an excellent overview of online comics worth reading in the Comics Journal called “Tape This to Your Cubicle Wall”. I recognize some of my favorites from the sample panels. Even if you don’t think of yourself as a comics reader, it can’t hurt to click on the panel that most grabs your eye and read a few screens.

See also: John Ridley on comic books for NPR

I’m going to steal some (unvetted) links from wood s lot today:

• "All liberals, report for re-education" Jay Bookman for the Charlotte Observer
• reflections on learning how to read class in novels (cf. rW books)
• about using blogs in research
• new issue of Adbusters
• emma goldman etexts

Holy fucking shit, man, you'll never guess who just walked in--

Changes in World Economy on Raw Materials May Doom Many Towns (NYT)

Stretched across the southern tier, from Arizona and New Mexico through Texas and Georgia and into Virginia, these small rural communities form the base of the national supply chain. They produce most of the oil and much of the ore, fiber and food. In past recessions, even if they did not bounce back entirely, at least they survived. But this time around, as the overall economy begins to show some signs of healing, things are ominously different in many of these towns.

Let’s work toward leadership that reflects the cultures and communities where Hip-Hop was born. That doesn’t mean that we can’t be active and feel invested in the culture, but we must be aware of how racism plays out in the power paradigm of America, and how it is controlling Hip-Hop culture.

Ever since Martha Stewart wrapped our planet (and others as far as I know) in her chilly perfection many people have become so uncertain of their decor that they simply quit having people over. They sit at night, alone, fumbling paint chips like rosary beads while pining for the perfect valance for the "keeping room". This sort of miasma drives us to abandon all sense of personal style and as an extension, our very personalities. Unable to trust ourselves at flea markets or antique shops, we flock to Pottery Barn to buy artificial flea market finds.

Islam is a religion in which God requires you to send your son to die for him. Christianity is a faith in which God sends his son to die for you.
-- Minister of Hate John Ashcroft

It's like my whole life was waiting for this moment, so I knew what to say. I said: ''Here's how I want to open the show tonight. We've got Sting, who beat you last night. Controversial -- Sting is now a freshly turned heel. I want to send him out with his buddy Lex Luger. He's going to cut a heel promo on the fans. We're in the Dean Dome in Chapel Hill. He's going to call it a dump, and that's going to get the entire crowd going bananas.'' I ran through the whole scenario for Hulk: ''Lex Luger's going to have a bat, like he's batting. Sting's down like a catcher saying, Come on, bring it, we're going to put you out of the park. You get up on the ropes, outnumbered. Then Bret Hart's music starts up and Bret comes down the ramp.'' Anyway, I went on, and at the end Hogan's like: ''That's pretty good, brother. Couple of holes in it, but pretty good.''

I told you so!

Nature’s Platform

We must bear in mind that while we regard the use of the [chair-like toilet] as natural, we represent only a relatively small percentage of the world’s population, and a percentage that may be said, in an absolute sense, to be wrong, insofar as we have allowed civilization to interfere with our biological functioning.

Read The Religious Experience of Philip K. Dick by R. Crumb from from Weirdo 17 online.

“Isn’t the whole accusatory concept of ‘self-loathing’ rather flamboyantly stupid?" Indeed.

This is no longer about stopping drugs, it's about fighting the guerrillas.

It does not matter how many people ridicule these ads; the idea will propagate without public consent. It works on an emotional level, not an intellectual one. It galvanizes fear. It frames the debate.

They know about us, but they think we're in a museum. The man you see riding the horse in the museum is not dead. I'm actually alive.

Bush’s Sickening Super Bowl Propaganda (AlterNet)

U2 first rose to fame off a breakthrough album in the early ’80s called “War” – the band, born of a country plagued by war and terrorism, was against it, and later songs like “Bullet the Blue Sky” specifically ripped U.S. military adventurism and its impact on poor countries.

Yesterday, Bono finished the band’s short halftime show with the inevitable tribute to 9-11 victims, literally wrapping himself in the American flag, as though honoring 9-11’s dead – many of whom weren’t Americans – somehow required solidarity with the U.S. flag and with the waging of yet another war, or three, or five. Permanent war, reduced to emotional spectacle and a brandable moment. (…)

It’s not drugs that fuel political violence throughout the world – it’s their prohibition, and the forcing of drug transactions into the black market. There, as the CIA well knows, lies the world’s most efficient system for funneling large amounts of untraceable money.

The effort to eradicate certain popular drugs – including the War on Drugs touted by yesterday’s TV ads and the Drug Czar office that paid for them – has literally created, and perpetuated, the very black market now accused of being a source of cash for al Qaeda’s jihad. Ending drug prohibitions would do far more to thwart terrorism than the War on Drugs ever could.

Faults Suggest a High Calling for Delphi Priestesses (washingtonpost.com)

Evidence is growing that the priestesses, known as pythia, were ripped on hydrocarbon gases, especially ethylene, a sometime anesthetic which, taken in modest doses, can induce lively conversation of a somewhat incoherent nature.

The entertainment industry executives who decide what goes on television can't seem to grasp the reality of a Hispanic experience in America that transcends that of the domestic servants who tend to their Malibu mansions. On television, we see the maids and the gardeners, but we rarely catch a glimpse of the families they support with their scrubbing or lawn trimming.

"Sesame Street," which was loosely modeled after the old variety show "Rowan and Martin's Laugh-In," is essentially becoming a series of individual stories. "I've never seen `Sesame Street' get worse through changes," said Peggy Charren, founder of Action for Children's Television.

Damn, why did Slashdot’s Rob Malda have to turn out to be an over-the-top asshole?

The huge challenge is making these things "directable"... Suppose the director wants [a mug dropped onto a table] to land upright, but in an accurate physics simulation, the vessel always ends up on its side. By adding subtle unevenness to what had been a perfectly flat table top, the scientists showed that they can create conditions in which the mug bounces a few times and then settles upright.

I’ve mentioned Bee before because it’s one of the best online comics, but I bet you didn’t know Bee’s creator, Jason Little, is (according to Boing Boing) married to Myla Goldberg, author of the bestselling Bee Season.

Most people pull off the interstate and expect to find a bumpkin town, not a good piece of chocolate, a good cup of espresso, a good theater and streets lined with art galleries and interesting shops.

George W. in the Garden of Gethsemane: An Open Letter to George W. Bush from Michael Moore

Motorola says listing Palestine as country was error (Yahoo) Shrug.

You just gotta be true to your lifestyle. I mean, if you come from a place where you got space around you, don't pretend and act like you squooshed up. Or if you come from squooshed, don't front and represent, like you spaced out. Just be who you are. If you from Kansas, you know, represent...wheat or whatever. I got respect for that. Be yourself.

Romanticizing the De-Evolution of the State (The Thresher)

Non-hierarchical networked societies are a grand ideal. I’m no fan of nosey and anal governments poking their fingers into every act, regulating away all vitality. But a total de-evolution of the state at this time would be M.A.D. Over-optimistic fantasies aside, the techno-libertarian reality is a grim Social Darwinist one. We’ve already seen how this oligarchy functions, with its networked corporate drone-hives, their virtual trillions circulating the globe out of the grasp of the Job-like-masses, who’ve been permanently downsized and temped (pimped) out, suffering for their faith in the market. And far-left/anarchist fantasies about the potential perfection of wo-man (alleged to have lived in harmonious hunter-gatherer, agrarian or even Neolithic golden ages), after the corrupting state is removed, demonstrate an even more unsophisticated form of wishful thinking. Anarchist devolutionists don’t only ignore most of the historical and evolutionary evidence, they fail to explain how we could get there from this far away, without killing off the several hundred million people who really want to go shopping at the mall.

Dining Out With Babes – babies, that is – in and around DC.

Monkeyfist’s WEF Protests News and Chronology links to a report of five women arrested in lower Manhattan for a banner drop (“Bush and big biz agree that people with AIDS drop dead”).

If you want to follow the WEF news at one site, this Monkeyfist page is probably your best bet.

Fuck Corporate Groceries: “so i decided to spend the next [while] not shopping at corporate grocery stores, living instead on food purchased at neighborhood places. i figure this way i’ll save money, explore chicago’s independent food sellers, eat better(?) or at least, more interesting food, and i won’t be supporting the man.”

Lance Knobel is blogging Davos from the inside at DavosNewbies.com.

Did you know?

This weekend in New York City:
• 4,000 cops (in riot gear and undercover) as well as contingents of FBI, and Secret Service agents will be greeting tens of thousands of men, women and children who don't think that the wealthiest and most powerful 0.0000005% of humanity should make decisions that will affect 6 billion people behind closed doors and without accountability.
• Cops will be protecting Gap and Starbucks locations throughout the city.
• Cops will be enforcing an unconstitutional 1845 state law barring people in groups of 3 or more from wearing masks.
• Some protestors are planning to wear the surgical masks which are commonly used by those who live or work near ground zero.
• Protestors carrying signs and large puppets, sitting, chanting, singing, and dancing the tango will likely be attacked in assaults -- either unprovoked or triggered by undercover agents of the state -- by cops who have been training and threatening for weeks to brutalize innocent people, if dozens of anti-corporate demonstrations worldwide are a reliable indicator.

The WEF is a private member organization comprising representatives from 1,000 of the world's largest corporations including Microsoft, Monsanto, Nike, General Motors and, until recently, Enron. Originally formed in 1971 as the European Management Forum, the Swiss-based group has grown into a major global agenda setter and a leading proponent of corporate globalization. Until this year, the organization held its annual meeting in the Swiss mountain resort town of Davos.

The exclusive meeting is open to members - who pay upwards of $30,000 in annual dues - as well as selected politicians, journalists and academics. President George W. Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair are both expected to be among the 3,200 in attendance. While the WEF helps set global economic and trade agendas that affect the entire world, the group predominantly includes European and American businesses.

• Yahoo photos
• nyc imc breaking news
• monkeyfist: wef news
• Yahoo Full Coverage: WEF
• the Village Voice
• The New York Times: WEF

• Another World Is Possible
• Anti-Capitalist Convergence New York
• International A.N.S.W.E.R.
• Students for Global Justice

• Socialist Worker on the WEF
• Public Eye on Davos
• WEF home page

The World Social Forum is a gathering of the international left meeting in Porto Alegre, Brazil this weekend. Indymedia is covering both the WEF and the WSF, and ZNet has backgrounders on some prominent WSF attendees.

The Nation: WEF/WSF Protest

The Nation and the Nation website will be featuring reports from the World Social Forum in Porto Alegre, Brazil; from the expected protests in the streets of New York City; and from the suites of the Waldorf hotel in New York, where the World Economic Forum will be meeting. Watch this space starting January 31.

Wil Wheaton swept the 2002 Bloggies. This is, somehow, appropriate.

Excellent – nay, essential – coverage of the State of the Union over at Craig’s booknotes.

Stop spreading lies about Saruman! It's bad enough the spin doctors led by Galadriel and Gandalf completely rewrote the real history of the War of the Ring.

Pay attention, for here is the TRUTH!!!

New Lynda Barry comic, how #1! Plus, archives!